skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I highly recommend his book, "On Intelligence".

It's also very interesting the way recent research into the way our vision systems do object recognition match recent advancements in object recognition software. It's all about feature extraction to find invariant information matched against a corpus of extracted features.
World shocked, shocked by Sony's download move
Yes, and then there's always the possibility of a third variable that causes both X and Y, and hence makes it appear as if X causes Y when in reality they are simply correlated. Oh my, statistics is a tricky affair :-)
>I agree that a lot of people want to work more, but I think that's part of the problem.

If you're suggesting the employer has a role to play in forcing employees to do something they don't want to do, I think you'll find bigger issues than the ones I put forth.

>Simply working all day every day doesn't lead to a balanced, healthy life.

That's true, but my employer's role is not to determine what that balance is, and how I live my life. That's my choice.
wow, no kidding, even the voting arrows are the same.
Drop the verification emails, then drop the text about them which is the only thing on your site I read besides the word "music".
The Scriggler is what's money. Show it off first, middle and last. Don't hide it after a bunch of text. Put the ad copy over background images of the laptop with the Scriggler on it. Honestly, it would be better if you had one of those images as your header instead of the album-cover satellite art. Which is great, and yes, it lets us know you're cool, but you're not in the satellite business.

Also, I now have 2 in a Room stuck in my head.
Have you had any luck at underground marketing/promotion?
No, but those conditions make a lot of sense to me in terms of differentiating a "wise crowd" from an "angry mob".
Proving You Can Execute In Your First Meeting with A VC
You're going to have to convince the VCs that you are more than a competent manager; they will ultimately want to know that you are ready to translate your vision into a business. Demonstrating this early on can mean the difference between gaining momentum or losing it...
Agreed. Awesome book. The author also started a company that uses the theories espoused in the book. numenta.com
Yes, I was also surprised at the small sample size. On the flip side this is one of the rare times and article like this says axactly how many people were polled and how they respond.

You've got to admit though, the numbers seem plausable. Nobody I've met has liked the RAZR's UI and YC agree http://www.paulgraham.com/fixrazr.html
"It practically backs itself up"

I'll rank that up there with "Step on it! We're only doing 90!" as famous last words.
The typography and the white-on-gray color scheme hurt my eyes. The animation is annoying: every time it changes, my attention jumps back to it and I'm distracted from whatever else on the page I was reading. Oh, and <grahambot>take half the text off your front page</grahambot>.
Coding Horror: Keeping The Menu Simple
Yeah, I agree. It's sort of an arms race - publishers might also try sneakier ways of slipping ads in. I have a feeling that 99% of users aren't going to get that excited about it unless the ads get overbearingly intrusive.
The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that it's all learned. -- Bruce Ediger

(pedantry: http://groups.google.com/group/comp.editors/msg/882fd4ef853e... )

It's definitely intuitive for marsupials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pouch_%28marsupial%29
I went to your website. I read it all. I have a question:

What is it about??

This is not a joke.
Is Desire a Priority in Your Site?
Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore pg. 154 : Define the Battle. Is a great book that discusses the positioning process.
My one suggestion comes straight from the mouth of Steve Krug:

"Take out half of the words on the page. Then whatever is left, take out half of that"
James Gosling: The Green UI
A blast from the past.
PM actually stands for "Product Manager", and she wasn't in a position to directly kill anything, though she was very much against the ads (the story makes it sound as though she quickly changed her mind, which is not what I remember).
Desperation Time? Synthasite Gives Stock Away To Users
Hire IQ: 7 hiring tips for startups
"I was born brilliant. See what education did!" :)
Apple: The best PR gig in the Valley
Operation Enduring Start-Up
iPhone was the best selling smartphone in July
100% of this RAZR owner is never ever going to buy Motorola again.

