skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is simply that Ebay paid way more than Skype was worth. $90 million in annual revenues is a decent amount of money.

Right, Skype would have been a great deal at a lower price.

But it's a case study that might give future acquirers of other startups pause, as the last paragraph suggests:

"Here's a suggestion to every Internet executive: take a Post-It note, write 'EBay wasted $3 billion on Skype' and stick it to your monitor. Stare at it the next time some hot social whatever-2.0 company comes by and talks about growing fast and finding a revenue model later."
swiss guy, unless gabor you really are german ;)? "schwizer ditch" anyone?
that's my deal
iWon Gets a Makeover
well, as long as the choice is between ruby and python I don't really care. Each has its strengths and weaknesses but they are both pleasant language to write things in. Developer time is worth more than CPU time but I think that Python and Ruby would have to be at about the same level in terms of developer productivity (I use both Python and Ruby but I use Python a lot more than Ruby so maybe there is some Ruby magic that I'm not aware of that would make it MUCH more productive).
Chris Messina is working on something like this ~ http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2007/09/21/announcing-oauth-10-pu...
For the ActionScript part just use your JS text, it's all ECMAScript. Mozilla is even <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/">integrating the ActionScript VM</a> to speed up Javascript.

As for Flex, the API is documented <a href="http://livedocs.adobe.com/labs/flex/3/langref/">here</a>. It's not too bad as long as you remember to wait for completion/ready events from objects before using them. Here are a couple <a href="http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_3">other</a> <a href="http://flex.org/">resources</a> too.

All in all Flex feels kind of clunky. I think Adobe spent more time worrying about a maintaining a clean separation between designers and developers than making either end of it particularly elegant. That said, it's cool to have such a powerful platform running in most peoples' browsers.
update. i suck. better?
WTF. Sorry, but that video did not motivate me to join you company.

Maybe, you will find somebody with similiar sense of humor you guys have, but what the heck?

Looks kinda:
http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1759736
I just used plotr on the weekend to add a nice little pie chart to a view. There's a few rough edges but it was relatively painless.
Solar hurricane rips off comet's tail
ok, i see, all the negative responses are getting negged.

If you don't want real feedback (even negative) than don't post something like that public.
Skype: CEO Zennstrom Steps Down; Only 1/3 of Earnout Paid
I liked the first one, but I must say I'm a little disappointed that there is an assumption that college is a needed experience. Granted, it is in most cases, but - especially for entrepreneurs - it's not always the only way to success.
on the contrary. while we hope that some people enjoy watching it as much as we enjoyed making it, bad press is better than no press at all.
My consulting firm organizes protests outside the offices of companies looking to generate controversy. It's a very lucrative market.
No.

Some people do wacky things on their PC's. I've got a laptop and a PC running XP, do a good chunk of development (granted nothing hardware related) and can't remember the last time I crashed, let alone re-installed.
It was 52.8% for IE7 and 46.6% for IE6.
And there was one single user still using IE 4.01 !!!
Accounting for the 9.6%:

1. 3.0% - IE at day job

2. 3.0% - Modified User Agent string

3. 3.0% - IE Tab in FF

4. 0.6% - Just for the irony of it
Schneier on Security: Threat Modeling at Microsoft
I am confident that at least 75% of students at the average US public university would score 60% or less on that test.
Nope, it's not chris, it's noah kagen of okdork.com
Xobni: Email startup takes on filmmaking
There's nothing I hate more than when my company wants me to pose for a brochure photo or website photo etc. Maybe I'm a "bad employee", but like most devs, I'm just an introvert naturally. However good or bad the video was, there are lots of people who would never want to participate in such silly things, irrespective of the technical sympathy that might exist between themselves and the company.
Microsoft gives U.K. start-ups a helping hand
Re-engineering Engineering
"deuchebags looking for a next victim er.. employee to abuse."

Thats not exactly constructive feedback you've got there. Next time at least spell it right -> "douchebag"
Headquarters at Home and Proud to Be There
I agree with you, it wasn't constructive feedback, so I removed that sentence.
Still, either that video is of bad taste, or I am lacking some sense of humor. I can't say it is motivating at all.
They have redefined hiring too :-)
I think the assumption is that, without a degree, you will not be able to find equivalent experience from which you can draw out the same "how to think like an engineer" perspective.

