skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think you're confused about what "viral" means.

The proportion of people to whom an application is recommended who actually install it is only part of the virality of an application; another (IMHO far more important) aspect is the proportion of people who install an application who then go on to recommend it to others.

Your (I hope hypothetical?) application might be great for identifying powerful advertising slogans, or for identifying suckers; but it isn't going to tell you whether a yet-to-be-built facebook application would be popular or not.
BlackBerry Curve + iPhone + Velcro = iBerry?
Need both? Strap the Curve and iPhone back-to-back with Velcro. When your in intense power-user mode, engaged in rapid texting and data downloading, the Curve fits the bill. But when you want a wide screen for viewing the Web, PowerPoint displays or viewing photos, flip your iBerry around to the iPhone side.
Let's not bash IE too much and just write that DAMN web2.0 app shall we?

You chose web to be your platform and you whine? Wuss.

Here's the problem with standard:

First you need to decide whose in

Then you need to have a meeting to talk about the agenda.

Then you need to have another meeting to talk about the next meeting.

Then another meeting to discuss a SINGLE TAG.

Then another meeting to debate about that TAG.

What happen when the consortium decided to move to a different direction? you'll have to rewrite your software.

You'd think all of the members could come at a certain Date/Day?

While I agree that MS might have a hand in sabotaging the standard but hey, they want to move forward faster than the train and they stick to their decision for a very long term.
...and it still can't block pop-up ads.
What is the license policy on bsdiff?
Robot Co-op web-apps seems to be an interesting hobby projects.
Meh. Other than the admonition to just go out and develop your app, that's a pretty weak argument.

I'd rather have to tweak my sites when the W3C decides to phase-in a new convention than be forced to do so with every hare-brained browser upgrade that some company does.

Yes, the W3C takes a long time to discuss what casual users think should be trivial. That's largely because they're actually thinking about the semantics and implications of proposed changes, not merely succumbing to feature creep.

Meanwhile, the implication that not all members can make W3C voting meetings is of no consequence whatsoever. If you were so concerned about the direction of HTML or CSS, you could actually get on the appropriate mailing lists and committees. How would you go about convincing IE to, say, drop the concept of "hasLayout" or, for that matter, fix any of the other numerous bugs in their CSS parser?

So yeah, Internet Explorer still sucks. The bureaucracy of the W3C is a complete red herring with respect to that issue.
they're driven by "licensing considerations". big music won't let them play the track you ask for directly. nor can you, for example, skip tracks until you find it (there's a limit to how many tracks you can skip in a certain time interval).

at least, that's how it used to be. they blocked all international listeners a while back, so i haven't been able to use it since (the final straw that broke my cd buying habit).
Who was that again?
It's not a complete picture. But hopefully these notifications would be more than advertising slogans for existing ideas and would identify novel apps that people would like.
The Continuous World of Dungeon Siege
To quote Chris Rock, "Shit, you could drive a car with your feet if you want to."
It's clearly not a silver bullet. Basically it looks to me like the main advantage is that you can write client-side code in Javascript using s-expression trees instead of C-like syntax(statements and binary operator expressions).
Please take that down and stop spreading lies.
Thanks. Going to play with it this weekend.
Thanks to everyone who's posted. I've been reading about some negatives - slow response times. Has this been fixed or is it something that still happens still now?
There is more to the web then social. XXX "graph" may be web 3.0 (trying to not say semantic web) but it won't just be social.
Yah, we (aka Buxfer) are alive :) Guess we need to be posting more frequently to the blog. Btw, we just announced support for synchronizing with over 300 financial institutions. http://www.buxfer.com/blog/2007/11/21/synchronize-accounts-w...

Check it out, and let us know if things are or aren't working!
$500K is nothing in venture capital terms.
yea i've tried really hard every time you explain it, and this is the first time it has made the least bit of sense.

i like it! build it!
how about something like 'Gotcha!'

since this is web two oh you should probably misspell it.
Metaprogramming JavaScript (presentation slides)
Gotta love the extension...
"Shell-Interpreted Template." The result of invoking the page compiler on a .shit file.

