skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me it was totally (a).

My idea came after our second child. I made a New Year's resolution to send an email a week to update my extended family on what we were up to. I totally failed. The failure dogged me often. The problem was that when a lot was going on it was hard to find time to talk about it. When less was going on it was hard to remember all the interesting things we had done.

Then I thought about digital photos with timestamps. If I just took pictures when we did something interesting, later I could have the computer sort them out by date, and I could type in what we did each day that had photos.

I figured this would be useful for other busy parents, or for people who travel, or anybody else whose photos tell a story.
The Business Dragons: Incorporation, taxes and other mythical beasts
A good place to start:

1) Find the most active product forums on Amazon.com
2) Figure out what customers are complaining about
3) Solve their problems / make their lives easier
4) Profit
Being a web-savvy person myself, I'm not thrown by this particular usability error. It's an easy one to make when working with templates; I have pages myself with this problem. However, I do think it's worth pointing out.

It's standard just like stubbing your toe is standard. Everybody does it sometimes, but it's worth avoiding.

See #10 on this list:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031110.html
Nobody has time for mentoring. Even larger companies don't have people sitting around helping the young buck become better programmers.

What I would argue the startup gives you though, is a chance to grow in an environment where someone will be there to bail you out in the worst of cases. At a startup, it's highly possible that you'll need to learn as you code, but you'll at least get a chance to work on something new. At a big shop, I can guarantee you'll be working on feature x forever because nobody will trust you to touch the other pars of the system, and BA's will tell you what new features are needed.
Is the Silicon losing it's shine?
More difficult for me was finding an idea I loved enough to settle on. I probably have an idea for a startup around 1-2 times a day. Probably 25% of them could be hugely successful for someone interested enough. I bounced around a bit before settling on one that has stayed interesting to me (and my cofounder) everyday as we've worked on it. It's actually increased the amount of ideas I have though, since I have to create things that I wish someone had already created.

The idea we're working on now is a very focused version of a grander idea we have. It's super small and users love it already, so we're just working on growing it.
Debunking "That Myth" About Startup Mortality
If you're logged in to (for example) gmail in one tab, and then you search in another tab, google knows who you are via a cookie. You would have to both search through a proxy and suppress the cookie.
You have essentially 2 options:

1. Coast in the day job and work on your startup.

2. Work during the day and put the startup on hold (or at least, focus less on it)

If you choose to do option 1, you should avoid the first company. You won't be able to coast there and the expectations would be that you are a fully functioning part of their team.

If option 2 is the way you choose to go, you'll learn more and probably be more satisfied working for company A.

My opinion, given your story is to go for Option 2. You're only 20, have no formal development experience, and have an opportunity to learn a great deal and possibly improve your financial standings. I would take the unpopular opinion that your startup can wait while you invest a little in yourself. Most of your peers are still in school.

If you do this, it's likely you'll learn a lot that you'll need to learn at any rate. At least this way you'll discover these things on someone else's dime.
Well, as for point number 1, thats what I mean...they are desperate. If they can't leverage current resources and a 200B valuation, how the hell are they going to beat facebook. Oh, and by the way, once FB/MSFT decides to make a push in Brazil, orkut can kiss their mkt share goodbye. Facebook is just that much better.
As web services become easier to build (e.g., as Facebook apps), one would expect a more systematic and scientific approach to emerge for exploring web service ideas.
I don't have as many examples but here is one. Galileo discovered his principle by conducting very simple experiments with no special tools or a lot of data collection. How do you find the relevant data or build relevant tools if you don't have a clue about what you are supposed to discover?

What computer vision needs is mathematics, in my opinion. And math has nothing to do with "data collection and tool-building". It is entirely about understanding.

