skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Perhaps cling? http://root.cern.ch/drupal/content/cling
I signed up a long time ago when there wasn't a list for Canadians to sign up for. Maybe I need to use a different email than Gmail. Who knows.
GDB can step through instruction by instruction, and you can easily examine registers.
A friend and I had several conversations around what a YC for grown-ups would look like. One of my ideas was it would look something like the National Guard. One weekend a month while maintaining your current employment, some benefits for families (vacation house to re-connect after a session), or something like that. But, whether investors would ever fund such a thing, probably not.
> C compile times suck

Can I ask you what you're comparing with?
I can compare with C++, Scala and Go.
The first two are horrible in that department when compared with C. Go's compiles are blazingly fast.
like digitalinfinity says info registers should be what your looking for. Here's the docs: http://www.ofb.net/gnu/gdb/gdb_61.html
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Count me in...
What I'd take as lessons:

1) It's better to start with a protocol and build an application than just launch into application building.

2) Privacy is wrong motivation for wanting to replace Facebook. A distributed social networking application is certainly possible (one might argue the web itself an example). A secure, distributed sharing scheme makes a social networking app exponentially harder to develop (Project Xanadu tried to create a secure "transclosure" scheme. They had a ten year head-start on the web and still failed. Distributed, revocable sharing is essentially a pathological problem).
Yeah, that should be front and center. If they want users, make it easy to understand the what and the how of Diaspora.
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Doable looks weird as a word. I read it as double. I believe it might look better hyphenated like do-able
Well, we aren't as far along as a formal "advisory board" yet... just a couple of informal advisors drawn from the pool of people I've worked with, or know from other organizations or whatever. Actually setting up a "proper" advisory board and starting to have regularly scheduled meetings and what-not is on the TODO list.

In addition to giving advice, another element of having an advisory board, that I was only recently introduced to, is this: If you get advisors who are, for example, retired execs who don't want to work full-time, but still want to be "in the game", they can be very valuable in terms of connections, making calls for you to their friends who are still in the business world, etc. I heard a story related once about a startup who wanted to pursue defense contracts, and they recruited a retired general to their board and he was invaluable in helping them navigate that world.
you forgot to say that you weren't intending to use it to replace your use of html, but for replacing your use of bbcode-likes.

it's the bees knees as a bbcode replacement.
I can't speak for other cities, but in Vancouver, there is a large 'go local' movement, even within developers. This is purely anecdotal, but within my circle (all of us live in or close to the lower mainland), if given the option, we would probably choose a local entity as opposed to a foreign company. For example, I registered my domain name with and my site is hosted on a local company. I'm sure with larger sites it is different, because they require a more robust web hosting solutions. But for the regular Joe, I'd imagine they'd go for something similar, a 'word of mouth' type of thing.

My wife and I try to purchase Canadian things mostly and support our local economy.

If you've ever been to Vancouver, you'll know the lower mainland has an unusually high number of Starbucks. Yet in the last year and a half, a few closed down, and cafés such as Caffé Artigiano can still compete with them enough to still be in business in the same area. I don't have the exact numbers, but I know they stay competitive (my old housemate works at one).
#perl6 summary for week ending 2012-08-25 | Perl 6 Reports [blogs.perl.org]
This is why I don't buy any digital books other than programming books (that will be irrelevant in decades) and books that, in general, will not survive the test of time. In other words, none of the library will be of value in a few decades.

Anything else I still buy physical: books I care about, music, etc. As an example, if I was after a design-patterns book, I'd buy a physical copy. Algorithms book? Physical. PHP programming book: digital. The latest "how to launch your startup book"?: digital. I own CD's for all of my music.

As an electrical engineer I have had the experience of collecting hundreds of physical data books only to throw them all away years later. That world has changed completely with the availability of freely downloadable PDF data sheets and data books. The same is the case with most mechanical components catalogs and product information books. Open and free websites and/or PDF files have replaced the world of hard-copy manuals, books and catalogs.

And so the question might very well be: What are other book genres going to look like in ten, twenty, thirty or fifty years? It could very well be that book authors discover that they can earn a lot more money if their book is published digitally and made available openly while being supported by advertising or donations. While most would reject the idea of a 300 page PHP book with an add on every header or every page, the idea that this book would be free to the reader might change their viewpoint.

Catalog or data-book providers have an incentive for providing these book or documents for free: They are trying to sell you what's inside them. That transition was a no-brainer. Novels, fiction, business, political, hobby and other books might not have such strong tie-ins with revenue generating opportunities. This means that they have to make some money per unit sold (or unit read). Maybe all books will become websites with advertising and many opportunities to monetize them. And, at the same time, the reader will have the option to pay a nominal amount to turn off all advertising.

