skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, but how many of her clients would still be clients if the tag line was "I push your kids to do extraordinary things". I could be wrong, but I think the target audience wants to trade their money for a college acceptance, regardless of the means.
Campus Fight Club
Are you a Startup or Small Business?
Django's Problems and Why 2.0 is a Bad Idea
One of my favorite parts was at 35:20 when he appeared visibly shaken that Google had produced typewritten data for the experiment he had performed a couple days ago. "Okay, what's this.... [15 second pause] How did this get here?! This was like two nights ago on a piece of paper."

Some of the other parts I liked:

5:45 - [Describes a scheme to create a map showing transit times surrounding an area, which will require about 500,000 page requests from Google Maps] ...and that had been running for a while. And then I went and read the terms of service...

21:15 - Python is basically executable pseudocode, and if that's the case, then Perl is executable line noise.

22:35 - We're gonna move away from talking about the searching algorithms for a moment now...

25:35 - You know, maybe you can actually verify this, because on Wikipedia.... This story is on Wikipedia, because I looked it up, and I think there is a "citation needed" tag attached to it.

30:25 - If a raptor were to attack me in this room, how would I escape? There is a lot of glass; I've noticed this coming in...

34:10 - Which word are you offended by: "bitches" or "science"?

39:50 - Actually, the first IRC channel... Oh man, why am I telling this story? The first IRC channel I hung out in... it was a... actually a fan fiction IRC channel. Erotic fan fiction...

49:00 - The "sudo make me a sandwich".... It was, I think, at Microsoft, too. Although, I mean, Microsoft? Why would they be using sudo(8)?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.ht...
not sure I get this appjet concept..If I have to do that much coding to build an app using appjet, what makes it better than the 200 million ways that already exist to do this?
"Except, instead of clicking on hot babes, you click on hot websites."

There's the catch...
The Next Social Network: WordPress
This explains why Watson's remark was so stupid.
UPS using software to reduce Left-Hand-Turns
RFC: My Facebook app, PhotoFlow
Great Post. I have scheduled to read this on my holiday.

Thanks for that story jkush. That was interesting.
Hi everyone,

I was hoping to pick the brains of the people on this forum and get some feedback on my Facebook application. For those familiar with iTunes coverflow my app allows you to flick through your photos in a similar manner. The rest of you, unfamiliar with coverflow, will hopefully be curious enough to check it out:)

Thanks a lot!
G
I had the same question, but my interpretation of the claims on their site (http://appjet.com/about/) was that you'd save time if the app was simple enough, because you wouldn't have to configure a server and do all that nonsense. This is fair, I think, but the question becomes, how big is the set of applications that are both interesting and not so complicated that it'd be more appropriate to use a more traditional environment/language where you have more power/control.
I think it is brilliant.

Client-side Javascript is the QBasic of this decade--it is the first language of a lot of (most?) self-taught programmers. It makes a lot of sense to offer these people a place to expand into server-side software.

And, Server-side Javascript is spiking in popularity and utility. I am working on a project in this space as well.
The Autodesk File: Autodesk founder's Bits of History, Words of Experience
Movable Type Finally Goes Open-Source
how big is the set of applications that are both interesting and not so complicated that it'd be more appropriate to use a more traditional environment/language where you have more power/control.

Basically every Facebook app, for one.

There's also a big niche for hobby programmers who want to make one-off online tools. The code sharing makes that even easier.
I had the same feeling after reading the article.

Brilliant for exploiting and exposing an apparently broken system.

Disgusting because the victims are the kids who use the service (I bet 99% of the time it is the parent's decision, not the kid's), not to mention the kids who lose out to people who bought their admission.
Hahah reading the comments on that article is great. While I've been guilty of it in the past, it's hilarious to see people come out of the woodwork to 'defend their turf'.

"If you just didn't want to do anything special and only used the options that Django provides you would see that it is amazing. If you need to do anything else you should just write it all yourself and you must not be a competent coder."

