skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Visual Basic 6 was innovative for its time - garbage collection, limited dynamic typing, foreach-style iteration. It compiled to bytecode and ran reasonably efficiently.

VBA works very well for its intended purpose, which is creating simple macros for Word and Excel. The idea of systematically ensuring that there was a 1:1 match between what you could do by hand and what you could automate with VBA rather than only exposing a limited subset of the program to an extension language is a pretty good one, and a substantial part of the reason there's no way in hell a hardcore Excel user would switch over to any of the web-based spreadsheet gadgets out there.

But, yes, programming in pre-.NET Visual Basic (which is really just C# with Basic-style syntax) is pretty infuriating, because the hard stuff is not hard, it's impossible.
Genetically modified 'supermouse'.
oh no i meant igoogle. this is basically just your bookmarks with a google search bar, right?
Free is more complicated than you think
That's what working on commission does. Tipping is just working on commission but with a bunch randomness and social rules as obtuse as victorian era manners.
plus the statistics, which are used to auto update the site monthly to ensure the best links are placed up top.
Why Google Turned Into a Social Butterfly
thats a very good suggestion. we discussed that, but the idea is to make the best start page. we think the most important things are:
1. fast
2. clean
3. google search bar
4. links

and adding that feature would detract from 1 and 2. our goal is to make the best start page for as many people in the web 2.0 crowd as possible. hopefully we can please a lot of people(1-20%), although we know we can't please everyone.
thanks. you're right, it's great for my homepage. the idea is to make it the best page for 1-20% of the web 2.0 community. i made one for my college as well, and it was mainly just for my homepage, but there are a lot of people that don't like to make their own homepages or customize thinks like igoogle, so we're trying to provide this segment with a great product.
Fair enough, but I doubt there is much of an overlap between the "web 2.0"/hacker community and the kind of people who don't like to customize their homepage.
Yeah, the reflections are all wrong. Definitely photoshopped.
in short no, the thing that made vb popular was it RAD stuff. Ruby on its own does not have windowing etc. Then again maybe it is when you look at the uptake of it. I still think people miss the point of vb and get far to elitist about whatever their fav language. why would I write a 5000 line C program when I could do it in a 1000 a lot quicker? If the end result is the same nothing is lost by doing it in vb. I live by use the best tool for the job.
lol. good point. i guess we should target it toward the lazy web 2.0 crowd.
Maybe it's just me (and this is more of a general comment to start pages), I don't see the need for a search bar in start pages, I can easily (cmd/ctrl+k) go to the search bar in the browser and it's not that much harder.

As for your site, bmaier's suggestion is good, but if you are concerned about speed maybe you can do some ajax request on some local cached copy of the latest headlines?
Devices Enforce Cellular Silence, Sweet but Illegal
Your concept is good but I think you are simply going after the wrong niche. Web2.0 guys have bookmarks/tabs and once they fire FF they probably have all tabs open and they can use the google search box on the toolbar. You should apply the same concept to sports for example and create startup page with the hottest sport website and links ...Then go after teenagers and launch the Gossip or Hollywood startup page...Before you know it you will have all these niche communities. That's just my 2 cents.
Stix Scientific Fonts Reach Beta Release
Right. All I am saying is, if a 20 to 22 year old with no commitments is given a) A chance to hit it out the park and get rich or b) Become employee #21,765 at a market rate wage and equivocates, why try to push it any further? You can lead them to the water, but if they don't drink....whatever.

At the end of the day it's YC's call and really none of my business. But every now and then I get on my soapbox...
Canadian Study: Piracy Boosts CD Sales
A plain google search isn't very useful, but what MIGHT be useful is a google custom search that has all the sites you listed pre-included. (See http://www.google.com/coop/cse/ ).

