skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am surprised to see people here criticize the article -- I though it was obvious that the man has got a valid point. For all "normal photographers" -- shooting vacation photos etc. -- it makes no difference to have 3 vs 10 MP. What makes a huge difference is good optics (where generally tiny = bad) and how well the automatic programs behave.

I think people should be aware of this.
Have any Y Combinator startups outsourced coding to China to get up and running faster?
// [-:) (:-[

I still don't know what I meant but I think I was just doodling.
I would like to know if any of the ycombinator startups have outsourced code to China? I have an idea and would like to apply for the next round of funding but have limited coding experience. Is outsourcing some coding to China or similar an option or are there major issues with this approach?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46024

It could work if your idea is good enough and simple enough, but it's rather unlikely. You need to create very, very specific documentation to get good results from outsourced Asian/Eastern European programmers. You also have almost no chance of getting funding from Y Combinator if you are not a hacker and have no hackers on your team.

The site consensus answer to your dilemna is to learn how to hack. Ruby or Python are the languages of choice here. Ruby has this nice learning IDE available, if you feel like playng around right now. http://hacketyhack.net/
The merits of out-sourcing are debatable in general, but where startups are concerned out-sourcing coding is just plain crazy. Startups, more than any other sort of company, need to be fast, need to do things well, and need to have very efficient internal communication; the likelyhood of any of these happening decreases the further away the founders are from the people who are doing the coding.

If all the coding is being done by founders, things have a decent chance of working; if all the coding is being done by people hired by the founders, the odds are pretty slight; but if all of the coding is being done by people hired by a company hired by the founders -- i.e., by people two steps away -- there's almost no chance whatsoever that the coders will have either (a) sufficient motivation, or (b) understand the founders' vision. (Of course, the same thing works in the opposite direction -- if the founders are two steps away from the people writing the code, there's almost no chance that the founders are going to understand what's going on.)

And that's not even getting into the difficulties of working with people who have a different culture, a different language, and are working in a different timezone.

Out-sourcing development might save you money; but it's distinctly not going to get a startup up and running faster.
Major issues.
Thanks for the comments, I am busy with Agile Web Development with Rails. I was just wondering if it had been done as I have experience writing use cases and functional specs. Thought it could be a way of expediting things if there are only two coders but I understand the issues presented here.
Holiday Presents from Facebook: improved Ajax support
This guy is on math crack. Square megapixels are indeed the proper way to compare resolution.

But he's right that megapixels aren't the whole story, and beyond a certain level they are irrelevant to typical users.

A nice page on this subject: http://www.wyofoto.com/Digital_Image_Quality/Image_Quality.h... details a plausible way to calculate perceived image quality.

There might have to be some adjustments made because the human eye isn't equally sensitive to all color differences, but this is getting closer to the mark.
Out of curiosity, did you consider Quickbooks (the business edition)? Or is the structure/funding of your startup very peculiar?
"Knowing that risk is on average proportionate to reward, investors like risky strategies, while founders, who don't have a big enough sample size to care what's true on average, tend to be more conservative."

I don't think that's the only reason founders want to keep risk low.

The most important reason is that money has diminishing effect on happiness. People want to be able to guarantee a "moderate" life. What comes beyond that is not as important basic needs.
Did Alexander Graham Bell Steal Phone Technology?
YC Dashboard widget
I couldn't find a YC hacker news widget for dashboard so I knocked this one up in dashcode. Let me know what you think. Hope someone finds it useful :p
I can't think of any silly comments from my code right now, but I have a new one for you :-)

# ...your computer really doesn't care if you seperate the password from the nonce with a dash; it's a computer, not a 2nd grade teacher[1]
echo 'MD5(): ' . md5(date('ymdHis', time()) . 'password-is-yummy-salty-safety-' . $pw);

1. http://www.matasano.com/log/958/enough-with-the-rainbow-tabl...
Well, like many things, the improvement is logarithmic. At small values, small increases make a huge improvement. I won't claim that his point is correct, but it doesn't seem unreasonable.

