skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
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poke 53280,40

At least, if I recall correctly...
Ask YC: Startup Capital. How much do you need?
Me and two friends are planning to do a startup next summer in Amsterdam. At first we figured that we would all put in E10,000 (=$14,700). However, due to changed circumstances, we're now considering E6,000 (=$8760) p.p. Would this be enough to start with? As a side question: how much would a team need in SV?

NB Living expenses will amount to about E800 (=$1168) p.p./month. So E6,000 should keep us alive for at least half a year (given no other costs of course).
Avoiding OutOfMemoryError when sharing movies over RMI: Pass Streams and Iterators with RMIIO
http://cbm.csbruce.com/~csbruce/cbm/transactor/v8/i3/p006.ht...

http://cbm.csbruce.com/~csbruce/cbm/transactor/v8/i3/p007.ht...
This sites cool,love the idea. Simple concept, so far seems well executed.

also if you submit a site, there's a hilarious video where the guy cries out free me I'm trapped on the internet!
Paul Graham is so good he somehow managed to take the credit for this paper. http://robotics.stanford.edu/users/sahami/papers-dir/spam.pd...
OK to submit links to WSJ.com?
I was going to submit a link to a Wall Street Journal article on startup CEOs. However, WSJ.com is a paid site. Is it considered acceptable here to submit pay site links? I didn't see anything about it in the guidelines.

For the record, here is the link to the article "The Other Tech CEOs Find It's Not Easy To Keep the Faith":

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119741476977621971.html?mod=...
The Daily WTF changes its name back to "The Daily WTF"
Ajaxian interviews Appjet founder Aaron Iba
By "many", do you mean, "one"?
Yes, Knuth showed up for the event...and I had an invite to go to the event from one of the Authors@Google team, and I would have been sitting within a chair or two of him had I gone. But, I slept in. Long night of banging my head on JavaScript the night before...sometimes it pays to get to bed at a reasonable hour.
http://www.geekculture.com/joyoftech/joystuff/apple1cake/smi...
He's got the virus-writing bug
Yep, so, it looks like you can't get your app to run it youself even if you wanted to.
If you like ramen you could probably live off $1200/mo in SV.

I do :)
That's not unusual for something large and complex. Even video games have multi-year development cycles and double-digit-millions budgets.

$6m in 3 years isn't high at all. Lots of little pre-revenue start-ups have sold for more with many fewer assets than it sounds like this company has. Google's first big round was $25m IIRC, and that was pre-keyword advertising; and by today's standards that's a tiny amount. Good thing its investors didn't panic and pull the plug.
well, this way someone else hosts you app, holds it to ransom and you have no way of getting at the code (really).

I hope I am wrong. Would be cool if you could "pull down" your app if you wanted (perhaps for a ransom fee?).

Dabble db anyone? it looks nice.
Penthouse Snags AdultFriendFinder for $500 Million
As long as I can download and/or sync my comments elsewhere and have the ability to completely remove my comments from their site, I'm happy.

For me the huge plus is receiving blog comments via email. Currently they are not sending the MessageID in the Reference field so messages aren't showing up as threaded, but they are aware of this. IMO blog comments should be handled like mailing lists/news groups.
This is kind of the point, as most start-ups are mostly technical people who only appoint one of themselves as CEO because somebody has to be. It's not a question of ability but of desire; lack of experience is obviously to be expected, and you could never get any NEW CEOs if that were a disqualification. Every CEO was a first-time CEO at some company.
We don't want to get in the way of people hosting their own apps. We will at least release binaries for doing your own app serving and local development. You can already grab the source to the JS micro-framework. More details in our interview with Ajaxian: http://ajaxian.com/archives/appjet-develop-preview-deploy-al... - see the "Aren't you tied to the platform" question.
I submitted a site just to see that working, but I had no luck. The video didn't work in my pc (though I could hear the audio). Btw, it seems they have a set of different videos...
Bubble 2.0: Guy in D.C. does something to make tech stocks go up
Red Fluorescent Cat Cloned
Why Reddit is broken, and how to fix it
I agree with your synopsis, but I disagree with the premise.