If you had that and included the most recent headlines from the sites you listed, it might be useful enough to get me to try it.
Yes very true. This niche probably isn't the best for this type of product. Our goal is to create something for us to use and share it with the community. I would encourage anyone interested to talk to me about how you could go about building a startup around creating these types of start pages. We've created a handful of pretty successful ones with 100k+ unique monthlys so there probably is a small startup opportunity here.
A study I'd like to see done
Ask the following question to twentysomething males whose net worth is not currently above $250k:

Suppose someone offered you the following wager: consider your net worth on the day that you turn 55. If it is greater than $n, where n is adjusted for future inflation, then your worth doubles. Otherwise, you lose all but the last $5000 of everything you own. If you are in debt, your debt doubles. What is largest value of n for which you would accept this wager?

I'd be fascinated by the results of a controlled study which compared how answers to this question varied across cultures. Anyone want to posit any hypotheses, or give their personal responses to the question?

Edit: perhaps the question should be changed to "consider the highest that you net worth has ever been...", to accomodate the case of people who have already gotten very rich but given most of it away.
Google Custom Search might add value. Anyone know if there are any successful custom search engines?
I'm with you: I do the same thing(ctrl+k) and rarely if ever use the search bar. But a surprising number of people still do.

The AJAX suggestion is good. One of our requirements though is minimal effort on our part(we've got a real startup as our primary job).
For me: n <= ~10,000.

This isn't a very enticing wager--it seems like I have a lot more to lose than to gain. If I set n at, say, $1M, then I might win $1M, which would be nice, or I could end up with basically nothing, which would be devastating. You might have a more interesting wager if $5000 were changed to something more substantial, like $250k.
What current problem are you solving exactly?
Ask YC news: are you supposed to get a karma point for submitting a link?
Guys, no offense, but you're a few years late to the static homepage party.

Here's a random idea: how about a service which turns any webpage into an rss feed? It'd basically provide a compiled feed of text delta's, which can be added to an existing feed reader. It'd be helpful for people who want to keep up to date with "feedless" sites.
37signals on taking outside investment and rewriting halfway through a new product
I don't think so. You get karma points when people vote you up.
You need to get voted up. And a good way to get voted up is to say something wise or, better yet, funny. The more the better.

That means it pays to be a karma karma karma comedian.
Yeah that makes sense. Whether the obstacles are there or just a phamtom created by our ego, my point is that the "effort" here is more like a round-trip journey, which can be quite enjoyable even if you'll eventually come back to the same place. Do we need that? I don't know, maybe not. Is it fun? I bet it is.
Whilst no IDE style tooling, rails is kind of a "RAD" (non visual) tool for classic style web apps. What with all the scaffolding and only writing the minimal code to deal with actions etc.

So perhaps rails is the new VB would be more fair.
> If I set n at, say, $1M, then I might win $1M

I'm not sure whether you're understanding the wager correctly. If you win, you double your entire savings, not just gain $n.
You absolutely NEED the RSS feeds for each of these sites, otherwise it's just a bunch of uncustomizable links; totally worthless.

I'll stick with my iGoogle at the moment.
A page of links can't be launched. It can be UPLOADED, but not launched.
There's some statistics behind it too(both backend and javascript--the latter only coming with a certain probability) to update it based on what's popular.
Thanks for the feedback aj. I don't think it's totally worthless. Thousands of people use our similar sites daily for different niches. I don't know if this niche will work, but there are at least a portion of this area who like something like this.
A very small one: getting you to the pages you use the most faster. We're aiming to help a small proportion (1-20%) of people in this niche who don't want to do any customization.

Once you build up a decent amount of traffic, you can add a few things that can only work if you have a steady flow of people using the same start page. We hope to replicate the success of some other niches in this market.
Oh like 12 years late. I remember making my own start page in 1995. But I think this one's a pretty good start page. I think it's better than google.com for most people who are in the web 2.0 community but don't want to update their own start page.
In my opinion, this is true at Berkeley as well.
Would a wikipedia-like site to create free illustrations work?
Although most of us can write, few of us can draw. Moreover, it's not obvious whether the sort of collaboration that goes on with wikipedia would work with drawing.
Oh, that's true. Still, I think the wager is too scary for most people to accept for large values of n. Even if I set n=1M and have 10M when I'm 55, gaining the extra 10 million will make significantly less of a difference to my life than losing all but $5k will.
The pixels are off. I can tell. I look at pixels a lot.
We advertised in Facebook once. We never met anyone who saw either this ad or the FB ad, so we never bothered again.
Quite a study. I'd like to see a study in which a group of very young children (even babies) are made to populate a controlled environment (where they are served by Automat-style food dispensers) in order to see what form of government they develop in such an untarnished state of nature.

