skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A truly inspiring story. While to us, blasé Westerners (tongue-in-cheek), it seems that the world is collapsing, it's heart-warming to know of a place where positive change is happening thanks to technology. It does put things in perspective, I'd say.
Do we know if Y Combinator is profitable yet? One quality that is likely to limit copycats comes from the fact that it is not like a VC. It is not out there with prospectuses advertising its performance to the deep pockets.

If the YC model is indeed profitable, then it might be time for an enterprising financier to go out, raise a fund, and do it ten times as big. Of course, the success rate will be somewhat lower, since the personal attention and advice that YC gives its companies just won't scale.

If the model is profitable, I would guess there would be private money to be had. I just don't think anyone knows how profitable the model is yet. It is still new, risky, and unproven.

Just because some guy with a ton of domain knowledge can earn a decent return off a few dozen companies a year doesn't mean it will work at scale.
Used the Windows 7 beta? Please take this survey (thanks in advance)
Why Adobe Flash penetration is more like 50% than 99%
Can a Tomato Change Your Life? The Pomodoro Technique
The demo probably was about 3 seconds. Look at tipjoy.com for 1.5 seconds, and you can tell what it's for and that it's cool and alive. In the other 1.5 seconds you can tip someone 25 cents for their blog entry. It's that easy and obvious.

Practice giving punchy demos. Don't frikkin make us watch you log in. We should be saying oooh at the 2 second mark, aaah at 5 seconds, and wow at 10 seconds. Definitely get all the best bits in the first 10 seconds.

10 seconds may sound flippant. But actual users will have clicked the back button long before if they aren't engaged.

You can practice demoing successful websites. Imagine you were pitching Google or eBay or Tokbox or justin.tv and had 10 seconds to demo. Start logged in. Assume some users won't see the last 5 seconds.
I'm just a webdeveloper hosting some of the people/companies website I work for. Since from time to time I have to get my hands dirty with their projects again, I prefer to do so in an environment I know because I set it up personally. If I had to let them decide, most of them would go for crappy inexpensive hosting providers and additionally I would have to deal with a lot of passwords when I get to deal with their stuff again.

The money I live with comes from me coding stuff, not from the hosting. Since I am trying to get a personal project up and running I am trying to cut all the expenses (time/money) I can possibily cut or reduce; that's all.
What the car industry needs is a reboot.

The 1908 Ford Model T had a 4-cylinder engine, ran on 4 wheels, used gasoline, with a mileage of 20mpg. A hundred years later, the basics are still the same. Why put billions more in a dead-end industry?

The government should instead invest in new ways of building cars. Like the Aptera 2e (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptera_hybrid_car) which is fundamentally changing the way a car is built. Or Tesla. Or Zap.

Forget the Big 3. Create the Small 300.
The question is whether trying and failing to become a millionaire by doing something interesting makes you more unhappy than not trying.

If the difference between expectations and reality is what makes us unhappy, then lowering aspirations to zero is what would make everybody happiest. I don't believe that it would.

Creating the impression that it is possible to be sucessful with your own startup cannot be false reality. Possibility is never reality, and founding a startup isn't taking part in a ponzi scheme. Some people being successful doesn't lower the odds of others to be successful as well.
Absolutely - I got on Wired last year by doing this.

Also, perhaps sign up to something like Google Alerts for various key phrases that are relevant to your area. When stories/posts pop up that you might be able to add some value/expertise too, don't be afraid to make contact with the authors.

You just have to go out and get noticed.
We were on TechCrunch. It sends shockwaves all over the blogosphere for a week

Don't be afraid to go out and approach normal media too - by far the biggest reaction I received last year from normal media outlets occured after I was interviewed by David Sarno on an LA times blog.

This is especially true if you're a young guy that's trying to build something...the media loves stories about underdogs.
Related, more cogent article:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-secret-to-raising-sm...

"The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

Hint: Don't tell your kids that they are."
Yeah, I've noticed this too. Some of the women I know that are quite attractive now at 22-27 were very awkward-looking at 15-17, which is the age range when all reasonably fit girls are supposed to be attractive. While some of the hotties from high school look old and washed up, even at just 25.
Insert Inigo Montoya quote here.
"the media loves stories about underdogs."

Thanks for that. That's given me more ego points to approach the media with a bit more hope.
No guilt for skimming some extra money off a fan who wants to go to the show? Or do you rationalize it as "someone else would do it anyway"?

I'm saying this as someone who goes to ~20 shows a year, and so it's obviously a sore point.
The numbers say otherwise. 51% of all vehicles sold in the US in December 2008 were pickups or SUVs. [1] Average vehicle sales price is $25,000 [2], despite the existence of nice cheap fuel-efficient cars like the Yaris at $12,000.