The link provides a good example of how people try to solve problems without any understanding. They don't know how the brain operates, yet they build its "model". And then they expect this model to solve the problem for them...
One quick comment: Your layout doesn't really work on a smaller screen -- here's a screen shot from my laptop with 1280x768 resolution as I was browsing and having some stuff open (visible) behind the browser window:

http://screencast.com/t/6ufdUZOW

All other sites I usually visit work fine at this size.
Yes, it's slower if you run it side by side with anything else on one machine, but I thought Erlang's main strength (in addition to reliability) was making it easier to create distributed applications on multiple machines (hence a better data cruncher)? Am I wrong? If I am, what was Oreilly making a big fuss about (and why do Hadoop/Java proponents like to mention Erlang)?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(programming_language)#Concurrency_and_distribution_oriented_language
8 ball
Gmail fights image spam with OCR
I personally don't have anything to oppose to the maths. Wolfram goes pretty deep, and nothing is obviously wrong, although some of it didn't feel right. This review, however, goes into the details:
http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/reviews/wolfram/

Search for "untrue" if you want to get there directly.

I enjoyed NKS as well. It's good intellectual stimulation, but the hyperbole was still annoying.
Using picasa album photos for contacts looks like the start of social networking.
The $10k per day number is only interesting if you understand the marketing numbers. If he's spending $20k per day in marketing, the business isn't that interesting.
"which, BTW, makes me wonder why on earth anybody would make a Mac their development machine"

Because a development platform and deployment platform can be two different platforms.
Do have a link to / are you still involved with your POS system?

(A friend wants me to build them a POS system and I know there has to be a decent working solution out there.)
what marketing do you think he is doing?

I have a feeling its mostly word of mouth and a high ranking for 'dating site' in google
Wish I did, but that was about 10 years ago. Sorry.
the question isn't whether it's easy to get java on 'x' OS. the question is whether it already ships with it...

it may be easy for developers to do it, but we often forget about the average consumer/user (not to mention update it)
Sounds like the article is describing this guy that left here to pursue an amazing startup in genetic algorithms for financial yadda, but left shards of incredibly clever (wrote his own html parser) but largely unusable bits of applications.
How are valuations determined?
...especially when there is no previous outside investment?

when a company is being acquired more for its technology than its user-base?
to clarify: valuation for acquisition, not for funding
I always log in, check my mail, and log out...
Top 7 Niche Social News Communities
"shooting oneself in the stack"
So Long Apple. The Party's Over
Joe Armstrong - On Erlang, OO, Concurrency, Shared State and the Future (Channel 9 interview)
(a) Was my road. I needed an intelligent way to deal with all my work flows for my architecture firm and found nothing available, so I teamed with a SW architect partner and we're finishing it up now.
Is this publicly available? I've been working on a (very) side project that's somewhat similar and for the same reasons.
"But I think they're inherently slower for things like reporting."

I wouldn't say the deficiency is _inherent_, but the powerful indexing ability of a relational DB that we take for granted seems to be necessarily _ad hoc_ in an object-oriented DB. From my understanding, the index in an OODB is just another object in the database, which may be a B-tree, a hash table, or a simple sequential list. So far, that's fairly similar to the RDB. However, the indices in the RDB are closely coupled to the table that stores the records. The RDB "knows" that it should update the index when the table is modified. On the other hand, there isn't a table of records in the OODB, so there isn't a close coupling of the index to the data store. It may be entirely up to the application to manage the integrity of the index.
How to evolve a watch
This is how the "Serene" phone looks - http://www.bang-olufsen.com/page.asp?id=54&bhcp=1

Some other pics -
http://www.infosyncworld.com/phones/bang_&_olufsen_seren...
If It Is Not Simple, It Is Wrong
People Are Human-Bacteria Hybrid
Woz raps on Apple for lower ideals, locked iPhone, less innovative UI
You're awesome. I indeed missed it at the top bar or as autodetectable.
Agreed. I don't think they "get it".
Try Turbocash (www.turbocash.net). It is open source and done in Delphi 7 but quite stable. I am doing one in python and wxpython but I am not done yet.
I don't get it... Steve raises Apple from the dead, creates a whole new genre of movies (3D animation) and continues to innovate. Woz quit while he was ahead, shouts from the sidelines, and everyone listens to him?

