skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Wait - first you say that there's no basis for AI because of the historical leadup to today ... then you state in this post that people (stock speculators) who act based on systems based on past variables don't think clearly because they fail to take into accounts new development (regime change) which loosen the deterministic grip the past has on the future. So which is it - there is no AI soon because nothing in recent history indicates that there will be, or ... just because recent history fails to indicate that there might be a basis for it, doesn't mean that it's not just around the corner? A bit contradictory??
Well, you'd be surprised at all the features they're constantly sneaking into iTunes for example that is sort of making it like a new operating system. Which works best with their own products (iPod). See the pattern? We get people to get our stuff, then we make sure our stuff works best with our stuff and slightly less so with the competition's stuff ...
Ray Kurzweil is nothing compared to Jaron Lanier. http://www.jaronlanier.com/

His webpage doesn't look very um, futuristic.

Also he calls Wikipedia "the Wikipedia", which coming from him sounds a lot like President Bush calling Google "the Google". http://edge.org/3rd_culture/lanier06/lanier06_index.html
Because the C?I?A? and N?S?A used to use pre-OSX mac computers extensively at the time that M-Soft got sued by the DOJ because there were a lot less OS8 / 9 hackers than their were window hackers. Then by some funny coincidence, OSX gets based on UNIX so now any government hacker anywhere can hack into your Mac with the greatest of ease. Why would you want to rock that boat if you were the government? You wouldn't. You'd say, "As long as you keep making it easier for us to spy on people, you can bundle anything you'd like."
Business Plan Templates/Advice
I have been working on a website that I believe has a very strong potential to take off and be very successful.

I feel it is time to write a business plan, whether I choose to search for VC funding or continue to seed this venture.

Unfortunately, I have absolutely 0-experience in writing a document of this nature. Are there any templates, guides, or how-to sites available that can assist me in getting a basic business plan completed?

What advice do you have for a venture that could virtually 100% seed funded? I have the programming and design aspects taken care of, it's the hardware and scalability, if this does gain popularity upon launch, that I am worried about (I simply don't have the funds to cover anything beyond shared hosting).
Like you know, everybody's forum is so interesting that nobody reads anything else because there are too many interesting forum titles and you don't know where to begin.
A little background:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil

"Kurzweil was the principal developer of the first omni-font optical character recognition system, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first electronic musical instrument capable of recreating the sound of a grand piano and other orchestral instruments (which he developed at the urging of Stevie Wonder, who was amazed by his OCR reading machine), and the first commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition system. He has founded nine businesses in the fields of OCR, music synthesis, speech recognition, reading technology, virtual reality, financial investment, medical simulation, and cybernetic art.

The inventor attributes his success in marketing technology products to being able to predict the arrival date of competitively priced components and match it to rollout of his designs, for example, the hand-held book reader built into a digital camera.[1]

Kurzweil was inducted in 2002 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, established by the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He received the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize, the United States' largest award in invention and innovation, and the 1999 National Medal of Technology, the nation's highest honor in technology.

He has also received scores of other awards, including the 1994 Dickson Prize (Carnegie Mellon University's top science prize), Engineer of the Year from Design News, Inventor of the Year from MIT in 1998, the Association of American Publishers' award for the Most Outstanding Computer Science Book of 1990, and the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery and he received the Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology in 2000. He has received thirteen honorary doctorates, a 14th scheduled in 2007, and honors from three U.S. presidents. He has been described as "the restless genius" by the Wall Street Journal, and "the ultimate thinking machine" by Forbes. Inc. magazine ranked him #8 among entrepreneurs in the United States, calling him the "rightful heir to Thomas Edison," and PBS included Ray as one of sixteen "revolutionaries who made America", along with other inventors of the past two centuries.[3]"
Wow. It's also charming to see someone who still uses <HR> elements (non-ironically).
> I was not inspired enough to make it to the ten-minute mark.

That's too bad. I personally found the second half quite interesting.

> even more precious to hear him refer to the telephone as the first virtual reality technology. What the hell is that supposed to mean?!

Being able to have a conversation with someone miles away. That is revolutionary. They are "virtually" there.
Yeah, I read that too -- I was looking up when he was born. I was figuring 2029 was also going to be "before I die" to him. He certainly looks like he'll make it to 81, but you can't expect a whole lot more, even with ten cups of green tea a day, so it seems like a personal goal to him. You can do it, Ray!

By the way, the first paragraph of that bio should be credited as being identical to the one on Ray Kurzweil's own site, which is considerably less plain than Jaron Lanier's (not that it means anything, in my opinion...):

http://www.kurzweiltech.com/
> Being able to have a conversation with someone miles away. That is revolutionary. They are "virtually" there.