My guess? Anarcho-syndicalism tempered by naptime.
It's real. We made this in the winter of 2006. Graphic design by Kevin Hale of Wufoo.
Apps Already Coming for Google's New OpenSocial
Then how come CD sales are falling?
why do i care what the most popular links to blogs are? if i like techcrunch i go to techcrunch, i could care less if 10 more people clicked it the day before. this doesn't do any value adds.
This guy is such a party loyalist. Microsoft only owns a sliver of Facebook, but DD takes their side as predictably
as if they were part of MS.
that's the point of the study
It would be very interesting to see a plot of revenue growth vs percentage of nonwhite pixels.
Go Hokies! (VT CS '05)
My guess is something closer to Lord of the Flies.
Should you have to pay to see research your taxes paid for?
I'd actually say the man is more pro-startup than pro-MSFT (he was an early employee at Napster, Groove, and others). I think he honestly believes Facebook has built a great product and a great community which open social won't dislodge. I tend to agree.
The Peel P50: 132 lbs and street-legal in England
Are you really looking at it from the point of view of running a angel investment firm, or from the point of view of a someone not wanting more competition either for YC places or in the startup world?
TorrentFreak misinterpreted the study.

From http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/epic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/en/ip01462...

>In the aggregate, we are unable to discover any direct relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchases in Canada... That is, we find no direct evidence to suggest that the net effect of P2P file-sharing on CD purchasing is either positive or negative for Canada as a whole.

>However, our analysis of the Canadian P2P file-sharing subpopulation suggests that there is a strong positive relationship between P2P file-sharing and CD purchasing. That is, among Canadians actually engaged in it, P2P file-sharing increases CD purchasing.

So they concluded that file sharing has no overall impact which is a ridiculous conclusion because it seems blindingly obvious that file sharing is hurting CD sales. They concluded that among those that engage in file sharing, those that file share more are likely to buy more music, which makes sense because the most active file sharers are probably the biggest fans of music.
Maybe because they're not a preferred format anymore and are antiquated? Seriously, I hate CDs. They're bulky, not "high density" enough anymore (one CD holds only 72min of music) and I need to spend 10 min on ripping and encoding them to make them usable in my preferred player (iPod). When is the last time you've seen someone carrying a portable CD player? I think that says it all.

Record industry is peddling accessories for buggies and everyone's driving cars now.
I'd say about $900,000 ( in 2007 dollars).

My logic is that I'd be approaching retirement age. I could/would definitely plan my career so that I had enough money to retire comfortably, which would require about $1.5 million. I'm saying less than that just to be safe (and in case I really want to switch to a less lucrative/more fulfilling career). In reality, I think I'll make a lot more than $1.5 million, but it's a little too risky to bet on.
just wondering - thanks!
Combating Piracy: Earth To Big TV
Being an entrepreneur type (at least I like to think so), I can't stand working for someone else. I hate it, I absolutely can't stand to sell myself short, which is what I feel working or someone else is. That said, before I started reading PG's essays, I had no idea of the "other option". I hadn't even considered web startups or not working for someone else. I didn't even know what it was that bothered me about working for other people; I always just thought it was the "daily grind" getting old. Of course, I realize now that I just felt like I was getting all I could out of my abilities, like I (hopefully) could in a startup.

So while I may not have been "looking forward" to getting a job, that was all I ever considered. I think that may be true for a lot of people. Now, of course, I don't even consider it, except as a last resort. I can't even stand being tied to the work associated with my Fellowship (for grad school), and that is much more open-ended.