This is one cynical developer!
MS would rather not change their codebase at the expense of market lead than to follow the new standard direction.

They want to decide their own fate.

What makes you think there's definitely ZERO politic in W3C? Semantics? implication of changes? feature creeps? bla bla bla bla bla you'll have Tim Bray.

Quit making feature creeps a big issue please. There are two directions for a software such as IE and Firefox: enhance or die. Enhance means more features. Quit adding features = stagnant = die.

Take 37signals as an example of "Less is More". Have you actually seen their customer complains? 1 million users.. pfftt, I have 2 inactive (free) accounts there. It's good only for about a week before I ditched them for good.
Microsoft really seem to be moving backwards rather than forwards judging from the decision to change the renderer for outlook 2007 from ie to word.
Android maker talks mashups and mobiles
At Feedity (http://www.feedity.com) we have been using ASP.NET and C# (.NET 2) exclusively. Quite stable and scalable, even during surges. Recently we moved our application platform to a web farm (clustered hosting), and its working out quite well.
Bill Gates Goes Back to School
Ask YC: What is the salary range for a proj manager or tech lead in Seattle
I am getting a job offer there and I want to know what the range of salaries are. Please do not say that I look at salary.com. Ball-park figures will do.

I really appreciate your responses.
Same to you and yours, Dan.
"Make something people want, for free"

"Then make something people want and ask money"

How'd you support yourself while working on the FreeBSD stuff, or did you get paid to do it? Do you think the same people who liked your open source work will turn tail at the thought of paying for software? Lots of them will, likely, but do you have indications that some won't?

I agree though, open source is a good place to be for a variety of reasons.
Great, another competitor...
17 Fast-Acting Strategies for Long-Lasting Success
Good analysis. I think Facebook made a brilliant move by focusing on the "utility" aspect. They even describe themselves as such in their tag line. They don't say "a place to meet people", or "connect with your friends", ...etc. They say: we're a "social utility".

I believe they're aiming to be the next-generation replacement of email. A tool through which you connect with people for all purposes. I use it to connect with friends, and recently for business connections as well. They still have a long way to go, so we shouldn't judge them by the features they have today. At least they're moving in the right direction.
The 8th Wonder: A single founder with a vision and lots of inspired helpers
How to Build Your Own Lifestream with Yahoo Pipes and NO Server Side Logic
> Shift-F11	Hide all windows in slow motion

Productivity Booster, right.
Ask YC:  Has anybody used MS Visual Web Developer Express?
Just curious, I don't really intend to use it, but I was talking to somebody who does, and it was the first that I'd heard of it. Any thoughts or reactions?

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/express/aa700797.aspx
in case you're as unfamiliar as me.
Rather, I hope that was just sock puppets. The rest of you can identify the pointless meanness on the part of the original poster.
It is missing a bunch of ones I use all the time, like ctrl+a in the terminal
The Secret Strategies Behind Many "Viral" Videos
Hi Mr. Graham,

I have translated this essay to Traditional Chinese version at here: http://mclee.foolme.net/2007/11/blog-post_21.html

In case if you feel that is inappropriate, please let me know. :)
I don't really think that EC2 should be considered a direct replacement for dedicated servers for your average web app, but if you have a need that can leverage the on-demand nature of EC2, then it's a great solution.

We use S3 and love it.
Can you grow cress in a keyboard?
Microsoft takes email design back 5 years
Depends on the PDF but you'd be amazed how high-rez iPhone's screen is... I really like reading on it.
To put this in perspective, Bill Gates's $50 billion, if split evenly amongst 200 startups, could fund each to the tune of $250 million.

Or he could fund them each for $15k like Y-Combinator and still have $49.997 billion left.