I don't see HIM building anything.
Microsoft Didn't Buy Facebook
This is really evil. Apple needs to realize that people use the Java JDK for purposes other than writing enterprise Java applications. Some run Python code above the JVM (Jython), for example. I use it to compile Java syntax to native javascript using GWT.

Bad move Apple.
Trying (successfully) to decrease mortality goes back to the 18th century.
And the conclusion is, God was a hacker?
While it's true that Woz isn't doing much of anything right now, he's at least voicing opinions that are widely held and he represents "the old Apple" (that is, whatever Apple should become).
People listen to Woz because he's smart.
Welcome to some time last week right after everyone read the news articles that made this distinction clear.
Low Buzz May Give Mice Better Bones and Less Fat
Reminds me of the adage "wise men never claim to be wise" (paraphrasing)...
Isn't anyone old enough to recognise the csh prompt?
Pricing software like low-cost air travel
He does radio ads[0] and tv ads on shows like "The Bachelor"[1]

[0] http://onlinepersonalswatch.typepad.com/news/2006/01/plentyo...
[1] See comment from Reddiance http://plentyoffish.wordpress.com/2006/12/29/yahoo-to-surge-...
(d) smoked some good weed
This article would have been so much more interesting if it had said, "Not only did Leopard not ship with Java 6, but Apple, in typical fashion, apparently thinks it has no obligation to its customers to inform them it replaced Java with Haskell" :)
http://ourdoings.com/
I never really understood why it was Apple's responsibility to write the JDK for OS X, and not Sun's...
S '07 YC startup launches: Disqus Joins The Battle For Your Blog's Comments
Excellent point. I hear a lot of talk about running Rails on the JVM as well.

Rails developers also seem to love apple (and I have a mac laptop for my personal use as well). But when I was first getting into rails, it actually took me longer to get up and running on the Mac, (at the time, OS X shipped with a broken Ruby,though this wasn't a huge factor in my difficulties). Not sure if this is still the case, but I only managed to get it all installed because the rails community is mac-centric enough that there were independent posts on how to deal with the quirks of mac installation.

When Mac went to OS X, a lot of developers came thundering back to Apple. And I'd still much rather remain in a Unix world than deal with windows. But I sincerely hope that Apple values the developer commmunity that they've attracted enough to keep it around.
Interesting... IntenseDebate also launched today.

TechStars and YC are neck and neck in this space.

To the Disqus guys:

1. On your home page, the logo should be clickable.

2. The logo should always take me back to the home page... sometimes it dumps me in the Disqus forum.

3. The paging links say "Next Next", instead of just "Next"

4. It's probably just me, but the background puts me off a little.
what email can I reach you at? I had a feature idea that I may never get around to implementing but would still love to see done and done well even if it's by someone else.
People Who Like Meebo Don't Recognize This Girl (lesson on platforms)
I guess the keyword is "listen to" and not "agree with" or "follow". While most smart people are worth listening to, most may not be worth following (either because they're evil or narrowly focused or some other reason).
Interesting. The site is designed for 1024x768, it should should not require horizontal scrolling. Is your browser window full-screen, or do you browse in a smaller window?
brlewis at the aforementioned domain
Facebook SocialAds ad network confirmed
unprecedented arrogance of Steve Jobs and company

Unprecedented?
If you use Python, then I recommend Schevo.org better than ZODB to me :)
thats pretty cool. Well done guys.
And why would you choose the slower one for development then?
Aaron Swartz launches Job Book, an encyclopedia of jobs
so, how ashamed should I be that I just checked for some haskell on my fresh leopard install?
Cookie tracking: How Facebook could be worth $100 billion?
Apple Sells Two Million Copies of Mac OS X Leopard in First Weekend
Lots of ways. If it's just technology, things like having (blocking) patents will prove value. Does the technology work, or is it in a prototype form? How much money would it take to turn it into a product (through either more development or integration). How big is the market the technology competes in? How established is the market? How much of it can this technology theoretically grab, and how long would it take to do so?

Can it (should it) be licensed? Does it make other technologies more, or less, valuable/usable/sticky?

Basically it will probably come down to figuring out if it's faster or easier to build or buy the technology you own. Blocking patents make your tech more valuable, as does a rapidly maturing market.

