skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is pretty useless without a definition of the term 'information age' and the notion of 'value'.

The only way this could be more vauge and lacking in meaning is if it was the wikipedia article on the Information Age: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_age]
My Web 2.0 Application.  Feedback wanted
The name of my application is Launchkey www.launchkey.com . It is a content monetization application for blogs/video websites. The core technology allows users to conduct searches within a website using keystrokes, but also can be used for links, images, and video.

Here are a few demos:
blog:http://launchkey.blogspot.com
video:http://launchkey.net/bunny
images:http://launchkey.net/vick

I currently have a new feature set rolling out soon, but I would like the opinion of this audience just in case the changes that I'm making aren't on target.

I have applied to Y/C for the winter session and I think my chances are slim because I don't have a Co-Founder. So if your a hacker with skills in this space, drop me a line (javascript.atlanta(at)gmail.com)
this group is pure evil. it's been roundly whumped on the scienceblogs network (yeah, that's real scientists, not PR paid lackeys for the walled garden science press).
PLoS is the future. R&D without access to the primary literature is impossible. we get scientists to do research who have to publish in these journals and then universities have to pay to subscribe. if you think getting people to send you the manuscripts (who also do the reviewing) that you then bind and sell back to the same people is a bit off, you're not alone.
Interesting idea. Why don't you get the ball rolling augy?
Facebook Opens Up To Public Search
> C#, PHP, and ASP.NET to my prospective competition. Oh, and especially Java.

Those sound interesting. Could you please tell us something about their implementors' religious beliefs? Politics too, if you have that information.
You may be worrying too much about speed. Remember, a lot of people have written scalable web sites using PHP, so clearly a slow front-end language is not a big liability.

BRL uses Kawa Scheme, so the code is compiled to JVM bytecodes. The result is slower than C implementations of Scheme, but still faster than PHP.
> three company names listed in the link title are stupid because you can't just say the name to someone without having to spell

Huh? Aside from noting "with a K" when giving the first name, I think all three of Wakoopa, Frengo and Squidoo are phonetically spelled. What would be a non-stupid name?
Add users to your Facebook profile and feel the love
Microsoft Officially Launches Silverlight (Flash rival)
I didn't understand why this was killed until I saw omarabid's other submissions: http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=omarabid
Sounds good. What kind of work will you be doing?
FEC Determines That Blogs Count As Media
Yay. One less form of government regulation to worry about on the web.
PG and Yamada are the Yin and the Yang of the startup experience.

One succeeded and is now overly optimisitic, the other failed and is overly bitter.
IMO, FB is moving in the right direction: adding gates (windows?) to the walled garden. What I would really love to see, and maybe this capability already exists, is to add a widget to any webpage (my website, blog, or even YC profile) that would list my FB info (as little or as much as I choose) to others. The amount of info would vary depending on whether the viewer of the widget was logged in to FB, and someone I've friended.
I don't quite get it. They cry censorship, but then want to continue keeping research behind the wall of payment.

All professors I've met would love to have more people read their papers. The way to do this is to make them open.

I understand the need for peer-review, but I don't see the need for it to be expensive.

A non-profit group could start peer-review.org. It would be a social network of researchers that rate the skills of other researchers. Ratings and reviews of papers submitted to the site would be scaled with something like a page-rank algorithm based on the collective reputation of the reviewers. The highest ranked papers would be presented on the front page of the topic area. Topic areas could be extremely customizable to precise niches.

It's interesting that the voting schemes of social news sites could be applied to the problem.