Isn't it interesting that before the Winter 2008 batch, the 60-ish YC companies represent less than ONE million invested (initial investment), combined?
It's distributed under a two-clause BSD license -- so it's basically "do whatever you like, just don't sue me".
Is this different from MS Expression Web? I thought that one was the successor to Frontpage. That one is at least competitive with Dreamweaver now.
I started out doing FreeBSD work while I was a university student supported by scholarships; but in 2006 I spent 4 months working on FreeBSD Update and portsnap funded by donations from the FreeBSD community -- I sent out an email saying approximately "here's the work I'd like to do; here's how long I think it will take; here's how much I'd earn if I spent that time working at the university; if people send me that much money, I'll spend the time working on FreeBSD instead", and the money arrived.

Given that many of these people were willing to pay me to write open source code, I'm sure that many of them will accept paying for online backups (especially because of the unavoidable hardware costs).
Accelerometers in Football helmets to track concussions
I wrote this app to test EC2's speed.

http://www.instantwordsearch.com/

It gets a lot of visitors thru StumbleUpon and has held up pretty good in terms of speed - over a period of few months.
Finally, A Fair Proxy Balancer for Nginx and Mongrel
The wizardry of Woz: interesting iWoz excerpt
All I can say is that I'm not really surprised.
Ah I thought it was that. The "inconceivable" word wasn't it?

yes, brilliant movie.
Amazon.com Sales Rank: #279,510. anyone know how to get a chart of sales rank over time? is this baby going up or down?
Where can I get music legally?
I gave a class presentation on this a couple weeks ago. I actually made the page in class because the group presenting before us had a web page so I figured we should make one too. The whole process took about fifteen minutes on Jottit, and the prof. loved it. I'm now a huge Jottit fan.
De-constructing Malicious Flash
You mean bash shortcuts?

http://hajek.stat.ubc.ca/~harry/local/bash.html
Also see:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6352
This sort of behavior will make social networks even more popular, since you will want to only trust your friends.
Ramaze: a simple, light, modular ruby web-framework
They forgot the most obvious one: your local CD or record store. Sure, Tower Records is gone and Borders and Best Buy have crappy selections, but if you live in a college town or a big city chances are you'll be able to find a good place. I never buy music online anymore.

Oh, and if you're worried about buying from the RIAA, just look on the back of the CD. It will almost always give the name of the record label.
Apparently this one is more closely tied into .NET; with visual frontends to DB design and not just HTML.
Ask YC:  What is "quality" code?
I've read tons online about an amorphous and elusive goal: quality code.

What is it? Links code that you consider to be great would be appreciated.
The iTunes Store (I'm biased).
Consider buying these books:

http://www.amazon.com/Refactoring-Improving-Design-Existing-...

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Object-Oriented-Addiso...
If you're talking nuts and bolts coding, and if you read one book about what makes quality imperative code, read Code Complete. In my experience, when people read it, they change the way they program in profound (and good) ways.

http://www.cc2e.com/

http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Microsoft-Programming-Steve-M...
This isn't a job board.

Edit: Oh wait, just saw the "jobs" link.
LinkedIn To Be Gobbled Up By News Corp?
After graduation, do you look for work or let your business grow?
According to my room mate, some of the greatest code ever written:

http://www.amazon.com/Standard-Template-Library-P-J-Plauger/...
couple of salient features:
- easy to maintain
- easy to extend
- obviously correct
- <this space is for rent>
Just like great art or hot women.

You'll know it when you see it.
I'm so glad they've finally released a paperback edition.

My favorite review "A Million Random Digits has saved my marriage 47 times, and I know it can save it 999,953 more times if called upon..."
this is exactly the kind of stuff that makes people distrustful of "marketing" messages. Sketchy direct marketers have found their way onto the Internet, and now they're finding their way out of the adsense playground.
New Metric for Web Startups: Pageviews/Employee and Unique Visitors/Employee
He's all for capitalism...but he gets that it's not going to take care of everybody. The financial incentives to take care of the disadvantaged just aren't there.

Maybe something was lost in the translation from reportee to reporter, but capitalism doesn't "take care" of anybody. And the incentives to "take care" [ie subsidize] the disadvantaged are never going to be there. This is a point of mathematical certainty.