Any writer knows that there is nothing more terrifying than the blank page. In social networks, it is the empty friends list.

All of that 'pseudo-user-generated' data that is pooh-poohed gives a new myspace page a warm and fuzzy feeling that is would be missing from a "build-it-yourself" network.

It reminds of Joel Spolsky's take on Jakob Neilsen:

"Every time I read Jakob Nielsen," I wrote in 2000, "I get this feeling that he really doesn't appreciate that usability is not the most important thing on earth. Sure, usability is important (I wrote a whole book about it). But it is simply not everyone's number one priority, nor should it be. You get the feeling that if Mr. Nielsen designed a singles bar, it would be well lit, clean, with giant menus printed in Arial 14 point, and you'd never have to wait to get a drink. But nobody would go there; they would all be at Coyote Ugly Saloon pouring beer on each other."
Anecdotal.

I've made more than enough mistakes in judging individuals. Doing it based on the colour of their skin is just the most egregious.

I've met white slackers, I've met chinese pot heads and I've worked with black men who humble me with the grasp of subjects I'm considered an expert in.

It's just a stupid (and I don't use that word lightly) way to judge someone.
> like "How do your reverse an array without a temporary variable?"

You hard-code it using XOR. Note you can't even do a for-loop, as that's using an extra variable. Of course hand-unrolling a loop takes extra memory because it's so many extra lines so there's no point.

a ^= b
b ^= a
a ^= b

This is very unlikely to be something that occurs to programmers who haven't had to XOR recently; if you aren't writing your own hash or crypto or codec functions then you probably haven't used it in a while. Now that you've seen this, you'll remember it and so if anyone asks, you won't be figuring it out again, just recalling.

IMO it's a pretty useless way to weed people out, kind of like testing people on chess by random arrangements of pieces. Chess experts remember actual legal positions that occur in games much better than non-players, but they are no better at remembering positions that never occur -- a bunch of kings on a chessboard, some in adjacent squares, for example.

Likewise, this kind of pattern NEVER occurs in what most people program; it's just implausible.
That link worked for me and I am not logged into the WSJ. Generally I would say if you want to submit a pay site, go ahead and submit it, and paste the content here as a comment. Or copy the content to Scribd and submit the Scribd link here.
[People behind AppJet must be very, very good.]

Indeed. MIT grads, Ex-Googlers. (http://appjet.com/about)

Besides, I personally see more "honey for the bee'" in AppJet, than CogHead for that matter (which I covered briefly in a blog post earlier this year - http://www.nilkanth.com/archives/2007/04/21/diy-online-web-a...).
I think this is a great idea. There is a lot of overhead in build web applications, and hosting is definatly one of them. Although I haven't checked out appjet yet, something that simplifies the process might would be valuable.
Why A VC Might Not Share Your Executive Summary With Other VCs
In my post, Getting Your Executive Summary Distributed To Other VCs, I described scenarios in which VCs will more likely be comfortable sharing your executive summary with other VCs (after they have decided that they are not interested). However, even if a VC knows someone else who might be interested in your company, they won't always offer to share your executive summary. There are a few potential reasons for this...
Content filtering is completely different from book-cover filtering.
Goojet wins gold at Le Web -- with mobile organizer
Interesting. You could almost s/reddit/digg/g and get the same article.

IMO, part of the downside of the whole "Web 2.0" social-whatever type sites these days is that they're so easy to create. Digg. Reddit. Mixx. Etcc. Why fix the broken one, when we can build a new one over a weekend (plus pizza and beer).

As the author outlined, they go through a standard-ish 4-step program as a sort of half-life dying off (at least as far as the hard-core geek users are concerned).