720p is still less than 1 megapixel, and has more than twice as many pixels as 480p. At such a small megapixel rating, the increase is certainly going to be much more profound than a 4mp to 8mp camera. But, perhaps doubling is a better metric than quadrupling.
50 most important people on the web
Not that I know of. Outsourcing is for banks, not startups.
Asterisks for italics, indent for verbatim.
Presumably, a YCombinator start-up is one where writing good code is the core competency, and a major competitive advantage.

You don't outsource your core competency.
23 Mathematical Challenges for the Future
> frankly for such a basic point

Hoplite battle is specific to a time and place. The Mongols conquered more territory than anyone, ever, with mounted archers and ready retreats. Accounts of battle in the French and Indian War probably best represent the norm when it comes to human warfare. It was characterized by raids and slaughter of civilians, not pitched battle with no retreat.
I thought this article was about your important question.

When it comes to hitting a wall after the early adopters, the first thing I think of is photo sharing. Wouldn't you think that would be one of the most widely-used services? Yet on Quantcast flickr shows 1/10 the monthly unique visitors of yahoo.com. In the top 100, only flickr, photobucket, and (arguably) facebook are photo-sharing sites. Shouldn't photo sharing have a wider appeal than blogging?
I am biased, but Linda Coleman is the best. She has her own blog at http://www.biztaxtalk.com and her email is lgc@possibility.com. On her blog she talks about tax issues and answers any and all questions for free. You can get a good feel for yourself that she knows what she's talking about just by reading the blog. Also, she is a former programmer and has many software clients, so she is very familiar with the space.
So, who is the source?
Not to downplay the accomplishment but I was fairly surprised that the article represented the idea as entirely unique without ever actually mentioning Tesla.

"WiTricity is rooted in such well-known laws of physics that it makes one wonder why no one thought of it before."
Here's the basic problem: you're writing a text editor. Stop doing that. It's 2007.
All on one page (instead of 5):

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/asseti...
My wife says some Italian guy has a claim to it as well, but I'm sticking with Bell, as he's a distant relative.
I don't have first-hand experience, so obviously I could be wrong, and if I've mischaracterized the culture, correct me. But here're a few points I've noticed:

1.) The obsession with "bling" and personal status through high-priced consumer goods. I've read that it's poor urban kids buying those $200 Nikes, and then marketers hope that their tastes will filter down into middle-class American kids. The street kids on the subway often have more stylish clothes and accessories than rich white kids. Remember Ludacris's song "Glamorous"?

2.) Anti-intellectualism. I have a couple friends who teach in inner-city school system. When black kids do well in school, they're taunted and teased by their classmates for "acting white". There's a strong cultural pressure not to stick out or excel.

3.) Gang warfare and revenge killings. There was a shooting a block away from my workplace a couple of years ago. A few gang members had apparently been slighted, so they got in a car, hunted down the rival gang member responsible, and shot him in a drive-by.
It's a terrible idea. I was in a startup that opened a China office, for about what it cost to hire 2 quality engineers in the U.S. However, the China office produced nothing. Moreover, it sucked up a lot of management time, so managers weren't actually around to, well, manage.
I've read almost everything on Ken Rockwell's site. He's very consistent, level, and fair, and you could get a pretty decent photography education just by reading it. He also makes the same point over and over and over: talking about cameras isn't as fun as taking pictures. Turn off your computer and go shoot!
Robert Sapolsky has a short but interesting discussion of what leads to the development of warrior-class cultures and what makes them so common in his book "Monkeyluv and Other Essays on our Lives as Animals". The chapter is "The Cultural Desert."

My brief, gross over simplification is that the local ecology is the driving factor: the warrior cultures (more thar-ish and more monotheistic) develop in deserts, while polytheistic, somewhat more egalitarian cultures develop in rain forests.

He says "ours is a planet dominated by the cultural descendants of the desert dwellers. And "most evidence suggests that the rain-forst mindset is more of a hosthouse attribute, less hardy when uprooted."

