skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Demos of our apps at submission?
For the upcoming application round, is it ok to record a short demo of people on our team demo'ing parts of our app (similar to what divvyshot did)?
hope they are not planning to release an iphone component for rendering/running said content... that would constitute a violation of the "you shall not build interpreters" terms!
Yup, exceptions that prove the rule.
TieCon 2009 -- a must for hackers/entrepreneurs
While I'm wary of the performance cost of what I assume will be a web frame wrapped inside a container with hooks into the iPhone's native environment, the ease with which this might allow development is pretty exciting.

There is a mapping software company that has a similar strategy, though I forget the name.. out of England, I think. Their library is Objective-C, but if you look at the source it is apparent that most of the implementation is actually inside a WebKit window.
Maybe jbrun doesn't consider copyright violation to be stealing.

#include "copying-vs-stealing-permathread.h"
> I've seen the rise of linkbaiting in the last few months and I feel that the problem has achieved mythic proportions and that it will only be getting worse because of the obvious incentives:

Is it (otherwise) nice to live in a world where HN linkbait is that significant an issue?
You don't need anyone's permission to market yourselves in the most effective ways you can dream up.
Never knew about this, looks good but expensive. I hope they have Video Sessions online.
According to what I read at the xsl file above, it looks likt it's the costs/user...

Don't tell me that this website is for scalable photo sharing!

You scale up and down your photos storage, and you pay as you go!
What you describe sounds like all particles in the universe suddenly lost all their energy. If time is change, time must be energy.
Few would notice, and those that did would understand your commercially-valuable service has to earn money.
I think you're being a bit dramatic.

All I know is based on what I've seen him say. He's extremely evasive about the actual numbers for the Kindle. He cherry picks a single number: "If you take the 230,000 titles where we have Kindle editions - Kindle unit sales are already more than 10 percent of all our sales."

I believe (based on my conversations with people about this) that many people hear that from Bezos and take away the idea that the Kindle is now 10 percent of all Amazon revenue or at least all book sales.

I believe he's phrasing this in an intentionally misleading way. I think he thinks that the Kindle isn't doing that well right now, but he believes in it and doesn't want to take the stock market hit in admitting that it's going to take a long time before the Kindle truly is a big success.

"For that to happen in 14 months is very surprising. It took us 14 years to build up our physical book business."

I'm just reading between the lines. I admit could be wrong.
If even then. You can get a good enough version of real time with Python and other GC languages.
If you're doing biz in CA, I'm pretty sure that CA still collects corporate income tax. (I forget if CA still has a unitary corporate tax, but it definitely wants taxes on in-state profits.)
I would think that as long as you are providing a service, it wouldn't matter.
People care about you helping them out.
They don't care if you are getting affiliate revenue or not, as long as it doesn't cost them (or maybe i'm not understanding your question).
I think Facebook has already lost too Twitter on this front. When people think Facebook, they think private info and friend's pictures. When people think Twitter, they think public broadcast mechanism.

The identities of the two systems have already been framed -- once that happens it is hard to change the momentum just by competing with features.
I can't help but think that "social media expert" means, "I tell people how to use the Internet to sell stuff."

But I also find that term grating, much like "Web 2.0".
The issue is your field. If you just had a B.S. and you were doing computer science, I'd say go for startups, but the barriers to entry for biotech firms are much higher. Typically they fund professors and Ph.D's and not undergrads.
I have been watching the development of this for a while, and I don't think that the algorithm has been tailored towards the test cases at all. The file format is extremely general (vertices forming polygons, color, alpha and blur per vertex). It's been fed anything and everything from around the net, but it takes so many days of computation to make the images look good that only a few examples were used in the article itself.

If anything, Mona Lisa and Lena were specifically chosen to be hard for a system like this to compress (fine brush detail does not mix well n sided polygons). Blur for example compensates for the shortcomings of polygon rendering to make the whole system more general purpose.
My family is in the biotech/pharma side, and I'm on the computer science side, fyi just to add credibility to my argument.
I think that this is a good idea, if you want to implement it.

