skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think what he may be trying to point out is that perhaps the kids that are 10 - 14 years old right now may enjoy a "Club Penguin" off shoot more than "Club Facebook".

Which one will be more profitable long-term? Who can say.

The tourists still find the Buddha Bar a "must hit" spot in Paris. Even though the "globally hip" crowd hangs out more in La Republique, Le Marais, or even Monmartre now. Eschewing what they perceive to be the pretentiousness of the Champs Elysee.

He is right when he says that these things fall in and out of fashion cyclically. During the Jazz age Harlem was hot, falling out of favor in the 70s and 80s, only to enjoy an admittedly controversial renaissance in the 90s to the present. Musical instruments may have had a brisk trade in Harlem during the Jazz age, but now something a little more bland is in order if you want to make money. Think Pottery Barn. (I know . . . it saddens the heart)

It is wise to try to strike while the iron is hot rather than build a business that is dependent on its heat.
The wifey can complain when she is driving her new Bentley.

Sometimes business has to come before pleasure, I know my lady would wait in the parking lot for 3 days if she knew it was important.

But if I was a VC, I would give everyone X amount of time, but have a plan B to talk all day if things went well.
Read Faster, instantly
I've interpreted his concern as two folds:

1) He's worried that the comments no longer are in his control, ie, on his server.

2) He's worried that because the comments no longer being his server, can not be cached by Google. He wants that Google juice, but when the comments now reside on the disqus.com domain, it's harder to connect the two.

The second one is a biggie. For the power users, they won't like this at all. The blogspot/wordpress.com folks wouldn't care, but the ones that make it their business to blog professionally would.
"Every idea I think of, someone else has done."

Make a list of 10 absolutely fabulous web products that you love. Now draw a line through all of them that came to market as the first mover. I'll bet you don't draw a single line.

As long as businesses want more money and want to save more time, there is always room for b2b products that can demonstrate good ROI.

On the consumer side, there's certainly plenty of room. I just read that Meebo is reaching 30 million people per month. Twitter is functionally brand new and kicking ass.

The good news is that most consumer sites transition from a "providing value" stance (in the early days) to an "extracting value" stance (in the later days). Later stage consumer sites add more advertising, do more biz dev deals, and overall muddy up their value prop. Meanwhile, the next round of consumer startups leap into the fray with a nimble team, the next rev of web technologies, and a desire to provide value and build something that's better than the big guys. Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL, Friendster, MySpace, Facebook... They are/were all on the same road.
Scala has some very nice features for making Java's libraries much nicer to deal with. The most useful are probably implicit definitions and parameters, operators (any method may be used as an infix or postfix operator), and target typing. You can often "Scalify" a library using these features. See [1] and [2] to see what I mean. These features are also great for creating DSLs.

The recent Scala 2.6 compiler brought some other niceties like structural types (imagine duck typing with a static type system), existential types, and lazy values.

All in all, I've been thoroughly impressed with Scala.

[1] Pimp my Library: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=179766

[2] Simplifying JDBC: http://scala.sygneca.com/code/simplifying-jdbc
Look out for more Xooglers becoming angel investors.
You've pointed out exactly why supervised recounts with paper ballots are so much better. You can look how well they go.
This is Lee from commandshift3 -- what browser/os and version of Flash were you using?
Jey draws a ball from an urn, inspects it, and sees that it is a red ball.

I now proclaim that all balls in the urn are red.
It would have cost him nothing (and he's the one with the money, in any case) to say "hey, I'm running late, it's important, it'll be a while longer" rather than simply not answering, as the article seems to say.
I totally support Mars exploration, in principle at least. I do think there are some more important problems that are being neglected funding-wise, but that's just how it is. I just want NASA to be honest and not do the whole "we think there's a decent chance of life on Mars" shtick.
I wonder what this means for Android, their wireless plans, etc...
We know a bunch who are, and they make good investors. Their model for a startup is Google.
good stuff. sam altman told us the most important thing for him was to remember #8 -- they need you as much as you need them. they _want_ to believe that you're the next google; think of how much it would make their lives easier if you were, and think of how hard it would be to spend your life saying no 90+% of the time and telling people their babies are ugly. they want to say yes.