Priceless...
Initially, I was hesitant to click on this because of the title. However, it is an interesting submission about problem solving (not just sales). So for those of you on the fence, it's worth a look. Hence this comment here.
Not really anything free. A few free libraries do make charts but none of them look pretty without a lot of customization.
The key is the trivial deployment. If a user wants a little app, and he has no server and no hosting provider, and he doesn't know how to install software or configure a shared hosting account anyway, then he is likely to just give up before he even gets started. This at least gives him a chance.

There are a lot of business people that have become programmers by building increasingly sophisticated Excel spreadsheets or Access databases. This type of "casual" programming is becoming increasingly common.

That said, I think that DabbleDB might have a more successful approach--data first, instead of code first. That approach made MS Access very successful. Casual programmers care a lot about their data, but code is just a nuisance that is tolerated to get the data to "work." People want assurance that their data is always there, even when the code is broken. In MS Access it is trivial to back up your database and view/hand-edit your data.
Why don't we just check it out? That is what we are doing. In effect, any experiment attempting to find life on Mars is an attempt to falsify the hypothesis that "life on Earth is a unique phenomenon". I think that's worth spending a few hundred million investigating. Are you advocating that we should stop these experiments because "it sounds like wishful thinking"?

When we are already there and with Mars being the most habitable planet in near vicinity, searching for life there seems like an excellent proposition. Stable atmosphere, not too hot or cold, close etc. What better place to check out? The philosophical implications of finding something would be great. And if not; it would be worth the effort.
I don't see any practical limit to the set of interesting apps that can be written in 100 lines of an expressive programming language like JavaScript. Of all the programs I have ever written in python, for example, I would wager that most were fewer than 100 lines. I wish these were all online instead of trapped on my hard disk.

Random thought: how big is the set of interesting essays you can write in 100 lines of English?

Our prediction is that there is a long-tail of web apps. We want to be kind of like the pen and paper of web apps. Maybe not great for writing a novel, but excellent for smaller works.
She might be taking the role that parents would have played in other situations where money or time was tighter, telling the kids to find one realistic interest and focus on it.
Data modeling (by Philip Greenspun)
Great overview of the latest Tiger-only features for mac developers.
Scoble To Leave PodTech, Heading For Fast Company
Disqus: Scoble, Winer and Fred Wilson Like it, Why I Don't
On the tendency of little girls to flush Barbie dolls down toilets
There are a lot of cool (though maybe smallish) apps that could be built with this.

Good job on lowering the barrier to entry even further!

I wonder if there are plans for an OpenSocial app builder?
Excellent idea and implementation... but terrible domain name!
Alan Dershowitz once told the story of a court clerk who would approach the plaintiffs in every trial and say "For $5,000 I'll try to convince the judge to rule in your favor. If you still lose the case I'll give you your money back." Then he would make the same offer to the defendants.
His mistake was not keeping the vigorish.
70 great popular science books
Interesting stuff there, I may have a poke around later.

Like the simple storage API too.

It seems against philosophy of this thing, but I'd like to see something similar that allowed for more separation of code and html/js/css etc. (I think I'm drifting into regular hosting territory though).
A Software Metric You Can't Refuse
GigaSpaces Launches Developer Competition
Sega and NeuroSky To Make Mind-Controlled Toys
Anyone know of a ruby version? Volunteers? :) Should be pretty simple to throw together a gem for it.
One difference is Paul probably isn't trying to get Hacker News bought out.
Microsoft Buys Multimap for a Reported $50 Million
Second-gen iPhone in final phase; Apple TV update planned - report
RockYou and Slide = Ponzi Scheme 2.0
My impression is that this app is looking for such a small overlap in demographics. It's looking for programmers who might not have the tools or the knowledge of deploying their own apps, which I think is relatively unlikely to find. I think programmers capable of writing their own apps would prefer to use their own tools. OH, BUT THAT'S JUST MY TWO CENTS.

Congrats on launching.
Command-Shift-3 is what you press on Macs to take a screenshot. It's an awesome name.
I especially like the About page.