It looks like a built-in monetization solution!
I shudder to think how bad the economy would have to be before PG started 'monetizing' HN.

Still, as mentioned when Ligertail was discussed under its former name [1], I like the Ligertail idea of mixed earned/paid placement in general, for other sites -- it has shades of Goto.com and Stumbleupon.

[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=382626
More likely a problem with a transparent HTTP cache near you... and ixnay on the idsquay oilerspay, mmm-kay?
I think of the desktop as something that got put on top of Unix in OSX, and terminal windows as holes in it.

Yes! I've been saying "put a hole in your GUI and get back to basics" for a decade now to quizzical looks. Sweet validation.
20 Useful Wireframe Tools Reviewed 
20 Useful Wireframe Tools Reviewed
Ask / Tell YC: Maximum email field length
When collecting email addresses, how many characters do you guys usually allow for? Most google results say "320 characters" is the limit, but I've never met someone with such a preposterously long email address.

I did some digging and found that the IETF recommends lines in message headers contain no more than 78 characters. This is to avoid some software from inadvertently truncating or poorly wrapping a long message header. Therefore, if one line contains "from: email@address.com", an email address should contain no more than 72 characters (78 - the 6 characters 'from: ').

In practice, I usually accept 128 characters, but I guess that's just always been a willy-nilly decision.

Anyway, does anyone have more insight?

p.s. I'm bringing this up because my 33 character email address didn't work at DivvyShot and I became ENRAGED.
Why Googlers Are Leaving to Start Social Sites
Anything you can do to improve the productivity of one of the best people will overwhelm by an order of magnitude even the most heroic improvement of the doofus. If you are in charge and are allowed to make such decisions, axe him. Getting another crack at finding a top performer is your best bet.
Secrets to Save Money During Bad Economy
What Slumdog Millionaire's success means.
Banking and hot air balloons
Unblock Bebo Proxy
Unblock Bebo using this fantastic Bebo proxy site. Tell your friends about this great unblock Bebo proxy site
There is absolutely no need anymore:

1. OSX comes free with every mac.

2. Textmate is the best, and it's very cheap.

3. Omnigraffle is worth every penny.

For just about everything else you could possibly need, open source has a category killer.
I can't afford the liability.
Reklam Billboardları
I'm totally in favor of him monetizing HN. A few 125x125 ads could probably generate $5k-$20k/mo given the traffic/audience here. It could go to charity and would give a nice spot for HN users to buy ads for an audience they may want.
SXSW interactive hacker house?
Well, I'm planning on going to SXSW for the music event and my friends are going to rent this completely unfurnished house for the music event. It's about a mile from the convention center. I had been considering going down for the interactive part, although I don't know if you can do much without a badge and have fun like the music part.

I got the idea that it might be possible to get the house and gather a group of hackers. We could do some sort of web project in a few days or just have a wild time.

Would anybody be interested in this sort of plan?
If a group of you wants to put all the photos you took at some event in one place, where do you put them?
Well,
It's weird... my 32 charachter email address does not work at DivvyShot too! I reported the report, but no response. They accept 30 charachters only, but I see no reason for that!

I think it's so important to give your users the most wider options, so you never miss a user, specially when it comes to the signup page! Users won't wait for you.. they will just be pissed off and leave!

Personally, I make it 155 charchters in my databases... I lose nothing to do so! But I think that 90 charachters look so reasonable.
You can add a link to such a demo in the demo field, but please don't put it in the field for the video. That's supposed to be just people talking into the camera, and we don't want it to turn into an arms race.

Also, if your demo doesn't get to the point within about 10 seconds, we'll just click on Back. I realize this sounds harsh, but this is a fact about investors generally, not just us.
So you need a longer runway and perhaps even friends in the bureaucracy to crack the traditional mass education market... things a teen (or ultra-lean startup at any age) might find especially hard.

