skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I knew a lawyer once who had a newsletter on gaming laws and casino's would subscribe at a cost of several hundred dollars a month. If you could hook up with these specialized newsletters that have high value and you can give the current newsletter a better presentation (remember the people writing these are not Quark express addicts) I think you could have a good business.

Also another idea is with meetup.com, they have a number of social groups who might be interested in a quarterly magazine that would be great for keeping memories in this digital world where pictures loose there context when stored in a directory, the only thing you have to keep the context is the directory name... and storage medias have a tendancy to fail or in case of media cards get lost.
What Interests Programmers
I needed a break from writing this web.py article so I was wondering what would attract programmers to converse about a blog post. Anyone have any more suggestions?
I'm sorry to say, but it really seems like many people here are talking right out of their ass.

For people who actually lived in India for an extended period of time:

1. what is the driving force behind this market? is it purely aesthetics, like tanning creams, or does race play into it?

2. how large is the phenomenon? is it something common that many people think about or just a fringe market?

3. how is it viewed by the locals? are people who do this kind of thing ashamed to admit it?
I really liked Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom but wasn't a fan of this book.
I was just thinking about this today. I was reflecting on how I'm giving up > $100K/yr. for a small but reasonable chance of making > $2m in ~2 years.

I agree that the opportunity cost is higher for older founders, but (as others have observed) so is the probability of success, at least vs. non-YC younger founders. It's also true that, if you are willing to live like a grad student, you can mitigate your risk by doing consulting/contract work beforehand or on the side. So could a 23-year-old, of course, but for a variety of reasons they usually don't bill at nearly as high a rate. I don't have to work very long at $100-125/hr. before I've got a year's living expenses saved up.

The real catch is if you have a family to support. I'm (un)lucky enough not to have that problem.
I think this is somewhat in line with how it seems Noble-prize winning research happens when the winner is a grad student...
>In much of Africa and Asia, whiter skin is attractive because white >foreigners have all the wealth and power.

This is not true, at least not the way you think. Attraction to (bias for) fair skin is a very very old tradition in India. If you look at Ramayana - one of the two Hindu religious epics which is at least thousands of years old, Sita, the main female character is described as fair many many times.

It has been argued that the fascination with fair skin came about because of the Indo-Aryan migration (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Aryan_migration) though some people have argued that Aryans were indigenous to India as far back as the Harappan civilization. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_Aryans)

That many of the ruler classes (The Chitpavan Brahmins in Maharashtra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitpavan and the Moghul Nawabs) had fair skin may also have contributed.
Are you recommending this book today (opposed to when it came out) for any particular reason?

I prefer Charles Stross for a bit of a mind-bend. Accelerando is available for download here: http://www.accelerando.org/
I could see that being the case, especially after VC funding. I guess I would just personally have a problem with that, knowing I was increasing the burn rate of the company I'm trying to build. That money could be used to hire another good hacker.

But I'm not speaking from experience either.
This is a "I loved Country before Country was popular" feeling. Industries get a new buzzword every few years and if you don't adopt the buzzword you look out of date. I didn't really want to adopt "Web 2.0" for my product but I had to if I wanted to get free advertising on blogs. I don't care about "Web 2.0" other then it's marketing potencial.

I take whatever best ideas there are from a trend and implement them, but it is just part of a focus on incremental improvement (because there is no such thing as "done".)
This machine kills fascists (pic)
Slightly OT I know =)
This is not exactly racism. It is a different kind of bias based on the same physical feature but you will see it between members of the same family. So for e.g. if there are two sisters in a family and one has darker skin, she is very often subject to discrimination. So also with brothers though to a lesser degree (so this is not entirely gender based).

In short this is bias, and it is horrible, but it is not racism. Interestingly this bias does automatically RESULT in racism, so you would typically see people of African origins depicted as goons in older Hindi movies. This has changed slowly. I am quite sure the rising popularity of rap and Hollywood has contributed to this change.
1) It is pure aesthetics, but the bias against darker skin, while not based on race, is deep rooted and does result in people with darker skin being discriminated against. It is not to the degree of dark skinned people not being allowed in X places, but it is bad enough that a groom would very often choose a fairer bride to a darker one.

2) It is very wide spread.

3) Not really. It has been around for thousands of years and has very little to do with recently developed fascination for or admiration for Europeans. Conceivably it could have it's roots in the "Aryan invasion" theory or a another time thousands of years ago when the ruling class had fair skin, but you will see references to "fair princesses" in mythological Hindu texts thousands of years ago. It is important to note though that there are references to "dark skinned beautiful women" also in some of these texts. So the bias could have been regional inside India. I don't know of anyone who has studied this extensively.
PG should skip the co-founder requirement on you if you can pull off the DEMO on that one.
This is not the same. It does not come out of a fascination with westerners and is a much older bias. See my other comments for an more detailed explanation.
>If you can be a doctor that does abortion, would you still execute? >(Conversely, if you're a doctor that doesn't do abortions, would you still execute?)