The idea of transferring ownership of digital assets to survivors might eventually translate into simply providing a list of the books, songs, etc. that the survivors can freely explore as a sample of what the deceased like to read or listen to. In the end, I think only a limited set of physical items hold sentimental value. As far as real monetary value, well, I think that books and records hardly count as investments save for very, very rare stuff.
"The bigger picture is a lot harder to balance. What happens after those 3 months? How do you run the startup while still maintaining a reasonable work-life balance?"

My theory on how to maintain work-life balance after YC is that you have to try to create some semblance of it during YC as well, then turn the volume up afterwards. That can also help avoid the post-Demo Day postpartum crash that comes with pulling a 3 month stint of nothing but work.

So for us, that meant taking Saturdays off, like I mentioned in the article. And it's not just about not working, it's about planning out some kind of epic release and fun time, like going to Monterey for a concert or kayaking around the bay. I have to admit that I wasn't as good about that before YC - I would work until some kind of internal safety valve would blow a gasket and I was flirting with the crispy edges of burnout, then I'd crash uselessly until I could be productive again - and now I'm hoping I've learned a life skill that can power steady productivity for much longer than 3 months.
The enthusiasm is good, but add more specific examples of problems you've solved and things you've built.
(I posted this in response to another comment but am moving it here since you actually addressed it)

What I'm curious about it, is there a general principle that stops things from possessing a property perfectly? For example, IIRC friction dictates that many energy transformations never convert energy perfectly, leading to far-from-perfect engines and unavoidable power dissipation in electricity transmission. Is there a similar principle that stops collisions/materials from being perfectly elastic, surfaces from being perfectly reflective, etc.? Does it go against entropy never decreasing in a system?

edit: hmm, so are the laws that dictate that perfect objects cannot exist somehow more deeply connected by a general principle (just like Noether's theorem underlies laws in various domains)?
I was thinking someone who drove 5 hours to visit family would be staying over night and could do an over night charge. I'll admit this may not always be the case.

I certainly agree that serious range and uptake will need serious charging and generation infrastructure.
Doesn't that presuppose Steve is "more of a business/management guy than an engineer"?
If you can't ship an MS-DOS "format /S" image, there are several DOS clones available under open source licenses (freedos, rxdos, ...) and lots of proprietary ones targeted at the embedded market too (rom-dos, pts-dos, dr-dos, ...). You might be able to find one with an appropriate license, or buy such a license.

Another option would be to implement the DOS API (INT 21h and friends) in your emulation code, instead of within the VM as x86 code. DOSBox does this (but its emulation code would be under the GPL). DOSCMD also appears to do this and is under the BSD license: http://sourceforge.net/projects/doscmd/
The things they did wrong were:

- During the initial 6-12 months after the Kickstarter there was little or no communication about what they were doing. Blog posts were very scarce. If you want to maintain interest in a project it's a good idea to have some level of communications.

- They made initial software choices which meant that the initial release wouldn't run on the target platform (ARM based servers)

- Once Diaspora got going it wasn't easy to find pods other than joindiaspora

- The Diaspora team were unresponsive to patch submissions and this meant that features which users wanted didn't get implemented.

- There were issues with the protocol being undocumented
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Good article on why counting calories precisely is pointless and misleading. Another factor is that food labels are often incorrect - the FDA allows them to be up to 20% off in the USA. Even if you could figure out how many calories you consume and absorb, estimating the number of calories you burn is even more difficult.
This result was pretty much foreseen from the start (at least here, maybe someone can dig up an old thread?).

They were attacking the wrong problem ("lack of privacy on Facebook") and had the wrong plan ("build webserver software that will host your data with someone else you'll have to trust") and were likely the wrong people (five inexperienced college students).

The main thing though is that all these problematic aspects were also what got them attention and money. It seems like a modern parable.
Though why not? They speak english. It's a little smaller population wise than California. Why ignore it if there aren't any language or localization issues. One reason to be sure, already mentioned here, are arcane geographic licenses that lock content down on a per country basis. But for other SaaS web apps, go north!

As a Canadian in the US, I sometimes joke "Forget 6 degrees of separation, Canada only has 3 degrees of separation." I joined FB in 2007, but only because EVERYONE i knew back home was on it and asking me why I wasn't on. And I'm like, really? I hardly know anyone on it here (I was long past undergrad at this point).
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If their napping facilities are anywhere near as sketchy as their website, you would probably be safer finding a doorway somewhere!
I think most of the lessons are non-technical, which makes them all the more valuable.