I downgraded myself back to my old Nokia.
scriggleit.com is way better than scriggle-it.com
Using del.icio.us as a Writing Summarization Tool
Maybe the author considers grad school to be part of childhood :)
Yeah, we own both addresses. I linked to the hyphenated address for clarity's sake. But you're right. We use the non-hyphenated version in all email correspondence and the like.
Nice looking design. I've been involved in the music industry, and I grokked pretty immediately what you're selling--so you might not need to take the comments to the contrary here too seriously. It might be a bit wordy for musicians, particularly bass players, though, so you might try to pare it down a bit.

Any musician knows about the merch table, and they know they want the customers name and address fast and in a format that they can read (probably a quarter or more of paper mailing list signups are illegible and lost). They also know they've got a laptop on the road with them. You might make it clear that the installed software doesn't need internet access (because clubs don't consistently have wifi). I assume that to be the case, since I know you'd have no other reason for making an installable app.

URL is a bit long and tough. Couldn't get "scriggle.com"? Maybe try a different name, instead of adding a special character (hyphen is hard to remember, and scriggleit would be hard to read). Just a thought. I don't think it'll kill you, but word of mouth will suffer--and word of mouth is how this thing will spread. Musicians talk before and after the show with the bands they're playing with...someone will ask, loudly because clubs are never quiet, "Hey, what's that software you're using? scribblit? wiggleit? fizzlemit? Oh, squiggleit! I got it. Cool, I'll go check it out when I get to the hotel tonight." If you send stickers and cards and other logo-encrusted schwag to your customers, they might remember to hand them out when people ask...but I wouldn't bet on it.
Motorola isn't doing very well financially either.. Nokia is supposedly blowing them away in device sales growth. Maybe its because people now realize (as this article points out), Motorola phones generally suck.
I like the point about keeping cool in tense situations and not making disparrageing remarks about co-workers. You just can't break that rule.
> What is it about??

That is the kind of feedback I was looking for. One of the things we struggle with is good information presentation.

It's a mailing list management system for bands. Or it was. Now we call it "fan management and data collection", and we have client-side software that lets fans sign up for bands' mailing lists at concerts. And there's more snazzy stuff in the works that we'll be unveiling in (hopefully) a week or so.
Man that tortoise picture shocked me at first. I won't tell you why.
Thanks for the clarification Paul.
Go easy on the egregious Flash animation.

Also, realize that you're getting feedback from Paul Graham fanboys and people who read "productivity blogs" and "startup news" websites.
However you choose to describe it, do it using words that your users will use. That is what they will search for and that is what they will understand.
John McCarthy turns 80
What I find amazing are problems like this:

What is the probability of a chopper crashing or someone shooting a rocket at it? I don't know, but I can say that when I see a chopper on TV, the probability is around 80%. Still, when I see a real life chopper, I know that it's probably not going to crash or getting shot at.

Do I know that because of any experience I have? No, I haven't seen many choppers in real life and not once have I seen one take off or land. But I know about the workings of the media. I know about why people use choppers and that they wouldn't use them if they always ended up crashing and burning.

Even if a program is very artificially intelligent, it's still very hard to get training data that matches that mixture of sensual experience and logical reasoning.

It's a hard problem. I still believe it can be done, but we're not nearly there yet. I hope Hawkins makes some progress without a big disppointment that discourages further research.
If she was still very much against the ads after seeing your implementation, then yes, the story is very different. It says she changed her mind while waiting for you to come into the office after your all-nighter implementing it.
Some. Word of mouth has worked really well. We also get quite a few signups from people who see it in use and check it out.
Gotta get a domain name without a dash.
We do have one. As I noted elsewhere, I linked to the dashed version for clarity's sake, but it was probably a bad idea. The non-hyphenated one is in "production" use.
Awesome. Thank you for the suggestions and commentary. :)
The sad thing is that at bigger companies like IBM dozens and dozens of billion-dollar ideas have been rejected out of hand for no good reason, far out of line with unfortunate serendipity. IBM rejected xerography, minicomputers, personal computing, and ignored the work its researchers did on relational databases.

Back in the 19th century, there were people who thought telephony was a lousy idea.