I'm not doing him justice. The essay, and the rest of the book, is classic Sapolsky: well-written, entertaining, and fascinating.
Here Comes The Google Mafia
Do NOT outsource unless you know the outsourcee in person, know he is an excellent developer but can't come to the USA because of visa reasons or whatever

(Due disclosure :-> I am Indian and work out of Bangalore these days ( I worked in the USA for a couple of years) and have been on both sides of the outsourcing contact. It can work for certain big enterprise projects, but probably never for a startup. )

My 2 cents
Great moments in predicting the future, television edition
Actually using time as an additional salt is a very healthy practice, just make sure you store the time you use.

It reduces collisions.
It would be great if you can learn and do it on your own, with the close knit team you put together. But if that is out of question and your choices are either to do nothing and stay with your boring job or outsource, I would say you outsource at least to see if it flies. You would at least have first hand experience of outsourcing by the the end of it.

You may want to get a "virtual assistant" first to see how it goes. If you get burnt by that, you can cut your losses early. But chances are you will find a creative use for them that might give you a competitive edge.

Have you read "The 4-Hour Workweek"?
Java is becoming the new Cobol
It really is true. Nobody wants to program in Java anymore, if you do it's just because you don't know any better. However, just like Cobol, there is going to be money available for a long time for anyone that keeps their Java skills sharp.
Outsourcing has its merit, but the risk is high too.
I wonder what Infoworld was saying about Java 5 years ago. But I can probably guess.
The most recent place I did some work outsourced work to India, and got code like this:

val = create_cat_res(create_res_val,ty,nm,pa,ow,tg,de,ic,f1,f2,f3,f4,f5,cty,oc,ors,rc,rr,c,r,u,d)
This is one of my favs of 2007
What about outsourcing graphic design?

I can code everything my startup needs, but we don't have a good graphic designer. I suspect that we could go a long way with a few mockups from a great designer.

Of course, good designers tend to be expensive, and I suspect hiring a really good one would blow through a good chunk of my savings :[
Oddly, I can't edit my own post... BUG?! In any case, note the final "c,r,u,d"... it wasn't intended but it made me laugh when I found it.
Reputation: where the personal and the participatory meet up
I think it's inappropriate to call those googlers mafia.
Xobni for mobiles
I am planning to make a software similar to the one that xobni is making, but for mobile phones. Any thoughts,suggestions?
A Sad Milestone: AOL To Discontinue Netscape Browser Development
I did think about going on my own but it seems like the chances that I will miss something are reasonably high enough considering some funding issues.
great, all my cs classes are taught in java.
Cobol doesn't have useful libraries like Lucene.

Cobol didn't convince pointy-haired bosses that technology which only 10-15 years before was considered an academic curiosity ought to be standard for business application development.
Made in Weebly.
Just happened to like this site simplicity, and found that it was made using Weebly. Good tool.
Unless you're the semiconductor industry.
I think I first heard the phrase "Java is the new COBOL" about 3 or 4 years ago.

Ronen says Ruby offers pre-built structures -- say, a shopping cart for an e-commerce site -- that you'd have to code from the ground up using Java.

Fact-checking 101:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22java+shopping+ca...

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22ruby+shopping+cart%22

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22ruby+on+rails+sh...
Breakthrough battery for electric cars?
I do. For my shrink-wrap web-app I will do next year, Ruby, Python and PHP are not a viable choice.
Does this article contain any facts that are actually correct? Java losing marketshare to AJAX?

"One bit of good news: developers and analysts agree that Java is alive and well for internally developed enterprise apps." Has Java ever been alive for anything else?

Java's big problem is incompatibility across platforms?

Ruby gaining popularity because of built-in shopping carts?

And what's the connection between losing marketshare and becoming the new Cobol? I mean, Perl is losing marketshare...

