skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Suspending scientific, critical judgement wrt religious beliefs does NOT imply stupidity - I thought my previous post made that pretty clear.

As to not wanting to read the Bhagavad-Gita, I don't really care if you do or don't - but don't expect to be taken seriously when you deride Hinduism.

And if you don't like taking a lot of shit from people, perhaps you could try respecting others first.
Can anyone confirm that TextPayMe was acquired by Amazon? I wonder if this is the YC acquisition that they still cant talk about. That would have been over a year ago..

http://textpayme.amazon.com
Hello junk science, my name is David!

I did very well in school and have an IQ of 130+.
If you are not willing to risk 70$ per month you are in the wrong business my friend, or you are woefully too cash-strapped even the smallest bootstrap should be able to afford that.

And what's the alternative going down the Twitter road? I think not...

Always have a reasonable scalability plan preplanned, it doesn't have to be fully implemented but you should devote some thought cycles to the problem and have a road map for scaling.
I went to the demo in Amsterdam, and that wasn't the best venue in town: low ceiling, bad lighting, a weird and incredibly distracting echo in the microphone, and worst of all, it was incredibly hot.

The talk was nice, although most of what he told was in his "evidence-based scheduling" article(http://joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/10/26.html). He's really a good speaker, although he did seem a bit groggy.

I was glad to escape to the fresh november air, but fogbugz is in fact pretty good - it's also available hosted, and free for teams up to two people (startups!). I'm using it on my own, and I love it!
The driver behind NASA's Mars Rovers
Basically, any storage on the machine itself could go poof from one minute to the next - or at least you have to think of it that way, because once it goes down, it's gone.

Therefore, you need to have some kind of distributed storage architecture, and automated recovery for said system.

For extra points, do the whole thing with no external server with a stable IP.
not in California. If your startup is not related to your work that you do during the day, and if you are not using company equipment, any claims like that would be impossible to enfornce.
Versionate and Buxfer are definitely still around.

AdPinion, definitely still around. Heysan, was hiring recently, so definitely still around. SocialMoth, it's just Paul now, I think...but doing well as a maker of Facebook apps.

I'm glad to see that Virtualmin is immune to the "no blog post in a month==company is dead" rule. We blog very rarely, though we're trying to be better about it. ;-)
Um, who are you to discourage this person because he doesn't want to blow $70 a month needlessly rather than spend $20 on a decent server slice? Not trying to troll here, but this comment makes you sound like a pompous ass who's never bootstrapped a company.

Sure, it's important to have a scalability strategy planned, but that's nowhere near the same thing as wasting money on excess capacity before you need it. I suppose a few years ago you would have advised the HotOrNot guys that if they couldn't afford to maintain a standing account with Akamai before launching, they were in the wrong business too.
that's a nice one, I'll consider that, thanks. :)
How to Read VC Interest
If VCs don't offer feedback you can try to assess their interest by reading other signals.

VCs' interest in your company is usually easy to read. Their tone is the best subjective indication of interest and their frequency of communication with you is the best objective indication...
That's kind of nice, just not to crazy about the word umoja. But nice technique to find a good name.
nice to type, not sure I'd like to use it everyday.

hard to come up with a name for this.
Thanks everyone for your help, keep it coming.
I suppose the URL is proof enough that Amazon acquired them. There's a note as well that points to 10/2/07 and links to http://legacy.textpayme.com.
Cringely says Google should buy out Credit Reporting Agency
If Google buys one of the big 3 credit bureaus, coupled with our other info (emails, shared calendars, etc.) they will control the world. Had to share!
YouTube's stagnation
I think he included that because some people just won't listen and they really really want to pick stocks instead of invest in index funds. I think he had to acknowledge that those people exist, but try to mitigate that desire by writing the first 400 pages about sensible investing.
but don't expect to be taken seriously when you deride Hinduism

There's a whole army of people on reddit and elsewhere who deride Christianity endlessly and are very much taken seriously when they do so. It's a common double-standard, and I'm always amazed when people get offended by it merely being pointed out.
Brain implants could restore speech lost to paralysis
Onelyp

http://onelyp.com -- The one and only plaform

Available. 6 letters.

http://virteal.com/CreativeDomainNames
How about the Oneders? Like wonders but spelled with a One.

(Sorry that's from some movie, couldn't resist.)
I don't think being rated third on a random blog counts as winning "top social bookmarking site".
Colossus cracks German code at Bletchley 60 years on
Jerry Kaplan talk at Stanford's Entrepreneurial Speaker Series
This is cool - I wish there were some small company which had the vision to do this properly (or I had the funding to do this).

I feel pretty strongly that the future of books is exemplified by these early attempts. One will be as big as iTunes/mp3s are today.