I postulate that you can't fix Reddit or Digg, and Mixx will be broken soon too. These sites start out by attracting the leading-edge hacker techie types. The ones who understand about a product being in beta (and feel a sense of elitism for knowing about it early on), they will report bugs to you (often with a 9 paragraph writeup of how to reproduce the bug(s)). They will submit good content, and comment on articles, and vote, etc. But they won't click on ads, or do other things that inch the site toward profitability.

So, there is no choice but to cast a wider net, gather in a lower-level audience. The folks that haven't yet seen a cat with a lime peel on its head (at least we're not getting pancake bunny anymore) flock to the site. With the masses comes the material that the tech crowd doesn't really care for.

news.YC might be the exception, if only because it's more hyper-topical, and it doesn't seem to be concerned with making money (I think news.YC is more of a flytrap for potential investees).

So, enjoy Digg and Reddit while they're young, hold on as long as you can through the growth phase, and then bid them farewell.

Maybe they will one day manage to recover. Maybe we'll read about their recovery here. Or on Slashdot...
"Aaron Iba has released" should read, "David Greenspan, JD Zamfirescu, and Aaron Iba have released..." I just happened to be awake when ajaxian emailed.
I went like this: Hmm, might be useful as I am looking for a new monitor. Click. Download plugin? Are you kidding me? I don't have the attention span for that.
Google the Next .Mac?
There is an accelerating flood of niche social news sites; it seems more likely to me that in a few years there will be a huge number of these kind of sites (and many platforms to let you make your own), which in aggregate will probably follow a power-law distribution of user populations.

Recommendations is a good idea (never figured out why it doesn't work at reddit), but only for the 'fat head' of the curve, for the long tail the problem almost takes care of itself. Also, better categorisation would be useful, and would help with recommendations too.
You are correct about this. Without getting into probabilities of the different outcomes resulting from action or non-action on climate change, I'd recommend the video someone posted lower down in this thread.

The weight given to an outcome in considering it in decision making would be the probability x magnitude (+ or -). So on your drive home the risk of death might not affect your decision to make the drive, if you had to drive across Johannesburg or Kuala Lumpar, you might consider taking a cab.

So even while the probability that the Country A would survive a nuclear first strike with the capability to retaliate was quite low -- the magnitude of the outcome from its doing so was enough to dissuade Country B from taking that chance.

To the other commenter below -- just google 'prisoner's dilemma' or 'Nash equilibrium' for some sources to get you started on game theory.

Note: I'm not claiming to be an expert on game theory by any means. I'm recounting the Mutually Assured Destruction example from an economics class's subsection on game theory and would be happy if someone wanted to prove me wrong or elaborate on the subject.
Internships at any time of your life
Wow. I guess that's the biggest adult oriented Internet acquisition? That guy (Conru) is pretty damned impressive, as getting acquired in the adult online business is very rare. (Of course, it sounds like he sold at a significant discount. The article indicates revenues of $340M in 2007...which either means they have an awful lot of expenses, or Penthouse got a great deal.)
I always assumed that the reddit recommended page used filtering based on the submission titles. Maybe not. Any idea what algorithm it uses?
Hardly. And I'm sure you're not the type I'm referring to, one who throws an equal amount of energy into everything and therefore focuses on nothing. They are looking for the grade rather than mastery, insight, or comprehension.
yikes |y&#299;ks|
exclamation informal
expressing shock and alarm, often for humorous effect : I had a dip in the 40-degree pool (yikes!).

From Oxford Dictionary.
How to develop good managing skills
The point about H1-Bs and lower salaries has some merit, but the author fails to mention perhaps the most significant reason.

Good programmers don't want to work at dull jobs in large companies (though there are some exceptions, e.g. for i-banks, hedge funds, etc., since people will tolerate dull tasks for substantially better than average pay).
Ultimate hacker pet, S. Korea cloning glow in the dark cats
I actually am the type, sort of. Which is why I take exception to the generalizations you're making.

