skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One reason those are broad is that our own filters are. We're interested in any dating site that also includes a solution to the chicken and egg problem.

BTW, by "Craigslist competitor" I don't mean a new Craigslist. I mean take one thing Craigslist does, and do it better. When you later expand outward from that, you don't have to expand into the rest of the stuff Craigslist does.
That's sort of what we're aiming to do at http://www.dojolearning.com/ - longer term anyway. We're starting off by hitting the business market first, which is more open to change and not as tied to the existing learning systems, but we do plan to branch out in lots of ways to make a better online learning experience for everyone.

Anyway, if you're passionate about online learning, I'd love to chat about it with you if you're interested...
One thing that has irked me about Google AdSense ads is when they present an ad based on faulty disamboguation: e.g., I'm reading an email from cello-dev(Cello is a Lisp package), and I get an ad for a re-hairing service[they put new hair on bows for stringed instruments].
Well, then the technical co-founder will spend tons of time doing things such as setting up emails, scanning viruses, looking for intruders to servers, setting up quickbooks. Then you lose man-hours that should be dedicated to your main product/services.

I know this because I have been working for 6 startups for 10 years. This is a very common pattern that leads to failure.
Or maybe as younger ones need less cash.
History shouldn't be a single subject in school; it should be an aspect of every subject.
I just can't help not to relate these two things: Make a better "erotic service" and "personals" than Craigslist is. But will YC fund such a startup?
Had Sam Altman done other projects before Loopt?
My first thought was that putting the sensor/ball in the middle means the mouse is less sensitive to the way in which you hold it. That would mean that if you hold the mouse at a slight angle, it would still behave the same as if you hold it straight on. If you put the sensor in the front, the mouse becomes more sensitive to its orientation, but it limits the different ways in which you can hold the mouse since you must hold it straight on for it to behave the same.
Google's products succeed because they're technically brilliant and well executed, not because their design is massively better (see: iPod, iPhone).

Google avoids bad design by the simple expedient of making everything sparse and functional, which is the way to go if you're not a great designer.
MySQL 5.1 is to reach GA state - all to arms
I like that approach - very interesting. Have you actually tried it though? I'm just wondering if this is one of those great ideas in theory things or whether real, actual, high-quality folks are saying, "Yes" to this type of deal.
What does he want? It's fine for you to come up with in your head all of this but does it match his expectations? He could be expecting 50/50 and want to walk when you show him something complicated.

What have you done to protect yourself from him starting a competitor if the two of you can't come to terms?
Ahh, they misspelled rtm's name...
Well, whatever split you take-- you'll have a vesting period (2-4 years). So, another way to look at it is this:

After 4 years (or whatever the vesting period is), how much of a discrepancy will there be between the total value you've created and the total value he has created? How much discrepancy will there be in risks you've taken and the salaries you've missed? With your 3 month head start, that'd be 51 man-months vs. his 48 man-months.

At the end of the day, there's no formula here, and you trying to calculate in assorted risks and values really isn't going to come up with an correct number-- all it's going to do is give you a feeling that you went thru appropriate motions.

But, I can say that 99 times out of a hundred, the first 3 man months of a business are really not the most critical months... And it honestly sounds like you're over-estimating the value you've created and the risks you've eliminated.

Also, from the way you're describing it-- you're not looking to bring this guy on as a partner or co-founder-- you're describing a decidedly non-partner relationship. It sounds more like you're looking for someone who walks and talks like an employee, but is happy to take no salary and a minority stake.

You really haven't eliminated that much risk, though you've clearly accomplished a good amount in 3 months... But you really don't even know what sort of business you're creating yet and whether the market wants it.

I'd go 55-45 or 60-40 with each of you having a 4 year vesting period (yours could have a 1 year acceleration due to your head start).
This is an interesting question. I think the main reason is time -- universities only have so much time. But yet these were major icons on the world stage: surely some classroom time should be given to them.

As another possibility, it may be the way humans think of science that is at issue. If we believe that science is always progressing forward towards some idealistic picture of reality and that exceptions are rare, what's the point in studying old dead guys who were obviously wrong? If, however, we believe that science is always progressing forward towards some idealistic picuter of reality and that exceptions are NOT rare, then we should pay attention to each little turn in the road we took -- we may have to go back to there.

I hear a lot of Marx in the political arena -- lots of times by people who have no idea they are channeling him. It might be useful for our universities to at least provide students with a good background on Karl. Likewise, to fail to understand historicism and the dialectic of the spiritis to miss out on some great ideas -- even if Marx took those ideas way too far later on.
Public school isn't irrelevant. It just needs to be updated a bit. The gap between how the current generation (people born post 1980 or so) and people born before before that is huge. And now we're starting to get teachers who grew up in the 1980's and soon, the 90's. Having teachers that know how to relate to kids will do more to keep them interested then any change in the curriculum can do.