Who would suggest skipping college? Yet, if you have a clearly great opportunity lined up, it's not a bad thing to leave. And if you get yourself kicked out midterm like I did, you have great motivation to make something happen in the non-college world. When I was at college, there were many stories of guys who flunked out and ended up doing interesting things. Then I became one!
No employees were harmed during the making of this recruitment video.
I thought it was funny, but maybe thats something they are just filtering for. After all, its more enjoyable to work with people you have fun with (and share a sense of humor with).
I think I have the "how to think like an engineer" mentality already, two and and a half years in. Does this mean I can quit now?
I'm sure participation in Xobni's shenanigans is fully opt-in.
It would be awesome if the hits on your site were spread out completely evenly over the course of a month, yet when is that ever the case. Say you were to get dugg, I have to imagine that at a concurrency rate of only 20 reqs/sec your site would probably go down.
"You got a good name and it matches the message you're trying to convey."

Why? Can someone explain the name to me...?
Or, Microsoft employees hitting "Refresh" all day.

With apologies to my MS friends :)
That is a horrible front page. You don't want your users to see that right away. I do understand that you want your users to see right away that your service is "OMG SO EASY" and everything, but throwing them right into the empty personal page is very confusing. You should have a more general front page that explains what's going on succinctly using simple terminology and pictures, with a big "Get Started!" button that drops them into the editing interface that's the current front page.

Alternatively, your front page could be the editing interface, but with the default contents set to an explanation as described above. So the user would just get started by removing your content and adding their own.

I understood your front page, but only after a moment of confusion. Your average user is just going to be confused and scared away by that page. (They have no incentive to put in the effort to figure out what's going on, so it has to be obvious.)

Just my two cents.
Looks cool...I think Fusion Charts is better though!
This reads like it was written by an HR representative at Google. I'm all for hard sciences and engineering but the most financially successful people I've met, been friends with, or worked for all have much different backgrounds than what he is describing.

He makes some other weird points. Economics and mathematics on their own are almost as useless as renaissance literature. (I know, I studied mathematics and economics)

"that's a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself when you hit 30 and you realize you still haven't done anything with your life."

I think he's a bit off base, here. This statement describes most of the 30 something engineers I've met who didn't work at the right startup and therefore didn't become rich. In contrast most liberal artsy people (do artists count, or does "liberal arts" mean people who majored in something like sociology?) seem reasonably content.
Good point, thanks for bringing that up.
That was hilarious. Gabor was great
I've been using YUI for the past few months and it's impressive. Not quite as out-of-the-box as you'd hope but the capabilities are endless.
Also, I think it's time we stop mentioning Scriptaculous/Prototype in the same sentence as YUI, jQuery and Dojo.
I was born and raised in upstate New York. I have never seen an article that better describes the rotting corpse that is the Rust Belt of the United States - "You can't make money with some goofy website! When are you going to get a real job? I hear they're looking for people at the Old Mill." Never mind that the Old Mill, in its heyday, employed ten times as many people as it does now. It just boggles the mind...
that video did not motivate me to join you company

I'm sure that was part of the point. A recruiting video this unusual both recruits and filters.
I actually do have German passport, and that's where I grew up. I can only say a limited number of things in Swiss German.
I dont really like the Home Page, as a 'stupid' user I don't know what to do!

And that background thing has me stuck there in Firefox.

You should really consider redoing the home page...but other than that...it's simple enough to use.
Nice..
i like
geocities -> myspace -> clutterme?

If that's your target market, I think your chances are good; I don't think I'd use it, but if I had a 14 year old sister I'd show it to her.
"Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently." ~Henry Ford
For what it's worth, very few of the very succesfull people I know have an engineering degree. Many have an MBA or JD, though.
On the contrary, I am emotionally scarred by (my own) sad attempt at rapping. :)

I want to start my recovery by issuing a formal apology to the Cocoa Brovaz.

But really, as someone who generally tends towards introversion, I guarantee swift, painful justice for the first person to try labeling someone "not a team player" just because they aren't into stuff like this.

However, it is important that they can laugh things off.