But maybe the idea can appeal to the growing nontraditional markets: tutoring, distance education, self-education, corporate training, for-profit higher-ed (U of Phoenix, ITT, etc.).

Also: internet in the schools brings advertising at a level far beyond the controversies that affected ChannelOne/Edison in the 90s. Not all school computers have ad blockers, do they? So perhaps even an ad-supported model would work for a really lean educational web-app startup -- and there's little more lean than a single teen founder.
Very extreme jpeg pre 2000 compression would probably do considerably worse as it would degenerate into drawing in boxes of averaged color. jpeg200 would absolutely destroy this compression technique as it specifically uses a form of fourier analysis (wavelet analysis) which is provably optimal for this kind of compression. In fact, AFAIK jpeg2000 is designed so that as more bit are read from a file, it is possible to get a better and more accurate picture -- one of the benefits of using a fourier-analysis like technique. Sort of like a compression on steroids. Getting a lower res. picture is only slightly more complicated than truncating the file and requires minimal processing.
No, Really, I've Deceived Myself
Oh, well. I have faint memories of Laser Discs around 1983-1984. When DVDs were being heavily marketed in the early 2000s I could hardly believe it...

"Huh? I thought we already proved those were inferior to recordable/affordable VHS tapes in 1986." (I still think this. DVDs make for horrendous media.) Oh, well. Fact is, not much has changed in terms of actual day-to-day life beyond the interactive qualities of the internet.
Does anybody have valid Microsoft licenses but resorts to downloading from torrents/newsgroups because you can't get their proprietary MSDN downloader to work on Vista?
It probably does poorly on periodic repeating textures. The DCT in JPEG handles periodic brightness (like a striped shirt) fairly well because it turns into a few high-frequency components (which are still roughly periodic despite the zig-zag transformation.) This compression scheme has no support for periodicity so it can only represent a striped shirt with a polygon for each stripe. Neither of his test images have stripes.
Y Combinator’s Airbed&Breakfast Casts A Wider Net For Housing Rentals As AirBnB
I agree with you, but the idea that someone might pay per use or per day for software is intriguing. I know some service apps (e.g. Fog Creek Co-Pilot) are built on this model, I wonder if there are any others that have pay as you go pricing models though. I can't think of any reason why it couldn't be done more.
"Provably optimal" always involves unwarranted assumptions. For example, least-squares fitting is provably optimal, assuming all your distributions are independent and gaussian. Image compression quality is all about sensitivity of the human visual system to various kinds of errors, so nothing can be proven optimal, ever.
Ask YC: do you still on the way
Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html), which posted by PG on July 2008. Do you still on the way on collecting the startups?

/Jack
Desktop sw companies are about to discover a variant of Wilde's remark: the only thing worse than being pirated is not being pirated.

I'm guessing you've probably never sent a greeting card with a Strawberry Shortcake on it. The company that makes those, American Greetings, sold $1.5 billion dollars worth of product last year. Much of it was paper, although they also have an online division which charges a lot of people a lot of money to send birthday cards. (I only know this because my mom says she pays $50 a year for the animated flash cards she mails me all the time.)

What relevance does this have for desktop software? Simple: it should remind you that there is an entire universe of users out there who do not have Paul Graham's problems. Many of these users have problems which can be solved best by desktop software. Those users will keep desktop software companies in business for a while. (Did I mention one point five billion dollars of paper greeting cards? And this is HOW many years after email?)

As long as I'm on the subject, ubiquitous net connectivity gives us desktop developers some interesting options against piracy. One is moving value from the client to the server. I do it a little these days (for non-piracy reasons), and if I can figure it out I'm sure the rest of the industry can.

You can't pirate a desktop app that requires connecting to a server to function (+) any more than you can pirate Basecamp by downloading Firefox.