Dagres' suggestion that cars should be more about electronic gadgets is wrongheaded. Cars last 10 years, gadgets are obsolete after 3. You want a car + an iPhone, the second of which you'll upgrade several times.

[1] http://www.bizjournals.com/albany/stories/2009/01/12/story1....

[2] http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2008/09/04/2008-09-04__anal...
For Some Best Buy Reward Zone members, the $99 iPhone is here, briefly
However, you have to enroll to the university for credits to distance-learn the course.

The Professional development course registration (noncredit) unfortunately does not list the course in its schedule of Fall 2008.
There's many startups attempting to do this including pipl.com, http://cazoodle.com/ among others. Here's some research about it: http://www-sal.cs.uiuc.edu/~kcchang/
I sell a desktop application that is written in Java. My web site is written in Rails (with the obligatory Javascript bits).

The distinction between the two is blurring these days. The core feature of my website is a backend where my freelancers enter new content, which is then operated on by my program, and turned into a page on my website advertising "Here's a taste of content you find compelling. You could make something like this if you only pushed yonder download button". This was originally intended to be mostly for marketing and SEO.

Then I got a bright idea: wait, I pay people to add to that content every month. What if I could update the application with it automatically? My users don't care about the distinction between code and data one iota: from their perspective, adding more content to the program improves what it can do. So I offer access to the new content as one of the benefits of purchasing the application -- free at the margin for me, high perceived benefit to the customers. Its like having a program that gets an automatically generated .1 upgrade every month.
James Hong: My economic projections
I like this quote from the comments:

"I don't have a clue how one would be able to build a gui with it, or how one can easily interact with a database."

Because SQL is functional programming. Functional programming doesn't just mean Haskell, it also means Microsoft Excel (which, I've been told, is the most used programming platform in existence).
Lots we haven't heard of, since they're working on interesting problems and not getting rich.

Partly because "we" (HN) are biased toward consumer-facing web startups, which are typically not the sort of companies started by academics, or people with extensive knowledge of a non-web industry. There are many startups out there that "we haven't heard of", but still end up solving valuable problems, and quite a few of them get rich as a result.
IBM Research | Ponder This | February 2009 challenges
Why dating sites are recession-proof
"takes into account the fact that they think they are charging insurance. If the hospital realizes you are actually paying this yourself, the price will come down."

Unfortunately it's actually exactly the opposite. The truth is that if you have no insurance you pay more (or at least are billed more). At the minimum get full deductible insurance - it doesn't cover anything (except massive emergencies AKA bills), but they do negotiate good prices for you (usually as part of their full pay plan).

For a tiny example: lots of stores have $4 discount drugs. It's a good deal yes - but my insurance got me a price of $2.16 (I don't see how the pharmacy makes any money at all at that price BTW).

As a starting point don't ever pay more than half of what they ask! Tell them: I'll pay half, or I'll pay nothing - you pick. You'll see, they'll agree. And you can probably get away with paying just a third.

Don't forget to look into all the government and private programs for people in your situation. They exist, and they have lots of hoops to jump through (on purpose, to discourage people from actually using them, while being able to claim they exist) - but if you do it, you can save a lot.
If you can afford it, UltraDns (Neustar) is the best. This is the service that Amazon uses, as well as a number of other very large sites. They have a 100% uptime SLA and a latency one as well. We haven't had an outage with them in almost two years. They also have an API which is nice. Oh, and they can do geo-distribution of requests, as well as a variety of other more advanced functions.
Twuys! Twaking twew twords twor tweverything twitter twis twetting twinda twilly.
This is pretty cool but I fail to see any long-term use.
I might have something to say if the page would ever load.
I'm #1607 on the waiting list for an Aptera. I signed up because I had complained so often that there was no electric car you could actually buy, and people kept telling me I just didn't try hard enough. So far I'm right, and I predict I'll never actually get mine. When the CEO brags that they have 45 circuit boards [1], I can already read the company's obituary. But maybe they'll pull it off, and I'll have a really snazzy car.

I'm more excited about Mission Motors electric motorcycle. http://www.ridemission.com/. (I'm an investor.) It's breathtakingly fast and fun to ride.

[1] http://earth2tech.com/2008/10/01/aptera-tweaking-electric-ve...
The problem with Mongrel is that you allocate N mongrel instances at setup time. Apache, on the other hand, can dynamically allocate new processes (up to a limit) in order to meet increased demand. This is especially important for people like me, who host more than one site on a machine, and want to be able to handle load up to a certain point without fiddling with config files every time there is a spike in traffic.
Why do you think there should be 300 car companies? Can you point to another manufacturing industry where hundreds of players collectively have significant market share?
SGML actually has some really nice properties explicitly designed to better handle parsing invalid files. The redundant close tags, for example, allow <b>this is bold <i>and italic</b> but not bold</i> -- these sorts of errors are made by people and it was a goal to handle those sorts of situations. Whether or not that was a good goal? Well, I guess that's part of this debate.
Functional Programming is just beautiful. You can't write beautiful code in C++. Functional Programming, however, is like maths, where you can create and exploit nice structures. It's just beautiful code.
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More details, including some description of the equipment used:

http://www.nepalwireless.net/index.php
This is very good advice and the interview, as short as it was, is very inspiring.
more accurately $19/mo or $199/yr
</anal>
hehe
God save FP from the "mainstream". I know I sounds elitist but I honestly don't see how it would benefit FP to have lots of Java drones descending on it and taking it directionally into "simplifying database access" (for instance).