It has such gems as, "So far there have been 228714 clicks. The energy it took to click 228714 times raised the earth's temperature by .0000000000000000033416006 degrees, contributing to the melting of the polar ice caps. Way to go, asshole."

And
"For Investors
Q. Do you accept PayPal?
A. Yes

Q. Who funded CommandShift3?
A. CommandShift3 recently closed a Series A round of $39 from leading venture capitalists, enabling it to buy some domains and a pizza."

Also the idea is awesome. Bookmarked (that doesn't happen very often).
Classmates.com cancels IPO
So... YC funded this, but not that cool firefox pricing plugin?
The next social network is Tumblr. Its the best combination of blogging, twittering, and networking out there.
It was cool, when you had the gear logo. ;-)
I think the point of the article was that people want to have control of their own decentralized sites rather than use someone's centralized site.
"Casual programmers care a lot about their data, but code is just a nuisance that is tolerated to get the data to "work.""

So do 99.9% of all users. And they're right.
More comments on resubmission:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=88726
Ruh-roh, Shaggy. Someone figured out that embedded iframes on your webpage doesn't make it your webpage anymore.
And why exactly?
Love the concept. I currently use retailmenot's firefox plugin for finding coupons for the site I'm already on; I probably am more likely to use something like that because 1) I almost always order from 3 or 4 main sites (amazon, newegg, thinkgeek, and grudgingly dell.com), and 2) price comparison shopping never seems to be as accurate or rewarding as that $10 off coupon you never knew about
World's first 'newspaper' phone launched in Sweden
What makes him think that sports teams aren't doing this kind of analysis but consider it a competitive advantage to not publicize it?
Ask YC: Making a difference
I wonder, working on a startup is hard work, it's easy to get caught up with it.

How do you make a difference in your community or poor communities? Is it just a philanthropic act after getting rich, or can it be done, right now?
sys 64738
Presumably he sees in the statistics that the teams aren't making the decisions they should be making.
Quote of the week: Marcus Loew on ambition and success
No, it doesn't make sense to talk about Caucasian race. There isn't enough genetic difference between any human populations to divide humans into subspecies or races, unlike for example dogs. Humans have the least genetic variation of any mammalian species, so you can't make the dog comparison anyways.

Furthermore the name was created on fallacious premises to begin with. From the creator of the "Caucasian race" Johann Friedrich Blumenbach:

Caucasian variety - I have taken the name of this variety from Mount Caucasus, both because its neighborhood, and especially its southern slope, produces the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgian; and because all physiological reasons converge to this, that in that region, if anywhere, it seems we ought with the greatest probability to place the autochthones (birth place) of mankind.
How Super-Precise Atomic Clocks Will Change the World in a Decade
Nothing like surprise savings, indeed - I'll put that on the future features list - thanks for the feedback!
Apparently we've upset ze censors - would love to know what's off limits wrt mentioning that this was an idea we interviewed with for YC this fall =)
It is often the racists who portray themselves as "dispassionate scientists", as if they have no agenda. And it is also the same people who know very little about the subject. To know anything, you have to by minimum have a passion for that knowledge. Anyone trying to hide that is putting up a facade.
"I hate seeing the people around me more concerned about their marks than how much they are learning."

I hate seeing the people around me more concerned about anything than how they treat other people.
Sami people were not included in the "caucasian race", at least originally.
'Sometimes' is becoming more frequent.

And there's nothing to talk about. "Haha yeah that's so true! Um... ok I'm going to go back to work now but not before voting this up because it made me laugh"

Personally I can't figure out why people keep up-voting xkcd submissions.
They spent $6MM on infrastructure pre-revenue. The investors didn't pull the plug anywhere nearly fast enough.
Where Are All the Qualified Programmers?
Bebo Embraces Facebook Apps With Its "Open Applications Platform"
Google Checkout Tries To Ring Up Market-Share Gains With Free Transactions
We get it, xkcd is funny. Enough comics have been posted that people who didn't know about it know about it now. Not every single comic needs to be posted - that's what RSS is for.