It's definitely not something like every line of code is worth $1. Or if you put $xM into development then it is worth some direct multiple, or fraction, of $xM
God, his writing style is beyond grating.
It's definitely very cool, and useful. Something I can't live without? Certainly not. Still, I think the idea was well-implemented and wonderfully executed.
I'm just pointing out that being a critic is easy compared to being a builder.
I'm surprised the article doesn't mention the backlash that would ensue. Privacy groups would just love this. As we saw with GMail, people hate their personal information used for targeted advertising. Weather or not it would be rational is irrelevant.

In fact, I think targeted advertising can be win-win if it is done right. GMail does it right, and Facebook is getting better.

And a $100 billion valuation? I don't claim to know much about valuations, but this can't be serious.
This is cute, but it would be even cuter if the JDK worked on Leopard. Little snipes at Windows -- which has gotten more stable with time -- only draw attention to the fact that Apple's house is not in order.
Woz is always so critical, at least in part, because it helps consumers trust the company. Having the second co-founder "on the side of the consumer" helps to build that bond between the tech-savvy apple fanboys, and the company itself. I don't mean to say that what he says isn't sincere, but rather, that highlighting these things and making them public does wonders for the company...and yes, he still cares for the well-being of Apple.
It's not meant to be 'easy reading' - its like a new-age fuckedcompany.com that is gaining more traction in the bay area. His blog (as he freely admits) is just drawing attention to him and the start-up he is working on. Any PR is good PR, right?
This is basically what DoubleClick was doing when all of the cookie backlash happened the first time. Maybe Facebook's good image'll help them past the PR nightmare.
Human Computation (Google Tech Talk)
The Story behind the founding of Cyworld - one of the pioneer virtual world social networks
Someone posted this earlier in a thread, and I thought it was fantastic from a cognitive meets algorithm standpoint. There are lots of hidden gems. And thanks to whoever posted the link!
We pushed a fix that includes cleaning up the footer thanks for the feedback.

I can see the linkjack/adsense page look and feel, any thoughts on what gives it that vibe? Is it just that we have a collection of plain text links at the bottom of the page? Would adding some more content or more text describing the site help give it a more valid look?
Yeeeeeeeahhhhh. DISQUS!!! Go 1203...
Ahh, I haven't heard the phrase "Lobby 7" for a long time . . . thinking of coming up from DC just for the nostalgia. :D
Ah, how did I miss that:) It's the last UI book I bought.
So, after waking up this morning, I realized that it would be more than a bit awkward (and probably very stressful for some) to meet this weekend, with interviews / decisions and all happening.

So we're NOT going to meet this weekend, and instead let's push it out so everyone has more notice - to December 1st.

Maybe people in other cities want to have meetups for the same weekend?
Escape velocity is a powerful idea. Live long enough to live forever.

If you were born in 1945, living to 2027 is very likely. In 20 years, do you really think life expectancy will be stuck at 82? My dad was born in 1946 and most of his elders lived beyond 86. My reasonable assumption is that he will live to 100. My optimistic assumption is that 40 years from now, he will have access to much better technology, and will live well beyond 100.

One big reason to have confidence in this is that there are trillions of dollars backing the boomers' goals. As they age, people will take the "cure aging" movement more seriously.
POSTPONED to DEC 1: (unofficial) YC Meetup: Boston, Sunday, Nov 4, 2007
(original post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74070)

So, after waking up this morning, I realized that it would be more than a bit awkward (and probably very stressful for some) to meet this weekend, with interviews / decisions and all happening.

So we're NOT going to meet this weekend, and instead let's push it out so everyone has more notice - to December 1st.

Maybe people in other cities want to have meetups for the same weekend?
Chinks in Leopard's Armor:  A second look at the Mac OS X Leopard firewall
I don't think Facebook has had a good image recently, e.g. over valuation has made them a mockery; privacy concerns relating to the disclosure of personnel information to third parties; the fact that they don't actually delete your profile when you leave and Facebook personnel willfully looking at peoples profiles for entertainment. I feel a backlash coming on already.