i'd also say spend a lot of time coming up with a story and framing your opportunity in the biggest possible way. this was something i really underestimated -- initially we'd just show a list of features and expect everyone to arrive at the vision we had in our heads, but really it's the other way around -- the features drive a more important story and vision.

a story is also a lot easier for an investor to retell and get other people excited about than a laundry list of "um, it does this, and this, and this..." remember, VCs have to then turn around and sell their own general partnership on the idea, so give them the ammo they need to do this effectively.

also -- practice your pitch until it becomes mechanical. not so much by standing in front of a mirror (though that helps too) but rather by debugging it with individual angels or mentors, so that by the time you pitch the investors you really want you've already seen most of the universe of possible objections and surprises and can handle them effectively.
On a subject overflowing with "advice", this seems like a particularly helpful post. I especially like the running theme of "putting yourself into their shoes". Great stuff! Thank you.
Re: Singularity

There are several incompatible definitions of "Singularity" floating around, as pointed out by Eliezer Yudkowsky here: http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singular...

I personally subscribe to the "Intelligence Explosion" idea, because of two very simple beliefs:

- AI is feasible.
- AI will have a profound impact on our lives.

I try to avoid using the word "Singularity" and just describe that I think AI is a very important problem because the word "Singularity" is too soiled. Everyone pretty much associates "Singularity" with Ray Kurzweil's vague and strange intersecting-expoential-curves idea which makes no sense (which Eliezer calls "Accelerating Change" in the blog post).
Roadmap to "Getting Luck on Your Side"
Cool. Maybe you should explain how the Leitner system works and how it's going to be used. I don't quite understand how it works from the explanation and diagram on the site, and I guess I need to have an account for it to actually work when I study.
Facebook opens up platform architecture (see third section)
How much does it cost to found a Microsoft-based startup?
Anyone have a link that explains how to read those charts? They say "Total assets and gearing" but I don't know what 'gearing' is.
Valuable lessons, thanks for sharing them! You mention in #4 that a quality referral is critical. Do you mind sharing your experiences meeting/using a referral to get face time with VCs?
Also, generally you can't patent ideas like "multitouch" but rather processes or methods of implementing an idea. Not sure if there's any patents on IR-based input like this, but a quick search didn't turn anything up.
Yes, you definitely can Scalify things. But having to write boilerplate facades for every library you want to use in a nice way significantly diminishes the utility of Java compatibility.

I meant to say that this is one of the biggest drawbacks of using Scala (along with slightly immature docs). It has an excellent design; it feels like a much bigger language than Java, yet the Scala spec is a fraction of Java's. It is overall an extremely nice thing.
And, by the way, I'm definitely going to buy this book.
Of the people I care about, none use MySpace.

I find MySpace incredibly trashy. Unfortunately, I fear Facebook is heading in that direction. Silly Facebook apps are Facebook's equivalent of MySpace users' annoying CSS styles and auto-playing media.
No clue on the chart, but you might try Investopedia:

http://www.investopedia.com/search/results.aspx?q=gearing
You said it. I couldn't understand all the vitriol from the manufacturers when this project was announced, other than in the context of a perceived threat. Surely it would succeed.
Now that their kids are starting to get laptops, it shouldn't be too long before you could make a web app which helps third-world poor people learn to farm better, or do other types of work more efficiently. It's easy to come up with things which poor people want. And web hosting is cheap enough for targeting them to be feasible.
I think this letter is about 3 years late.

IE7 fixes most of the annoying stupid problems that used to drive me crazy; now I can develop a site in Safari and Firefox, and it usually works almost perfectly in IE7. I don't mean to say that IE7 is perfect, just that the problems aren't nearly as bad as they used to be.
Sure, I was only taking issue with the claim "In a free market economy there is no such thing as a shortage, by definition". Let's take food as another example: if there is not enough food to feed all people it doesn't help much that the market will establish a fair price for the food. Some people are still going to starve.

