skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm resistant of this but curious to see where it leads. I know people who "don't like email" because "FaceBook/MySpace is easier" and they only ever send me messages through those applications. At some point it seems there must be some kind of convergence into a single, shared protocol that multiple applications can tap into ... a la email but perhaps a bit more personal. People bemoan privacy issues, but they continually plug away their darkest secrets into these walled gardens and their illusions of security. Oh crap, am I ranting? Sorry ...
I don't watch it, but if it's a game show with prizes, then it's regulated. Celebrity game shows usually give money to charity, but my guess is that those are regulated too.
I'm 29 going on 30 this year which means, given the results here, that I am on my way down and out. Either that or I'm at the crest of a wave that will move and break as we all die off. Morbid ...
Brilliant! I think everyone involved benefits:

* More startups get to receive YC aid and funding, and these startups are more likely to have (as a group) advice from/access to a top-tier VC firm.

* YC gets to fund more companies, while spreading the additional risk and reward around. This also means they get to expand the YC alumni network at a faster rate.

* Sequoia gets to invest, via YC, in web companies that may not need big enough rounds of funding for it to directly be worth Sequoia's time. And they arguably get a slight edge in investing in those YC startups that do wind up wanting more money later. (I am not at all saying they have an official edge, but if they are somewhat familiar with a company from the YC stage, they'll have a slight natural edge. That's how familiarity works.)

* Silicon Valley wins, because that's where this is all happening.

I wonder who first broached the idea: YC or Sequoia?
So ... submit it to reddit, or somewhere else appropriate for these kinds of discussions?
Carp, no wunder Im dum nwo
Agreed - this is blatantly off topic.
Why do teachers value Olympiad-level mathematical insight so much in high school?
I can understand the high school wanting students to rank very highly in national math contests and competing internationally in the math olympiad.

But for the vast majority of students, this behavior is simply destructive. There is more to life than math olympiad-level insights.

Why criticize students for something that only a handful in the entire country can really do for reasons no one really understands anyway?

Perhaps some of these math teachers are disappointed with their own achievements in life and want to succeed via their students' success?
While I'd like to believe the article, it doesn't entirely jibe with my B.A. degree's understanding of good economic policy, of which the fundamental tenet is to ensure a marketplace that is both fair and stable. Eliminating corporations would destabilize many sectors of the economy(particularly infrastructure-oriented ones), and it wouldn't make those sectors more fair than before.

The point made for human health in the Middle Ages can be interpreted as a factor of the lower number of people around at that time. The difference is that we now support a large population via improved disease treatment and engineered methods of increasing calorie count. We probably still don't get the same kind of nutrition per person as the people in the Middle Ages.

Alternative currencies are worth considering(for example, the scrip used in Germany and Austria historically.) in isolation as a means of balancing local economies with national ones.
I can't count how many times we've put together a site and at some point the signup feature had some kind of problem. Out of curiousity, what was the specific bug if you don't mind me asking?
What does a successful YC application look like?
I am really thinking hard about applying for this round. I'm curious though, what do the applications of successfully funded YC companies look like?
Hacker News User Affinity Graphs
One of cloud computing's best practical apps is community building
Twitter: A fine 'pre-business' but un-monetizable and a deadly acquisition target
See related discussion in IETF ALTO WG: http://www.ietf.org/mail-archive/web/alto/current/maillist.h...
All it did was take me back here?
This reminds me of the old joke about induction in mathematics. Maybe it could be adapted as follows:

Claim: Every Wikipedia page ever made is notable.

Proof: Suppose at least one Wikipedia page that is not notable exists. Choose the one whose length in characters is smallest. Then surely this page is notable for being the short non-notable Wikipedia page ever created, making it quite notable, indeed. We have reached a contradiction and hence the proof is complete.

Or something like that.
There are a number of areas where Findjango--or vertical search engines in general--can outperform a mainstream search engine. It's certainly a work in progress.

1. "Perfect answers" that relate to the topic at hand. For example, Findjango has an index of Django's documentation and lists related documentation at the top (above search results). For a large percentage of searches, those links will answer the search immediately (also, the links deeplink to the correct location on the documentation page, as opposed to simply dropping you at the page's beginning).

2. Because of a narrow scope, it is possible for a vertical search to be more current.

3. Because of the narrow scope, it is possible to apply custom relevancy algorithms suited to the specific niche which may outperform generic relevancy algorithms. Findjango has begun traveling this route, but is clearly not there yet.

4. The ability to collect and display targeted metadata. Although I'm not taking advantage of it yet, Findjango knows the number of followers and last commit date for each GitHub repository, and can display them in-line in the SERP. For a targeted audience this can be worthwhile to add, whereas for a main-stream search it would represented a negligible usecase.