I think it's entirely plausible that a person goes through college taking classes--including difficult ones--that they're interested in and getting good grades in all of them. I also think it's not impossible to have mastery or insight or comprehension (or all three) in spite of breadth of study. I base these beliefs on my own experience...
wow I didn't even know Penthouse even had money left... the last news I heard some years back what that they were on the edge of bankruptcy; I guess they too got acquired?
Clinton E. Curtis, programmer, testifies to Congress about fradulent voting machine source code
> Merriam-Webster President John Morse said, "People look for self-evident numeral-letter substitutions: 0 for O; 3 for E; 7 for T; and 4 for A," he said. "This is simply a different and more efficient way of representing the alphabetical character."

More efficient?
It's sort of ironic that despite all the attention from Watson's comments, and with people crying "racism", folks still don't seem to know much abut genes and race.
It seems like most internships are not so much a "free trial" for the internee, but an extended, interactive interview and test of skills, personality, and attitude. They exist so that firms don't get stuck with inept workers.

There are also significant costs associated with interns (e.g. training, relocation) which are depreciated if the intern gets hired. Having an intern program like he describes would definitely see an increase in those costs, which makes it a disincentive for firms to have such a program.

That said, I'd love to have the opportunity to intern anywhere at any stage in my life.
I have an idea for the Reddit people. The old people was the one you got when the community at Reddit was the old community, but the community now is a lot bigger, as there is a lot of people that there wasn't here then, and there is a lot of people that is gone too. So, imagine you want the old users to get the classic Reddit experience again, how would you do it? Just identify who the classic Reddit users were (that's easy, just check the time at which they did sign up) and let them access to a Classic Interface, where karma counts as if only they were part of the Reddit community, and nobody else.

That would make the new reddit behave as the old reddit.

Would that be feasible?
The Holiday Greeting Card That Wasn't
well if you already have a feature complete beta, and all that is left to do is to make it look pretty, then congrats and I would recommend the following. You don't necessarily need money right now! Try to get a small group of beta users on your system, see their reactions and take their feedback. Then try to slowly grow this group to get more people using it. It is always a lot easier to raise money with a working product and some users on it. For doing any of these you guys don't have to quit your day jobs, if you have managed to get this far without quiting I am sure this will be doable too. Or you can do what the guy's at hotmail did (read the second chapter in Founders at Work) one person quits and the other works and they share the income, until they get to a point that they can get funding or generate revenue.

Also as a reminder, the more you have achieved, and the more you have to show, not only the easier you can get funding, but the higher you will be evaluated, which is definitely to your benefit. I would say giving out shares and raising money just so you can pay for your life expenses is not the best idea, get a line of credit!

Anyways, it looks like you are in better shape than I thought. All the best to you.
>'Sometimes' is becoming more frequent.

I don't see what the problem is. As one of the best comics of all time, it seems perfectly reasonable for xkcd to have earned a permanent spot on the front page.
News.yc will have gone the way of reddit when good stories on the new page are immediately buried. As soon as good stories start going unseen, I trust PG to turn on the voter power algorithm and let's hope it works.
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/12/social-blogging.html
Will there be a programming competition? That could be fun ;-)
"... Jason showed Disqus to me a few weeks back, and I seriously considered using it -- until I figured out that you don't own your comments anymore. ..."

A quick check of the faq, blog and api disproves this. You do own your comments and better still you can extract them via xml.

- http://disqus.com/faq/#faq-7

- http://disqus.com/developers/#api-methods

- http://blog.disqus.net/2007/11/05/export-comments-to-xml-com...

So you own your comments, can get access to the data. The only real data disqus can claim ownership is the right to infer from your data. It's this distinction that makes me think using the disqus service is valuable because they give you the ability to take your data away.
"Unless a man enters upon the vocation intended for him by nature, and best suited to his peculiar genius, he cannot succeed."