In the long run the market might try to provide more food, but perhaps there simply is a limit to the amount of food that can be provided.

Likewise for good programmers - maybe the amount of people who are intelligent enough is severely limited? Although I suppose woith 6 billion people, there should be the one or other with sufficient brains...
I actually had more problems with Opera issues than with IE problems. Anyway, I really don't like that kind of thing - companies should be allowed to do shape their products the way they want, and no, Microsoft is not a monopoly.

And I am not even an American...

Besides the European Commission whatever is definitely a bigger bane than Microsoft ever was.
scribd shouldn't be.
I meant $25m as a dollar figure is a tiny amount when compared to today's acquisition prices (which may follow Angel-only investing) and considering how big a chunk of Google they got for it. Perhaps that's hindsight, but even at the time it seemed a pittance considering any expected IPO especially in those dot-com days.
I took it as he was just making her wait longer than expected.

Either way, I wouldn't be booking anything 5 minutes after the pitch.
Gearing is basically a ratio of debt to equity IIRC.
Icon Search Engine
Perhaps a better title would be "we can't stop people from cloning our platform, so we might as well embrace it". I have to wonder if anyone will actually pay to clone Facebook's API, though.
> Anonymous hassle free micropayments for instance...

Someone please make this, much lighterweight than PayPal, and saturate the market with it. Add a prepaid micropayment card anyone can buy at a store with cash.

This is one of the things that I have great interest in using (both as a user and as a client), but not so interested in building and running it myself! :-/
> I think that yo have replied yourself, 20 years ago there were not microwave ovens!

They didn't have microwave ovens in 1987 ?!

"20 years ago" is not a fixed date ;-)
Finally Adobe admits that AMF3 isn't a secret -- months after it was reverse-engineered. I wonder if they'll also decide to "open" RTMP after RTMPE comes out.
"Aw, man... BrainBook is down again..."
You don't; it's basically, "here's an array, now reverse it" (keep in mind a pointer is not an array).

http://www.lysator.liu.se/faq/c-faq/c-2.html

The general point is that interviews of this type are counterproductive.
Firefox supports Acid2 as of 3 Beta.
I've deployed FreeBSD and OpenBSD as both front facing and back end systems. My only complaint has been lack of SMP support (to be fixed with FreeBSD7.0 at least, I'm not sure about OpenBSD).

People often complain about Ports but you soon get used to it and I've found the port maintainers to be helpful on the odd occasion when there has been a problem.

Although hardware support can be said to be weak, when choosing servers there aren't a lot of chip sets out there so things are mostly covered. Certainly when deploying to HP or Dell boxes I have had no problems. It only takes a few minutes to check h/w compatibility lists. Chosing the correct servers for any job requires careful research anyway.

The most annoying thing is explaining to people that although it's open, it's not Linux and yes it is production ready.
> The Universe IS my kitchen.

As long as the kitchen isn't your Universe... :)
A lot of people criticize facebook using the "fad" concept. However, I find that hard to digest because of the investment we've all made in facebook. We've got our friends in it, and we rely on it to stay abreast of what they are doing. It has significant mindshare. It is becoming an internet within the internet, if you factor in the percentage of time spent on facebook vs total time online.
Sure, this could all change. Similar arguments have been made about eBay's hold on auctions, but nothing has dented their majority share yet.
My point is, UNLESS something big happens, facebook is going to be a major player. If you argue for a downturn, you have to explain what this big thing is and why it will happen. The burden of proof is on that side of the debate.
I played hockey for 22 years. The beautiful thing about it is that fighting is the great equalizer. There are unwritten rules that you must follow to avoid getting stomped by a toothless caveman. For example, if you shadow their star player, you will get dropped. If you are a 2000 lb goalie, you will get drawn into a fight and at least thrown out and at worst hurt. Allowing a little fighting makes the game better b/c the rules don't have to be so explicit. One goon willing to drop his gloves is a more effective way of toning down the dirty side-play than 10 more refs.
Good!