5. I believe that vertical search engines can be monetized much more effectively--and while doing so create more added value for the user--than a generic search engine. Certainly I have no numbers to back this up as of yet.

In the end, my argument is that a vertical search can outperform a general search engine within its vertical. It is certainly not my argument that it will inherently outperform, and certainly Findjango lacks the breadth of content to compete thus far.

This is a long-term project, certainly not an overnight road to success.
What!?

Alternative: Go to the Apple store and buy a MacBook. Turn it on. You're done.
Would have been really neat... but fail.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this looks like a personal blog. If I am mistaken, you should consider modifying the design to have a better call-to-action and quick explanation of what's in it for me (the user).
News, Twitter, FriendFeed and Many more in GTalk : Are Chat Client Becoming new Browsers ?
Intel warms AMD about patent breach
13 Must Watch Pixar Animated Short Films
True - But the same happened in the dotcom boom. There were some pretty terrible coders around. A lot of bad entrepreneurs lost people a lot of money on some bad ideas.

I'd disagree that being a banker can't be noble... but you'd really need to meet/know a counterexample to argue that point to it's end conclusion - and that's not necessarily a simple thing to do at this point in history.
Man-with-a-hammer syndrome
Why is it "only fair" that I reimburse them if I am employed on an at-will contract? The legal expenses are no different from any other one time expense such as a sign-on bonus. As such, just like sign on bonuses, if an employer believes they would be compensated for their legal expenses only if I stay there for X years, they should put it on a contract. If I think it's fair as well, I'll sign it.
Wow, the graph results are formatted just like the actual layout HN uses when viewing a topics comments.
Sorry, I should have been more explicit; I meant the other way around.

The self-deprecating dynamics I get, the U.S. version I don't -- probably just because of that :-) I would still appreciate thoughts on why and how?
it's an exploit
It is absolutely a good thing for gamers. Gaming is becoming a cottage industry again. Games were produced by small teams on small budgets at first. It's coming full circle, except this time around it's about as easy to develop for a console as it always has been to develop for personal computers.
To achieve what exactly?
NY AG demands AIG payment list
auto-upvote this submission...
same was for me
Yeah. I see some Belushi in there too.
Interesting idea (as well as color scheme). I think though that there are too many houses on the market and too few people using your site. Focusing in one place would be good. Personally I would choose detroit, at least you then have a story to tell, you're trying to help out the country. Real-estate startup in seattle? Boring. What story is there about seattle real estate? People love a train wreck (Detroit), and you can leech off those eyeballs.
The one good thing about crises such as the dotcom boom and the current Wall Street meltdown is that they weed out the mercenaries. The coders who stayed in the business after the crash were the ones who did it for the passion, not for the buck. I would say the same applies to bankers, but I never met one banker who admitted to love his job. I have met traders who loved their jobs. But not bankers.

Unless by "banker" we mean anyone who works at a bank, not just investment bankers...

I would argue that bankers are not particularly noble, but I am not bashing them either. Guys like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Marc Andreessen and others became rich because of their companies' IPOs, which were carried out by bankers. Not all is black & white, right?
I haven't gotten an email from Qwitter in months, so either no one has unfollowed me (unlikely) or its totally broken.
Ask HN: Getting Buzz for your site on popular blogs & media, how much is really PR? (Yes, Techcrunch sucks)
This question reminds me about some startups I had seen that had not get coverage on Techcrunch, Mashable and Readwriteweb. Personally I think the Techcrunch guys are quite arrogant. If you send them an email about a useful startup and if you don't know someone there, it's unlikely they will review your startup, even if it's a quality product.

I said this because, I also had seen stupid product ideas and getting coverage on techcrunch, one is like a tinyurl for google searches (this is very simple, in just some lines of code), the other is the simple idea of the google fight (two queries, see who has more results).

So my question is how much is knowing the right person, rather than having the right product?

To get coverage, to get the first buzz.
sounds like a localized problem, to me.

i was good at math, went to a the best HS in the area, and didn't experience anything like this.
You can't have profit without loss. It is the twin engine of capitalism that make the economy run.

When these companies failed, their asset get liquatated. Those assets that got liquatated will hopefully end up in companies that were sound, financially and bottom line wise. That is the purpose of the bust, to clean out unprofitable activity and correct the misallocation of resource.

If you subscribe to the Austrian business cycle theory, than you also realize that these booms and bust are not natural, and are largely due to the nature of the federal reserve. For example, if you lower the interest, you're signalling lot of resources are availiable because of the high saving rate. But since the feds control the banking system, the interest its mandate are unnatural and not based on real market condition. This cause a chain reaction in the market(as people are tricked that there are more resources availiable) in which a number of factors lined up perfectly to cause a spectuative boom and than a market correction, thus creating a large cluster of entrepeneural errors.

