skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know the feeling. You can't just churn for the sake of churning.

I think at the heart of every entrepreneur is a contrarian. I know that I'm just the type of person that if everybody else went left, I'd go right.

I don't see a conflict between failing fast and going deep. That's because when I'm in the mode to qualify the work (before I spend 8 weeks on it), I try to scope it down. Am I getting into six months of development effort? If so, is that because I want to make my technology hard to reproduce? Or is it just feature bloat -- I'm putting the kitchen sink in. I know now that I'm failing fast (giving it 4-12 weeks once approved) with small timeboxes, I'm seeing a lot more progress. Chase the users, right?

I don't think I'd go back to long timeboxes again, although I might very well chop off some really gnarly problems and chew on them a little bit at a time :)
F# = OCaml
Next time ask your daughter, "why do you keep asking why?" It all comes down to pleasure.
Thanks for such transparency.
Ask YC: Are all employees with no equity in the company wage slaves?
Friend, this post is very, very poorly written. Hackers need to open up a book first.
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Apple's U.S. market share rises to 8.1%, up from 6.2% a year ago
Do you think more bands/artists adopting Radiohead's model or at least selling DRM free music at low prices (much lower than iTunes .99) will make a dent in the piracy distribution model?

I suppose they'd have to be in a centralized web location for convenience and variety.

Then again, if more and more artists move away from DRM/labels, maybe piracy statistics will lose their significance altogether.
Autopopulating text input fields with JavaScript
Speaking of arguing about borderline cases -- have there been instances where you (or other YC principals) have gone ahead and funded applicants personally when you haven't managed to convince everyone else that they deserve to be funded by YC?

I suppose this is really a question about how much you're committed to doing things as a group -- if the YC process is anything like assessment processes I've been involved in (e.g., deciding who gets honourary degrees from my university) there must be instances where a minority thinks that an application is exceptional but can't convince other people of this.
Right on! What a beautiful machine that was. And I, too, wasted many, many an hour playing Wizardry. Other favorites were Castle Wolfenstein and Aztec.

And remember how it cam with the green Basic programming book to get you started? I don't know if I've ever loved a product as much before or since.
i would gladly be the 2nd employee at facebook even if mark didn't want to give me equity

great experience + great connections > equity in a successful company > a wage > equity in an unsuccessful company
Unless you believe what they say about Statistical Independence which says that you are therefore still one of the startups that had a 10% chance of suceeding the other times "regardless of on's experience".
An experience of working with YC who has got people so transparent will be a dream come true (if selected, ofcourse!)
No, but more because the money is not the important part than because we feel like we always have to act as a group.
Commodore 64 with the tape deck for saving my programs. I'll never get the three hours I would spend loading pong back...ever!
I'm surprised that companies like Apple, with sizeable legal departments, didn't bother to do the research necessary to get the patent thrown out. Sure, I can see that they might pay royalties in the short term for the sake of expediency, but I wonder why they didn't also investigate getting the patent re-examined themselves...
Ask YC: Your Favorite Hack
This is for all those people who have written more than one piece of software.

What was your favorite and why?
Is it worth the hassle? I have no problem with SVN, centralised works just fine. I really just wanted a CVS with atomic commits. Maybe I should look into GIT.
Thanks -- I should have realized that while any one of you could fund an application which you liked, no one of you could provide all the other YC-related advantages without all the other YC principals agreeing.
Counterstrike: Murdoch, DeWolfe Announce MySpace Platform and New Privacy Controls
A conductor I know, when asked what his favourite piece of music is, always answers with the name of a piece of music from the next concert he's conducting -- and then goes on to point out that as soon as the concert is over and he starts rehearsals for the next concert, he will have a new favourite piece of music. As he points out, if what you're working on isn't currently your favourite piece of music (or software), you're not giving it the attention it deserves.