Things will always be like this.
This is not your father's telecom industry, Part 1: The future of connecting people
Very interesting idea but I'd have to agree with the original poster: it's very hard to figure out what it's about! I went to the site, started reading text to the left and was distracted by the flash animation to the right. So I watched it. And guess what, I couldn't make heads or tails of it! I don't know if it's the style, the fonts or what... but I was clueless as to what the app does. Only when I watched it the second time did I make a connection.

PS: The background of the flash anim is HORRIBLE! It's EXTREMELY distracting.... never use high contrast backgrounds. Never!
If PG and YC are such awesome hackers, why does news.yc use spacer GIFs?
Spacer gifs are present on paulgraham.com as well. C'mon mang, it's 2007, not 1997. CSS and semantic markup are the way to go.
I particularly like the "neighbors" feature, which shows you people who have similar tastes as you. You can then see what they're listening to that you aren't. Also PureVolume (http://purevolume.com) is excellent for listening to independent music.
Furthermore, links which appear to perform non-idempotent actions (voting) which are sent as GET requests seem kind of sketchy.

Ever hear the horror story about what happens when Google rolls through your CMS that has the "delete" button as a link?
I wouldn't buy Motorola to begin with. I bought my cell phone from Amazon.com, and the RAZR got pretty torn up in the reviews I read. So I opted for a Nokia, and have never been less than pleased with it.
Bill Gates: Allowing piracy in China was a great decision
Because we're smart enough to realize that html is object code?

For all I know, my macroexpansions are ugly too. The whole point is that I don't have to look at them.
I've wondered about that, too. One guess: it makes the design harder to steal (but not harder to copy). With CSS, you can just reuse someone else's format -- not so with spacer .gifs.
Duly noted, on both counts.
Startup trends: Internet connection everywhere will arrive soon
Knowing how to learn is "something". And if you include non-conscious activities apart from those that involve systems normally considered conscious (bodily functions), then we "know" almost everything just in our brain stems.
Has Technorati Stopped Counting?
Chicago Area Y Combinator Readers Meetup
hey, anyone at that time that wanted to keep something free was against advertisments, and many were trying to find a way to do just that.
obviously you are too young to remember that, and obviously Google did it first with Paul and AdSense. A lot of ad skepticals changed their view of ads when adSense came. So, I would say its good that she recognizes that
Scientist maps own DNA
i'd cut the initial sign-up form to the essentials.
unless the search indexer has registered, logged in, and posting stories and comments, its a non-issue
Voting and deletion are both idempotent, they just aren't side-effect free. The weaker condition of idempotence is all you need for GET, because it's sufficient for guaranteeing that caching won't break things. The solution to the problem with Google is to not let anonymous users delete pages irrevocably.
What's also interesting are internet start-ups that will accept samples of your DNA, decode it, and then give you a profile of you genetic weaknesses.
http://www.23andme.com/
http://www.navigenics.com/
Security through... obsolescence? =)
History of Boston VC's and the web (Cartoon)
seen on Scott Kirshners blog
you know sometimes you got to spend more than 5 seconds to understand something...
Video conference units are awesome in work from home developer scenarios. When collaborating on code, the ability to see the guy at the other end coding away, is soooo much better than wondering if he hung up or got disconnected when he stops talking to think or type. It really must be tried to be believed. (And understanding Indians is a lot easier when you can see as well as hear them:)). Also, with these things available, there is even less reason for developers not to work out of private offices.

YC should convince Tandberg or Polycom to provide them some samples for a lower cost. I'm sure some founders could find ways to put them to good use, and the manufacturers could get some exposure in markets where they're not well represented.
Cool idea! Couple thoughts:

- Agree that the front page is very busy and wordy.

- I expected that you could click on any of the icons on the left (Code, Mail, Kit, etc.) to learn more about the offerings. "About" has more about the products, but I usually expect About to describe the founders or contact info, etc.

- I would leave off all the "coming soon" features. Announce them when they are ready.