A company that figured out how to make the ebook h/w experience better than a book would mint money.
I wasn't trying to be condescending and I apologize if I hurt any one. I have actually bootstrapped quite a few startups (crashed and burned horribly on the first 3, only the 4th one actually made me a bit of money). And when I thought I didn't have enough money saved for what I thought I needed as bare minimum I suffered through another couple of months in my day job before taking the plunge.

The entire advantage of Amazons services is that you don't need to pre-purchase too much capacity and you can scale relatively painlessly so long as you designed your server architecture for it.

I admire the HotOrNot guys for their "beg, burrow, steal" approach, I wish I had even a fraction of it. And that was exactly the right thing to do back then. But now the infrastructure has improved so much that you don't need to do it for servers.

Keep your energies for the other hundreds of battles you'll need to fight on your way & good luck
Look at that...these guys finally got a web site:

http://tsumobi.com/

They're particularly interesting to me because what they set out to do was very similar to Hecl, my mobile phone programming language.
I don't think YC News IS a social bookmarking site. But congrats, YC! :-)
oneappy.com
Music boss: we were wrong to go to war with consumers
Great choices... I've seen Jesu and Isis live in the past month or so; they both were great.
"... Non-startup related chores ..."

Same here to some extent. There are certain tasks ("fatigues") that I have to do at set times during the day. The only suggestions I have is to focus on small bits at a time and chip away. Another thing is to use exercise as thinking time. Think on very specific problems. Write your solutions as you get them. Then work on them.

Another suggestion might be to adopt the Joshua Schacter (Schacter worked while building delicious) model of "being lazy". You can read/listen more about his techniques here. [0], [1]

[0] http://notelab.infogami.com/startupschool2006

[1] http://wiki.ycombinator.com/presentations/apr06/Joshua_Schac...

ps; Oops I downvoted by mistake while trying to upvote, so I re-adjusted via prior comments.
loopt is one of the most successful YC companies alive.
Rob, sorry haven't checked my threads in a while. Fantasy Congress is fantasy sports for a political junkie. Instead of drafting football players, you draft members of Congress. Instead of touchdowns and interceptions, it's votes, legislation, and news. What happened was we created this cool tracking system when we created Fantasy Congress and we didn't really know of its other uses until after.

The CRM idea is cool because it would use the same tracking system.
Money and advisors (oh, if only YC would just accept us). We can bootstrap all we want and keep on tapping into our bank accounts, but we need to generate money somehow. The first product hasn't reached the powerful userbase it needs to generate the high CPMs or the deep sponsors. The second product is launched with a paying media partner, but that sucks because they get some of the branding, which decreases our branding.
Adpinion still alive, in fact, we're testing them on some of our pages. Heysan still alive because the service works. Social moth is trying facebook stuff now I think. Luke, wherever you are, I got your back dawg.
Maybe I'm reading this article wrong, but it strikes me that Scoble is unaware that lots of sizable startups don't own servers. What's the difference in this case between using ec2 instances and renting servers from a provider like LayeredTech, SoftLayer, ServerBeach, Rackspace, etc.? I understand there's a huge difference if you're bringing up -- and especially down -- ec2 instances in real time as demand changes, but beyond that, it's renting a server for $70 a month. So, for by his definition, Wordpress.com is a server-less company with 300+ servers in three colos.
Go here: http://www.thenameinspector.com/10-name-types/

Choose one of the name types and figure out what you want. Remember, if you're making a calendar product, DO NOT call is icalendar or something like that, choose a name that you can build because your product(s) will change. Believe me, we've made that mistake.
Will the Credit Crunch Inflate the Internet Bubble?
Lack of monetization of Youtube is almost irrelevent, Google have the time and money to concentrate on establishing it as the dominant video site. They can afford to let someone else figure out how to make money, while the small fry try to compete with Youtube's predatory price.
> For extra points, do the whole thing with no external server with a stable IP.

Should be doable. In principle, ARP over SQS.
Is it standard practice for publically traded companies to keep acquisitions secret? I know price does not need to be disclosed if it does not have any real effect on shareholders, but keeping an acquisition secret all together just doesn't seem right to me.
Greg from Xobni pontificates on memory managers
You're supposed to construct the most powerful computer that has ever existed. Use it to help you create an even more powerful computer. Then let it compute for 10+ million years, while protecting it from outside interferences.

Obviously.
DLW's thesis that Symbolics lost as part of the general losing of custom hardware (including all the parallel computer companies) is basically correct. Lucid on Suns was as fast as ZetaLisp on Symbolicses.

But not so fast that that alone made me switch. What made me switch was that Lisp machines (both Symbolics and LMI) were so gratuitously, baroquely complex. The manuals filled a whole shelf. Each component of the software was written as if it had to have every possible feature. The hackers who wrote it were the smartest and most energetic around. But there was no Steve Jobs to tell them "No, this is too complex." So the guy in charge of writing the pretty-printer, for example, would decide. "This is going to be the most powerful pretty-printer ever written. It's going to be able to do everything!"