In that vein, my favourite piece of software is my (not finished yet, but still very useful as it currently exists) "tarsnap" backup software (http://www.tarsnap.com).
I used to work for Leading Edge...they owned the Elephant Brand. It was my first job and I couldn't believe they actually paid me to work there!
Can call center computers analyze what you're saying?
Do you ever wonder whether people can hear you when you're on hold with customer service? Forget about people, computers are starting to eavesdrop on our calls. This article tells us what lies ahead.
Looks hot. I worked with a startup when I was consulting for the Federal Reserve that did something like this. I think their name was CyberArk?

I think there's going to be a huge need for secure backup with all of the home servers that are popping up. Storage has been exploding for years, and there's no end in sight.
A metasearch engine, written in Javascript, that executed entirely on the browser. How? The page was hosted at d.o.w.s.e.r.bueno.org. o.w.s.e.r.bueno.org pointed to Google, w.s.e.r.bueno.org pointed to Yahoo, etc.

The XmlHttpRequests always appear to go to a root domain of the page, so it worked.

That one still makes me grin.
Coding Horror: Remember, This Stuff Is Supposed To Be Fun (Life's short, enjoy it!)
Comparing navigation by discovery to navigation by search
Wow!! I'm impressed! I have a three year old and after the 4th or 5th recursion I would run out of answers and just turn on Shark Tales!

The why question makes my head hurt!
But then my son's answer when I ask why to anything... "Because I do" or "Because it is".
I like that a lot! Use the DNS system to outwit the stupid XMLHttpRequest sandbox. Way cool.
Amazing timing! I'm very excited!
Well, I have to say I'm quite pleased with Amazon's new music store. It's easier to find and download things than any peer-to-peer service I've tried, especially when I want the entire album[1]. And unlike the iTunes store, I don't have to use iTunes to do my shopping. It's all just browser-based, and then I can play the music in Amarok, which has a better interface than iTunes does.

[1] I listen mostly to classical music, which makes this the case a lot more often than with modern works.
Thanks, but while the restrictions on XHR are heavy, they aren't stupid. An unnamed party used the same idea to implement a LAN sniffer: each successive root domain pointed to the IP addresses of well-known routers, like 192.168.15.1. The script ran down the chain and attempted to log in to the admin page of the router, using default passwords.
Three steps program to be "in" altought you are "out" of Silicon Valley...

1. Blog, blog, blog. Do this for 9-12 months, show how you have industry and market insight, whatever your actual geographical location is... it's a small and smaller world after all, with blogs and mailing lists available whatever your exact physical location might be.

2. Connect (thru mailing lists, twitter, blog comments, and other "not being there" means) with SF locals and impress them with your understanding of your market/technology/space... again, build up your network and make sure you are relevant.

3. Go there. For a week or two, for an event, for a geek dinner, for an industry meeting, invest 4-5k to go in SF and meet with the people you had a chance to connect in steps 1 and 2.

This is what we have been doing for our startup, praized.com, for several years... it's paying back handsomely, but you have to be patient. We are now invited to events at hot megacorps (sorry, can't say wich one, my VP product dev would kill me!), met some great VCs with "back-home" connection (a canadian expat VC in the valley coming to Ottawa fairly often, that's quite close to home for us Montrealers) and even sponsored a geek meetup (the microformat crew) while I was in SF for Web 2.0 Expo last April.

Bonus #4 : connect with other industry folks not in San Francisco / Silicon Valley area. You might get some benefits from sharing your vision with other global partners, even if your only investement is offering them the best "local" beer when they are visiting your "off-center" location...

As you can gather from the general tone of this comment, I quite a contrarian to the "you-have-to-be-in-silicon-vallley" meme, but then again, I am the first one presenting in my city "how we can learn from San Francisco" at the local BarCamp event... YMMV, IMNSHO, TINSTAAFL, been there done that, but hey, I am rooting for this "not in SF" trend more than I should, and I like every minute of it!
A couple of years ago I took a course in Marine Ecology, for our final exam we have to do a lot of calculations using the Shannon-Weiner index (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon_index)

I wrote a program in my HP 48 calculator to solve it putting all the variables in a list, it's my favorite hack because I was the only one in the class who knew programming, so I finished the 2 hour exam in 30 minutes =)
Nice.