That is not to say that there won't be a boom and bust. It will probably happen in a true free market as entrepeneurs are fooled, but it will happen less. Entrepneurs will make mistakes, but not in such large clusters to cause such a crazy business cycle, which by the way the federal reserves was supposed to protect us against.

For some reason, the federal reserves fails to prevent business cycles from happening.
Lol why didn't this person just really create the program, shouldn't be that hard. I think that would have gotten him more votes than this scam.
I've been had!
Ah.

p.s. He's done interesting visualizations before - I'd suspect something else first.

Guess my benefit of doubt was unwarranted: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=518752
The Downsides of Streaming Services
The FU seemed somewhat elitist when it started. Maybe that detracted from the potential members?
I'm not sure I like this. Let's suppose that this does become standard practice.

Now we could end up in a situation where users and corporations disagree on the wording in the terms of service, or about definitions of terms.

As a simple example, let's use Apple's Itunes "software updates" that attempts to push safari onto my machine.

Now lets suppose they add into the terms of service that if you use itunes, they can use this updater to add safari without your permission.

In legalese it might read something like "add or update installed or new programs onto your device" while in english it may read "Installs software updates automatically."

I'm not saying Apple would do something like this, or that this article and company it uses as an example has such intentions - but this is how I would abuse the system if it became widespread, and if I wanted to abuse it.

I do think it would be better to have terms of service that users actually read - and in fact, I would assume many terms of service do start of being readable and understandable. However, in the end its about CYA (covering your ass) and for that reason I think it's best to have everything spelled out. Perhaps the summaries would be useful though to draw attention to what is discussed in each section ,as it it in the example provided, so that I know exactly where the privacy information is, I can quickly see where the SLA is, etc.
Why this is important:

AIG was already being investigated for their compensation "schemes." AIG is at the heart of the financial meltdown, and after having received $165 Billion for bailing them out, they have the affrontery to outrage every taxpayer in the US with rewarding the behavior that got AIG into this mess in the first place.

One of the arguments made by the NY Attorney General is that these payments may be "fraudulent conveyances" which is a fancy term for wrongly sucking the money out of a company before it goes out of business.

From the letter: Please also provide whatever contracts you now claim obligate you to make these payments. Moreover, you should immediately provide us with a list of who negotiated these contracts and who developed this retention plan so we can begin to investigate the circumstances surrounding these questionable bonus arrangements.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7945774.stm
Some admin/moderator please delete this submission :-)
> In a perfect world, the stock market would decline another 70 or 80 percent

"The economy" is a measure of the value being created and enjoyed.

Anyone who says that they want "the economy" to decline 80% is saying that they want EVERYONE'S standards of living to decline 80%. You, your brother's, your retired parents - they should lose 80% of their housing, 80% of their nights out, 80% of the books they'd like to buy, 80% of the movies they'd like to watch, 80% of the vacations they hope to go on.

Except for the dead bodies piled on the sidewalks, he's basically hoping for a genocide.

"I feel alienated and I feel like a failure and I hate everyone and therefore I want it all to burn" is a fine sentiment for a high school heavy metal band or an idiot 14 year old goth, but it's an absolutely shameful thing for an adult to say.
interesting, i wonder how it works
This is what, to me, is inspiring about your work: YC is first and foremost a 'cool hack'. It's not a finance guy thing or an 'entrepreneur' thing in the sense of a calculated attempt to make a big bunch of money, it's taking some existing pieces and putting them together in a novel way, and creating something new and valuable, and hopefully, in the process, also making a good return on the risk. I think that, ultimately, this attitude is what I've always liked in your essays - hackers can do business stuff and do a good job of it.

Sorry if that seems a bit fawning... let's balance it out a bit: a skeptic might wonder if the YC bunch's investments are not panning out enough to continue investing at the current pace and think that therefore, they're seeking outside funding.
I moved from Pittsburgh, PA to the South Bay last summer. While the cost of living is somewhat higher in the Valley, in my experience it is not as much higher as it is usually made out to be (except for buying a house, as pg mentioned).

* Housing: I'm renting a 4 bedroom / 3 bathroom house in a nice area of Sunnyvale with 2 friends. My share of the rent is about the same as the rent I was paying for a large 1 bedroom apartment in Pittsburgh.

* Food: Restaurant prices seem to be about the same or a little bit higher. Groceries are definitely more expensive. The first time I went to the grocery store, all of the prices seemed 10-20% too high. However, with some careful shopping, you can stock up when items are on sale and not pay much more than I was paying in Pittsburgh. Buying fruits and veggies at a farmer's market also helps keep the cost down and the nutritional value up.

* Car: I drive more often and further now. The Valley is not designed for pedestrians. With the rapid fall of gas prices, this hasn't been a big deal for me, but plan on spending more on gas and maintenance if you don't currently drive much.