I learned how to program a Symbolics myself, from reading the manuals. I sometimes suspected that I was the only person who'd ever done this-- that everyone else who knew how to use the damn things had either learned how from the guys who invented them, or had learned from someone else who had. The libraries were so hairy that I generally found it was faster to write something myself than find and understand the documentation for the built-in way of doing it.

Unfortunately this complexity persists in Common Lisp, which was pretty much copied directly from ZetaLisp. In fact, both of the worst flaws in CL are due to its origins on Lisp machines: both its complexity and the way it's cut off from the OS.
Other than the reference to one of Paul's essays, what does this story have to do with startups and hacking?
Any professional UI designers out there?
We're boot-strapping a brand new startup, which is SaaS. Our success will depend a lot on the visual look and user interface. While we have a pretty creative contractors on board, we're considering bringing in one as a co-founder. It's a weighted decision. The UI and design are going to be pretty essential parts of our products. So if there are any great and creative people around who'd like to join a fresh startup, I'd be more than happy to talk to you.
But it takes more than a scalar score on a test to prove your ability to integrate whats around you into something new. If you get a perfect score on one of those tests and don't do jack shit afterwards, what does it mean?
Looks like they're very well positioned to take advantage of Android.
Ask YC:  What is the most embarrassing technical book that you have ever owned?
I'm particularly interested in knowing about technical books from the 80s that look silly/ridiculous now.
He will have to become a master of dry wit. Greenspun kills me with the bland hilarity.
Choose a Startup Like You Would a Spouse
Turbo Pascal FTW
creative startup capital = selling your $90 startup guide for $40 to yc.news kids. please tell me nobody here bought this! i guarantee you your money and time would be better spent working on your product.
The first step is to inventory your assets. What value would you bring to
a hypothetical startup? You're not (currently) a coder. What about
business, marketing and sales? If you can become strong in one of these
areas, you provide value.

Can you project a profitable business from one of your ideas?

If your only contribution will be your ideas, they'd better be valuable. Valuab
le ideas are generally new solutions to existing problems. As such, they're usu
ally patentable.

Good luck.
Wow. This is practically the first intelligent thing I have ever heard from anyone in the record business.

This guy is smart enough to realize how much power well-designed software gives Apple. I wonder if he has realized yet that, even though they now know where the road is, the music industry won't be able to follow Apple down it. They're not the right kind of people. They're dealmakers, not hackers.
I thought it was the opposite -- it's cheaper than buying your own servers and co-locating to start, but like any rental, eventually you hit the inflection point and it costs more.

Also, multiply by 4 or 8 depending on what instance size you are using; so it's $72, $288, or $576 a month, per box.
Badvertising: Flash-Based Malware Ad Sneaks Onto Legit Websites Via DoubleClick
Funny, but I uninstalled Xobni precisely because it decided to run its own little daemon at all times. Initially I liked the product a lot and several guys at work installed it because of me not shutting up on "look! all attachments from you in the corner, see?!"

What he's talking about is a valid concern. I too, having implemented an RSS reader with background polling process, had to deal with users complaining about "big" number in Task Manager.

However, what I learned later on, was that it isn't the number in task manager that people dislike, it is the assumption that we, engineers, make about how they use their computers. Our applications (my RSS reader or Xobni's analytics) may be useful, but not useful enough to be running at all times. An average user probably does about a hundred things he considers useful with his PC on a typical day, and if each and single one of those things starts its own little "monitor", things may get nasty.

It should not be so hard to keep in mind that our code is not the only thing on a computer, and using our software is not users' full time job.

Ever saw a 3 year old laptop that belongs to a "typical" user? Task manger has a scrollbar four (!) pages tall. That's how many processes he's running. Sure, every single one of them is written by a guy who knows the difference between private working set and shared memory, and every single one is somewhat useful (anti-virus, volume controls, sound enhancers, CD silencers, download managers, RSS daemon, weather bugs, temperature monitors, etc). But in the end, you DO end up with sluggish performance and ridiculous startup times. And Vista only amplifies the pain.

Therefore, unless you are a driver or a shell of some sort, DO NOT run any code in the background. Ever.

This is why I am not a Xobni user anymore. Kudos to them for a great idea and usable implementation.
Bronfman's not smart. It took him 8 years to figure out what he just said. Arduous 8 years filled of declining profits and pissed off customers. He destroyed the industry by always pushing the same crap. He's one of the people that Benjamin Franklin talked about when he said: "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and
expecting different results."

http://www.slate.com/id/1862/

Finally, when the industry is close to being destroyed and all of his ships have sunk, does he wake up. Too little, too late.
Why not switch languages --

unplatform.com

(Seems to be expired)

unap.com also might be available.