Not that I approve. But nice.

I'm a JSON person myself. Ran into too many problems with domains and XMLHttpRequest. From a security standpoint, the entire browser is broken, but that's probably a discussion for another day. Neat how you re-routed.
Quantum device developed to control single electron spin
Macintosh LC...and then I got a 486DX2!!
There is also the problem of which part of the previous statement the 'why' is for. You can construct different kinds of questions and you can only choose to answer the ones that are easy. So unless the 'why' is a complete question, there is a bit of ambiguity here.
Since 3 years I keep under my bed a hardprinted copy of the Solaris dynamic linker source code, and another of the AIX kernel machine-dependent (esp. the boot phase).

the Solaris RealTime Dynamic Linker code is available at:
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/onnv/onnv-gate/usr/sr...

and the AIX kernel is available on your favourite peer-to-peer network. This is my bible. Look at the files under aix/bos/kernel/ml/, you will learn a lot about kernel-land and Power(PC) architecture.

I enjoy it as a real piece of poetry, each function as an unique verse. You can even appreciate some erotic pieces (especially if you try to compare your reverse IDA analyse with the source).

If you are more openminded you can read the Linux kernel bootcode files (under linux/arch/$ARCH/kernel/). The first time is still the harder one, and you'll always remember it. But it worst it.
So basically your SCUBA gear was in the guest room shower because it's the closest you are ever going to get to space travel!

Just kidding, I've practiced SCUBA diving, its a hole new world down there =)
Let's do it this way, here's the top 5 web products I use:

1) Firefox
2) Gmail
3) WordPress
4) Craigslist
5) Delicious

I can't even fathom anything remotely touching those products made by a company that's outside of California. Or this state. Or this country. Silicon Valley wins.

Hell, I'll do 5 more:

6) Ebay
7) Twitter
8) Facebook
9) Upcoming.org
10) Flickr
Great essay. Maybe a new startup should be something like one of the microfinance sites like Kiva (http://www.kiva.org/about/microfinance) but instead of people making loans, they purchase equity in a startup. All the startups put their "pitch" on the web site and let people read the pitch and decide if they want to purchase equity in the company. If not enough $ comes in, the pitch was not compelling or they are not giving enough equity for the $$. One challenge will be to have a system where getting funding is not just about who can make a slick pitch, but about "real value" (how ever you measure that).
Pat
Backup is such an easy/hard problem (easy to do, hard to do right), that I'd probably be afraid to tackle it. I'll have to check out tarsnap. Sounds neat.
That's kinda creeping me out.

Did you write the dynamic linker and kernel, or are you, er, just enjoying them in your private time?
They seem to be playing catch-up--there's nothing in this announcement that's above and beyond what Facebook is doing.
The idea that skin color or athletic ability is "heritable" but not intelligence seems an idea more motivated by our cultural stance of anti-intellectualism than by any data. If you want to be politically correct you must assume that everyone has the same intellectual potential, but you don't have to make that assumption for athletic ability.

This cultural convention affected me even as I was writing this comment: I hesitated to write "intellectual potential" in the previous sentence and had written something indirect like "potential in this area" at first.

/although i wonder what an "executive function" is. :\
"Before you read the YC email or answer PG call, read this."

This is a great title, rokhayakebe is a marketing genius! I think every single YC user have read this thread!
Journalists too often declare trends based on isolated examples. Where's the context? How do peer-to-peer downloads compare to legal sales for traditionally marketed albums?

Also, a lot of the illegal downloaders may get their music that way simply because it's how they've become accustomed to doing it the past few years. Over time, high-quality legal options could sway many of them.
Why Google Won't Help Your VC Pitch
Safari-as-SDK's shortcomings that really bother me:

- can't integrate with addressbook, phone, nor maps

- can't do alerts/notifications (sending an SMS for this is a dirty, dirty hack!)
I think that the man has a point. I think (and luckily, I'm holding no public office, so I can think what I want) the effect includes criminal organizations, in places other than Kenya.