A final note, the following search works wonders to find gated papers:
"[paper name]" filetype:pdf
Web 2.0 Snuffs Business 2.0
I rewrote this a couple months ago to explain what we actually did, so I suppose it is news of a sort.
nice blog?
Amazon S3: 16 Sites and Resources
We wanted it, so we built it...feedback?
thoughts?
I don't think I'm overly optimistic. For one thing, I've both succeeded and failed (http://paulgraham.com/bronze.html). But also there are the 58 startups YC has funded over the past 2 1/2 years. With that amount of data, I think I look at the startup business with a fairly clear eye.
really cool idea. i can only get the "L" key to work on your blogspot page, but i think there is lots of potential. the keyboard is essentially dead when you're looking at a website...never thought of that before!
I for one welcome our public search... oh shit! wrong news site...
People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market
I Think You're Fat: The Radical Honesty Movement
MySpace: Hot or Not?
Loss of Arctic ice leaves experts stunned
BitTorrent Continues to Dominate Internet Traffic
The other keys are only active when you highlight a word and press a key that is linked to your desired search engine
The colors/layout give me a headache.
Tell me how you'll measure me, and I'll tell you how I'll behave...
Yeah, I was considering signing up for an account to see if there was a preference for that. Brilliant!
yeah the black background was a topic of debate. we went for black because all finance guys think bloomberg is the best thing since sliced bread.
I'd like to see the numeric rank next to the link.
I actually like the background; I would maybe make all the other colors a bit subdued. My suggestion is to make the text font size a bit bigger.
Apple Stores selling seven times the iPhones, and it's no wonder why
thanks! you probably have a nice monitor? we tried making things more mellow, but a lot of our readers have crappy monitors so the dark stuff ends up being black on black...which is tough to see...
we opted for a letter based ranking system (derived from moody's debt ranking system) because it relays relative value like a numeric ranking does, but avoids the issue of the user "let down" when they see everything has 0 - 20 votes. there are no +1000 point posts on anything other than digg and reddit...no need to use their system...
Didn't France try this a few years ago?
ahh...that wasn't clear...very cool. maybe have some similar lightbox/iframe feature that brings up a cursor in search when you hit "g" with nothing selected?
i liked business 2.0 and will be sad to see it go. could present a good opportunity for fast company or inc., to get a bit better in tech and web reporting.
And easier to spell, to boot. Many of these names would be hard to guess how it is spelled; I know if I heard of reddit by word of mouth and didn't have it spelled out for me, I'd be looking at readit.com or read-it.com wondering wtf was so cool about it. I have absolutely no trouble remembering xkcd.com, and it's just a random string of characters.
Drop the google ads until you get serious traffic.
Paul Graham: News from the Front
The Monetary Value Of Not Taking Capital
The line spacing for the list of links is quite small, it makes the page feel quite cramped for me. Notice how the links on bloomberg.com are about twice as far apart. You could also put more space around your logo, again like bloomberg.com. Not sure about the serif font.
Peter Norvig:  Global Climate Change Consensus
Thank you for bringing the fact that Paul Graham's unreleased programming language does not yet have a mature web development framework to our attention.
Looks like the jobs page is not picking up your stylesheet ? I see borders round the logo and the major links have default HTML formatting.
ha - yeah that's jacked up! we weren't going for the purple borders...
I actually have a crappy CRT monitor.
yeah - there is tons of content every day that we want on the site, so we tried to get as much on as we could :) not great from a design perspective, but our users like it way more so far.
good idea...
See also: http://weblog.raganwald.com/2005/07/why-you-need-degree-to-w...
ha! maybe we should tone it down then...
Money derived from ads = traffic * click-thru rate.

Web page quality reduction caused by ads = (Some constant)

So, you plot that out and find out when the money derived exceeds the damage. Requires guesswork, of course.
It feels sleazy to me to draw users with a certain level of page quality, while planning to reduce that quality later after they get in the habit of using it and recommend it to their friends.
Nice site. Going to pass it on to a few friends in the industry to see if they have any comments I might pass along.

SEO theory suggests dropping ads until you have lots of traffic b/c with AdSense you provide random relevant exit points and they're not hooked on you yet. It's also distracting, takes away from the experience, etc.

In your case I think it's subtle enough not to detract.
This is stupid fucking shit.

(I think the implicit message of the article is that the addition of 'fucking' to any statement makes it inherently more honest, hence the above).
There is pertinent info to this topic in discussions of monetizing forum communities. SearchEngineWatch maybe? I forget the link.
I started a facebook group yesterday to discuss all aspects of Bubblegeneration/Umair Haque, FYI:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5842972550

Obviously, the game is in reducing search costs.

The REAL issue I see here for all these "music recommendation" startups is that they still are nowhere near competing with quality human DJ/knowledge.

There are thousands of music supervisors, party Dj's, and just general record nerds whose recommendations/playlists CRUSH last.fm, et al.

Somebody needs to build the Digg of music, moderated by people with real music knowledge.

That's the moneymaker.

All this implicit listening information is garbage.
Analogue: no one ever gets penalized for upvoting comments that have already been upvoted several times.

Same basic idea.
As always, a convincing case, well edited. :) Paul's point probably plays even better among Hacker News readers, who are probably more suspicious than the average bear of college in general.