Thanks, and I do appreciate you making sure YCNews readers are aware of xkcd. I'm a subscriber and a fan, so please don't interpret this as criticism, just the kinder side of a social news site.
I also wonder if an entrepreneur who already has their $2E6 could focus more on what the user wants. You don't have to worry about what the landlord or electric company wants.
Time Magazine names iPhone as Gadget of the Year
The problem with peer-review sites like this is that you are measuring how much other designers like a particular design. For most web sites, designers AREN'T the audience.
You might very well be right that the overlap's small, but note that AppJet is potentially for programmers who do have knowledge about deployment/hosting issues. How so? Well, such a programmer might not want to deal with hosting issues for a particular project. If the project s/he is attempting really is 100 LOC, then getting the app all nice and hosted and scaleable might take an order of magnitude longer than the actual coding does. AppJet, if it delivers nicely, could be a real win here.
He mentioned that the "sudo make me a sandwich" was seen at Amazon. I don't know if there were other people who also did this, but I believe that it was my drawing he was talking about - I copied it onto a giant whiteboard in the hallway :)
Interview Honesty Box 1m Facebook users in 8 days
Coding Horror: Blacklists Don't Work
I don't get it: Why would general purpose classifieds publishers (craigslist and ebay) be interested in sharing their revenues with some middle man like edgeio? I don't get their aggregation proposal: there is nothing to aggregate - those two control most of the market, plus your friendly local dying Sunday newspaper.
It just occurred to me the other day why many sellers (especially eBayers who buy and sell in large volume) will stick with Paypal and not consider GCheckout before some major changes happen.

Until 2/1/08, Checkout is free, and Paypal is ~3%. Clear win for Checkout, except...

You can buy lots and lots of stuff with a paypal account. Not only that, but the money you get via paypal never leaves your paypal account. With Checkout, Google automatically sends the money you receive to your checking account (in my case, anyway), which means that if you receive $1,000 and spend $1,000, all of that is going through an offline account.

In other words, if you're willing take a slight risk of a very invasive audit (i.e., one that looks at your paypal history), receiving $1,000 thru paypal and spending $1,000 through paypal is all tax-free. Doing the same through google means you take the tax hit on the income.

If I didn't hate paypal so much and like checkout so much, it'd be enough to get me to switch over right away.
This is the best proof of YC investing in people, not ideas.

People behind AppJet must be very, very good.
I think there's a very wide spectrum of people who can appreciate AppJet. I would argue that most programmers don't have the knowledge to deploy a web app, especially if you define a "programmer" as someone who can hack together an AppJet app, which is very easy to do. Even for a very capable programmer, it's a lot of work to get an app hosted if you haven't done it before. Then there's programmers who CAN get a web app online, and have, but don't want to manage all the machines and software involved for every little project.

Before sites like Flickr, for example, it was possible to post photos online, just harder. Maybe the difference in perception is that hackers aren't expected to want such an "easy way out" when it comes to programming, their very area of expertise. But as a hacker myself I can tell you that using AppJet to whip up a quick app is a pleasure compared to going through all the typical production work.
"Hosting issues", although I am not entirely sure what are you referring to, become issues only when a certain level of complexity is reached. By the time you get there, you already implemented several appjets yourself.
I think this is a problem they are working on and will solve in time. And it's one I'm willing to put up with since in return I get kick-ass threaded comments that I can read and reply to via email.
Oooh, I see, thank you...! I imagine the intended audience of this website uses Macs then, which is somewhat reasonable if they are web designers).
This just in: Second Life replaces Fox Network
Social networking is about to start replacing television stations. Not all of them, of course, but many stations will lose regular viewers to people who are spending more and more time fiddling about on social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, etc. After all, most of the programming is becoming harder to watch, the commercials are forever getting longer and longer, and the majority of television just doesn't entertain certain people anymore.
Erlang ended up outperforming Ruby by many orders of magnitude in the same benchmark. Read the final article.
should be in scribd :(
Combined with this news: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=60, this effectively kills OpenSocial dead in the water, in my opinion.
I'm about 1/4 of the way into his autobiography right now and it's excellent.
A child's view of the $100 laptop
What will a child in the UK make of a laptop designed to help children in the developing world?
>receiving $1,000 through paypal and spending $1,000 through paypal is all tax-free.