Also, most of my profile is made up anyway. I have put cereals as one of my interests; I can't wait to receive 'contextual' cereal ads!
Methinks as the organizer you should keep your word and still show up; whoever finds it awkward would simply not go.
According to Jakob Nielsen at http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031110.html (see #10), the home-page logo should not be clickable.

Even though the advice is 4 years old, I don't see a reason to violate it.

*Edited for better formatting.
Well, for better or worse, I'm going with the enterprise job. Thanks a lot for the advice, I took it all into consideration.
Could Frind flip for $1 Billion?
Interesting... some of the goals of this sound similar, and complementary, to Path101 (http://blog.path101.com).
Hmm interesting. I'm just used to it I suppose. Sometimes instead of refreshing to see if something has changed, I just click the logo by habit.

But, I concede the point.
He's the angriest startup commentator you've ever heard.
He's the Angry TechCrunch Nerd.
He's the Angry Zooomr, Meebo Nerd.
He's the Angry... Web 2.0... Neeeeerrrrrrrrrd.
Nowadays, the average Apple consumer doesn't even know who Steve Wozniac is.
Everything past page 1 appears to be 404.
I've been talking to him and reading his blog since earlier this year and I still don't know what his startup is.
i can think of a few websites that could realistically be acquired for $1M-20M in today's environment. it's a crazy time.
1. I didn't know the Jacob Nielson point, but I'll side with that. ;)

2. It does. The logo you are clicking is on our forum and is our forum header. This naturally takes you back to the forum index.

3. Oops, caching problem.

4. The background color?
Yep, the background color. It's a little dull, but that's just my personal preference. So I don't know what other feedback you've gotten, but take what I say with a grain of salt.

EDIT:

Also on pages like this one: http://disqus.com/people/danielha the text of the comment and the box on the right (points, replies) overlap sometimes. Minor quirk, but work getting fixed.

And you might want to make the green arrow (on hover) a bit more noticeable... kinda like the red arrow for voting down.

Sorry for all the cosmetic feedback, but I haven't gotten around to creating an account to give technical feedback/bugs.
This image recognition game has been out there for a while. There have been other efforts. And yet image search still sucks. Why?
"My methods reduced the problem from 400 million years to a few hundred years..."
Last time I saw it, intensedebate seemed to be very well executed, but disqus is a way better name. Way, way better.
As much as I am a Nielsen fanboy, I wouldn't hesitate violating that rule of his.
Note that the Black-Scholes model won the Nobel (Memorial) Prize in Economics -- and was developed six years after Thorp started trading with it.
Why? What purpose does it serve to have a logo on a home page be a link back to the home page?

The only reason I can think of is consistency across the rest of the site.
infogami ... reddit ... openlibrary ... jottit ... jobbook ... This guy's on fire!
Macs make good development machines if your production machines are also UNIX based. Even if my code is truly platform-independent, I still find it easier when I don't have to mentally switch back and forth between windows and unix. Of course, I also find Unix to be a much more powerful environment. That said, I also haven't found speed to be a problem on my mac (it is slower than the windows laptop that my work gave me, but it's also an older machine).

Of course, this only addresses Mac vs Windows - the argument becomes less compelling if you're comparing it to linux. I'm not sophisticated enough with Unix to appreciate the differences between linux and bsd, but I do like the Mac UI, and unlike windows, I get a unix prompt, which is pretty tremendous.
Java is a crappy language. It doesn't bother me one way or the other if it's broken in Leopard. I don't want your nasty Java GUI apps defiling my Mac desktop anyway.

Good riddance!
The problem with job/salary surveys is that the people who respond tend to skew towards the more satisfied and higher paid range. That's why when I was in undergrad, all the jobs seemed so darn great - the companies sent the happiest, chirpiest employees they could find.

On a separate note, does jobbook.org look a bit under developed for a publicized app that "took several months"? Maybe there's magic behind that simple UI.
So when does "peak SQL" kick in?
And how about calling it the Cambridge meetup?
I think they're referring to the JVM, not the language.