skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We didn't get in.

I don't want to spill too many beans, but I will give some advice.

YC is nice. They are not necessarily going to be nice to you during the interview.

We expected YC to have remembered more of our written application, and that threw us off. We wound up explaining things we hadn't prepared for, and not explaining what we should have.

Ten minutes is nothing.

In other words, everything went wrong!

And a tremendously valuable experience.

Congratulations to everyone who got funded.
Filipino but living in San Diego. What are your sites?
Interview Experience with Google in Zurich
A Engineer in the Philippines got an email from Google. After a series of phone interviews, she was flown to Zurich for an interview.
I'm surprised the decent solution to this isn't more widely known. People have mentioned Occam and Stackless Python; both interesting. But their ancester is Hoare's CSP and other descendant have included Squeak (not the Smalltalk relation), Newsqueak, Plan 9's Alef, Inferno's Limbo, and now libthread.

Channels with co-operating threads are easy to reason about. See Russ Cox's overview page http://swtch.com/~rsc/thread/ for more.
A(nother) Plan for Spam
Apologies in advance for the title.

One reason that Spam still exists is that it works -- people do respond to the messages.

We all assume (and this might be be incorrect), that if we could just educate folks that are responding, they'd stop. And the even the crazily skewed economics of spam blasters would fall apart.

The question is: how do we reach them?

The answer is: Spam!

Here's the premise

- send spam to people that is even more tempting than what, um 'legitimate' spam looks like

- when clicked on, it takes them to an educational page talking about spam, and why not to use it

- link in horror stories of people dying from bad V!@6rA or having their credit sapped

- the user might also see a message warning them that clicking on this sort of thing might invalidate their account.

One would hope that ISPs and folks that have to manage mail servers would appreciate the reduction of the load. And would pay to keep this service in effect.
I've seen that way too many times. :)
I did say seriously...
Or maybe Google realized Dodgeball needs a better platform to become truly usable.
:( Um, think about it this way: if you are able to generate spam that is more effective than 'legit' spam, your technique would be copied in about 2 minutes.
Isn't that what Loopt sort of does?
Seconded.

Don't remember the last time I went to the ER for myself. With 2 boys in the house (now 3 and 5) we had a stretch of 3 visits to the ER in one year.
Savvica Languify - Don't Sleep, Release!
Facebook Class: Sealed with a Kiss(Me)
Google details highly anticipated 'Android' mobile platform
Open Handset Alliance - Future of Mobile Phones, Google and other companies involved
Two charged with hacking PeopleSoft to fix grades
Swaptree.com - a startup to easily trade or exchange of your music collection or book collection
America's Best Young Entrepreneurs: 2007
I think Mr. OReilly has an interesting point about how all these different social networks that he is a member of portray an image of who he is... and my belief is that instead of having one ultimate platform such as Facebook with our social graph we might have to see it spread out between different networks ... each network will focus on something specific in our lives, and will hold information about us with regards to that particular niche, topic, group or activities that we have ... for instance I don't think facebook could ever replace Flickr or Ebay, and the two could have many info on me that represent me, my activities, reputation and social graph
This is really interesting stuff. But I wonder, how much did this guy do? The 'machine' they talk about emits radiofrequency waves of a certin wavelength and strength, something that can be bought from a catalogue. Did he make the nanoparticles? Probably not, you can buy these nanoparticles from stores found via a simple online search. Did he find the radio frequency himself, or did he look up other studies that have been doing this since 2002, and just copy their procedures? Maybe I'm wrong, but I do not see anything novel from this article.

There is a lot of promise from respected academic institutions for using gold nanorods and nanoparticles for cancer therapeutics. On the other hand, few treatments ever get through clinical trials and are approved for use in mass populations.

For those interested, other universities that have been doing similar things include UCSF, Georgia Tech, and Purdue University.
The Khosla Ventures website leaves a lot to be desired. I nearly told Vinod this one day before his partner told me that it was designed by Vinod's daughter.

Truth is KV has invested in many new web companies including big guys like Slide and RingCentral. Maybe they just don't want a ton of inbound slide decks from web 2.0 companies making sticky note apps.
Fun diversion: Arastra programming quiz
VC Financial Performance Requirements
A reader recently asked, "What revenue and EBITDA is required to receive investment? The answer to this question (as with many others) is, "it depends"...
Google Enters the Wireless World
You are speaking based on a gut feeling, and the article cites what appears to be pretty thorough research and investigation into actual, real life geniuses and what they had in common.

I know which I'm going to put more stock in.
This is clearly addressed in the article.

"Studies of chess masters and highly successful artists, scientists and musicians usually find their IQs to be above average, typically in the 115 to 130 range, where some 14 per cent of the population reside - impressive enough, but hardly as rarefied as their achievements and abilities."

For example.
Erdos2 makes some good, interesting, points but I wonder how often that section on a grant form asking if the research results will be transferred to a corporation is used? How easy would it be to get this through peer review? I suspect that under current funding conditions, very difficult unless the company was supplying serious cash and unique expertise. If I was sat on a review panel and saw a proposal saying that "This work will be great but we will not publish it and everything will belong to company X", my response would be "Why isn't X paying for everything then?". Actually my response would be quicker and firmer, but you get the drift.
I suspect that the researchers cited in the article might point out people who demonstrated aptitude like Yano's and yet did not achieve as much as someone who had less aptitude but worked harder. There is some baseline of innate aptitude required for excellence, but among people surpassing that baseline hard work is what distinguishes them; that is the hypothesis proffered in the article.