Seems to me there's an extra factor contributing to the longevity of the "which school" criterion. There are other roles in the business (especially larger businesses) such as biz dev, M&A, etc. where attending an elite school might enhance success considerably - not for the academic content learned, but for the network of friends and colleagues you gain at that school. It's the English Grammar School model of corporate success.

s Paul points out, hiring decisions are often made by HR types: but HR is a very extroverted, business process focussed profession. As personalities, and in job description, the HR folks have more in common with the people and roles that do benefit from elite school connections than with technical people for whom the elite school is irrelevant. Like all of us, they apply lessons from familiar situations to more unfamiliar situations. And so the Stanford Screen lives on.
yeah we're not getting huge traffic, but i doubt anyone is not looking at us because we have some ads...and if we can get any but closer to breaking even, i'll take it!
I think you've got something nice here. I personally don't care for the color scheme or the letter-based voting, but as you mentioned your likely user base will be comfortable with that. Probably a good move.

I'd actually use more line spacing between news stories though. It feels a bit too cramped to me. I agree with other comments about the ads too--lose them for now.
thanks very much for the feedback! it has been an interesting exercise for us: balancing what users what, what users actually DO on the site, and "good" design all at the same time. We've ended up going after the first two more aggressively at the cost of the third...simply because good design alone in a forest is worthless :)
JoinSources: Equally useful for site owners, designer and developers?
Startup BizCast #14 - How to Franchise Your Small Business (Rod Gardner)
n small business you can't just rest on your laurels once you've built a successful organization. It's best to make moves that will help it continue to grow. This growth can take a number of forms, including expansion to new locations, expansion of existing locations, selling dealerships, and selling franchises. In episode 14 of Startup BizCast, the small business advice podcast that's shorter than your coffee break, we discuss the last of those options -- franchising.
Two points: 1) It does seem to matter for at least CS grad school, as was said in Undergraduation, because of research opportunities. So if you just want to start a web startup and get rich, fine, but if you want to go to grad school after you get rich, not so fine.

2) I've taken classes at CMU, Berkeley, and Stanford, and while the differences didn't particularly correlate with the rankings (since the relative rankings of those three places in CS get permuted regularly anyway), there were serious differences in attitude and rigor. CMU and Berkeley were both very rigorous; the difference was that CMU was rigorous in a somewhat more pointless, soul-sucking manner, on average, and didn't explain things as well. Stanford was somewhat less rigorous, which I imagine was because of the Ivy-league difficult-to-get-in but easy-to-pass phenomenon. This seems to correlate somewhat with the number of undergrads at each place involved in research; at both CMU and Berkeley, I know many undergrads involved in research, while the one professor I talk to at Stanford hungrily scrounges for the rare undergrad who's good at research.

So there are differences in curriculum and selection, I think; they're just not particularly amazing predictors of success. They certainly should influence the decision of which colleges to apply to, though.
Cf. James Morrow's novella City of Truth (http://www.amazon.com/City-Truth-Harvest-James-Morrow/dp/015...)
When I was in college, I figured out that the education you get doesn't really change. However, what does change is the people that you are associating with.

At the "elite" colleges, there is a greater percentage of smart students, which lends itself to more productive discussions and more difficult tests that force you to challenge yourself. Also, it is like the difference between the regular classes in high school and advanced classes -- in the advanced classes you cover the same material, but with greater breadth and a deeper understanding.

And the number 1 biggest advantage of going to an elite college is that you have a much better chance of meeting the world's future movers and shakers -- the people that will be the educational and business leaders of the next generation. That alone is a good reason to go to an elite college.

So I have to disagree, and say that there are indeed advantages to going to an elite college, just not the advantages that most people think.
There is an acceptable line between a world full of Enron executives and a world full of Diogenes.
heh.

the guy featured in the article sounds charismatic like a cult leader, with a message as easy to sell as bottled water.
I like to write clean and readable code when I program, so I also try to do the same with the HTML output. It's a matter of "pride".

Another thing, is that you could reduce the HTML code a bit by using CSS more. The following example shows a <font>-tag inside a span...

<span class="comment"><font color=#000000>
This essay seems to resonate with another Paul Graham theme -- to avoid prestige while choosing a job. His point then is that you are never compensated for prestige, so you might as well stay away from it.

It looks to me like the education market is starting to catch up with the job market. Prestige in either area probably means that you're paying too much or being paid too little.
I Warned Ye...
14 Tips for Healthy Computing
Silicon Alley Insider Demo Video
Sun seeks 1-for-4 reverse stock split
Hell Freezes Over: Microsoft Supporting Linux
With this and changing the ticker symbol to JAVA someone is really driving hard in the Sun PR department.
Online stock market for web2.0 creations
Meta-Markets is a new form of attributing value to social products. The idea is to create an online stock market for things like Facebook friends and Flickr profile views.
I did my D.Phil. at Oxford University, and my B.Sc. at Simon Fraser University; while SFU is one of Canada's best universities, it clearly doesn't have the stature of Oxford or Harvard. Were the students at Oxford more intelligent than the students at SFU? No. Were they more motivated? No. Are there jobs for which I'd rather hire an Oxford alumnus than an SFU alumnus? Absolutely.