Well, not really. $1000 may not seem like much, but multiply that upt to $100000 and make it your sole source of income and you can bet the IRS will be all over you. And it isn't you they'll be auditing, but Paypal itself:

http://72.14.253.104/search?q=cache:oX20J-QVyBkJ:www.usatoda...
http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,125368-page,1/article.html
My in-laws lived across the street from P.T. Barnum's granddaughter (possibly great-granddaughter - I never really asked) in Florida. A lot of the stuff from the circus was apparently sold off but she still had lots of really cool stuff.

In fact, if I remember correctly, she has a tiny little sofa and end table which belonged to Tom Thumb!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Tom_Thumb
http://www.scribd.com/doc/40434/COMMODORE-64-PROGRAMMERS-REF...
Startup CEO fired: Plan on it, just a matter of time
How to Work the Room 2.0: The Holiday Party
w00t is no better or worse than 'yay!' (or yikes). I've also heard plenty of people (nerds) say it in real life.
Not all that surprising, although I'm sure it might come as a shock to some folks who have less startup experience (no disrespect intended).

In the previous startup I joined, I asked the founder and then-CEO when it was expected they would hire a more seasoned CEO (in a polite) way. I wanted to see what their plans were, if they had thought of this yet, and if the question would offend them.

People who start companies aren't usually great at running them (once things begin to achieve a regular cadence) and people who run companies aren't usually all that great at starting them.
I imagine it's because you referred to yourself as "YC Company X" and then qualified it with the interview info.
This may not be the greatest website since sliced bread, but that "cool firefox pricing plugin" doesn't exactly have a lot of room for growth, whereas clearly there is plenty of room here.
You can if you hate to fail.
Gotcha! Sorry about that!
One the one hand it is interesting, I guess mostly for mini-applications. On the other hand there is the risk that you can't take your app and run it elsewhere, you bind yourself to AppJet.
Was that... Knuth?!
It all looks so familiar, and it's been 20 years since I've used BASIC or 6502 assembly. When I pick up Perl or Python after not working with it for six months it looks kind of foreign again. It's weird how those very early experiences seem to be more intensely imprinted than what came later.
Umh, was that Knuth asking him about his log(log(n)) search algorithm?
One of my favorite Barnum stories is probably more well-known:

His Scudder's American museum in New York was struggling, in part, because the customers he did have would often end up lingering in front of the exhibits for an unnaturally long time, while they enjoyed the free heat and conversation of other patrons. He added a sign that read "This way to the egress!" and an arrow. Most patrons thought they were going to see a strange and unusual creature, but they were actually being herded to the exits (Exit=Egress.) He then charged them another quarter if they wanted to re-enter the museum. Maximizing throughput!
Microsoft rebrands PlaysForSure to Certified For Windows Vista, confuses world - Engadget
It's kind of strange how I like mostly 80s music. It's almost like I'm stuck in a time warp. I guess it's that way with a lot of things.
alternate title: How Super-Precise Atomic Clocks Will Change the World in 3.1536 x 10^8 Seconds
This is what I call the "Internet is HUGE" problem.

My previous company worked on a content filtering system for kids called Penguin Feet. By the time we added 10 new domains to the blacklist, a 100 new ones had sprung into existence. Blacklists will never win. (Whitelists are marginally better.)
Agreed. Although I wonder what the future plans are for this thing. It has some potential for virtual serving of web apps, but right now it seems more gimmicky than anything to me.
I think its fairly safe to assume that most news.yc readers who would enjoy xkcd already know about it.
95 percent of all e-mail sent in 2007 was spam
You mean GM I think. GE is worth 20 times as much.
I mean the term "hosting issues" to be pretty general -- implementing a data storage system (perhaps a database), caching, setting up server space, getting Apache to proxy to your app server, etc.