skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I thought the same thing when I saw this (I was particularly interested in craft building) but you have to remember this is it's a non-profit (backed by Squid-Labs ~ http://www.instructables.com/about/fullstory.jsp ) So to go into something like this you really have to adapt the idea more. The site is so generic that I'm sure there are very specific areas something similiar could be launched (with a few twists that Instructables have yet to think of).

The idea is also closely aligned to O'Reilly Make & Craft but who else has an eye on this market? (Avoid markets with no competition).

"... A key insight behind instructables is that humans are constrained to working in linear time - ie you do things sequentially and are generally not in two places at once. ..."

For me, the key insight is you can apply this reasoning to other concepts. Instructables has nailed the community bit that Phil Greenspun advises in SEIA to a tee ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/software-structure.

I've also noticed (as has O'Reilly) the crossover b/w hackers, crafters and DIY which is growing again (marketroid term: emerging market) after a 30yr hiatus.

Where else do you developers like Leah contributing this ( http://www.instructables.com/id/Teddy-Bear-Remote-Control/ ) for the hell of it?
pg publish it :)
If you like this, check out Processing as well (www.processing.org).
http://worsethanfailure.com/Articles/Soft_Coding.aspx
That Google maintains its audience despite zero lock in is a testament to just how strong their search product is. I don't see Facebook opening up all of the details of their network.
Auctomatic in open beta now
Web 2.0 whiteboard
I was poking fun : )
Regarding (1) - Have you ever been to South India my friend? So many of the Brahmins from South India I know, the Aiyyars and the Aiyyangars have dark skin. I was born a Brahmin myself and > 75% of my family members have "dark" skin.

The caste system is definitely racist and a much much bigger problem but this whole linking of skin color to castes is just not true.
Yeah arithmetic is so hard most calculators have bugs in them... oh wait a second...
The thing about wealth is patently untrue. 25 - 50% of the seats in ALL schools (yes, even private colleges, at least in the state I am from) are reserved for poor people from lower castes and their ANNUAL fees are less USD 200. I know first hand that this is true in Maharashtra (the state that Bombay belongs to).
Well their last name is what would prevent them from lying. They can change the last name though.

The irony is that there has been reservation for people from lower castes in government jobs and schools across the country and they pay much lower fees and get in with fewer marks. So you now have people from higher castes changing their names to lower castes to cheat and get into schools easily and also pay less.
Yes. Google Babasaheb Ambedkar. He led such a movement 50 years ago. This movement is now very politicized though and not very true to it's roots I am afraid.
What the hell is "african features"? You say the caste system is racist and then yourself say the most intelligent people are from higher castes. Don't you think that is a racist claim?

By the way I know several people from lower castes who are super intelligent. And forced hereditary occupations are a thing of the past EVERYWHERE. Even in Bihar, our most backward state, you can't FORCE someone from the lower cast to stick to a profession (which is why Lalu Prasad Yadav, our railway minister and his party came to power, by fighting for Dalits, or at least claiming to).

Make no mistake, the caste system is very prevalent but you don't need to exaggerate to make your point.
No, he is modded down because he is making factually inaccurate statements (which are also racist). Where is the data backing up his claim that the most intelligent students in colleges across India come from the highest caste?
Quite to the contrary, you will find that Gujarat, perhaps the richest state in the country, is least represented in the IITs and the IIMs (including IIM Ahmedabad which is ironically in Gujarat).

Yes K to 12 level education needs money but University admissions do not depend at all on what school you attended, only on your score in the Std 12 exam held by the state or an entrance exam. Further there are 25 - 50% reservations for poor people from lower castes in most Universities. So yes bribing is a big problem and so is casteism but one place where the problem is close to non existent is higher education.
10 ways the world could end (video)
[Edit: this was originally garbled in rot13 with a warning of SPOILER ALERT. I have decoded it back to readable text since the spoiler warning has been added to the post title.]

From the solution page:

"1. What is the quantified piece of information that the Guru provides that each person did not already have?"

Indeed! I can understand the solution, but I don't know how the word of the Guru matters. Rather, under the given rules, everyone should leave the island exactly on the 100th midnight after the 'game' starts. Say, after they enter the island, or after the rules are established.
Yes except the only metric that Universities in India can use to give you admission is your score on a centralized public examination. No essays, no discretion what soever. They have to publish a huge list of everyone's scores and the top n people get in.

Further, there is actually reservation for poor people from lower castes (25 - 50% of the seats). So it's not the same thing. I don't disagree with ingenium that better socio-economic opportunities help richer people do better, but the discrimination against lower caste people is not systemic in higher education.
Congrats! Some first impressions:

- http://www.auctomatic.com/app/username is a little strange. Would it be a big headache to remap it to http://www.auctomatic.com/username?