The old new name was a meta-WTF...
From the wikipedia article that he linked:

Acid2 is supported by:
- WebCore-based (Safari, OmniWeb, Shiira)
- Konqueror
- Prince
- iCab
- Presto-based (Opera, Internet Channel on Wii)
- Gecko-based 1.9+ (Firefox 3 beta)

It is not supported by:
- Internet Explorer
- Firefox 2 (Current stable version)
- NetFront (PS3 browser)

So yes, technically IE is not the only browser that doesn't support it, but they are the only browser which has said that CSS compliance is not a priority for them.
This kind of stuff isn't new. These guys use optical feedback to achieve similar effects:

http://www.mine-control.com
This approach is too simplistic to be useful in nearly any environment. On top of that, its basically the exact opposite of what undo is/has always been.

The "correct" way to do undo, is to perform an event, and keep a list of inverse events. As you pop those off the undo stack, you can simply execute them.

As you mentioned, this may be slightly more complicated in a multi-user environment -- but in this example, it would absolutely be the right way to go. Plus, this is so easy to get working in javascript, where you can actually push functions to the stack, and then execute them when you pop them off...
The psychology of learning: perfection vs performance
This is great! Are all of these icons free to use?
I don't know what that paragraph you wrote means, but $25MM is, in 2007, a very large A-round.
The prepaid card is a good idea. And I wonder whether it is always necessary to authorise individual payments. For something like newspaper articles, payments could be pooled and transferred en bloc via some kind clearing mechanism that doesn't require me to have an account with every magazine or website I read. The seller wouldn't even know who was paying and the clearing institution wouldn't know what exactly is being paid for.

The reason why nobody does it that way is probably that it's difficult to garantee settlement and the credit risk involved. But do we really need such a garantee in cases where no physical goods are delivered? Maybe it's enough if it works in 90 % of all cases. That's more than the rate of legally acquired software licenses today.
After spending some time with it, I personally can't find a way to make OO and functional mix in a nice way. I know some people say OO can be functional (in the sense that objects don't mutate) but that just looks aweful to me. Fortunately you can avoid the use of a lot of objects in scala anyway, so its not too much of a problem in practice.
Social websites refute this a bit. If you want to connect with people then, generally, you need to have a similar package of web apps as they.
Ah, but interrupting business for personal looks bad; and the thing about (possibly most) women is they want you to have something that's more important than them. If you drop everything for them they won't respect you.

So he did the right thing from both perspectives. Which is probably why he's rich and has a (presumably) hot wife.

(I know that sounds politically incorrect, but alas, reality often is. To be fair, it probably works both ways: a man won't respect a woman who drops everything for him, either.)
Are these reviews by the same team that tried to clone Quicksilver for Windows and wound up with nothing more than Launchy set in Garamond?
Frank Pringle has found a way to squeeze oil and gas from just about anything
Ask YC: Good time & ways to launch
Hello!

I'd like to know, what do you take into consideration when thinking about when to launch and how to launch a new web product, so it gets some attention?

Where do you post? (reddit, news.yc, digg, ..)

What's a good day time to post?

What's a good day to post? Mondays? And what about holidays? Is it a good idea to post on Jan 1st?

Do you write press releases? Upload logos?

I'd also appreciate if anyone can introduce me to bloggers or people interested in new products. I have a product coming up which you can read about in my profile.
I wonder if a retargeted GTK library would allow you to run The Gimp as an AJAX application; either that or perhaps a Flash FreeNX client.

Ulteo made OpenOffice work online:
http://lifehacker.com/software/online-documents/use-openoffi...
Beautiful Code vs. Readable Code
"... He's worried that because the comments no longer being his server, can not be cached by Google. He wants that Google juice, but when the comments now reside on the disqus.com domain, it's harder to connect the two. ..."