Best Chapter 1 advice ever!
edit:

I knocked up http://wiki.appjet.com/

That was strangely fun to put together...
Great job, this seriously looks awesome. I can't wait to see what it develops into and the apps that will be coming out through its use.
I was flabbergasted, too.
Analysis: Bebo Snubs Google With Facebook Platform Clone
But, for a classifieds service?
This article focuses on the receptor side (company employing for a trial) and glosses over the donor side (organisation that loses/offers the person for trial). Universities aren't affected by students taking internships over summer breaks, and are hardly affected by students inserting internships during semesters. However candidates at later stages of life are likely to either have an employer (who is likely to incur disruption and have little incentive for allowing extended leave), or be unemployed (which makes them less attractive for receptors).
Why pregnant women don't topple over
How the Next Billion Users Will Reshape the Internet
Your response assumes that the system operates alongside the current employment system. If every company operated that way, sure there would be disruption - but if you imagine a fluid system, no one would be disruting their 'current' position because every break can be made cleanly. Think out the box about what you've said as opposed to with the lense of how the current system works.

Also if you consider the long term evolutionary impact: as people have the flexibility to try out companies a) candidates will be more experienced as they will have received training from different companies b) candidates will know exactly what roles suit them c) companies will only be populated with people who want to be there hence leading to greater productivity.

Overhall the current system. As myyoung8 said - how many people want this but can't have it. This is the sign of a broken system.
Ask News.YC: Is hand-coded html an outdated and silly way to operate a site?
It seems like everyone these days is using some sort of CMS. Is there any reason to code the pages by hand anymore for a frequently updated site? One of the few upsides I can see is the speedier load time of non-cms sites because of the lack of need for a database interaction but other than that I can't think of much else.

Anyone out there not using some sort of CMS for a site of reasonable complexity?
I think it was supposed to cluster users who often voted the same way, and then infer that if a user voted up an article, most people in the same cluster as that user would also like the article.

It never worked for me unfortunately.
I used to do a simple rails site for anything I put on the web. I switch to html based site for things that I wasn't updating much. The reason was to save on memory usage on my vps.

For a site of any complexity, I would use a cms, home-brewed or open-sourced though.

Removing the database layer is always a nice option, but if you plan to have any sort of interactivity, straight html might be a pain.
Is it just me or does Facebook make major decisions very quickly for a company its size?
Ruby IS-A Smalltalk
via LtU: http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2573
Practical, real world example

-------------------

1) Long ago: windows XP from 2002-2005 WITH Mcafee Virus protection, SpyBot and Adaware on a computer thats junk now. By 2003, its so infested that spybot and adaware can't do anything. Especially with "CoolWWWSearch." 2006: I used xubuntu and made sure it ran well as a server up to now.

2) I used Ubuntu, from 2004-now. I've actually tried to catch a virus. Nothing bad has happened to it. Oh wait, it has had things happen to it, like the bootloader getting screwed up, but that was from installing something wrong. Namely, a windows driver. And all I needed to do to right that was to use my super grub disk. NEVER has it been from any site.

Can virus writers change OS's? Theoretically, yes. Practically, yes, they know "everyone" (or everyone gullible) uses windows. Hell theres a good chance they do. But even ignoring that, they'd have to discover an exploitable flaw in linux (and in what flavor of it? what distro? many have different architectures, some are bleeding edge...) and then they have to make sure linux users even visit their sites or whatever. All that hassle to write something...they dont/wont do it.

Not to mention the OSS community's insane patching speeds. And Mark Shuttleworth is friggin awesome, hes been to outer space xDDD

Point being, as far as I go, the author is right in saying that any *nix has been 100% effective against malware, and its not just because windows has larger marketshare. Its because running as root is just DUMB.

But also point taken, people are always going to me infinitely more creative - blacklists are a necessity of life, as long as you have windows and blog-spammers.
Direct YouTube link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky-YXvxYbck&feature=relat...
What's on your Christmas Wish List?
In my family we give family members a wish list. I am struggeling to get mine going. any ideas?
I agree, and I find this idea fascinating. You can write code, and show testeable versions of it, together with their source to anyone who cares. And you can do some small code apps for your websites... I think there are plenty of applications for this tool.