- It would be really neat if you could have a preview button when you're setting up your auction that generates a full preview. That is, the preview would generate HTML identical to Ebay's but with your auction info.
While amusing, the point of posting this to News.YC is to openly discuss the solution :P

Upmodded for geekiness anyway though.

From what I understand, it's the fact that everyone knows that everyone else knows that someone has blue eyes that matters. You have to look at it with an extra layer of indirection.
This is kind of what I tried to do many months ago. It was also based on the premise of transparent authority, many-to-many content and user connections, categorization on multiple dimensions, and such. I also approached it from a sociolinguistics angle. The problem with sociology and the like is that the metrics themselves are very broad and hard to quantify.

The application's complexity spiraled out of my control. I still believe in the core concepts, but execution of this thing in particular is very tricky. Theoretically speaking it could be the end-all recommendation engine, and that is, from my own experience, almost as lofty as building a Turing Machine. Granted that you have user input, it probably only needs to be half as strong, but that is already very strong, and very difficult (at least for me).

Now logic is one thing. One the same level of difficulty is how to make it user friendly; for this app, regardless of how hard the AI is, the UI is probably half the battle.

I'm not sure what kind of app you have in mind specificially. dcurtis's mockup is real slick and to the point. My implementation was a lot more passive, but I suspect internally the structures share commonalities with your proposal. If you are interested we can discuss. I won't be applying with my implementation though, because this the kind of site where without 100k users, a VC won't even bother. And no matter how good it is, it is much harder to get traction today, hence higher uncertainty, higher burn.
You were way too slow then. This page is not new. I think it was posted for being interesting for hackers, not as startup news.
Article summary:

Math is hard, buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, here's a picture of Excel, buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, math is hard unless you buy Mathematica, buy Mathematica, BUY MATHEMATICA, BUY MATHEMATICA, ... I SAID BUY MATHEMATICA OR MATH WILL BE HARD!!! BUY IT!!! BUY IT NOW!!!

Note that the salesmanship in the summary is a bit more subtle than the actual article.
Yes, but they don't need the guru to tell them that, do they? Do you mean the green eye guru thing is just red herring?

[Edit:] Besides, I claim the solution is wrong. Everyone but the guru needs to leave on the 100th midnight. Everyone but the guru sees one group of 99, so everyone should know to wait 99 days, then conclude that if the other folks in that group haven't left it's because they see a group of 99 too.

The guru doesn't leave because he sees two groups of 100, so he will wait 101 days. By that time, everyone has left, which means there were indeed two groups of 100 and herself had a different color.

Note that everyone but the guru sees a group of 1 (the guru), but this does not mean that everyone must leave at day two unless the guru has left the first day. That's because the guru doesn't know there is anyone with green eyes. If he knew, he'd trivially conclude it had to be him, so he had to leave the first day. None of this affects the other 200 at all.

[Edit^2:] I don't really believe I'm right; I just fail to see what I'm missing. I realise that the guru is there to somehow kickstart the induction providing the base case, and that the previous paragraph somehow has the key to this. But I fail to grasp how that is really necessary.

[Edit^3:] OK, it goes like this. We have to prove the thesis that if I see any group of n people with the same eye color, I can NOT conclude that I belong to that group, after any number of days, until someone publicly reveals that there is at least one person in that group.

The paragraph right before Edit^2 explains the base case of a group of one. Now we have to establish the induction step: if the thesis is true for a group of n, does it necessarily follow for n+1? Yes, because if I am not in the group, each person in the n+1 group only sees n other people with the same eye color. Which, by the induction hypothesis (i.e., that the thesis is true for a group of n), doesn't let them conclude anything, after any number of days. Therefore, I can't infer anything from their failure to leave the island after any number of days.

Makes sense?
Thanks for the feedback!

On your points:

- To prefix or not to prefix is always a tradeoff (as in, http://twitter.com/ev vs. http://google.com/a/foo.com). We wanted to keep some of that tasty top level namespace open, and figured /app/ would be an easy prefix to remember.

- That's definitely a good point, and something we're quite likely to do soon.
This seems like a great idea! Congrats.
We were able to carry over some of the back-end work from the first version, but not the majority. Much of the old code was fairly convoluted, and we wanted the new codebase to be easier to maintain and build on. The good news is that we're very happy with how the new code is working for us, and it should serve us well for a long time.

You're absolutely right about how easy it is to get so wrapped up in the features that you completely forget how anyone will actually use them. From the moment we started developing the new ImThere, we really shifted the way we worked to avoid falling back into that trap. We're always looking for ways to get even better at thinking about new functionality from a user's perspective. We test every new line of code that goes out the door extensively not just for bugs, but also for usability and how it affects the flow of the site. It takes more time to do, but we've found it completely worthwhile.