At least for me, it was fun to loosen up a bit.
Das ist sehr gut Gabor. Ich bin eine stinke arschloch vom Peru! Deutscher ist das beste. Meine freundin wurde geboren im Berlin. Ausgenommen, meine deutsche ist scheisse!

Y yo hablo espanol tambien. Porque yo soy Peruano, mi espanol es mejor que mi alleman.

I speak english as well.
maybe erasers weren't allowed or something...
Hacker Music?
Really wondering? What kind of music do you guys listen to? I realize everyone is different, but is there a majority?

Can everyone comment with their favorite artist or group + genre?
I figured I'd start.

Kanye West (& The Roots) + Hip-hop
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work."
- Thomas A. Edison

One of the reasons Henry Ford was willing to risk so much to start an automobile company is because Thomas Edison, who Henry idolized, encouraged him to do so. Edison told Henry something along the lines of "Do it Henry. If I was a young man I think I would start an automobile company."

I think companies like Y Combinator are serving much the same purpose, helping encouraging people to go after their dreams. Most will fail, but they have probably learned a lot more than they would have in a cube, about both software and business. Those that succeed, well, hopefully they will pass the encouragement on. I wonder who Henry Ford encouraged?
> However, most of the people who have a huge impact on the world, outside of pure research and education, do not have PhD's. Draw from that whatever conclusion you think makes sense.

My conclusion is that Marc is being a bit sloppy here. Like 75% of the Y Combinator partners, I have a Ph.D.---and I think graduate (and, indeed, undergraduate) degrees are overrated. But given the small percentage of Ph.D.s even among technical people, it would be very surprising if most people having a high impact had them. More relevant is to ask whether Ph.D.s have relatively more impact than those without doctoral degrees. I don't know the answer, but I think it's a more interesting question.
I use IE, not really sure what the 'hateration' is for since firefox is constantly freezing.
How about... installed for testing and occasionally accidentally used during breaks.
Anything Trip-hop (Massive Attack, Morcheeba, Portishead, Sneaker Pimps, Bjork, AIR, EBTG, Zero 7, Tricky, etc.)
You could also run a VNC server, which provides the same abilities (an X display that runs on a machine, that you can disconnect from and reconnect to later if you wish).

For people who just need to do that the topic says (rather than run apps somewhere they can't see like you need to), here's a simpler solution:

In Linux:

ssh -X user@host:appname

If you want a full X display server, run:

ssh -X user@host:Xnest

If using Windows, get Xming (a Windows X display server) first, and turn on X forwarding in Putty or your other SSH client.
Bay Area hackers: be prepared for the inevitable earthquake
I'm confused: why put a line over the 'o' in 'Xobni', indicating a long vowel, and then proceed to pronounce it 'Zahbnee'?
Cool, another one for Morcheeba here. Been listening to The Antidote as of late (not their most popular I know).
I used to live less than a few hundred feet from the Hayward Fault in Fremont. Then I solved my earthquake problem by moving to Boston.

However, I was listening to a podcast of Mark and Mary Lou Zoback (the cheerful geologists of doom) giving a lecture at Stanford, and I was suddenly reminded that I know a lot of friends, colleagues, and websites that still live in the Bay Area, and it would be a terrible shame to lose any of them to collapsing bookshelves, cheap apartments, lack of fresh water, or week-long communication outages.

(You can find the podcasted lecture on the Stanford section of the iTunes store for free, if you search hard enough; a writeup of it is here: http://daily.stanford.edu/article/2006/4/17/quakeCentennialT... )
While programming, I prefer either baroque classical music or weird glitchy sounding electronic music. When I'm not programming, anything goes.
I think this is software-centric thinking.

If you look at hardware, you really need a Ph.D. to make a serious contribution to theory, and a lot of important founders (Intel springs to mind) had doctorates.
um, im classic rock, led zeppelin, blue oyster cult and stuff

i guess im a little different than most programmers/hackers judging by the other posts
That's probably from a cell phone...
Yeah, I'm another one for Zero 7, or any downtempo electronica while hacking.
Radiohead Releases New Album with Name-Your-Own-Price
Omnivorous classical, but particularly the Renaissance and Baroque periods. My favorite composers are Bach, Dufay, Ockeghem, Morley, Byrd, Mussorgsky, and Respighi. Ensemble Unicorn is my favorite group of performers.
I can't listen to Baroque music while coding. The same brain cells that I'm trying to use for coding get tied up with unweaving the strands of melody.
Static On Skype, Zennstrom Quits
Which one were you?
Most active for me while working (from iTunes): Skye, Coldplay, Keane, Morcheeba, Afro Celt, Zeppelin.
Lately I've been listening Jack Johnson, but I like any kind of music.