Because, fundamentally, the curricula is solid - Math doesn't change that often, Physics/Chemistry/Biology/Earth Sciences are well established fields. History is ongoing, but given what High School history classes focus on, it's not going to change much. English/Literature isn't going to change an incredible amount - new books can be added in, but Shakespeare's words haven't changed since he wrote them. Writing styles may come and go, but thats just a small part of everything learned in HS.
I am supposed to be working on my thesis now but any thing seems to be more interesting than it after having worked on it for almost the entire day. I think an approach to beat procrastination is to "accept" it. If I know I spend generally an hour surfing the web for every two hours of work, then I will start working on a project sooner if I can. I guess this can be called a "know thyself" approach.
Tough call right now, but certainly within 6 months, it will be a viable option.

I'd most recommend GAE if you are in any way interested in open sourcing. It's a great platform for quickly sharing and re-deploying applications.
Ask YC: Any good lawyers for web startups in NYC or Miami?
I've seen the previous posts on lawyer recommendations, but they focused exclusively on SV or Boston area firms... does anyone have a good lawyer that you've worked with in NYC or Miami?
Not that I know of. He wouldn't have had much time; he was a sophomore when he started Loopt.
Ask HN: Do Companies Tie Digital and Physical Security Together?
This is a question for those with industry experience out there.

I imagine that major companies today are concerned about their computer security. From my understanding, it is not unrealistic for a company to higher a contractor to audit and/or overhaul existing security. What I am curious about is if companies worry about the physical security of their data as well. Do they rely on their computer security guys to give them advice? I would think that the people who would be most aware of the physical security needed to complement whatever computer security exists would be the people responsible the digital security measures. Or are these two aspects of security usually handled by two different entities?
I totally agree. But that fits under a good enterprise solution. But it may be smarter to aim at healthcare specifically.
Pressflip Is A Belly Flop
I think all of these are great ideas for startups to pursue. The wide range of ideas presented in this write up show how diverse the problems on the web are, which presents plenty of opportunities for startups to fix them. #12 particularly stood out to me. I think that with the direction a lot of the resulting startups will take, new ways of advertising should follow. This one of the areas where theres room to innovate the most, because theres more to advertising on the web than "ads by goooooooogle".
Personals shouldn't be a problem for investors. If the "erotic service" section is what I think it is, it probably wouldn't be a problem if you had enough other stuff so it didn't seem that was your whole business. That seems to be the strategy of indy papers like the Boston Phoenix, for example.
Keeping Prediction Honest
that's often pointed out regarding his Special theory of relativity, and in fact it seems like it's used as "proof" that original ideas can't exist. but while it may be true in the case of the Special theory, people conveniently stop short of the General, for which it isn't
Of course... take a look: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military_law/4270...
So am I right that "fiber" is just the Microsoft word for "green thread"?
It's likely that the biggest startup ideas won't be on this list. But, it's still a great list.

I also think the idea of measuring and comparing complexity should be included. Even though this is arguably a pure math problem... A software startup will likely be involved because 1) any useful implementation will likely be software based 2) It'll be useful to most businesses in the world 3) most hackers know math.

[edit: wording]
Maybe it isn't comparing the list to itself, but to each item in the list to something it is a minimalist version of. Notepad is extremely minimalist when you compare it to Word.
I have often searched google looking for recent articles, but the most highly ranked are always first which are often really old and outdated ... maybe there is something in the advanced search to tweak the ordering, I am not sure ...
To be a little bit snippy, why isn't Genesis taught in evolutionary biology courses? I mean, Darwin wrote "On the Origins of Species", but Genesis was there before Darwin and wrote about the origins of all life on earth so clearly Darwin should be put in that context. How can someone understand Darwin without knowing creationism?

As the anti-intelligent-design folks would say, science is a harsh place for ideas and ideas need to prove themselves over and over and be verifiable. You don't get to be taught just because you wrote about something earlier.

There are places where these things should be taught - because they are important to our history and culture. They don't belong in the sciences anymore for varying reasons. Freud wasn't scientific in his studies (meaning things like double-blind, verifiable results). He has influenced a lot, but the field has moved past him. Marx worked under economic assumptions that were held as true by economists of the time that were later proved false (and which greatly affect his outcomes).

However, there are some things that have held up over time. Ricardo's Comparative Advantage (from the 17th century I believe) is still taught. The Pythagorean Theorem from over two millenia ago is huge in math. And I believe both Newton and Einstein still hold in their fields. At the same time, as we learned about the universe, Plato/Aristotle went from astronomy (they did write a lot about what was in space) to philosophy - because they were simply wrong. Thinkers who thought the earth was flat might be mentioned in a history course, but not in a science one.