Thanks for the great comment!

- Gorman
The risk is higher for younger people.. and yet so many more younger people are successful? Hm.
You could burn yourself out much faster with a $0 salary over a number of years though.
I wrote about what information the guru gives recently:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56196
"Everyone but the guru sees one group of 99"

No, the guru and the people with brown eyes see 100 people with blue eyes.

Edit: I see now that you really meant "a group of 99", not "99 blue-eyed people". My comment doesn't apply. FWIW, I don't think it matters how many brown-eyed people there are.
That's great. I love the idea that there's a secret Paul Graham essay, one revealed only to initiates facing the ultimate test. A nice poetic touch, like the black t-shirts.
Maybe if you made it easier to identify with? For example, 'my' or 'i' or 'im' instead of app.

Also, points for not requiring an ebay account until absolutely needed. A+++++ will visit again
But would you pay for it if you had the money?
I've usually found good philosophy hidden in good novels, movies and science fiction. It's a bit paradoxical, the generalaties become clear only in a more specific presentation; it requires a lovely balance, and few can manage. That's what makes it all the more intresting I guess. I think this is one of your finest essays.
Idea: Competitive Microblogging
I have this idea for a website where you can craft competitions around goals you want to achieve.

For example, if you want to eat healthy, you set up a competition for eating healthy and invite your friends to it. Then you log your meals with them. It keeps you objective and focused because you want to look good to your friends and perhaps best them.

This idea isn't relegated to one thing, any goal you wish to achieve you can set up a competition around.

The inspiration for this came from reading PG's essay on "How Not to Die." This paragraph kept harassing me.

"You've probably noticed that having dinners every Tuesday with us and the other founders causes you to get more done than you would otherwise, because every dinner is a mini Demo Day. Every dinner is a kind of a deadline. So the mere constraint of staying in regular contact with us will push you to make things happen, because otherwise you'll be embarrassed to tell us that you haven't done anything new since the last time we talked."

The idea of using others as objective markers for your progress isn't new, but I don't think it's really been digitized.

I'm going to apply to Ycombinator with this idea, so if there's anyone who wants to come in on it as my partner, please email me at primevector@gmail.com.

The other point of this post is to see what people think. The comments here are always thoughtful, so please, do tell.
Yes, I meant "a group of 99 people with the same color"; sorry for not making it clear. And I see now that brown-eyed people don't matter, but the reason why they don't matter turned out more involved than I originally thought.
You are too modest. That mockup was great. I couldn't make out from the thread if you and steffon are working together?
For Mathematica, I would buy it if it was required in a specific professional context. For what I normally calculate, Google is fine and I use a TI-89 if I need to solve anything symbolic. Mathematica is significantly harder to use than either of those for me.

And instead of a Bugatti Veyron, I'd get two Tesla Roadsters and buy ten more for friends or as company cars for employees.
Did Jobs know he was forcing the music companies
to abandon DRM by refusing to license FairPlay?
Or was it just a happy accident?
Delicious allows users to put a permissive license on their RSS feeds, so (IANAL and within reason) you can probably get those bookmarks and importantly tags. So how closely would making recommendations per tag match your idea?

Tags are a little messy, and perhaps overly specific, so you may need to cluster them and then do recommendations on that.

I'm not sure I understand how you plan on making 'influence' work, if someone bookmarks a link recommended to them do you simply increment all those who have bookmarked it before?

Please don't use the word incentivize, its terrible :)
Paul could you please publish it or if it's not suitable could you send via email. We're a startup from India, there's no ecosystem for startup's here unlike the valley.We've been looking for guidance mostly on the web and you're writings have been extremely helpful to us.In fact your writings have been one of the most important factors of inspiration for our belief that "it can be done !"
Probably not. All I know: using one star on each sides of something for italics, two for bold, and if you put a space at the beginning of a line, you get fixed-width font (for code).
and links get auto <a href>'d if you use the full http:// address
I don't think Steve Jobs does a whole lot by accident and if he did he would probably take credit for it anyways.
No bold here; two stars just cancel each other out.
Ten Tips For A Slightly Less Awful Resume
trying to confuse the competition? :-) (where XXXXXXX is the site name and YYYYYYY is the session id (?)).

looks great though!!

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX_run.py?=YYYYYYYY

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX?_main.asp=YYYYYYYY

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX?_autoexec.bat=YYYYYY

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX?_run.arc=YYYYYYYYYY

https://auctomatic.com/app/XXXXXXX?_dispatch.fortran=YYYYYYY
This is nifty, in the same way that the "don't break the chain" ideas are nifty (I like this kind of GTD idea, and making it social is cooler). Start thinking about the business case for this idea, though. I don't mean you have to know how to make money today...I'm just wondering how big you visualize the market for this product being. Whether it's a feature or a product you want something that appeals to a very large swath of people (or a small swath with disposable income to spend on what you're providing).
Yeah, steffon and I are working together. Between the two of us, we can make a pretty great interface that is very focused and has defined boundaries. The problem of boundaries tends to be what most potential investors are worried about. We've definitely got that concern covered.