Well, why not the daguerrotype? But my real question is, what value is there in making that distinction?
Nothing wrong with a benevolent cult.
It probably doesn't have an official name for itself in English. "Kolsky" means "of Kola" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Peninsula), and there are several ways of transliterating it into English. "Research Institute", too, could be one of several things, and each could have a different English translation. It would take a while to try all possible combinations in Google and see if something comes up, but that nothing comes up for "Kolsky Research Institute" means nothing.
> Well, why not the daguerrotype?

It doesn't update in real time.

To go back to your Starcraft example, that is why Starcraft is a game, and the screenshots on the box are not.

> what value is there in making that distinction?

To most people it's a novel way of thinking about it.
Seeking a cofounder for a digital entertainment website.
Hey I'm looking for a technical cofounder for a karaoke based site who knows actionscript and either rails/python/php that preferably lives around Pickering in the Greater Toronto Area.
If your interested please leave me your email or contact me at justinseeney@hotmail.com.
Rule of thumb: The smarter the person, the plainer the homepage.
David Rusenko said in a blog post that if you're scaling too fast to afford your hosting fees, ping him, and he'll hook you up (with investors).

In other words, don't worry about paying the bandwidth bill. Just turn the site on and see what happens. Shared hosting can also get you surprisingly far, MediaTemple offers 1 TB of transfer for $17/month. They kind of suck other than the massive amount of bandwidth offered. And it'll be much more expensive if you need a VPS for lower level functions.

Before you write the business plan, I'd fill out a Y Combinator application, whether you plan on applying or not. It asks really good questions, some of which you may have not already asked yourself. From there, if you want to write a business plan, go for it.

A business plan take whatever format you want to. There are certain things that will always need to be there, but the order varies a whole lot. You can find a bunch of different templates if you just google for business plan template, pick one you like. Don't write the whole thing at once, start with a two page executive summary and then slowly expand it.

Also, I have some decent business plan resources, including PaloAlto's business plan software and some .pdfs. Email me and I'd be happy to share.
Can you persuade potential investors that you have a concrete advantage over competitors? Something that they can't (or won't) copy easily?
As for the size of the market, IMHO there's no such thing as "large enough for all of the competitors to co-exist" on the internet. That works maybe when you can carve yourself a geographic niche (e.g. grocery stores, banks, and there's consolidation going on lately in both markets). When online markets mature, only a handful of competitors survive (e.g. search).
You may want to try and redefine your market - as a subset of the large market you see now. Try to show how there are customers whose needs were overlooked by all other competitors, but you're going to serve their needs and thus come to dominate this niche.
IMHO this is not one of his better talks. Much better just to read the book. It's 500 pages but it's a very fast read. Lots of pretty graphs also.
Steve Yegge? Damn, now I feel guilty for being about to restart my laptop.
Some criticism of Kurzweil's book, The Singularity Is Near: [http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/tmodis/Kurzweil.htm]
They're big pages though! I could only get through the first 200. Does he say anything particularly important in the last 300 pages?
We need an alternative source of energy before we have flying cars. It'll never work with fossil fuels. Maybe if the ultra-capacitor batteries turn out to be real we can do it. I also think they'd need to fly themselves to really catch on.
So does anyone know enough Russian to try to see if there is a paper published in Russian?
Thanks for that. I'm really interested in where the fundamental limits are. Already on the machine I'm writing this on (65nm core 2 duo), the transistors are on the order of 100 atoms long, so clearly the limits of 2D transistor density are already closing in rapidly. From there, there's frequency, efficient design (i.e. actual computing power per transistor - multicore design, stream processors etc) and 3D, so there's a lot more to improve.
In fairness, they're nowhere near 50% success yet. Only a few startups have actually "succeeded" by PG's definition (i.e. gotten rich). That's largely because most of their fundees haven't had time to get there yet.

They do have enough horses still in the race and running strong that I wouldn't bet against them, but their success rate right now is a something around 5% right?
This is actually hilarious. I could go through and point out how many of these things are wrong due to outsider perspective, but I wouldn't want to degrade the humor quality of the post.
Thanks for the tips. It's actually more difficult to advertise than I thought, because "kratom" is a banned keyword on Google. I can't advertise on other appropriate keywords like "pain" and I can't use kratom in the ad. So most of the people selling kratom on Google adwords only mention that they sell Kava, which is another worthwhile legal drug that is fortunate enough to have registered supplement status in the USA.

I gotta try and get kratom approved as a supplement by the FDA, the process doesn't look too bad. But if they want to inspect a facility, I'm screwed.

Adbrite won't let me advertise either, even if I claim to be selling incense. I gotta try and get the $5 back from them, because they haven't run a single ad for me. I haven't try Overture yet, I'll give them a try.