I also love to dance Salsa :P
A couple of the questions were surprisingly easy (e.g. find the area of a circle, given its radius), but you're right about most of it.

Interesting how on the English section, the questions were basically trivia. There wasn't much at all in that part testing skills, as opposed to specific knowledge.
Yep, and it's still my #1 place for surfing, nice work.
Favorites are Mozart, Brahms, Bach, Chopin, and Beethoven but like dfranke 'omnivorous classical' is a pretty good description. But I will pretty much listen to anything.

Some of my favorite performers are John Eliot Gardiner, Andre Previn, the Kronos Quartet, Cecelia Bartoli, Murray Perahia, Mitsuko Uchida, Emmanuel Ax, Alison Hagley, Bryn Terfel, and Yo Yo Ma.

And I also often prefer quiet when hacking, and only listen to music to drown out distractions.
Coding Horror: Pushing Operating System Limits
Exclusive: Wetpaint Launches Facebook App - Wiki Whiteboard
Bonobo, Clint Mansell (The guy who scored The Fountain. Try listening to Death is the Road to Awe, it's worth your time), Talking Heads, Moody Blues, Pink Floyd.

I'll mix in some hip-hop if I'm feeling a burst of excitement.
Current favorite hacking music: Pink Floyd, Goo Goo Dolls, Guster, Real McCoy, Dar Williams, bunch of college acapella, Van Canto, Crash Test Dummies, Sophie B. Hawkins, Savatage, Nightwish, Postal Service, Narnia soundtrack, LotR soundtrack, some Dream Theater.
Where would you have put the iTunes icon on iPhone?
silence anyone?
Ambient. It never taxes my brain and helps me focus: Brian Eno (Music for Airports, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks), Sigur Ros, Four Tet, Cliff Martinez (Traffic, Solaris).
It might help if you read his "part 0". Won't necessarily make you agree with his points, but he provides a bit of context:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/09/the-pmarca-guid.html
Nothing like silence.
Same here, but preferably Bach and preferably only 1 or 2 instruments. The Goldberg Variations by Glenn Gould 1955 is a favorite.

Or weird glitchy sounding electronic music. :)
How Users Read On The Web
That's not a very good approach to encryption. It still requires you to trust Google not to send you malicious JS. While I trust Google a lot more than I trust any other company their size, a private key in the hands of ten thousand employees still isn't very private.
Another nod for Zero 7.
Zero 7. Definitely something I would listen to while programming.
I'm a musician, and particularly a composer/arranger/orchestrator, so it's hard for me to listen to things without having them distract me.

Thus, when I want background music that doesn't distract me, I go with something I've listened to about 3,000 times in the past. Doesn't really matter what it is: Schubert sonatas, 70s Herbie Hancock, showtunes ...something that requires the same number of brain cells to take advantage of as a library that I wrote a long time ago and have been using ever since.
Recent rotation:

* Do Make Say Think (recent album I think)
* Alice Coltrane "Journey in Satchidananda"
* Various - "Putamayo World Lounge"
* Hybrid - Live DJ set from Moscow, 2004

In general while hacking, anything ambient, repetitive (electronica) or without vocals (jazz/classical), or vocals in a language I mostly don't understand (tropicalia, death metal, stereolab) is a great soundtrack.

While designing though, no sounds at all! Maybe something really ambient to shut out environmental noise, like Stars of the Lid.
I'll second the zeppelin. Although generally for me its Detroit Techno, it has a lot more in common with led zeppelin than you probably think. Also I listen to a lot of motown as well.
http://www.last.fm/user/kevin143/
No, the original post called them criminal. Which is an asinine argument.
How long before the state gov sends cops to close down his "illegal" restaurant and issues him citation for running a restaurant without a license?