I am quite sure all doctors are barred from executing anyone based just on "do no harm" if not the law of the land :P
"... I don't think web developers have to think about disk I/O unless they're Google or Yahoo. ..."

I'm not sure about this.

For "any" interactive Webapp, speed is important. If you have repeated queries to/from, DB I/O does come into the picture when peak loads occur. So right when you get lots of users, the site will be hit. I've seen this with e-commerce (where user speed == $$$) where sure enough every peak time the server(s) would begin to grind. Remember your max speed will be determined by bandwidth. DB I/O will have some effect to slow response times. Maybe not as much as bandwidth but it is still something you must consider. Not every site is as extreme as e-commerce but the idea is still valid.

"... Every Web usability study I have conducted since 1994 has shown the same thing: users beg us to speed up page downloads ..." ~ http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9703a.html

Why is it important? Well user perception is one.

user: "Gee your application is slow compared to google, a bit slower than amazon"

developer: "But google invests squillions in hardware, network connections . Their applications run in memory. My apps run on fast hardware, I optomise for small pages ...."

user: "... So, it still appears slow"

If a user thinks your site is slow (and if you subscribe to the idea that you are creating web applications as apposed to documents) you need to keep your response times as close as possible to applications that people use every day.

It doesn't help that developers constantly throwing new (unoptomised) techniques to do new things at the same time larger sites are optomising to improve their load times, making comparisons between load times inevitable ~ http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/performance/
I work with a Harvard guy who has ID in the low 300s on Facebook and also had an account on the early ConnectU.

His exact quote: "ConnectU was nothing like Facebook. It was a total joke."

"Spamming" or not, Facebook executed better.

Also even if another team had the Pagerank idea, they still could've royally blew it. You think Yahoo hasn't studied the algorithm and come up with their own version by now? If it was just the idea then Yahoo would have a search engine competitive to Google by now. (it's getting there but still has a long way to go)
and by salary you mean - no family/spouse to support.
Excellent points. Especially on #3 -- so few people I've talked to are open to working on ideas other than their own flushed out ones.

"Co-founding" is more than just splitting the stock pie. It's about coming up with the vision & direction for the company, which can't be done if one person has already done that for himself.
If the market rate for the founder is 300k then it's all the better for the founder. The problem is if the founder's burn rate is also close to 300k / year. Otherwise the founder making 300k per year can hopefully save up a decent amount of money quickly and perhaps bypass the need for angle funding.
Some more details on what I'd like to hear:

- Which party approached the other

- Who throws out the first offer

- How is value determined in the absence of any outside investments

- What are the attorney fees

- Negotiating favorable terms for post-acquisition work at the acquiring company
IPv4 address space heatmap inspired by xkcd
Imho, too many americans have had sour experiences with offshored workers or H1-Bs working here, etc.

It's the language thing. Oh but they have an IQ of 160?

Well that doesn't matter much when communication is hugely important in conveying & understanding high-level ideas (on all sides).

The worst are suits who can't speak either language (tech & broken-english mumble). Offshore guy mumbles, "Oh we'll mmm hhmmm AJAX mmm hmmm Web 2.0 mmm hmmm screen-scrape data layer API. mmmm hmmm Simple." And the suit goes, "Well, Bob, glad we got that one nicked in the bud!"
Re: first offer:

Ask pg.news.yc: How do acquisition prices get settled?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45337
Other reasons why startups fail:

Observations from 10 Months at a Startup:
http://www.tortoiseandachilles.com/2007/09/observations-from...

10 more reasons why web startups fail:
http://www.jroller.com/dscataglini/entry/5_more_reasons_why_...
Have you thought about the IP issues? Printing out other people's content and putting it into a magazine is an obvious case copyright infringement.
I dislike Cory Doctorow's writing style. I like his ideas but his writing is awful. I could never complete any of his books.
"older" isn't the relevant factor, and neither is market value.

First "market value". All other things being equal, someone who has a typical salary of 300k has a lot more opportunity to save for a couple of years of no salary and will find it easier to come back to a decent salary if the startup fails than someone who only makes 20k.

However, all other things are not equal. The relevant factor is overhead. Overhead is associated with age but isn't determined by age. For example, young folks supporting other folks have exactly the same problem as older folks supporting other folks.