1. Diaspora had all the characteristics of vaporware for the longest time - I remember they were #1 in a HuffPo 'Top Ten Alternatives to Facebook' lineup in May 2010[1].

2. The source code released that fall seemed to fail Spolsky's second rule of being able to build in a single step, because I remember checking out the repo and then realizing that I'd need to dedicate more than ten minutes to figuring everything out, making a mental note to do that at some point,a and promptly forgetting about it entirely.

3. The officially-hosted version was a victim of poor timing - the first time I saw it was last summer (2011). Aside from the fact that this was more than a year after I had already seen it in a mainstream news source, this was immediately after the release of Google+ and at the height of the 'nymwars'. By that point, Google+ had already gained its reputation as a massive, overhyped soon-to-be-likely-failure[2]. Diaspora's UI was nearly identical to Google+, so it seemed less like an alternative to Facebook and more of an open-source alternative of an alternative to Facebook.

I don't think the technical spec of Diaspora as a product is broken at the core (though that doesn't mean that something like what you envision couldn't also be valuable as well). I do think that the end goal is worthwhile, and let's be clear: this does not kill Diaspora - it has every chance to be as much alive as Netscape is, just in a different form (ie, Mozilla/Firefox). That's the beauty of open-source projects, particularly community-driven ones.

[1] The lineup is of course indicative of nothing other than the fact that Diaspora was already hyped-up enough to be included in such a lineup!

[2] Whether or not you agree with that conclusion now, it was certainly a popular sentiment at the time.
Well, nothing of use. I could not show up. I could show up and work on my new cool project instead of the one I sold. And they can't fire me because they would have to give me all the stock.
And compete with http://aws.amazon.com/glacier/ ?
Well if you are changing the behaviour of the getter or the setter then you are already changing the public API contract.

I would rather want a compile time error instead of a silently not changing value in a setter for example after a library upgrade
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I seem to recall reading this in Thinking Fast and Slow[1], but I can't find an online citation and only have the book in dead-tree form at home.

I suspect it falls into this general realm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effort_justification

edit: Specifically I believe I recall this (from the linked Wikipedia page) in Thinking Fast and Slow:

One of the first and most classic examples of effort justification is Aronson and Mills's study.[2] A group of young women who volunteered to join a discussion group on the topic "Psychology of Sex" were asked to do a small reading test to make sure they were not too embarrassed to talk about sexual-related topics with others. The mild-embarrassment condition subjects were asked to read aloud a list of sex-related words such as "prostitute" or "virgin". The severe-embarrassment condition subjects were asked to read aloud a list of highly sexual words (e.g. "fuck", "cock") and to read two vivid descriptions of sexual activity taken from contemporary novels. All subjects then listened to a recording of a discussion about "Sexual Behavior in Animals" which was dull and unappealing. When asked to rate the group and its members, control and mild-embarrassment groups did not differ, but the severe-embarrassment group's ratings were significantly higher. This group, whose initiation process was more difficult (embarrassment = effort), had to increase their subjective value of the discussion group to resolve the dissonance.

The cited study is: Aronson, E., & Mills, J. (1959) The effect of severity of initiation on liking for a group. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology ,59, 177-181.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/...
I was very jazzed about it, but didn't donate, back when it was being kickstarted. Whether or not they were intending to, the publicity quickly took on a flavor of "these wunderkinds are going to save us from FB!" I couldn't say whether that was intentional or not, but the day they first released their code to the public, I read through some of it and was singularly unimpressed, and basically gave up on the project because it looked like their first Rails app, and seemed very insecure. I don't know how many developers lost confidence in them that day, but I certainly did. The punk rock ethic is great for getting things done, but some things are big projects and need to be undertaken with a degree of care and commitment, and those kinds of projects are not conducive environments for all-cylinders-firing wunderkinds.

I think a takeaway better model is: produce a beta or a demo that you bring to Kickstarter and ask for double or quadruple the money you think you'll need (because you will). Either make the code open-source last after it's fully developed, or make sure the code you bring to the demo is secure and unembarrassing. Even though I disagree with the idea, I think Light Table is hitting most of the notes Diaspora missed: Chris showed up with a compelling demo, raised way more money than a kid would deem necessary (and then more still with YC) and at least originally was going to make the code available last. He also updates frequently and people are using the software today, which never really seemed to happen with Diaspora.
Ha! Remember this comparison with java back in the day? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQbuyKUaKFo
With this discussion in mind, a concrete case study is "When should RIM have pivoted?" When should they have invested most of their R&D into a developer friendly ecosystem and committed to a well defined strategy like Samsung (a hardware company), Google (ad platform company) or Apple (hardware and content platform) company? I believe RIM is most similar to Apple, but would die a slow death from hardware development costs without the volume support, so should have pivoted and merged with NOKIA while both were strong to leverage RIM's enterprise software expertise with NOKIA's hardware development/manufacturing scale. The pivot occurs when you do the numbers and realize that to master both hardware and software is a rare feat of skill not worth embarking on unless you believe you can beat Apple at its own game.
Of course, the model with the 85Kwh battery is significantly more than $50k.
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so have dozens of others with their own federated/distributed social network projects. diaspora seemed to ignore these projects/people, even though technically many were ahead of what diaspora put out after several months (things like, most other projects didn't have fundamental security flaws that could be found in any webdev n00b book in 10 minutes).