- Agree with the poster that news.yc isn't your target market. I'd find some bands, buy them a coffee, have them look at your laptop & get their opinion.

- Bonus comment ;-) Bands must get sick of trying to get their gigs listed on all the different sites (myspace, purevolume, etc.), having a solution that could push that info to all those different sites would be interesting part of promoting shows.
No one told users this.
The evolution of my own methods has largely been due to my own self directed education: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
New Genome Map Shows We're Way More Diverse Than We Thought
Top 10 programming languages of the future (results are up)
Yes, that's fine as long as your logged in users don't use some form of "web accelerator" that pre-fetches "delete" links.

Using get instead of post for these kind of actions is just asking for trouble.
What's Scheme?

Just kidding.

Not really.
The last time pg had to do design work or perish (figuratively speaking) was ten years ago. It'll take him a while to get up to speed on all this new-fangled technology.

Besides, it works in all browsers, is reasonably accessible, and if it doesn't make him uncomfortable to work with it...why does anyone care?
Scriggle it. Just a little bit.
Scriggler is DEFINITELY the money. Guy who wrote it must be AWESOME. >.>
BetaHouse Incubates Web 2.0
Thank you for your thoughtful comments. They're definitely appreciated.

> Bands must get sick of trying to get their gigs listed on all the different sites (myspace, purevolume, etc.), having a solution that could push that info to all those different sites would be interesting part of promoting shows.

In the works!
One of the speakers at our YC session had a great quote: "It just doesn't matter." The site delivers interesting stories and commentary on a topic I care about - who cares what HTML it uses?
Martin Fowler Bliki: Customer Loyalty Software
Mom's Genes or Dad's? Map Can Tell.
B2B Opportunities for Web 2.0 Startups
Why Functional Programing Matters
RAZR is your typical form over function product: it looks great but performs horribly. Usability is absolute crap too.
"List/Scheme" ? No Erlang? Bzzzzzzt.
My attention span is far too short to understand what this is.
Is this a YC applicant/winner?
Prism: Coalition of journal publishers fighting free online access to research
Nope. Actually we've never taken/sought VC, and we've been working on the thing for about a year.
Taped Episode of Raw - TvByDemand | Forums | WWE
This was my impression after reading a valleywag article. Probably bad form on my part, but whatever.

Also, I doubt I'm "too young" to remember much about google, since I remember when it didn't exist.
Man, i'm 0 for 2 today.
I take the BOFH outlook on this: that problem is isomorphic to the problem of a user leaking his account credentials to a malicious third party and should be dealt with in the same manner.
When did "ajax" become a programming language?
That was Robert. I've never heard him complain about anything the way he complained about the Razr's software. After a few months he gave up and got a Nokia.
Opera 9.5 Alpha 1 Released Today
What a funny consequence of having a massively successful product. The design was so successful, that they sold so many phones, that they lost tons of customers.

If this were a failure in every way, then it wouldn't be as much of a problem for a brand. But because it was well executed in one dimension, it will be incredibly destructive.
Responding to Richard Dawkins's pestering his fellow atheists to "come out", I mention that I am indeed an atheist. To count oneself as an atheist one need not claim to have a proof that no gods exist. One need merely think that the evidence on the god question is in about the same state as the evidence on the werewolf question.

Hopefully this will outrage lots of founders so they will refuse to use Lisp, thus giving me another competitive advantage.

I would like to take this opportunity to recommend C#, PHP, and ASP.NET to my prospective competition. Oh, and especially Java.
Super Stealth Search Engine; Google Has Definitely Noticed
GooglePhone PR in the hands of CEO's girlfriend
> 2. Windows NT4

Downarrow for blog spam needed.
New tech killing cinema, says Scott
Ok I'm really interested in Monterssori for my unborn child. So perhaps the graduates here can help me out a bit. Why is it a frozen curriculum? I appreciate Montessori made great improvements in teaching retarded children but surely any methodology advances?