I've been swayed by Joe Stiglitz's account (read, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization_and_Its_Disconten...). I'm no expert, but I've done a fair bit of reading, and my take is this:

The problem isn't the aid -- it's the onerous terms placed on extremely fragile societies. This is somewhat akin to tough VC terms on startups, except a thousand times worse - rarely do startups have military junta evolved specifically to plunder said sources of funding.

Often, the only organizations surviving a calamity are criminal organizations (threats on one's wellbeing are, unfortunately, one of the only dependable crediting strategies in an economic collapse), which then grab up most of the funds, and a self-reinforcing pattern emerges: the most corrupt organizations, those most effective at looting aid, are in the best position to do it again.

But aid is not bad, wholesale. Ethiopia refused IMF aid, and eventually turned it's fortunes around after an incredible period of adversity. But if they could have taken a loan at less punitive rates, without stripping their economy of the regulations that would eventually serve them, their economy and population would not have suffered so miserably.
Smart kid :)
I like your batback and your shared folder ideas. You shouldn't give up just because of the amount of work. Find someone to help you for a few hours on the scaling problem I bet that can be fixed with some indexing of tables and faster sql code.

In 2001/2002 I needed some help money wise, I had done some websites and developed relationships with the owners of the companies. I went to those people and they gave me extra work and extra money. It didn't last but it got me over a bump that I wouldn't have otherwise.
Yeah but Myspace has a totally different demo and 2x facebooks traffic.

Anyone else here have plans for Myspace?
Commodore 64 (from my Uncle)- the fantastic black (actually floppy) disks, a TV for a screen, and the original Advanced Dungeons and Dragons RPG- Curse of the Azure Bonds!
The fed needs to raise interest rates in order to have a strong dollar. The fed needs to lower interest rates to help the housing market. I have a feeling they will do neither.

This can be good for us, find a angel or VC in Britain where there Sterling is now worth more then 2 of our dollars.

A few years ago I owned the domain ehosting.com, I sold it to a hosting company in Britain they were really happy that they were getting it at close to half price (not that they paid much for it anyway). That has always stuck with me and the value U.S. startups might have to a UK investor.
Hum, good one. I have a cool non-hack, actually.

In college, I worked for a while in the applied physics department. It was an undergrad research project, where I was supposed to work with parallel systems and cluster architectures. They use software that calculates "density functional theory total-energy". Part of my project was to make this piece of software run in multiple machines and speed up the simulations. That used to take days to complete, sometimes weeks, and they wanted to reduce the period of the cycle.

I never got to know the whole theory behind the software (I am a Computer Engineer) but I did get to take a look at the manual explaining some of the algorithms, while I was learning more about parallel systems using message passing libraries.

I was just getting started on the whole "implement map, reduce, filter, barrier" using MPI (in Fortran!) when I found a description of the software where it showed how each atom in the strutcture, IIRC, needed to have its plane-wave basis-set calculated. This calculation required a long list of functions and was called for _every_ atom in the structure. Also, the software consisted of long runs of this call, getting more approximate results at each run.

Basically, I found an unbelievably parallelizable (is that a word?) piece of code in a application that was mostly serial.

Let's just say this: it took me more time to find the place in the code that have the call and even more time to make changes in the Makefile in order to use Intel Fortran Compiler than the time it took me to add 5 lines of MPI code and get the problem solved.

When we saw the speedup was directly proportional to the size of the cluster (if we wanted double of the performance, just add the double of computers), I realized that the feat (changing significantly the behavior of an program with so little modification) would be hard to repeat.

It was no "major hack", but it made me value (a) proper documentation and (b) getting a complete view of the system that I am supposed to work on and modify.
That's 99% on that one trait 'inhibition', but very much less on the others.