So far I've had the best success with Amazon/Clickriver. The minimum CPC is $.10 which kind of sucks, but they let me make really obnoxious advertisements about kratom. They also give you as many impressions as you want. I'm up to 50,000 impressions with a .03% click through rate; it's great that they don't cut or overcharge for low click through ads.
If you advertise on individual web sites the web site owner approves or disapproved your ads, you might try that. Adbrite then click on Directory.

Also, Adbrite is kind of slow. If they have not approved your ad in one day, that is not unusual. It can take two days often.
Paul: I think the problem is that you're measuring something slightly different from what everyone else wants to measure, and thus the claim in your first paragraph winds up being too strong.

One way attending an elite college helps is that it makes it easier to learn--both in that the resources are more obviously available, and in that the institution is pushing you to do work. You can graduate from Northwester Louisiana University going out drinking six nights a week and never really doing the work; you can't pull that off at Harvard. But if you're driven enough, 'easier' doesn't matter all that much; if you're determined enough, you can learn to the limits of your own abilities at Harvard or at NLU. Or, hell, you could pull a Ramanujan and teach yourself entirely out of books.

The problem is that most people aren't that driven; most people will get a lot more out of the college where it's easier to learn (I know I've needed the push more than once to keep going aggressively). But those people aren't the ones you're looking for at Y Combinator. If you need that kind of push, you're not going to succeed at a startup, because a startup requires drive and determination more than almost anything else. So your evidence says something like, "in the set of people to whom the institution matters the least, the institution doesn't matter very much." Which is probably true, but doesn't say much about the people who are going to settle down into a nice comfortable job when they graduate (doctor, lawyer, middle management), and aren't driven enough to go for broke the way you did.

Also, institution matters much more when you're doing something where letters of recommendation make a huge difference (say, applying to grad schools, like I am). When my profs write a grad school and say I'm in the top 25% of the math majors here, or whatever they wind up saying, that tells programs something; they've accepted students from my college before, and they can compare me to those other students to get an idea of how good I am. Sometimes this is explicit; I think one of my profs has written a rec letter along the lines of, "this student is about as good as student X whom you accepted three years ago." This gives them very precise data about whether they want me. But if I were going to a weaker institution, they wouldn't be able to get that sort of gauge of my ability; this makes me a riskier pick, and so I'm less likely to be accepted. But once again, this shouldn't factor much into your particular dataset.
Oh, thanks. I was getting disapproved for the network wide ads. I just bought a $.30 ad for a "Pimps and Hos" game, hopefully the owner approves it.
This is just an outdated understanding of C++, unless you really need to target a VAX or something. I don't intend my programs to run on machines more than 10 years old anyway. A decade ago, the non-portability of C++ was a real concern.
Time will tell. Meantime, all you can do is to watch the concrete numbers. Note that the line between destructive cults and other groups are not only blurry, but some cults may morph into a normal group over time, or vice versa.

If you really suspect a certain group is a cult and want to do something about it in a short span, watch a concrete prediction the group makes (somehow lots of cult leaders often makes them, e.g. the world will end by year 20XX). Then compare the outcome. Don't be destructed by what the member of the groups says, or how the group is organized and managed. Look for the objective evidence.
Does anyone actually do it? Aside from doing it just because you can.
Drunk driving cases turn on source code
The U.S. House of Representatives passes a patent overhaul bill
check out simsonstage.com, formerly singshot.com.
Not much news since Thursday but this status update just in: http://news.aol.com/story/_a/few-signs-of-hope-as-search-for...
Namecheap.com! Excellent domain management panel and great customer service. I've always received email replies within a few hours.

Btw, you can use the coupon code "LABORDAY" at Namecheap to receive a $1 discount ( ref: http://www.hostingdiary.com/2006/08/namecheap_disco.html ).
It's an interesting idea. I've seen a few startups have their teams replaced in an attempt to save the company and I haven't seen it succeed once. Anyone seen this work? What happened to kiko after sale?

Theres certainly some interesting YC companies that have gone missing that I would love to see revived. Jump Chat for example.

Does YC accept companies doing the same idea as a previous YC company?
Who do you think will be providing the blanket coverage Wimax and IP?

I see the value in Wimax as a technology, I just cant buy into this vision of uninterrupted IP access everywhere you roam. Its just Wifi on steroids.
Didn't you all see the price drop coming? Maybe a $200 drop was a little unexpected, but I fully thought apple would come out with a new, better, and shinier iPhone months after the initial release when they announced it. Marketing-wise, its hard to claim that the price drop is a bad business move since they are still beating projections.
I'm hoping it's real. And being real, I hope it can be cheaply obtained and stays that way.
Maybe soon we'll be able to use nuclear power as much as we want. Once we start recycling leftover radioactive wastes, fission becomes sustainable enough.
I thought this was an exceptional talk. It is absolutely packed with data, and presents an exciting biological perspective on the exponential nature of the growth of human technology. If you like good research then you will probably like this. The message is basically that any technology can and most likely will get eaten by something better that comes along, and with exponentially increasing probability with time. Got it. The talk then turns into a forecast of technology through 2030 or so. Fairyland, yes. But fun.
What makes you think WiMax will reach wide penetration?
Sprint is the only one investing in Wimax. I think all the other major architecture builders aren't bothering because it changes their current business model. I think it's more likely that a bubble of Wi-Fi appears across most urban areas.