+ Edit for clarity: I don't mean in the sense of "phone home", I mean in the sense of "value is provided by code or data which only exists on the server". Think WoW: without connectivity its the world's most expensively engineered paperweight.
I actually like the idea of adding music or something else that's weird and quirky to the workshop. A bunch of guys pitching their startups sounds like every other tech event that already exists in the Bay Area.
Let it BDD: a song about testing
Seems like that's just better PR. 10 Years ago Iceland was, in most people's minds, something akin to Greenland now. Cold, desolate, poor.
If space isn't a concern, and you're using e-mail verification, I'd set it to allow however long the RFC allows for... invalid addresses would be found through the verification e-mail, rather than an arbitrary length constraint. That said, my startup's database seems to be set at 50 characters, and I'm not worried about it yet.
The Guitar and Soul Music
One of the essential characteristics of soul music is that it originated in an environment whereby access to musical instruments was very limited in all senses of the word. However, it was just the limitation of the people and the times in which this music originated and not the limitation of soul music. Soul music belongs to organic music genres and it is a combination of rhythm and blues and gospel music. Normally these genres are not linked with the guitar. Nonetheless, it does not mean that guitar cannot be used as an accompaniment for soul music. With the creativity of the musician, the guitar can become one of the best accompaniment instruments of Soul Music.
Yes to all of those and that's part of what we try and do. There are also many models/ideas from programming that are applicable to the way engineering should be done I feel, such as don't repeat yourself, reducing dependencies etc

There are software tools for analysis developed to standardise what can be standardised and to force people to use templates for their analysis, but they are generally not great and getting them developed is always politically and financially challenging.

IMHO engineers find it difficult to identify and extract the common processes because every part is slightly different and complex and usually requires its own judgement calls to be made about how to deal with it. This leads naturally to everyone doing things their own way and therefore using the most flexible and cheap tool there is...Excel.

That's not to say there aren't common processes and higher abstractions to be made, it just requires people to look hard for them and think about things in a way that does not come naturally to the industry. They also need to have the clout to get people using them.

I think things are changing some what with modern aircraft though. My opinion is that judgement is playing less of a role in many cases and we are moving to brute force analysis i.e. Just throw it at the computer and analyse it all in great detail.

This leads to more common processes and standard ways of sharing and moving data around.

It's a big problem and I enjoy working on it but the support isn't always there to invest in it.

The cost of designing an aircraft is tiny compared to the overall lifecycle of the aircraft and the costs involved in manufacturing. So the industry would generally prefer to keep operating in the same old ways rather than take risks on new things. Especially new things that involve upfront investment. Just my opinion anyway.
There's the whole "kids who can't afford the games and want to play them anyway" thing that I sympathise with, but for a business it's easy: if you use something to make money, you really need to pay for it/donate/contribute your patches.
Introducing expandable ads on AdSense sites
The future of tourism in the Middle East
Google Docs.
Google Apps.
Gimp.
I noticed at work recently that despite having gigantic muli-monitor setups, everyone had the same apps open. About 6-8 terminal windows, 3-6 gvim/emacs windows, and Firefox. Seems like a waste of all that graphics hardware to me, but I guess that's what we find productive to use...
I beat TechCrunch by 2 hours: See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=503739 for more discussion.
Alas, this is just on the far side of comprehensible. Do you mean are we still looking for those ideas? If so, yes.

Some in the current cycle are instances of them. For example, AirBnb is #25, the Craiglist competitor (a suggestion which iirc was much ridiculed at the time).
I am getting a whiff of a fractal image compression.

It was developed by none other than Michael Barnsley (of "Barnsley Fern" fractal fame) and it was the compression technique du jour in the early 90s. It looked very interesting.

And then it got patented all over, which effectively inhibited any further academic research. The patent holding company (Iterated Systems) struggled with commercialization of the technology, so the practical applications never really took off either.