And sometimes there is still value there. I'm a religious person myself, but I think it would be stupid to teach it in a history or science class - its ideas just have no place there. Maybe they did at one point in human history, but not today. Likewise, I think a lot of psychology today is going to fall into nothing as we learn more and at that time, the authors of today will cease to be taught in psyc.

Science moves forward. It's unforgiving. Once something has been proved false, it can remain, but more in the "history of ideas" way.
None of the phenomena referenced in this article are particularly new; all are well explained by fetal hormonal effects and social conditioning, without reference to epigenetics.
Er -- philosophy is not science. It's outside of science. So it cannot be wrong. It either is more or less appropriate for various circumstances (just like science, but we won't go there)

So Hegel is not wrong. Heck, Freud and Marx weren't even scientific, so they really can't be wrong either.

I know what you're saying -- we wouldn't take time in chemistry to go over alchemy -- but there is a difference between a person, a time, and the best way of thinking for that time and the current state of the scientific model. Lots of times we can use heuristics and methods of thinkers who ended up in wrong spots in current problems. Likewise, not being aware of old ad beaten-to-death canards like Marxism means we end up going over the same old ground again.

Or looking at it from another angle: wouldn't you want to remember Carl Sagan a thousand years from now? Even if he appeared no smarter than a primitive cave man worshiping the sun? You see, everybody wants to throw away the old guys -- they're so obviously wrong. It's much harder to take the good with the bad.

To ignore thinkers from another age because the current scientific belief has changed deprives the current generation of everything else those thinkers had -- their powers of deduction, observation of human nature, the ability to put various disparate pieces together in synthesis, etc. It's throwing the baby out with the bath water. Over and over again we see thinkers trashed and the later parts of what they had turn out to be extremely useful. Plato missed the boat in certain ways, but who the heck could predict forms would turn into OOAD?

This is not a boolean question. (to quote another dis-remembered scientist who eventually gave us something useful) In most human affairs, there is a give and take of ideas, a dialectic. But there I go again.
A more direct parallel is a posix thread with it's scope set to PTHREAD_SCOPE_PROCESS. Solaris has something called a "light weight process" which is also the same thing. A green thread is a thread running within a virtual machine.

This article is also slightly inaccurate in saying that you CAN'T call API calls that block from a fiber. You can make the calls but it will block all of your fibers / process level threads which may not be what you want.

"fiber" is just Microsoft's marketing term for threads scheduled at the process level.
Google supports many third-party libraries, (e.g. Django, etc.) and many that they don't explicitly support work anyway.

What doesn't work is Python code that has C extensions. There are obviously security issues there. That's the reason the PIL was initially disabled.
Thanks, I think your answer to indie newspaper is correct even global-wise

When I was a kid, the biggest indie newspaper against government in Taiwan had to support itself with those ads.

Freedom, democracy and smut can go hand in hand.
It's outside of science. So it cannot be wrong.

p and ~p
"It's not the land, american indians had the resources to do it if they wanted."

That's pretty ignorant statement, and probably downright offensive to many. I'm no native American scholar, but I do remember reading about the law of the Iroquois,

"In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."

I wonder if the Europeans thought about things like the Iroquois we'd have so much "innovation". Did you ever stop to think that that many of the "problems" that we're all so good at solving may not actually be real problems?

Furthermore, your missing the entire 1000 years that Asia and the Islamic world led innovation around the world, while the Europeans were playing D&D in the Dark Ages.

Amy Smith is solving real problems. I have nothing, but respect for this woman. I'm really starting to lose faith in this community when a comment like this has 7 upmods, and the article only has 20.
Amy Smith's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/amy_smith_shares_simple_l...
The Simple Formula for Marketing Successfully on Social Networks
OpenMoko UI Train Wreck (video)
JRuby 1.1.3 Released (Lots of fixes and more performance improvements)
"... How can someone understand Darwin without knowing creationism? ..."

Everyone has a right to believe what they want. So just don't expect the science community which bases it's ideas on testable theories to take ideas such as Creationism seriously. I nominate that to understand Darwin we should also look into the Australian Aboriginal "Dreamtime" ~ http://www.dreamscape.com/morgana/miranda.htm or the Chinese idea of "Yin and Yan" ~ http://www.innovationslearning.co.uk/subjects/re/information...

Surely we will fail to understand evolutionary biology without understanding "Eastern Re-incarnation"? ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reincarnation
Well said. My eating habits are making causing my sleep problems :-)
Thank you for those links. I don't fully agree with what Jared Diamond says, but it's interesting nonetheless. In particular he says that genetic differences had nothing to do with it without actually showing so.

But even more in particular it doesn't explain why nothing has changed today. All his arguments fall to the wayside today, and yet nothing has changed.

For example: both china and japan stopped progress because they were isolated. Fine, and it's a reasonable argument because today both those places have plenty of progress. So that makes sense.