The incentives are of a strictly different type--for instance, the incentive of an evil old billionaire trying to buy his way into heaven.
I use it all the time when I forget sudo...
Quality code is the kind that someone else maintaining it doesn't feel the urge to rewrite...
It's "somewhat" tongue in cheek, but the dude has got some gems in there. Or however you want to take them:

---
Web Services noun A software development meme that espouses the notion of tying together disparate software components via a crude, non-typesafe, remote procedure call (RPC) mechanism that consists of sending and receiving data encoded in an excessively verbose, plaintext format (XML) over a largely inelegant, stateless file transfer protocol (HTTP).

---
Web technology is certainly a controversial topic. Despite the fact that building Web applications is about as enjoyable as having one's private parts caught in a cement mixer, it continues to be an extremely popular software development paradigm. It's been said that although there is a certain class of problems for which Web technology is the appropriate solution, your problem is almost certainly not among them, no matter what your problem is. But one would be hard-pressed to convince the industry of it.
All this crap works only because YouTube measures only the number of views of a video, and not how many people stop watching it after the first few annoying seconds.
ASUS eeePC: First impressions and GPL violations
I can't justify paying money for a worse user experience, less selection of music, and lower quality music. http://www.waffles.fm for the win.
Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them?
You can't download music, only listen to it, but check out http://www.songza.com for a nice interface.
> Why do you need to promote your startup somewhere other than on the internet?
You got a point.

Anywhere I can sign up to be notified when you launch?
That's pretty good. http://www.deezer.com/ is another similar on demand song service.
what's the bias?
Ask: famous Greenspun's Tenth Rule manifestations?
Here are some examples I'm aware of of large software systems bucking at the brutally low-level nature of their implementation language:

- Mozilla/Firefox - XPCOM, a COM/CORBA-like thing the codebase has, implements message passing and garbage collection.

- (allegedly) Yahoo's rewrite of Viaweb

- X Windows, though I've never studied its source code so I don't know for sure

- Apache: implemented using the "Apache Portable Runtime" library that provides things like hash tables and memory mapping.

Are there any other instances you're aware of?
I think he works at Apple.
Entrepreneurs want to make their place hot, not go to someone else's. I also doubt Facebook is recruiting top hackers: they don't have hard technology there. They are probably getting a lot of idea guys/socially savvy people.
Well, these guys found their way to techcrunch, so they must know something about the novel ways to spam.
Great code is simple. Simplicity is the cornerstone of all the other attributes of beautiful code - ease of extension, ease of understanding, often even efficiency or at least amenability to optimization.
It really depends on what you are planning to do.
1. If you need a server for a longer term - or need to make serve web pages on demand then ec2 doesnt seem like a very good option - not that cheap, server might trip and you might loose state, and respnose times are not that great.
2. It is good for batch processing tasks that you can pile on multiple machines and then let go of the machines. You get work done faster (parallel) and is cheaper than any other option out there.
Incidentally the author's website, Findory.com, is now defunct. Looks like the answer was "yes."

From the linked post: "And this makes me wonder, am I ruthless enough? In Findory Video, for example, the system tries to automatically filter the soft porn that appears quite popular on both YouTube and Google Video. Is that a mistake? Findory has never spammed anyone. Findory keeps well within fair use for copyright material. Findory directs traffic to content providers to help them earn revenue from their work. Are those mistakes?"
Ask YC: How important is it to be friends with your co-founder?
At least twice I've had the opportunity to co-found a startup with someone whom I've respected, who I know does good work, and has complementary skills. But I chose not to, because of some other aspect of their personality. Something bothered me about them, but I couldn't put my finger on it. It definitely seemed like at some level we didn't like something about the other, and we weren't the kind of people who would end up being friends.

At normal jobs, I've never had a problem working with people that I wasn't friends with, and sometimes actively disliked, but my view is that in a startup situation, this is much more important. How important is liking or being friends with the other person? Did I pass up good opportunities or make the right decision?
Quality code is code that is worth reading, not just running.

Which leads us to code litterature.

And poetry.

And haiku.