The reason I like FP is because it is "pure" and I enjoy the difference in the thought-model when programming. Plus I usually can get things done much faster. I think this is why most people enjoy FP in one way or the other. Why ruin that in the quest for popularity?
i think i read on the forums that neither free not paid users have deleted files counted to their quota :D
I believe I've seen this type of crawling in action in request logs. For example, Yahoo might try to request "news.ycombinator.com/user?id=britney_spears", even though it's not linked to from anywhere.
thats a good point.

at some time you're gonna have to trust any cloud provider, irrespective of the encryption(/lack) or the implementation - you send ur data off over your dsl and it's up for grabs. simple as that!
On the same Nepalese village, here's a story from Oct. 2001 (before they had internet access):

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1606580.stm
The Meaning of Keys
They do inflate their numbers a bit.
Complete nonsense, in spite of the credentials of the source.

A beggar is somebody that asks for money without giving anything in return. An entrepreneur seeking funding is not a beggar, it is somebody that knocks on doors with what he thinks is a win-win proposition, to be judged on its merits.

To degrade that to 'begging' is really unfair, it is not as if beggars are giving shares in their business to donors.

Raising money can be an important skill for an entrepeneur who is in a position where raising money is the only way to succeed, there are plenty of ways to succeed without it. It depends to a large degree on how you define success, for one person that may be a 1M per year business, for another 10M or 100M or an IPO.

The trick is not to always be unhappy because there are bigger successes in life, statistically speaking your chances of a billion dollar success are slim because there are only so many 'slots' for such successes and your niche may not be one of those. But if you score a 10M business that you've built up by yourself then that's pretty damn good compared to the average. And if you do that without external capital than more power to you.
Ok - I'll give it a shot. :-)

Using FP is like learning to ride a bike. It's difficult to give you "advantages" over riding a car (or bus) - you have to try it out and get comfortable to appreciate it.

Just give it a try - write out a few of your (semi-serious) projects in an FP language. Start with Scheme. You may enjoy it!
Orange: data mining framework C++/Python
Link posted on a comment by mjtokelly:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=490930
Why not teach Programming + Politics
Isn't there a lot of pointer arithmetic in RDBMS land?
No, it's silly to try to draw any parallel between the content of this article and entrepreneurship or "hacking".

I would much rather see this article as simply something that might be interesting to people that like to think about stuff.
This is the place to go, Douglas Crockford really knows javascript and passes on valuable experience. http://javascript.crockford.com/

This is a valuable resource
http://javascript.crockford.com/code.html

Here are some really good presentations: http://www.metafilter.com/61049/Douglas-Crockford-Teaches-Ja...
Why do you need to be a millionaire though? I think working for yourself, on (mostly) your own terms on your own product that you're passionate about is more meaningful than the box you might one day tick next to millionaire.

There's no risk in failure either, you can always go and work for someone else, and personal bankruptcy isn't _THAT_ bad.

I don't think PG is giving anyone false hope that they'll hit the lottery - he's just offering an alternative. And as everyone has said tons of times before, your chances of making a million by starting your own business are orders of magnitude higher than winning the lottery.
Is Offer-Based Monitization Really The Future Web/Mobile Revenue Model?
Everyone I talk to in the Valley seems to think that companies like Offerpal (http://www.offerpalmedia.com/) are the future of web and mobile application monitization ...What?!
Go to press now, but one important note: go to press with a "Story".

A Story is something the press will be able to tell. Something that captures the imagination. Prepare that Story in advance of going to that journalist, so that it comes out naturally while you talk to her. It should be inspiring, positive, human, not arrogant, something people can relate to.
I disagree that the number of startups around are constrained in any way by funding. Or, at least, the number of viable startups.

I think there are far more important things on the list of stuff that new startups need, like business guidance and planning, structure, strategy. There are so many avenues right now for "cheap" startups -- using AWS, for example -- that I just can't see that throwing more money at the problem will help at all.

And, even in the case of "expensive" startups -- those that need serious capital for manufacturing or prototyping -- they need a strong business plan and a solid structure before they need money.

I suspect that pouring money into the startup sector would have a result very similar to the dot-com boom and bust cycle, and we don't need another of those right now.
Why would anyone want to do this?