Then suck the comments up via xml or at the api (at some time in future TM) and redisplay your documents. Of course the other alternative is to host your own comments and deal with the associated problems. I guess the pro's should earn their money and deal with the comments with their own tech, time & resources.

For the rest of the world there is always alternatives and this service is looking good because of the "Freedom to Leave". Meaning you can stay because you are free to leave at any time. [0] So if you are a developer "Lock-in is the new Lock-out". The ability to get your data out is a feature of lots of successful services that attracted early adopters.

[0] SImon Phipps, Zen of Free, OSCON 2006, http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/advocacy/events/tech...
> I envy the LAMP guys, not because of the technology which I think is slightly behind Microsft's [sic] (VS + C# + .NET)

Ruby and Python and Lisp and all their frameworks and PostGres just aren't the same as those cutting-edge Microsoft products.
Now thats sarcasm !
Check the markup and style validity of web pages
Cool site. The calendar isn't working properly, though (you have to refresh to view events you add if they aren't on the current day). I also somehow ended up at the year 20070 at one point just by pressing the next link.

Regarding how to launch: I'd wait until you're ready first (this is obviously more like an Alpha launch, so just showing it to the YC community was a good first step). Once you are, you can do the normal digg and bloggers route, but even better is to figure out who are your target users and try to get in touch with them. Advertise on a site or in a publication they all read (try to negotiate and get this for free in exchange for something else). You can write a press release if it makes you feel good, but odds are no one's going to read it at this stage--it never hurts, though.

Otherwise, just try to get in touch with your users and ask them to spread the word. Sending a personal email to the early adopters would probably go a long way--ask them what they thought about it, what could you improve, then tell them you'd appreciate it if they could tell their friends. People like cool T-shirts too...

Definitely post on a Monday or early in the week if you can. Fridays are for bad news, no one cares on the weekend, or holidays for that matter. Bad idea to come out on January 1st if it's a mainstream release. Otherwise it doesn't matter too much.

Good luck.
I recall this being lambasted on Reddit a while back:

http://programming.reddit.com/info/2piup/comments
It seems like they mostly index GPL/LGPL licensed icons
Looks pretty cool. I'd remove the political advocacy link at the bottom though.
I agree that extracting information from a sample size of one is a bad idea but so is ignoring all evidence even if the sample size is one.

Anyway, life need not be a complex process: http://www.livescience.com/animals/060609_life_origin.html

It might seem odd for a random process to end up with a life form but there are a lot of possible life forms that could work. AKA picking a single winning lottery ticket is hard but winning the lottery is not that hard if you could buy a million tickets that never expire.
[SF] Disqus wants you to join the team
Hello fellow news.yc'ers!

Disqus was in this past summer's Y Combinator program (SFP 07) and just launched about a month ago. There's currently 2 of us and we're looking to for an enthusiastic, skilled hacker to become #3 of Team Disqus.

Our recently launched public beta is going extremely well. However, it's only the first step. We're working on changing the way people interact and engage with blogs and sites across the entire web. You will play an integral part in bringing Disqus to the next level, solving many interesting problems along the way. We won't list all the qualities that make you a, ahem, rockstar programmer (musical talent not too important), but here are some things we'd like:

- Adept in Python; Django experience is a plus

- Extensive JavaScript knowledge

- Comfortable with scaling web apps

- Ability to work fast and flexibly

- The drive to succeed

- Passionate about startups (the ultimate life hack)

- Understand online communities and the Blogosphere(tm)

Let us know: jobs@disqus.com

Daniel and Jason
That was a hilarious article...not exactly typical WSJ fare...
I have a hot Italian wife, and would never leave her stewing like that.

It's not about dropping everything for the other person - I don't think anyone can expect that. It's about picking up the phone and saying "sorry, got to keep you waiting, it's important". Communicating and managing expectations.

It's a pretty minor quibble, I guess, but it just struck me as something rude.
Or sit around eating Doritos :-)

http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/early-retirement/