Diaspora go the hype via kickstarter - they got the drama - but they just tried to build another rails app. And burnt through a lot of money building 'yet another rails app' instead of using that money to build a community/protocol/standard on top of some of the work of the existing players.

Yes, true, perhaps behind the scenes they approached every other player in this space, and were privately rebuffed, but I don't think so. I think they took (and we encouraged) all the support and money on Kickstarter to be an endorsement of them personally (look, 4 college dudes! it's the perfect movie sequel to "the social network"!) instead of an endorsement of the idea, and a charge to act wisely.
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Even overnight isn't enough though. It's 30 hours to charge in a normal outlet, and you then you have to take over their garage.
Saying these guys "took on Facebook" is a bit of a stretch. Did they even make available a beta version? I don't think so. Talking about taking on Facebook is very much different than actually doing it. I think they are getting a lot more credit than they actually deserve.
Prior opportunity cost is a sunk cost. The "exit" needs to be evaluated based on realistic alternatives at that point (i.e. keep going or shut it down). The fact that you may have left money on the table to join a startup no-longer factors into the equation. It comes down to making the best choice given all the current alternatives, not all the possible past alternatives that could have been taken.
That format is perfectly valid YAML, easily parsed, and just as easily created. It needn't be any more complicated than it is. I could make a WP plugin to support it within a few hours.
I'm assuming that based on his roles in his own startups.
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Of course it isn't a fundamentally flawed idea. At least, from a technical perspective.

Email is a distributed social network. It just doesn't define very many types of actions or objects.

You can create "messages" and then you can "send" them. The user sees the guts of the message -- the "from", "to", "subject" and "body" portions, mainly.

As far as I know, nobody has extended the standard email formats and protocols to support new message types that have caught on lately. Actions like "Post photo", "Tag photo", "Take a special action defined by this third party which should be displayed like so when rendered in a 'feed'".

This seems like mostly a matter of agreeing on some new types of messages and some suggested ways of handling and displaying them.

I'm not saying this has to be built on top of existing email protocols -- it's really just independent sites exchanging messages of some sort. But email is a good working example to point at today.

The hard part is getting adoption, and getting different implementations to interoperate. Once you dive into this, you find a huge soup of different projects working on different pieces of the puzzle. Some of these projects have a future, others do not. It's going to take some time for this to shake out, and for the developers to resolve issues with bringing this stuff together.

A lot of this work has been going on without a lot of fanfare. See for example http://indiewebcamp.com/ or http://www.internetidentityworkshop.com/

Naturally, it couldn't hurt to bring a lot more help into these efforts.
Canada might have the second largest land mass in the world, but its population is just about the size of the California. From a Total Addressable Market, that's quite small. Foreign entities, IMHO, are reserved at the idea of investing large sums of money into a social engine of lesser significance.

Simply put, Canada is too small to be relevant.
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The question isn't, "is the acqui-hire the rational next step for the founders?" We can assume that acqui-hires virtually always are.
BIG BIG slippery slope here and I'm glad you raised it. When it comes to insurance, "plausible deniability" is the best policy because they can deny coverage for so many petty reasons. I believe Obamacare is supposed to address some of these issues, but not certain. Nevertheless, insurance companies would certainly move for genetic sequencing prior to issuing a policy at some point in the future, it just makes too much business sense for them. Which is why health insurance should be non-profit - to take away the profit motive that corrupts health care.
These observations are spot on, I just encourage you to actually use your advisers. They are there to help, sometimes a startup will recruit an 'impressive' person as an adviser and then think "Oh this is too small a problem to be bring to this person, I'm sure they are too busy." or any number of rationalizations. Don't do that. Let the adviser tell you if you're over stepping your relationship.
This is an area where many college professors fall short. In my intro to CS class we learned C, and the professor explicitly told us to debug our code with printf statements. It wasn't until my first job that I even found out about gdb. I can't believe how much time I wasted trying to debug C and C++ code in college with nothing more than printf and cout.