Note that overhead is typically the result of choices and comes with benefits. Those with less overhead typically made different choices and don't get the benefits. Also, "young founders" are often delaying overhead.

Note that overhead contributes little/nothing to a startup's odds of success.

BTW - One could argue that the market actually undervalues not-yet-known-to-be-successful 22 year old founders.
Python's footprint is a bit large for embedded systems.
yeah you're right

I forgot about ancient Egypt where it was looked down upon if a woman was dark (it looked as if she worked the fields during the day). It was alright for men though (since they have to command slaves/troops day or night)
Thank you for your response.

One more question, is there a movement in India to counter this trend? kind of like the civil-rights movement in the US 50 years ago?

Also, a related question, how prevalent is the caste system? are people discriminated against based on their caste? I hear it's not a significant factor anymore, but what's your experience been?
What do you think of my startup idea?
I studied a lot of sociology in college and noticed a way that one could organize communities around their shared preferences of content so that people could discover new content with what should be a much higher degree of relevance then current recommendation systems.

I'm calling it a discovery engine, where the user can enter the name of a specific piece of content they have in mind, or something they are generally interested in, and receive recommendations of new content from like-minded people.

Just like Wikipedia issued a call to all people interested in making an encyclopedia, this would issue a call to all early adopters to be recognized as authorities and trend-setters. Think The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell, but taking place online, efficiently, and transparently.

The project calls for combining social-bookmarking and user-generated media with an algorithm that both aggregates similar collections of content into networks and makes recommendations of content based on the evolving network structure. The ranks of "influence" and "in the know" are measured against networks of users with similar collections of content. These two rankings incentivize users to continually post relevant content because they want to remain "influential" and "in the know" in front of the people that are genuinely interested in the same content. The majority of users coming to Topiat for recommendations receive relevant recommendations fueled by the work of those who are genuinely influential and in the know.

But unlike current recommendation systems, which are domain specific and treat an individual as the sum of all their preferences (e.g. Netflix), the discovery engine would allow users to create networks based on all types of content (any combination of music, products, images, videos, URLs etc.) and enables users to explore different interests they have with the ability to create multiple groups of content on their profile. Each group of content becomes aligned with similar groups of content, from which recommendations are generated and delivered to the user (e.g. my oldies music compared with users with similar tastes in oldies music, my surfing group compared with other users that think of surfer the same way I do).

I'm putting together a Y combinator funding proposal based on this basic idea and am looking for feedback before I send it in. If there are any developers that like the idea and want to know more, let me know. Additionally, if you are good with machine learning techniques (e.g. neural networks) and are interested, let me know.
I tried it and my order failed (after making a normal order just hours before for something else). I guess they use the default 1-click thing, which I didn't have set up properly. I can't fathom why it wouldn't just use the normal checkout process.

I also can't imagine why they make you download an .exe to get full albums. Dumb.
On the other hand, pg's articles have never managed to crash my browser even once.
... Serious Philosopher.

Isn't that the whole problem expressed in two words?

Euclid was arguably "more serious" as a philosopher than a mathematician -- his principal contribution was to build a logical framework around others' results.

I want to start punning now -- who was more serious, Edward Teller or Richard Feynmann? -- but it's not useful. I'll simply note a certain dissonance in calling Diogenes serious, as you seem to.
what's a one or two sentence explanation that would get my little sister to use this? what value would she get within the first 2 minutes (assume early on, before you have a ton of people using it?)

ideas like this are tough because they're only really useful once an incredible amount of content has been submitted. what tricks can you do to make the site be sticky to the first 100 users, when nothing yet is submitted? what are the first concrete things the user sees, or does, when they arrive at the site?

i think that's why these recommendation sites are only successful in niches (e.g. travel (tripadvisor), food/entertainment (yelp), movies (netflix)).
I've got a few ideas, such as front-loading the site with content and preference data by using differnt API's, such as Flickr's API, Youtube's, del.icio.us, Last.fm's. This way when you showup, lots of your preferences and rating "work" comes along with you. Additionally, the preference dataset is jumpstarted.

What you would tell your little sister about the site is "find more things you like, and if you're good at finding new content, be recognized for it."
Here's an example of how I would use something like this:
I want to watch a movie that's similar to Jurassic Park. I can go to the site and type that in. The web application picks apart the constituent pieces of "jurassic park," like "action movie" and "dinosaurs" and "made a lot of money," then looks for other movies that match the criteria based on information from IMDB, Google, and MPAA.