What we need is someone who is amazingly good at neural networks, algorithm design, and advanced mathematical engineering with programming languages. These people don't grow on trees; they're extremely few and far between. But the main asset for this idea isn't the idea itself, or even-- to some extent-- the user interface, but the way the math works behind the scenes. That's our innovative secret, and it's the reason I'm excited.
This is a great idea. SelfImprovement and GettingThingsDone were always hot topics in our competitive world.
It is like 43things.com but more focused on doing than just willing to do.
If you write an interface to Facebook and such then you will get a even more.
Feedback for UK Writing Startup
Hey everyone. I setup this startup with my confounder. Its for people who don't have time to blog, to write articles/essays etc and get feedback themselves. Typically, Paul Graham-esque essays and articles are likely to be written, as opposed to news reports for example.
I assume that the most important message of that unpublished essay is "Remember, deals fall through"
I'm not sure if it's possible to get enough traction for a general purpose recommendation system. Could this be a service that you offer to providers of niche sites? In terms of machine learning, I think you need to look at algorithms that work well with sparse data. This is particularly important in the beginning, but even later you might not have much data in every single field of interest. Good luck.
Some comments from an Indian working in Bangalore: there is definitely a lot of weed in the services offered from India. If you expect everybody that you come across in cheaper countries to be 100% efficient and as intelligent as everybody else in the world then rest of the world is really cooked. That's hardly the case. I have been on both sides of the interviews and have seen really crappy resources. On the other hand I have recruited bright guys for as little as $1000/month. The key here is to spend some time in choosing your resources. This could be a difficult task especially for foreigners because they have no or little idea about the country/people they are outsourcing to. Some ideas for getting the right resource:
1) Use any Indian connections you may have. I am sure a lot of them will have connections back home. This is your best option.
2) Use your LinkedIn connections.
3) Hang out in newsgroups/mailing lists and watch out for people who answer questions. They are generally good.
4) Use communities like news.yc and slashdot. Some communities attract bright people and some of them could be Indians.

I know it's not as easy as I say but you need to take that extra mile if you want good resources. It will pay off in the longer run.
If the mobile operators could charge 50% of mobile users $15 a month extra for a flat rate data plan it would dwarf any revenues they could get from trying to run services themselves (ringtones, video etc is peanuts for most operators). Plus, they can get incremental revenues through providing enablers like billing, CRM data, location feeds to third party service providers.
i bought mine when i was a student, and it cost me a hundred or two bucks. if i had the money -- yes, i would pay for the non-student version. i don't know of a more multiparadigmy language, and it's more or less the most powerful computational environment available in terms of what you can do

unfortunately the language isn't very readable -- not in the semantic sense, but just how it looks. the usage of square brackets for functions (myFun[arg]) is particularly ugly, and absolutely hideous when nested
Without revealing any trade secrets, is there anything you can say?

I just have no clue what to expect--I sit down at the table with a company that has expressed interest and ... ? Who says what first?

The reason I posted this here is because YC is in the unique position of having done this more than once. Especially the tiny startup/large company transaction.
thanks...not currently in negotiations but i may be in the near future.
Benefits

Facebook: Better contact with more people

Google: Answers to questions. Solutions to problems.

Last.fm: Good music

Pandora: Good music

reddig/Digg: Inspiration, quick and easy learning about tech, internet, politics

This idea: ?

For example, what's the benefit of getting movies that are similar to Jurassic Park? If you say "comfort and delight" I'd like to know how it's more comfortable than checking the movie with imdb and checking the recommendations. It has to be a bit more comfortable than the way people find movies today. Why would they check your service instead of just walking down to the video store and look at the selection?
The site has been going for 2 days btw.
By the way, we've also got a reddit style site set up for requesting features at: http://features.auctomatic.com

Thus far we've mostly used it internally to track requests people have emailed us, but it's time to open it up. So, if you signed up for an Auctomatic account and have some ideas, we'd love to hear about them.

Thanks!
And if you're on a Mac, you might want to take a look at NodeBox: www.nodebox.net

(Disclaimer: I'm the author of NodeBox)
------- I personally find it offensive that you even put that line in there, juwo.
Is PG neglecting his users?! And how is this?! So he's a bad teacher, not following his own advices. That's sad.
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Have you looked at MySpace's html yet? Good luck with that...
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