I guess my point is that advertising like this is definitely valuable. There are individuals out there like myself who have the drive and the talent and simply aren't aware of any opportunities outside of the status quo. Thank goodness I took that random Lisp course....
I've been reading his blog for a very long time (more than 18 months) and I've NEVER seen him not kowtow the official MS line. Try to find one post in his archives that does not parrot official MS line.
I gave you back some... but it was still a pretty crappy attempt at a joke :-).
A Library of Required Reading for doing Business on the Web
Please note I'm not saying you guys are unable build a great site; however I am saying this isn't it. Keep chipping away at the idea and I wish you guys the best of luck!
Stephen Hawking - "Humans have to expand beyond earth to survive"
Oh boy George, here we go again.
Six teams finished, looks like it will be a close call.
http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/422974... - Popular Mechanics live blog
Although to be purely fair, if it's ysearch.com vs google.com then Y! is the obvious winner.
Yeah. Marginal utility has to be taken into account as a confounding factor.
I guess you didn't read this one where I rip a Microsoft lawyer for dumping on Google? http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2007/03/micro...

I have been in the software business for 25 years and been on the management teams of 5 startups. I have been at Microsoft less than 3 years and haven't drank the Kool-Aid. However, I don't buy the Microsoft is evil argument either.

I rarely write about Microsoft. In fact I write about Google and lots of startups about 80% of the time. That said, if you want to disagree with my point of view anytime...that is fine. It is a free country.

Don
Looks as if the UF car didn't finish. Oh well, better luck next year.
kind of like drawball.com?
It's only a confounding factor to the extent that the shape of the curve varies across cultures. The only reason that comes to mind for any such variation would be the availability of charitable handouts or government welfare, and that's objective enough to easily factor out.
Imagine a car accident in one of these... ugh.
Heh, so among a relatively homogenous group, the first two answers I've gotten vary by a factor of 90. Nice.
OpenSocial offers a way for other social networking sites to implement an API -- e.g. play catch-up with Facebook. Yet playing catch-up isn't the way to beat your competition. These other sites need to find a way to use own unique strengths to differentiate themselves from Facebook (and each other).

Really, the biggest thing OpenSocial has going for it is Google's support and the integration between OpenSocial and the Google "platform". Third-party apps that take advantage of GMail would definitely be awesome. But that's because that plays to Google's unique strengths, rather playing catch-up to Facebook's. Doing the latter would be like Facebook trying to do e-mail and search.
The problem is that the result that we're talking about -- becoming recognized as the top person in your field -- is a moving target. It's relative.

In an absolute sense, research has very much reduced the amount of effort required to listen to world-class classical music in your home -- you used to have to practice until you could play like Mozart, but now you just buy an iPod and download high-quality recordings of the world's best musicians for a couple bucks.

Researchers can also help you effortlessly beat the world chess champion -- they invented Deep Blue. (Soon to be available in laptop size at your local Best Buy.)

We've even built decent simulations of the experience of playing a world-class rock guitar solo in front of thousands of fans (Guitar Hero II), coordinating an attack on a medieval fortress (World of Warcraft) and, yes, beating Tiger Woods at golf ("EA Sports Tiger Woods PGA Tour '07").

But, of course, it's hard to be proud of these things. Our society still finds ways to respect the people who put in the hard work to actually be Tiger Woods, and who resist the temptation to just play golf on the Playstation like the rest of us.
Pitching to a Venture Capitalist by Guy Kawasaki
VCs Are Not Like Your Parents
7 Steps to Land and Leverage an Angel Investor
xkcd reference ftw!
Novelty may have been a factor.
i think its a fascinating problem and don't feel current options (adverts or donations) are addressing. tim orielly points out that there is not a one size fits all solution.
when the content/media/art is the product it becomes increasingly more important than if your a casual blogger.
This is probably a personality thing. Many of my friends at MIT loved 6.001/SICP/Scheme and most of them at least respected it. Personally the class rewired my mind in fundamental ways and I appreciate that.