Too bad really. The idea of compressing an image down to a formula was both elegant and damn smart. And so are these genetic algorithms. I just really hope they don't follow the path of the fractal ones.
I think you're better off finding something that can start outside the education market, then have it be adopted by them when it reaches the point that it would be ridiculous not to.
Java app doesn't seem to work on mac safari.

When I upload from the HTML box, the javascript status thing keeps spinning and never lets me know that the file has been uploaded.

I am on a relatively bad hotel connection right now.
I could offer it for my software fairly trivially. Here's why I don't:

1) Customers hate buying things multiple times, particularly in my niche.

2) Authorizing transactions frequently is friction. I hate friction.

3) I'd rather charge $30 than $5 because $30 communicates that the product is worth $30 and $5 communicates that the product is not worth your time.

4) If I charged $5 it would be unprofitable for me to advertise and Paypal would make much more than ~4% of my sales.

5) I strongly suspect that average lifetime revenue per user would be much lower if I charged per-use as opposed to per-lifetime. If a customer wants to use my software to do an activity tomorrow, and I told her "Its going to cost you money just for tomorrow", she might decide otherwise. If I tell her "Its going to cost you money, BUT you'll be able to do it for the rest of your life for free", then she (empirically) frequently decides to purchase for me.
That doesn't save you the dereferencing, though. It'll actually add another dereferencing for 15% of the articles, although by scanning the comments instead of the article you don't give the writer the satisfaction of a higher page view count (and possibly related ad income). Which in turn, in an ideal world, would make linkbait titles less popular (in favor of some other scheme, of course).

So, sounds like a good idea to me!
Yes, but for all that time we missed, we can see that much more in the future.
Having a synopsis like this in a mouseover on every article on HN would be insanely practical.

@pg: make it possible to vote for a comment to be awarded 'representative for article and comments' and show the 'best' comment as a mouseover!
Do you mean are we still looking for those ideas? If so, yes.

I think jacktang might also want to know that you still
want to fund startups with those ideas -- in which case
I think jacktang probably wants to see this:
http://ycombinator.com/s2009.html
Sam, congrats on getting techcrunched! Can you share with us your marketing/outreach efforts and how you got them to write about you in such an early stage of the product?

Thanks!
Business Sales Lead - Addison Klein Group
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Ask YC:  making contract for new co-founder??
Hello YC,

Recently in the past, I have ended up in some pretty bad relationships, getting ideas and hard work stolen by people who would try to turn me into their lowly paid employee with no equity. I have dug myself out of some horrible pits and made great progress in my startup. I found a guy that shares my goals and seems pretty honest. Our skills compensate each other very well.

However, I'm still paranoid because of getting burned so bad. I've wasted well over two years because of bad relationships. I want to at least get some kind of basic contract down. What have you guys done on your pre-money arrangements with other co-founders? I'm going to call my normal lawyer tomorrow, but he mostly does criminal defense stuff, so I want other options.

I've honestly burned through most of my savings that I had from a successful business years ago, with these previous startups and a terrible lawsuit. I can only spend maybe a few hundred dollars at most.

Both of us have some software built and a decent amount of time spent on seperate stuff. There are no patents. The company is an LLC registered in Nevada a few months ago.

Please help me with any advice you can give. I can't bear to get screwed over again. I'll probably end up going postal if I do. :)

Thank you for your advice,

-Zak
Unfortunate, then, that this article is from September, 2008.
I think it's the same as they wrote about likaholix.com , which is by ex-googlers, and stills at too early stage, too!
To me, there's a difference between having a bias or giving a personal opinion and intentionally insulting a group of people. But to you I guess there isn't.

If you met someone face to face who happened to be a PHP programmer, would you let them know that ostensibly based solely on the language that they happen to be using at the time, you don't consider them a real programmer?

I'm just saying man, it's a slippery slope and one that I actively try to avoid these days.
GTD:Choosing What To Do Next