For the money, obviously.
Bingo!

Although this describes something of a subset of the current economic situation, I think it's still safe to say that there is a lot of money available for "the next Google" (or Intel, or...). The problem isn't the money, it's figuring out who the next big players are going to be.

I mean, hell, is this not directly demonstrated by the entire YC process? Here's a model in which there's a very reasonably-sized fund available, and an entire business set up around trying to determine who's got a good potential product, and who hasn't, and then assist the ones that maybe have a chance.
That haystack is infinitely large.

Gah. I really hate it when people misuse "infinite".
Mining 60TB of EverQuest II data (plus 7k player surveys)
New 64-bit Operating System released
Does anyone have any recommendations for credit card preocessing in UK? It looks like I will go with PayPal to begin with, but I am also very interested in looking at other alternatives.
| So how does an entrepreneur who is bursting with good ideas surpass this obstacle?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately ... business has been good to me, and I'm on my first "cusp" -- the point where I've got too much business to handle, but not enough resources to expand -- and so I've found that I'm starting to get ahead of myself in thinking about what's going to happen next.

The thing about good ideas is, they're almost worthless by themselves. They're only one part of a much larger formula involving things like hard work, dedication, focus, and good teams.

The funny thing about more money is, it doesn't really make any of the other parts of the formula any easier. A little, maybe -- I'd love to have just a few thousand dollars extra to cover my first employee's paychecks and do a little marketing -- but it's not going to make sure that I keep working hard, or that I stay focused on the task-at-hand, or that I remain dedicated to my purpose.

So, to get back to your question, an entrepreneur needs to write down their good ideas, when they have them, and then remind themselves to get back to work, and realize that funding is just one minor obstacle, and solving that one won't make their business much more viable.
There seems to be some confusion among the HN user about the actual starup definition. Many people call a startup even outside projects and websites made for fun.

PG says "The essential task in a startup is to create wealth", that pretty well rules tarsnap out as a startup, I guess.
The absence of something like a "Java Pet Store" for FP was what drove the topic for my MSc dissertation that I finished last year: I basically implemented a simple set of requirements for a publishing-workflow system in both Java and Haskell and then set out to evaluate the differences that the two approaches had from a software engineering perspective [http://www.lars-oppermann.com/dis/dis-lopperma-final.pdf].

The Haskell version turned out to be much more compact and some parts of the business logic could be expressed in a really straightforward way. The Haskell version also had a meta-programming based mechanism for automatically deriving and parsing XML representations of the domain objects. The persistence layer could also be made very unobtrusive due to Haskell's type-classes.

Nevertheless, the absence of extensible data types and the clunkiness of Haskell's record system made the domain model rather unwieldy. This is not a necessary limitation of FP. It rather seems that most users of FP today don't need such facilities because they are not normally building systems that require these kind of models.

It's also very important to note that object oriented programming and FP are not conflicting. Mainstream OOP languages tend to embrace an imperative execution model (Turing Machines) and FP languages are modeled around Lambda Calculus. Projects like Scala show how FP and OOP can augment each other nicely.
Don't forget #macdev on irc.freenode.org

Also, this is a great rundown: http://andymatuschak.org/articles/2007/09/09/getting-started...
Here is xhtml for a link with mixed content:

<a href="http://news.ycombinator.com">News for <b>Hackers</b>!</a>

How would you suggest equivalent s-expression syntax that leads to fewer errors due to its beauty?
some really good links thanks
Client side resample ? I would love to know how they do that. With AJAX it does not seem possible.
Here in Germany we have very strong unions. The system we have here would be called communism by right-wing american standards. In Europe we call it social capitalism.

With this system, we are building the best cars in the world for decades. I am sure Steve Jobs could manage a Porsche successful, within the european system.
Why Do Enterprise Applications Suck?
I learn that it's even better than that: You're the FreeBSD Security Officer, which presumably involves a great deal of practical expertise in reviewing and fixing insecure software.

cperciva has a bit of a history of surprising people with his credentials: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35079
There's a slight lack of good readable documentation, practical examples and best practices about the canvas tag out there, and the HTML5 spec itself isn't very readable.
Foreground activation and single-instance programs
You need a cofounder who can take care of the ramen goal so you can focus on what you love best. The point of your business isn't to do it all yourself, it is to do something you love. If you find founders with complementing skill sets, it's win win win.

I would say you could easily get a web/design/biz cofounder who could dramatically change your ramen and also enjoy a few of those tasks you have been putting off for a while :).
most of the smart people in finance, especially quants, are just there to signal intelligence

This is exactly it. Hedge funds want to tell their wealthy but not terribly smart clients (e.g. heirs, etc) "we have PhDs managing your money". That it is quite literally not rocket science, they never know. The danger came because the fund managers started to believe they were 10x rather than 10% smarter than average.
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