That said I trust the folks running the Course VI department. I have not looked into the specifics of the new program but I suspect it is a fine program.
why is this in hacker news?
I've been writing Rails apps for a while. While I still use scaffolding, I almost always start changing them after I generate it it. A lot of the better Rails dev on #rubyonrails write their stuff from scratch. People who want to take scaffolding to something more capable usually use a plugin such as ActiveScaffold.

If you want to point to anything "RAD" in Rails, it is the ActiveRecord ORM, and more recently, the RESTful controllers.

Hanging out on #rubyonrails, there are a lot of Rails newcomers who come into the channel with little or no programming background, or those that do, come in without having first learned Ruby. They expect to be able to have Rails do the work for them, but Rails doesn't replace the need for a programmer to be able to think. Even a highly expressive language will have difficulty helping someone who has nothing to express.
Sadly, you're describing me and quantum mechanics.
Because the topic isn't as rigidly defined as many people think
sounds a bit similar to VB - although of course it was (deliberately) a far less capable language, it still had the same issue of people expecting just to sprinkle a "little code" behind the scenes and have it work.

My (distant) memory of most RAD tools of the 90s was similar to scaffolding - in some cases it could get you started but for any reasonable app, you tended to build stuff up by hand or dynamically etc.

I still think it bears a lot of similarity. Now with Sun and MS "blessing" ruby as a glue language, it seems even more likely to follow a similar path, for better and worse.
NYTimes Blogrunner v. TechMeme
> ysearch.com

Never knew about it! Thanks.
NYTimes uses Hadoop, S3, EC2, and some custom code to handle PDF generation for 4TB worth of data
Magnetic models
How to start a Lisp User Group
World's oldest source code repositories
Are Microsoft and Yahoo working on a new web language to replace JavaScript?
Google's OpenSocial and XSS exploit in Ning
Tell it to the Catholic church.
It also means that waiters at expensive restaurants can expect to earn more in tips. So, they get the more experienced waiters.
Maybe so.

I'm fully anticipating the day when an entire generation of non-US kids who grew up with the OLPC XO, and expect Python and Squeak to be in "grown up" computers.

Ruby is like a Japanese stone garden or a bonsai tree. Maybe it'll stay weird and Japanese enough to keep the tourists from stumbling in drunk, late at night.
Well, it has the problem that people may answer surveys differently than the same question in real life.

It looks like it tries to expose expected future earnings and risk (avoidance|tolerance). Did you mean that? If so, that relationship may show in asset allocation choices by people over their lifetime. Data from any tax firm would work....

Also, why focus on 20-year-olds with less than 250K? Have you already established that current net worth and/or age has a quantifiable impact on risk aversion?

Patrick
Not high. Money has diminishing marginal utility. If your net worth is high, you get little extra benefit for doubling it.

So I'd say $100k, just off the top of my head. Seems like risking 95 to win 100 is pretty good, not to mention it's trivial to get there.
How to manage your mobile phone via web
Are you being sarcastic?

This strategy of getting start-ups to explain their business models and share their technologies...

This kind of accusation seems so childish. Of course Google can start a competing service, and looking into possible acquisitions instead seems like a sensible thing to do before starting one. But Google's goog411 has nothing to do with the Free411 business model - they aren't trying to sell ads, they are gathering speech data. If Free411 had an enormous database of voice samples, goog411 might have never been. Just because Google didn't consider Free411.com a valuable acquisition doesn't make them evil.
Do you guys this there is an PR strategy behind rhetoric like this?
Google is looking to centralize all e-mail services to their servers. The e-mail system (GMail and domain services) aren't competing with MS Outlook, they're competing with MS Exchange and hence with Windows Server. That's one hell of a market. If Google sets themselves up as the strongest "utility provider" with respect to IT, and it looks like they're the only ones that "get it" as an organization at this point, I'm wondering why Google's stock price is so freaking low...

Googling "information technology utility" points me towards a more articulate explanation of the concept at MITSloan:

http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2005/spring/13/