Or KeanuAP.com, because Neo is The One.
If you guys are serious, I'm working on a partial solution. www.shelfmade.net.

Email me and I can explain how it is a solution, if it isn't clear.
Not being a hacker and not having enough money just yet to hire one for my startup. So I spend a lot of time looking for and trying out shortcuts that tend not to amount to much.
@ Mrevelle. Just start to build something and pitch it to people (your would be market). The idea will always change and the feedback will always help.

Every bit of progress you make increases your future success whether it is with this venture or another. I meet 3 people a week that need programers or technical co-founders. If you're in NYC, email me, I can put you in touch with people that have good ideas.
I think the text below the title "The law will make you into the worst kind of person" is pretty interesting by itself.
Fantastic article, thank you!
Octopart is still alive. A month ago, they went to Make Faire, and they released a parts list widget about three weeks ago. They add features quietly and on the down low.
82 Ways To Kickstart Your Marketing Efforts
Saudi minister warns of dollar collapse
Slides from the Stanford class about Facebook: business models for apps and widgets
Agreed. Not counting furniture, books probably make up 40% of the volume of everything I own. The thought of transferring them all to a thin tablet is very appealing.
I've got a cofounder, and yes, he helps. The problem is still brainpower-constrained.
some people are a little trigger happy on the ol defunct switch. :-)
Stay away from MT - the grid is slow even for simple apps, and they go down on a regular basis. Have also had bad experience with Dreamhost.

I recently signed up w/Joyent and am happy with it so far, have also heard good things about SoftLayer, ServerBeach, RackSpace, Layered Tech...some of the other names you hear thrown around on here.

EC2 is probably a better option once you've been around for awhile and that economy of scale starts working in your favor.
Coda Unites Web Development: Panic Builds Its UI with WebKit, Quartz
Sun may sue Google over Andriod licensing
Storing media content on the servers
Anyone who enjoys a moderate amount of success combined with publicity, accolades or seeming "legions" of followers / blog commenters, inevitably becomes the victim of personal attacks.

Having an abrasive (see Calacanis), or egotistical, or whatever your bit may be, can be an effective way of gaining more readers and attracting a following.

The opposite would be waffling, and we'd all be talking about how Aaron doesn't seem sure of himself and waffles on issues he talks about.

So you're screwed either way, really.
Octopart is definitely alive. I emailed them recently and got a prompt response. I'm seeing new features on their site too... it looks really slick.
This is the coolest comment I've read on news.YC in a while. Congratulations!
Sad. I want you back as a user tx. My goal is obviously to make the product so much a part of your email life that it is painful to uninstall. I bet you are like me and use email all day long. I hate Outlook without Xobni. I would hope Xobni would have its place above temperature monitors, weather bugs, download managers, etc on your machine too.

Our separate proces is super small and simply allows us to do automatic updates, nothing else.
How are those Y Combinator companies doing?
"free for teams up to two people"

I'm curious what kind of room there is for having a "team" in the under two people category.

I'm sorry, I just found that funny.
I agree with optimal's comment: Don't throw any files away for at least six months. Let your emotions cool down, there may be quite a bit that can be salvaged or recycled. Write up a personal list of lessons learned, so that you can translate your mental "if only" to "next time." Review the list every few months as you gain more perspective and revise it. Try and stay friendly with everyone involved, even if they are blaming you for the moment. With time and some perspective you may reach some different conclusions about what really happened (and what you will do differently next time). There is a quote by Eric Hoffer I find useful:

Our Achievements Speak For Themselves.

What we have to keep track of are our failures, discouragements, and doubts. We tend to forget the past difficulties, the many false starts, and the painful groping. We see our past achievements as the end result of a clean forward thrust, and our present difficulties as signs of failure and decay.
i think what they're saying is that youtube is losing market share, and are in fact losing their place as the dominant video site.
Seth Godin: gift cards/certificates are for chumps
Teach Yourself Visual Basic 6.0 in 24 Hours.

I should make up some story about finding it in a dumpster or buying it for $2 at a garage sale or something, but whatever.
That bit about "inadvertently" going to war really sticks in my craw.

These are the same people who decided to sue their own customers. How inadvertent is a lawsuit?
Scole is just a journalist, he pontificates about technology, but he's not a techie.
Teach Yourself Windows CE Programming in 6 Hours.
Good question. Come to LA in a couple weeks, let them get sauced and we'll find out!

http://www.drankkit.com/
PayPerPost Bloggers Get Slammed By Google
It gratifies intellectual curiosity (what's the grass like on the other side of the fence? it sucks).

Those liberal arts majors who counted on a JD for a career often wind up hating life and themselves.
I grew up in a lawyer family and I have only recently begun recovering from it.

Lawyers have a tendency to go into "lawyer mode", where they start acting like total dickheads who are impossible to talk to.