But it doesn't answer about any other parts of the world.

As for your second link, I had never heard of it before (or even of that concept before), I cribbed from reading a book on the history of technology and nothing else. I just kept noticing the same countries over and over, and started wondering why.
www.google.com: Advanced search: Date, usage rights, numeric range, and more: Date
The next big search engine will answer queries you wouldn't bother giving google. Things like "what mid-priced chinese restaurant near downtown SF would my mother like?" Its not about design, or about patching holes in google's relevance. It's a paradigm shift. Tough problem, btw ;)
Of course you could also choose to donate one to broke ass students. For example someone like me. :-P Who knows, maybe I can even work for you when I graduate. :grin:
I have yet to do this, but if I end up working with my friend, it will likely only be under such a structure. Although it requires a more detailed and explicit contract up front, so long as the benchmarks, time frame, and price are reasonable and agreed upon, neither person should have any reason to complain.

The point is that both I and my friend/co-founder will know what we own and what we have to do, and we should both feel reasonably good about it. I won't feel like I've given anything away, and he will probably feel like he got a fair deal.

If he agrees at the outset and meets all the (negotiated) benchmarks, he will have a legal right to enforce the transfer to the joint company. If he refuses to structure the deal that way, then I will probably interpret his refusal as a sign that he is unfit for the job and possibly even untrustworthy.
e=mc^2 came out of special relativity; while Lorentz etc. essentially had most of the pieces, Einstein was the first to derive that beautiful little bit.
Ask YC: Would you share your (successful) Y Combinator applicaton?
Are any former/current YC'ers willing to share their "winning" applications here? I think it would go a long way toward helping us YC hopefuls find the strengths and weaknesses in our own applications this next cycle.

For the record I know the policy:

We don't make any formal promise about secrecy, but we don't plan to let anyone outside Y Combinator see these applications, including other startups we fund.

...but I haven't seen anything that precludes entrants from sharing their applications on their own accord.

I bet plenty of folks share my interest. Anyone willing to help (even if it means you censor proprietary pieces of your app)?
I agree with gopalakrishnans about the time taken. However, it is safer to give notice after the H1B transfer gets approved.
Serious YouTube test of copyright law
If newspapers are so out of touch (#3), why is that you linked to one in your post citing its vital coverage of Octopart (#7)?
Sweeping Panoramas, Courtesy of a Robot
For that matter, I don't know of any biology classes that teach Darwin or economics classes that teach Adam Smith, except in a passing, general sort of way.

I'm sure everyone knows about Darwin's finches and Smith's reasoning about the butcher's benevolence but that's a far cry from making a detailed study.

Fields move on. Ideas are refined and re-expressed in terms not available to the originators of those fields.

These texts are all valuable as historiography but it shouldn't be surprising that students learning the material don't go to them first. More often that not they were wrong about a great many things, Smith and Darwin included.
Children Predict Flying Cars Will Cure Cancer
A Compendium Of Code Reuse & Recycling
>I'm not trying to brag, but I did outline the exact way to beat eBay.

And somehow missing out on a $20,000 investment stopped you?!? That is total bullshit; you would have just taken out $20,000 on a credit card, because beating ebay is literally worth billions of dollars.
Stating facts should never be offensive. And besides I don't see what's offensive about it anyway, at worst you should simply tell me that they didn't want to.

And yet, whatever reason was, it clearly was a mistake in hindsight. (If it was deliberate, perhaps they simply never thought of making changes in their life - I don't know - I was asking - maybe you can tell me.)

And I did not forget about asia and the islamic world, geographically they are part of the same area I was talking about.

And finally about Any Smith: why does she need to go to another country to solve problems for them? Why do they not have anyone who can do it? That's my question.
How We Integrated our Offshore Development Team
This is interesting. Looks like it's not too hard to build an app without any C knowledge since it can be coded primarily within safari.
shrug

It doesn't mean Uncov wasn't on the mark (most of the time). Maybe Ted should bite the bullet and give self-review of Persai/Pressflip/whatever, Uncov-style.
Microsoft Winning Digital Living Room War on Paper, but Failing to Lock It Up in Practice
Ask HN: Corporate structure for software development?
I am writing some software which I hope I can sell for a profit. However, I am concerned about the possibility of being sued. Thus I would like to form a corporation of some sort to protect myself. What should I choose in terms of legal complexity and taxation? (LLC, LLP, S, etc) Also, where should I incorporate in? Keep in mind and it is just myself and I do not plan to sell the company (although I may sell the copyright to the software).
Seems like you're looking for something like Kosmix (http://www.kosmix.com/). The way they present results indicates that design is a major part of their users' experience.
Sure, email in profile. But I should stress that I use the word passionate to mean enthusiastic, not to indicate I have any special skills or expertise!