This article is utterly clueless.
Anatomy of a Next Generation Text Editor
What's up there. I have a mobile app that mines your phone and sends it to the server. it is up, and runnning and I have 1 corporate client. what is a good way to contact you?
Title: Java Under Siege

http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/03/22/020325fejavastrat_...

Can't seem to access the website right now, though. Google cache at http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:UmQdAoYGKp0J:www.infowo...

Also, "Java Web Services High in Potential" at http://www.infoworld.com/article/02/02/22/020225feweb_1.html , but the website isn't responding right now.
What kind of startup can succeed by that strategy?

If you prefer, what must be true about coding for that strategy to work? How do you know that programming for your startup qualifies? (If you don't know anything about programming ....)
You might as well use random salts.
Wal-Mart Abandons Online Movie Downloads
Amazon to Sell Warner Music Minus Copy Protection
Apple Making Deals for Web Video Rentals
Well it's TechCrunch; they're amateur journalists so they can't find a better name. What do you expect from the Internet full of amateurs? The screenshot is done valleywag style as well.
you will spend more time managing them than if you do it yourself
I would bet that's only because you haven't looked hard enough. If you know Java already that's what you feel like you'll need to use, but honestly it's probably not true. Good Luck, I hope Java works out for you.
If you're a company that's going to "drive a new approach to social networking and solve key problems holding back the advancement of the semantic web" shouldn't you make your OWN website.

That is the problem I have always had with website creators. If you're trying to do something technical you're going to be looked down upon for using them to make your site. If you were going to sell running shoes to people then yeah it's great, but I don't think Weebly has a plug-in to solve the problems of the Semantic Web.
Aren't you the same person who posted http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=93204 ? :)
hehehe most of mine was like that too
For myself and almost everyone I know the mobile phone is the definitive buddy list, so this is an excellent idea.

Once you've gathered information about who people contact and how often what will you do with it?
just curious, but what makes you think xobni will not be offering the feature soon, and if they will what makes you think that yours will have an advantage to theirs, knowing they are already ahead, have users, and done a good job executing it and will probably offer the services faster than you can!!!
You'll never start a startup with that attitude. ;-)
Though that means that if the adoption of Ruby on Rails in the enterprise becomes widespread enough, it too will take the crown of "the new Cobol". Or it might be .NET

What I mean is the rising population of unskilled so-called programmers who have no business programming entering into the marketplace. I've already seen crap Ruby code floating around, including ones that were "ported" (I use the word lightly) from PHP or Perl. (They copied-pasted the code and change things here and there to make it Ruby-like ... doing things like retaining the $ in front of variables, or ...)

The DailyWTF is a monument to these pseudo-programmers.

When a language is sufficiently popular enough that pseudo-programmers perceive it as a way of getting secure income ... without having to expend skull sweat ... that language is flooded with utter crap. The result? COBOL.

People have said you want the top n-th percent of the programmers. For me, I just want to work with programmers that don't suck.
Ask YC: Do you unit test your Javascript?
As web applications are using AJAX and effects to create a better UI for the user, more and more Javascript is being written.

I unit test most of my server side code with pyunit. But I haven't written a single test for my Javascript yet, but the amount of Javascript I have is almost 2x the amount of server side code.

If you do unit test your Javascript, what unit testing library are you using?
And the memory footprint thing....

I understand the concern for mobile/embedded stuff and don't know much about how well Java does there.

However, when a half gig of RAM for a server costs well under $100, it just doesn't matter much for regular 'ol server apps. Even a "bloated" J2EE app doesn't usually require more than a gig of heap (unless you're doing massive, in-memory caching). Yeah, it's nice to use less memory, but there are 50 other things I'd give equal weight to (the availability of libraries being about 25 of those 50).

As I write this comment, I am tuning a Java rules (rete) app that is using an 11 gig heap :)
Nvidia and its future | Shoot To Kill
Social Networking, Japanese-Style
Not really. It's like asking an architecture firm to not rent office space.
I talked to her today and she was very helpful and knowledgeable. Has anyone else had any experience with her?
End of Support for Netscape web browsers
You're talking about outsourcing non-programmers. The guy who was asking was asking about outsourcing programmers.