Maybe Google will use the old TV frequencies to launch a new nationwide wireless IP network. It seems like a really good use of their market cap to take control of the old TV frequencies.

Also, devices will need better battery lives or a clever hack if you want to be able to listen to anywhere.fm wirelessly for 24 hours.
See, if you'd just left it at the original post, without trying to defend it, it would have been funny. Now you just look sad.

Never mind. Being turned down isn't the end of the world; there's no reason you can't start up without YC funding.
Right now blogs.xobni.com is giving me the output from phpinfo()...
i am beggining to like Joost. next year this thing will be really hot
"It could replace secretaries."

Most of us don't have secretaries to replace. I worked in a place where I used to get 700 emails a day. Still no secretary.
The problem is that modern GUIs have sets of tabs and a taskbar or dock or window menu instead of a better global task manager.
This is so dumb. It wouldn't work to have a cult of startup founders. Cult members tend to be passive people who need someone to tell them what to do. But if you funded startups started by people like that, they'd all go off and immediately fail.
Another step towards that artificial life thing
No one has ever been turned down for this. We ask it mainly to see how well you understand your market.
> But some campaigners worry about the new technology's unsettling potential and argue there should be a moratorium on the research until the ethical and technological implications have been discussed more widely

Are we going to have to listen to these people complain until they all die off?

> In an interview with Newsweek magazine earlier this year, Dr Venter claimed that a fuel-producing microbe could become the first billion- or trillion-dollar organism. The institute has already patented a set of genes for creating such a stripped-down creature.

Energy technology this big does not deserve to belong to a corporation. Free energy should belong to the people. We need to rewrite market economics for breakthroughs like this.
Good start. Unfortunately, it is still possible to get patents in biotech for things that are neither unique nor novel.
French startup: MyBooo (webOS)
The letter that destroyed a nation
invite code please?

From the screenshots, it looks like they have done some decent things towards making a better interface. They still have windows though, and I think floating windows are best done away with for general use.
Learn Haskell: Lesson 1: Hello, World!
How many cores do we need before we start really showing the limits of parallelization? Is anyone educated enough to make a ballpark guess for when the diminishing returns will stop rapid progress in parallelization?

We can't know because we can't prove P=NC or P!=NC.
MDesigns MCube: gorgeous, flexible, solar-powered, and stunningly affordable
Any chance you could expand on this a little?
Biotech is going to be very big soon. Remember, in five years you'll be able to store your genome on your personal data network.
That's great. I'd like to see one made livable on $100/square feet though.
I think the author has firmly placed his tongue in his cheek.
Best Places to do Business in the Wired World
cheers guys
He's just having fun trolling (saying something he doesn't necessarily believe to get a rise out of people).

The best way to get him to stop is to ask him to stop trolling.
Sorry I don't have any invite code to share. Try contact the founder using this email address ca@lynxoft.com

I heard about MyBooo from the BillautShow.
[url]http://billaut.typepad.com/jm/2007/09/connaissez-vo-3.html[/url]

This is a video podcast in French (sorry) from the Billaut show where the founder is pitching his product. It is very impressive since it has many commonly used applications.

The BillautShow is something I haven't seen in the US but that would be worth doing there too to allow people to pitch their stuff. It is thus like techcrunch but with video podcasts. Mr Billaut is retired and spend his time doing such interview when he is not traveling around the globe to visit and report on other countries hiTech developments.
The videos are thus not made by a professional and not meant to be an advertisement or so. It is more like a personal interview of the founder.

Note that the founder doesn't consider his stuff to be a webOs. But this is how such type of application is called and the reason why I used this term so that people can immediately make the link.

Another interesting info I got from the interview is that this startup had no funding; it is thus bootstrapped. This is the most impressive, knowing the amount of effort required to produce such a complete system.
Thanks for the info.

I understand that WebOS is a misnomer for this type of product but it's the accepted phrase and in the end it doesn't make a whole lot of difference what we call these web service computing environments.

The video demo podcast Billaut does is a great idea, someone should start doing that for US focused companies.
I've read a few of your emotional crackpot rants and they all say a lot more about you than YC or this site. You got some issues, Stan.