Land of the free... :(
BTW, now that you're at Xobni, is Pairwise RIP?
I'm currently using a laptop with Windows XP, because it isn't mine - if it were, it would have some Linux distro. But I do run a virtual machine with Ubuntu installed. Do I count as Linux or Windows?
Maybe you like being spied on, but most people don't.
What front page do you have?
I'm with you there. Led Zeppelin is my favorite band of all time. And classic rock is the best music of all time. Now if only I could write the best code of all time while listening....
Generally, familiar music. I can't think of any other commonality beyond what stems from the fact that programming doesn't facilitate the ability to listen to new music.

I was going to say--oh, Debussy and Chopin. But why be a snob when I also listen to early Madonna music, and stuff too horrible to mention except anonymously:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dsi8ho1PgKM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI5LWwC-cE8
Hyperlink = www.clutterme.com
or
<a href="http://www.clutterme.com">This Links</a> ... without embedded styles.
The English section, in addition to being beset by trivia, also misspelled 'Bismarck'. And what the hell does Otto von Bismarck have to do with English, anyway?
This was surprising well written. I grew up in Toledo, OH (on the border of Michigan) and this describes the attitude there very well...
Is Favorit a Digg killer?
Mostly progressive rock, jazz, power metal. Favorite artists: Spock's Beard, Savatage, The Strawbs, The Tangent, Gentle Giant, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk, Stratovarius, Rhapsody, Dream Theater, Sonata Arctica.
greg is the one formerly known as logcabin.
I used to love happy hardcore, acid jazz, progressive house, and electro metal, but now i mostly listen to electroclash, eurotrash, synthpop and all of the other hipster variations.
New Technorati CEO Has A Challenge Ahead
Can't wait.

For fans -- email me and I'll send you a link to download a bootleg compilation of live songs appearing on this album.
http://jey.kottalam.net/tmp/clutterme.png
Jackson and his Computer Band. (pardon the pun)
Blah-Blah Text: Keep, Cut, or Kill?
Alright, so the parent poster was not very constructive with his criticism but personally I have no idea what to do with this site. And don't take that to be a reflection of your own abilities as a developer, it just means it's time to push through the next iteration cycle and do better.

A front page should provide a value proposition, either implicitly (allow the user to sample your service in a way that makes its value clear, like google) or explicitly (by stating your value prop, like photobucket). I think the best front pages are hybrids, much like Flickr, which allow you to both quickly sample the service and read how you should be using the site.

Just some food for thought!
Ask PG/YC: How verbose can the YC app be?
We are in the process of submitting our YC application and we do get the feeling that it might be a bit heavy. Any tips on how verbose the application can be or is it purely a case-by-case thingy?
> Graduating with a technical degree is like heading out into the real world armed with an assault rifle instead of a dull knife. Don't miss that opportunity because of some fuzzy romanticized view of liberal arts broadening your horizons -- that's a great way to end up wanting to kill yourself when you hit 30 and you realize you still haven't done anything with your life.

Jesus, what a prick.
I waffle between YUI and Extjs. Ext is slightly smaller for the full stack of widgets and all, but in the way I end up using each, YUI is slightly smaller. YUI is better documented and somewhat better supported do to higher user count, but Ext has some nice widgets. Design of YUI seems a bit more stable, as well. Ext changes pretty frequently.
is each answer less than 120 words?
GreaseMonkey Script to put a YC news search right on the site?
Has anyone made or seen something like this? I think it would be handy.
I think you're fine as long as you have an average of less than 120 words. If some questions are more pertinent to your product, then you can answer longer, just try and be a little shorter on other questions.
it actually depends on the question.. but a couple of 'em go upto 300 words..
Stars of the Lid is great, thanks for the recommendation. I tend to listen to ambient stuff when coding. Shpongle, Bonobo, Boards of Canada, Andrew Coleman, Bill Laswell, Birdy Nam Nam (definitely not ambient), Broken Social Scene are all good.
I was under the impression everything after 120 words gets cut off so I had to revise my 800 word 'What is your company going to make?' answer!
hmm.. interesting.. did PG mention it somewhere? thx for the heads up though :)