* Taxes: California's sales tax is very high. It's going up by another 1% on April 1, to 9.25% (or more, depending on where you live). California also has one of the highest personal income taxes in the country. I'm not happy with this state of affairs, but I think it is worth it to be in the Valley. In the long run, this could really hurt California, though.

In short, it is more expensive for me to live in the Valley than in Pittsburgh, but it's not as bad as I was led to believe. Perhaps this is because I don't have much interest in buying house at this stage in my life. Most of the people who told me the cost of living was "insane" in the Valley were family men who already own a house and were factoring the cost of replacing that house into their calculations. For the rest of us, if you can get by in some other major U.S. city, you can probably get by in the Valley.
Your HS didn't care much about math contest performance?

Even if your marks are in no way affected by math contest results, teachers can still make you feel awful for not meeting their expectations.
67 votes in 13 minutes? I've never seen anything shoot to the top quite that quickly. There's a surprising disparity between the number of people who click a link and the number of people who go back and vote.
Just a heads up, the http://news.ycombinator.com/apply page still lists the old deadline, you may want to update that as well.
I think your last paragraph is an important further part of the logic. If there is going to continue to be a big-ticket games industry, it needs to pull in new customers or it'll eventually choke off. The way to do that is with casual games; some percentage of such users will step up from there.

Casual games are the future of the big-budget industry.

I've been gaming a bit with my wife. While I don't normally consider myself "hard core" in most senses, my skill set is, whereas she is in the "played some Nintendo as a kid". (She can still beat me at Dr. Mario, but that's it.) I still note there is no apparent path from casual gaming to Mass Effect; it's still a huge jump. In my wife's case, I don't forsee her ever enjoying Mass Effect, but looking through her eyes, I wouldn't know how to get there, which is a problem in general.
Startup Tropes
Ditto this. I got tired of constantly tech supporting my mom on her Dell, and gave her my old MBP. Spent 30 minutes walking her through the OS X differences, and really haven't heard from her since. She uses it all the time now to create and give presentations, along with the standard e-mail/web/etc...
User-generated Software and Education
Perhaps some of the other Rails developers around here could satisfy my curiosity: when do you do the work (minor or major) to update your applications to use new releases? When the first or second RC comes out, or only once the 'official', final release is ready? Or are you tracking edge with an 'upgrade' branch or some equivalent?
> These days the modern equivalent would be throwing together an ajax handler...

No, the truly modern equivalent would be rolling over and dying.
Want to reply? Use the invite code "sxsw"
When a stock market declines, it just mean that the investors think the companies are doing unprofitable activities and that they need to change their activities to more profitable one. Hopefully they will switch to production of goods that people actually want and the stock market will rise up again.
> Other POWs have made simpler radios

They weren't trying to pick up shortwave.
> ensure a marketplace that is ... stable.

Punctuated equilibrium is a feature of markets. Creative destruction and all that. Stability is bad. You want upheaval and reformation. Unfortunately, things are playing out exactly as Schumpeter warned: the wealthy players are using political power to achieve "stability" and keep themselves dominant.
The second I saw the title I knew which site it must be referring to.

Such a great strategy for a site catering to artists and people who care a lot about terms but don't want to read legal text.
I guess I've never heard of game jams, but am now intrigued... It seems though that unless you've developed games before it might be hard to accomplish anything, even with a team? Or no?
Twitter Search, the most promising marketing tool since Google Adwords
I prefer the discussions here. The same topics will have different discussions depending on where they are introduced.

Submitting to reddit won't give you the same result.
So - What's the alternative to debt to fund growth?

Or are you saying we should contract?
Ok, people have voted down my comment.

Can people point out why they disagree with my assesement?
My teachers never directly prepared me for olympiad style events. We did have a math team, but that was more focused on a local competition with short time limits (very similar to ARML, if you are familiar with that.) In terms of real math, there are limits on what high school teachers can teach. Olympiad style problems require the same sort of thinking as real math does, but without requiring as much knowledge. That seems like a good compromise to me.

Personally, I wish I'd had more preparation of that sort (I took USAMO and achieved a very average performance.)
its probably both, as well as a chicken/egg problem.

having said that, techcrunch has gotten kind of insular and ... i dunno. weird.

if there were a more open/objective(hopefully) version of techcrunch, would there be interest? i've kind of been mulling that idea around for a while, if nothing else than to try and snag some sweet private beta invites :)
it's working, why let Sequoia in the deal?

Because working is not the same as being liquid.
Even if people were willing to post their successful applications, I don't thing pg would approve. That would encourage copying the successful-looking applications and gaming the system.

But generally, he's looking for people who are smart, very determined, and like to make things.
Well there is:

http://deletionpedia.dbatley.com/w/index.php?title=Main_Page
Olympiad-level is a bit of an exaggeration, but it was certainly the case that there was enormous pressure to do well in math contests in my junior high and high school. Why?