The largest advantage of a great university like Oxford is in increasing the range and depth of ideas presented to students. It's impossible to completely separate the teaching role of a university from its research role: Teaching (and inconvenient questions asked by irritating students, like yours truly, in class) informs research, and research informs teaching. And quite apart from the "indigenous" research, if you're at a minor university without a strong reputation for research, you don't have Knuth dropping by for a few months, or Rivest visiting to give a lecture (albeit about the rather odd notion of obtaining forward security by using a stream of broadcasted random numbers which is too fast to be stored).

There are undeniable advantages to being at a great university in being exposed to new ideas. Why haven't PG et al. noticed this? Probably because their measurement -- can someone create a successful startup? -- is just as biased as everyone else's measurements. After all, when was the last time that a YC-funded startup really did anything new?
10 Tips for a Powerful Voice
Lay-offs surge 85 pct in Aug vs July
If you read all the way to the end you'll find you're not disagreeing as much as you think.
Peter Norvig in his essay "Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years" says,
"If you want, put in four years at a college (or more at a graduate school). This will give you access to some jobs that require credentials, and it will give you a deeper understanding of the field, but if you don't enjoy school, you can (with some dedication) get similar experience on the job. In any case, book learning alone won't be enough. "Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter" says Eric Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary. One of the best programmers I ever hired had only a High School degree; he's produced a lot of great software, has his own news group, and made enough in stock options to buy his own nightclub.
# Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you're the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you're the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do (because they make you do it for them)."

He is referring to Jamie Zawinski.
http://norvig.com/21-days.html
aka: The Life Going Nowhere Fast Movement.
They have (or had, not sure if it's still there) something called a badge that you can put on your site. I don't think it varies based on someone logged into facebook (don't really see this as possible, since my site cannot access FB cookies).
Anyone have that awesome quote from Bowling for Columbine where Moore is interviewing South Park co-creator Matt Stone and Stone explains the supposed consequences of not getting into honors classes in the 3rd grade?
Heh, trying to install on Linux, their web site gave me a 404 on "http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/undefined". undefined is the new NULL :-)
> when was the last time that a YC-funded startup really did anything new?

Considering how many there are of them, probably within the last couple days. But instead of me giving you an example to which you will predictably reply "that's not really new," how about you giving us an example of a non-YC startup you think is doing something really new, so we can see what level of really-newness it would take to satisfy you?
I'd use this but the color scheme is too hard on my eyes as well; doesn't allow me to spend a lot of time reading. I'd also like to have the ability to make comments on the story and hear the chatter of others. It would be nice to be able to look-up stock quotes. Thanks, nice start.
Suggestion: YC should provide its founders with W2 benefits for one year. Healthcare, Life insurance...
(Almost certainly, I am not applying but thought this would help those who are).

There is sometimes a perception that YC is perhaps exploiting founders. This is because it is founded on the VC model. This can be removed if it is more like a "temporary job to work at your own startup".

More like IBM or Microsoft provide elite employees, the freedom to work at their own R&D projects aka skunkworks - but in this case, making them into successful businesses.

suggestion: YC should provide its founders with W2 benefits for one year. Healthcare, Life insurance, etc.
This essay posits that choice of college doesn't act as a success indicator when evaluating a pool of people. That's addressing a different question from whether choice of college acts as a success factor for individuals.
I don't worry about speed, except we are talking about a factor 50 or even 100.
But one thing must be clear: The quick development that is possible with very high level languages is an advantage for the developers. They have quick time to market, fast prototyping etc.
The one who pays is their client!
This is indeed the wrong point of view!

I think it is desirable to give clients the best possible user experience and execution speed is indeed a valuable point, especially in the web.

A friend of mine still codes assembly if he feels its necessary. I 'am not that fanatic (in facts he is always making fun of java) - but, once you have used his number crunching algos, you'll never go back.
How was the data analysed?

The most obvious way, and the way the essay seems to imply, is simply to look for correlations between success / failure and which school the founders attended.

If this is how it was done, then the conclusion is flawed. All it shows is that the school doesn't matter, conditional on being accepted by YC (rather than rejected). This is a completely different conclusion than the one the essay reaches, namely that the school doesn't matter, period.
Often times people have families and other obligations that keep them from taking the huge risk that is starting up. Or they just don't have the courage. Or whatever. To the detriment of the business world and consumers.