I'm very skeptical that it's all genetic, since they didn't factor out the environment. I can't access the paper right now, but how did they measure the resistance to habit? Did they build up specific habits and then try to break them down, or did they use existing habits, or what?
some 286. i still keep it around, i've been meaning to pull my killer qbasic games off it for years (coming on decades).
a couple of years ago I was working as a lab assistant in a university computer lab. Part of my job was to check the printers hourly (in labs on 5 different floors) and see if they needed more paper. Being extremly lazy I wrote a program that would log into the printers web based panel. This panel displayed a paper level indicator as an image. I discovered tgat the image filenames contained the percent full as a number (0, 25, 50, 75, 100). I had my program regularly check all the printers, parse the paper level and alert me if any printer was at 25 or empty.
Aye, it was a good title and it did catch my eye.

And just to pass on another link:
http://www.foundersatwork.com/1/post/2007/10/what-no-means.h...

Good luck to every one who applied. Keep your fingers-crossed, I know mine are.

R.
...which reminds me of Ron Paul.
Paul Graham can give three young men only $6000 for a whole summer of 'work'.
Survey says: Microsoft ecosystem is biggest
Good advice, but certainly common sense. Startups that rely on others are destined to fail.

Using AdSense (or any such mundane scheme) is a sad excuse for lacking the creativity to develop an innovative revenue model that fits your startup and the values of the user community.

Piggybacking on facebook? Don't even get me started with that one; that's a another whole world of problems.
Futures markets deal with financial instruments, not predictions about stuff like when an iPhone nano will come out.
Paul Graham ith tho thmart, he hath hith own dialect
Obviously MySpace is doing fine now, but time is unkind to companies that coast. Until MySpace does something very new, they're coasting. Of course they'll be around in 2008. I'm talking about whether they'll be around in 2015.
The problem I believe is that people have become accustomed to downloading off their favorite P2P service. Even if the music becomes free or extremly cheap somewhere else it will take a while to break that habbit.
Video editing comes to... GNU Emacs?!
I think iTunes is your high quality, legal option. With the non-DRM stuff now 99 cents along with the DRMed versions, its becoming more of an ideal legal alternative for illegal downloaders.

I highly doubt the music industry can create something better, but I'll embrace it if they do.
This year I mean it -- it's a bubble!
For non-techies, iTunes is a better deal than BitTorrent. There's no hunting for torrents, managing wonky downloads, dealing with slow clients, etc.

Maybe the popular peer-to-peer options in Russia are more mass-market than the ones in the US.
A DIALOGUE WITH SARAH, AGED 3: IN WHICH IT IS SHOWN THAT IF YOUR DAD IS A CHEMISTRY PROFESSOR, ASKING "WHY" CAN BE DANGEROUS By Stephen McNeil

http://www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=657
10 Most Bizarre Scientific Papers
That honestly doesn't sound terribly innovative to me. Of course the data will be centrally located, and of course the low-end computers will be cheap. However, there will always be a market for high-end computers, and companies will gladly provide them (and reap huge margins)

The most important thing about the future of computing, in my opinion, is the connectivity; the fact that you'll be connected to all of the world's information, and all of its inhabitants, always, no matter where you are.

I'm still waiting for a computer I can wear.
What stopped me from buying a PS3 just to toy around with it was the fact that (AFAIK) the Linux kernel does not use the special processing units. Basically, I would be buying an under-priced PowerPC.

I do believe that it is getting harder to think of how to make money on things like that because the set of applications that are (as a whole) processor-bound are getting ever smaller. It seems that everything (except videogames, of course) is either memory-bound or IO-bound.

Outside universities, the only people that could be interested in PS3 clusters would be crackers that want to break passwords using brute force.
Years ago when Garage.com was starting up, I applied and was rejected. No big deal as I was expecting it, but it did get me a signed rejection letter from the big "Guy" himself.

As a beta tester it was a very nice gesture, to receive that letter with the comment "Prove us wrong!" hand written as a P.S. to the form letter. That letter hangs in a frame and every day I use it to remind myself that the only person that needs to believe in me, is me.

Today, many years later, I thank my lucky stars for that rejection. I went it alone, no co-founders, no frigging investor BS, and did not take a dime from anyone.

This year the 17 employees of MY privately held company drove our sales to 61 million dollars in online transactions.

The satisfaction that comes with proving investors wrong can't be bought, only earned.

Those that can, DO. Those that can't, find an investor.