$de&&bug( "Carpe diem")

http://virteal.com/DebugDarling
...except because of the language it's written in.
Oh, well I'm not crappy then. Neither I'm a good one though...
I've heard the same things about Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit and so on (news.YC?). What I don't get: how do you get a significant number of "friends" on those networks who are willing to watch/read your spam?

My real life friends typically don't use social networks and, not being entrepreneuers themselves, they often did not get the point when I asked them to get a stumbleupon account just to rate my site. On the other hand, I could not yet muster the motivation to worm my account onto some other people's friends list just to make them rate my submissions.

How do you handle that problem? Perhaps a "entrepreneur helps entrepreneur" network for those things would be in order?
The last time I suggested news.yc users collectively upvote each others' submissions on digg/reddit I got downmodded... but I'm still game, if you guys are game.
I think the amount of comments at TC proves that Dan knows he's stuff.

There is no such thing as bad publicity.
Find the security hole in your plan. :)
I think it should have been "Signs you are a day coder (and don't know it)"

I am amazed how many programmers I have worked with who are not up to date and just do their job and are not interested in it.
go with your gut I say. Only you know what ticks the boxes for you. Also never look back at what could of been...

I have worked with people that I have disliked but over time I have ended up getting on with them quite well in the end. Sometimes first impressions can be wrong.
and most of the world still uses it so we have to deal with it. At least its not IE 5...
"startups" Google search (interesting that PG's site is not number 1)
When speakers at YC dinners take questions at the end, there's one I ask most of them: what do you know now that you didn't know when you were 24? The most common answer is to trust your instincts about people. If you're thinking of working with someone but something seems iffy about them, don't.

So you probably did the right thing.

Friends can help you screen people. Especially female friends, who often have a more sensitive social radar than men.
It is a matter of taste and opinion though. We had a programmer at our office who used to use strings for everything. Any datatype, he'd use a string anyway.
He thought it made things uniform and easy. So he'd probably feel the urge to rewrite everything. That doesn't mean it's bad code, it just means he has issues :)
well, a big difference in total LOC might be significant, but that's slightly different claim than saying that a difference in LOC for "hello, world" has any importance.

The reason you can get by with a shorter hello world program in most dynamic languages is because you're doing it in the "module" definition, which I think is not proper form in any non trivial programs. So any differences in LOC for hello world really mean nothing over the course of a real application.
Microsoft - Give your products away to startups
jQuery: The Write Less, Do More, JavaScript Library
i think it's really important. not only from a trust perspective, but also the amount of time you are going to spend with them means its vital you can have a laugh together when things get a bit tough. the risk is that you may fall out over something related to the business - this is something only you can decide, but if you address the possible scenarios early on and have agreed upon a way of dealing with possible outcomes (good and bad), then i think this risk can be limited.
check out www.amiestreet.com, a lot of the tracks there are affordable, or even free.
PR Tips For Startups: How To Get And Keep The Media Attention
Not sure what you thought I was "offering" - just answering the OP.

But I understand your skepticism about the id. I've just been lurking for a while and had no need to post.
Thanks for the contact - we generally look for permies so probably aren't compatible with what you'd want. But always worth getting in touch just in case.
Not really, unfortunately. Good luck.
Did anyone else know about the London Startup Weekend?

http://london.startupweekend.com/

It's taking place over the same weekend - I wonder if we can still jump on in after Tayyabs...
ParenScript: A Lispy JavaScript Generator
Desktop memory usage comparison
AMD v Intel: Oil money and hafnium
Seed Money to Launch Area's Tech Innovations
Can Games Fly on Google Earth? including source code
That's possibly the best definition of good code. Simplicity and succinctness is not only power, it is also beauty.

Besides, good code is inseparable from good architecture, for which beauty=simplicity applies as well.
Joel Shapiro on the birth of string theory
TeX Finally Made Functional
Infinite sums in nature, and a startling result
Hotmail founder set to take on Microsoft and Google
Why Being Outside Silicon Valley is Good for Startups
Quality code is elegant and concise.