I am wary of outsourcing. I've done some work on RentACoder ... most of the people there want cheap work done for crap. I've picked up some projects where I ended up fixing mistakes from other people's code. They were candidates for a DailyWTF submission. Some of these people were from overseas, and some were from right here in the US.

However, outsourcing non-intellectual-property stuff like the virtual assistant or a bookkeeper -- that sounds like a great idea. You don't really want to be messing with non-code-related details while coding.
ex googlrs heart ycombinator startups. c4 urself
There's so much bashing of Java lately. It reminds me of the kind of daytime TV rants that begin with "Well, Oprah, I think that man needs to..."

When people decide to end a relationship, they often start to think of all the ways they have been wronged to justify it. I always think, eh, maybe "that man" was fine, you just got tired of him. You don't need to justify a break-up to me - feel free to go.

Personally, I don't feel as aggrieved by Java as some people do. It was certainly better than working in C++. It certainly made web programming easier. Tomcat was simple to install and configure. Ant was a good build too (but I did start to wonder why all the XML configuration for something that could probably be standardized). Struts was heavy and cumbersome. Hibernate got on my nerves - why do I have to deal with all this XML. Spring was an improvement, but I broke up with Java when I started reading about Inversion of Control and all the design patterns. Why am I doing this when the actual code I care about is going to be, oh, maybe a thousand lines, tops?

"Well Oprah, Java is no good, let me tell you about what he did, in the beginning he was so nice, always bringing me flowers, but now he just sits on the sofa an plays video games, why even last week, when I got home, working hard to pay the bills, he's just sitting there..."

Eh, my take on it is that technologies and programming frameworks move on (often by finding something that was done better in the past and modernizing it, or even just dressing it up). Many if not most of the "breakthroughs" in rails were already present in other languages.

There's really no need to hate Java or decide it's a foul language that has wronged you. Maybe you're just ready to move on. Nothing wrong with that.

(of course, if you're a Lisper who suspected Java was stupid from the very beginning, I suppose you are entitled to your victory fist pump when everyone starts to wake up and get it).

I'm sick of programming in Java now. I'm not sure what's next, but Ruby and Rails certainly opened my eyes to how much more pleasant and productive other frameworks and languages can be. I just don't feel any real need to hate Java, because it did make my life a little better (almost) a decade ago.
Year-End Deals for Mac SW
What is the problem if you learn something in the process?

Do you really think that the world needs more condescending blog posts and less text editors?
I suppose that could be true, but I really think it depends on what it is you're doing. If you're going to be doing something inventive in the backend, some sort of api, or db structure, then yeah I understand that. But I still think there are going to be people out there that look at the site with that stigma. Just something to be aware of.
From the "Info-Tech Research Group" paragraph, this looks like submarine PR by Microsoft.
I was suggesting outsourcing non-critical functions first, to get a feel of it.
the best YC headline this year!
Ask The VC - Should I Outsource My Fundraising?
make it web based and target all web enabled devices. At least that way your not going to limited by device memory.
I dislike this post. Reading between the lines he's negating much of open source software, e.g. "You shouldn't develop B because A exists"
An owner is not a king. If your goal is 100 families who are financially independent there are likely another 1,000 to 100,000 that support them with jobs they need because they haven't made enough to become financially independent. These may be direct employees, or at suppliers, partners, customers. These are voluntary associations, not hereditary.

Successful businesses create and rely upon interdependencies. Feudalism was one structure for reciprocal obligation (certainly post Magna Carta in England) but there are many others. For me the goal is to create products that customers value and build a company that people want to work at because of its shared values, regardless of who is running it. Ken Hendricks clearly embodied a "leadership is service" model and for me is good example of a business leader.
Silly. This is like saying "Stop innovating." Everybody thought search was a done deal when GOOG arrived. Mp3 players all seemed fine until the iPod arrived.