I guess you could say if it works why change it, but I'm suspicious of what seems like dogma.
In my opinion, new tech brings me movies i want to view which might never make it to the big screen.
The design of the hardware was successful, not the software.
CSS is ugly. For anyone who's used it throughout the years, it was consistently poorly-documented and incompatible across different browsers. Standards compliance? What's that?

A lot of deprecated methods are still used because they work reliably, whereas the replacement often didn't, until much, much later. People remember the pain and bugginess and so you lose the early adopters even if the problems eventually get fixed. Cf. Apple III, g++, MySQL.
thats true. [adding to the TODOs for my web app. :sigh:]
Yeah the flash with the moving words on the circular background actually gave me a bit of a head ache, seizure like...

Besides that I really like the site and the product I know a band that had me write a similar one off app in rails so they could have a laptop and have people sign up at their merch table.
The New Economics of Music, or, why stealing feels so right
This article (part 1 and 2) has helped me think critically about new models for selling music, along with the process of discovering other kinds of user-generated content.
By design, I meant "industrial design"... It looked great, but worked like crap, so it really hurt their image worse than if it sucked all around.
Social Network Ad Spending Keeps Rising
Projected $900MM in 2007, $1,380 in 2008.
Using some form of "web accelerator" is asking for trouble. I consider Paul's method better than requiring Javascript to vote or making the voting links some wacky kind of button element.

If HTML had a method="post" option on <a>'s then it would be no problem to always use the proper HTTP verb, but we have to satisfice with what we've got.
You can just add rel="nofollow" to those links, by the way.

Edit: Or so I thought. I'm wrong.

It turns out there's no standard for this, so who knows what you can do today. But practically, Google Web Accelerator doesn't prefetch links with a query string, at least currently. So Paul's voting links are A-OK with GWA. And that's the only one that you need to worry about, at least today.
HTML is object code only because you don't have a dedicated designer who wants to make design decisions and changes without requiring the programmer's time. For news.yc that's fine, but for many business sites, having HTML automatically generated in a designer-opaque manner is inconvenient. Eventually you want to hand off the design to someone who is good at design, and having to find someone good at design and good at the programming language you use limits the pool of designers.

The usual alternative to html-as-object-code is to use a template system, but template systems seem to move as a group (and individually during development) toward being a way to write your usual language, but surrounded by HTML, which has the same problems I outline above, since the designer still has to mess with what's really application code. I suppose this is because template systems are usually designed by programmers, for programmers.
do all web accelerators obey that?
You have a major flaw in your logic for Wildfire: the fact that "we associate with people who have similar tastes" does not imply that "we associate ONLY with people who have similar tastes". I'm interested in startups, but a few of my Facebook friends are. If I bombard them with startup news, most of them will be annoyed.
The hardware actually sucks just as much as the software. Cingular knows this. Try to get optional insurance for a RAZR and you will be politely told that it is not available for that model. That should tell you something..
Why don't you just say that "applications are hard, particularly those with a UI"? ;-)
All the good ones follow specifications and good practices religiously. But I've never met a good one.
Soon after Windows NT4 lost popularity as a programming language.
(I'm the author.) Yes, Erlang is where I've gone. I'm still learning, but it hasn't taken long to get me up-and-running more than proficiently, and I'm loving it so far
does apple do this? if not, they should consider doing the same thing
One might also wonder why the vote URL contains the username? The cookie identifies the user so the url can either match that, in which case the vote is recorded, or not, in which case it returns "user error."

But I do note the board does work well: is always up, does what it's supposed to, is easy to use, seems secure, and thus it just doesn't matter.
Thanks for asking, I double-checked and there are of course not even any informal standards for web accelerators, apart from their common appeal to the HTTP 1.1 standard when the issue of link following safety comes up:

http://webaccelerator.google.com/webmasterhelp.html#prefetch...

I've edited my post. Thanks for your reply.
I agree. I cannot stand CSS fanboys one bit.

CSS is awesome for many things--but blindly using it everywhere isn't a smart choice.