Then, it looks for people who have voted/commented on the movie, and extrapolates a probability of you liking other movies that they have rated highly or poorly. If your rating history is similar to theirs, it rates their other movies with similar pieces higher. If your history is very different, or if they voted Jurassic Park very poorly, then the other items they voted highly are placed low on your recommendations.

I think that's awesome.
What determines "groups of content" (people? algorithms? either way, the value is in figuring out how)

It isn't clear why "domain-specific" recommendation systems don't work within a group.

Note that it isn't obviously true that separating by group actually produces better recommendations. In fact, the (inadequate) evidence that I'm aware of indicates the exact opposite.

BTW - If you don't have the algorithms mentioned, how much do you think that you actually have? (I can imagine lots of wonderful things that would come from a personal transportation device that got 100mpg, but if I don't know how to make one....)
increase font size, observe breakage
Sounds like IRC. Once you find a chan you like and kind of settle in, you realize that the actual convo rarely relates to the title of the chan, but is still of interest to the people who regularly go there.

IRC is pretty popular, I don't see why your idea wouldn't be among the less BitchX-inclined internet crowd. ;-P

You'd have to be brutal with the 'influence' system, though, to keep the trolls out of the 'ponies and barbie dolls' group.

The killer feature, to me, of an idea like this would be something like musicovery.com, where overlapping things lead you down new paths.
Josh Kopelman's bad break - Valleywag
"groups of content" are collections of content that users create themselves (the social bookmarking aspect of the site). Users that want to build a reputation for being in the know and influential are incentivized to make these collections relevant. The groups also become lists users can form to bookmark content they find around the web and want to save it one spot.

Based on what you have put into your collection of content, and collections others have made, the algorithm aggregates those similar people into the same network. People in the same network get content recommended to each other from their like-minded peers that they have not discovered on their own.

With regards to the feasability of such an algorithm, I've talked about it with many mathematicians and machine learning programmers and the wheel does not have to be reinvented for this application. The tools already exist, and just have to be customized and tweaked for this application.
"... I don't see a whole lot of value in it. ..."

I wonder about how creating tech tools like this can add more value? Is this an example of a tool looking for a market? (one hint is 10+ examples of what you can use it for) Or could it, if it solved one specific UI niche problem in a "foo" app become a more useful and potentially more valuable?

"Cool idea. How do I do it?
Are you going to have a DIY
blog/sketch. Are there issues
about someone being artistically
challenged - me?"

One reason I can see why the tool could look lame is it is only worthwhile to creators. If you are not a creator, artist, cartoonist, someone who draws then you can be left with what appears to be a trivial toy.

But if you applied the technology to an application that users "might" want (one that comes to mind is virtual birthday cards - sign the card with others & send it to someone) it becomes a powerful tool and maybe a business ~ http://sketch.basement.org/2007/07/introducing_sketchcasting...
In other words, I make a "group of content" that I call "movies" and it gets compared with other peoples' "group of content" that they called "movies".

Why isn't the netflix recommendation system useful for generating recommendations from "groups of content" labelled "movies"?

If it works for movies, why can't it combine "groups of content" labelled "science fiction"?
Here are two large differences between IRC:

1.) One of the main problems I am trying to solve is in your second sentence: "Once you find a chan you like..." It's time consuming to find new content you like, especially in a setting as nebulous (for most people) as IRC. With the discovery engine, all a user needs to do is rate recommendations based on what they are interested in, and they are immediately connected with groups of like-minded people and what they know. Fast and easy.

2.) In addition to connecting to groups of like-minded people, the user gets recommendations from those who are most influential and most in the know. All content is not equally desirable, and users using the discovery engine will only get recommended that content which has empirically shown is wanted by people that think like them (relevant).
Description is too long, doesn't make sense. However it also sounds like the plan of no fewer than 10 already existing startups with tons of venture money that are already doomed to failure ... Except for Ning.
The point of having groups of content is to combine traditionally dissimilar types of content-- movies, music, housewares, etc...

For example I can make a group of content called "new living room" and add all of the things that go into my new living room. This includes the music and movies that I have stored there, the type of TV I bought, the type of couch, stereo receiver, speakers, or even the paint on the wall. When someone searches for something within that collection, the system knows that someone else, somewhere, has combined that "thing" with the other "things" in the collection, so they get rated higher as being compatible.
It made sense to me. It's a great idea but implementation is going to be incredibly challenging. It's only doomed if the founders don't have the skills to actually implement a better recommendation everything.

I think an uber-short pitch here is "A better recommendation engine for everything" which of course only makes sense if you know what a recommendation engine is.
Why do you think that the netflix system won't do the right thing if we both put some music in our "groups of content" labelled "movies"?