As for Mozart, the point was that even he had to put in over 10 years of work before producing his best work. But, because he started at 3 he got there at a really early age.
rev split with hospitals + terminal in the waiting room. Get biz dev and sign up hospitals. I'm sure that someone is saying this already in the comments, but don't have time to read all.

Find the person in the hospital that is having pain (figurative), whoever deals with the ER scheduling. Start by giving offering the hospital 15-25 %
Kleiner has invested in only a couple web companies in recent years (including Friendster).

http://www.kpcb.com/portfolio/portfolio.php?consumer

It seems they're not saying they're pulling up stakes but rather saying "we didn't feel like playing in this game, anyway."
Microsoft Feels Forced To Defend Facebook Stake
What Sun giveth though, Sun may "take away" at some point in the future. I'm thinking of Tcl.
The writers have more power in this case than the studios do. They need to get paid, yes, but the ripple effect in Hollywood right now is just ridiculous.
i work in wireless, (J2ME) and I am tired of the current state of fragmentation. It is a true hell. %90 of development time ends up being spend on fixing device specific issues, or workarounds for the wildely different and crappy implementation.

Now, you don't have only J2ME, but also Winmo, Palm, Brew, Symbian.... Blackberry flash mobile, all require differnt set of expertice.... it is hell people.

I envy server side guys. When you hear people b!tching about IE/Firefox javascript problems, i can't help but roll my eyes. Mobile dev. is 10 times worse.

I have sweared long time ago, that my next job wont be in Mobile dev. Maybe, if Google Android is good, and picks up steam, I might change idea.
I'm pumped about this -- anyone developing mobile apps?
Creepy poetry video describes working on a startup.
I don't think there's any correlation at all between whether a startup gets called a "web 2.0" startup and how hard the problems are that they have to work on.

Look at Loopt. Seems like a classic, frothy social app. And yet beneath it are very difficult technical problems and horribly tedious negotiations with carriers. Or Justin.TV. What could me more frivolous, right? And yet to get it to work they had to build their own CDN for live streaming. They spent 6 months working round the clock building infrastructure (including custom hardware) before they could even launch.
I guess that's the end of OpenMoko.
I think Tim O'Reilly summed it up pretty well:

"If a company needs to identify itself as a "Web 2.0" company rather than describing the problem they are solving, or the opportunity they are creating, then they are just playing the buzzword game, and aren't worth investing in."

Some of the ideas of "Web 2.0" are definitely worth pursuing, but those alone aren't a replacement for a legitimately good business idea.

Honestly, there's a lot of fluff out there under the "Web 2.0" name, and I think that's what Kleiner wants to stay away from.
oh. you mean like lala? oh wait. they had to change their business model because it doesn't work.
Nov 2, 2007 (3 days ago)
Rick Dalzell's retirement tribute from Jeff Bezos
heheh thats interesting, I have never had the experience myself... but I think if Google is able to get enough partners for this, the support will also be much better ...
Trevor Blackwell: Random writings, not really worth reading
I agree that there are several web applications that require solving hard messy problems. I'm not sure if I would call Loopt a Web2.0 startup, but I agree with the point about Justin.tv

The problem however is that a good number of startups that call themselves web2.0 companies are building facebooks apps, Yet Another Social Network, or roll your own web app with Ruby on Rails in 15 minutes.
In Portland, Cultivating a Culture of Two Wheels
What does Google's Open Handset Alliance announcement tell us about iPhone third-party apps?
"It's hilarious to hear all of the big wireless companies speaking about open platforms and software. "
agreed
imagine if instead of typing amazon into the google search box you had to type "site to buy and sell books", and instead of Amazon you got back Half.com

Google did not invent a new way for people to search, they took the way people were used to search and made it return more relevant results. I believed Powerset was bound to fail from the beginning. the problem is when folks search for email, for files on a machine, for files on P2P networks or for web pages on Google they use the same keyword based method.

It might certainly be useful to have a semantic search capability for some obscure searches but that would work better as a Google add-on (and with all the engineers Google has in-house if building such a technology was worthwile they would do it).
Google's Social Design Best Practices
hehe... its interesting you say that since its a totally different business model than any other "web 2.0" company out there... but again they can't function like any other ones since they can't generate that much ad $ ... so a CD of the most viewed, or highest voted videos would probably be appreciate (not me obviously)
Indeed. Whenever I travel I lock my laptop in the trunk. In my car the trunk can only be opened by the remote attached to my key (or by someone with a really good crow bar or chain saw but that would cause way too much noise).
Try to sell this service to government agencies where usually the wait times are ridiculous. Personally I would feel weird registering online for a visit to the ER. I'm either sick enough and I want to go there NOW or I'm not that sick and I can just see my regular physician when he has time.
Wow - what did this guy do at Amazon that was so valuable?
Introducing NewsCred - the future of Digital News?
NewsCred is aiming to be the preeminent digital newspaper that will give you only the most credible news from your favorite sources
FlickrFan - another killer app from Dave Winer (his latest creation)
Bill Clinton drops in at Microsoft to say thanks
"Over the last decade, Rick has been the glue that has held together our engineering organization and driven us to success. He has constantly taken on new roles and brought people along to fill old ones. He has been a coach and mentor to many of us."

I would say this makes an employee valuable
Politics of OpenSocial and why Google did it - (Video: Robert Scoble and Marc Canter )
Sorry, I didn't see this here.

I used it on one project. Whilst it was quick and easy to get the layout done I do agree with you on it been heavy.

One thing that I did get from it was exposure to some decent CSS. I'm confident that my future projects will benefit from having used and learned from their techniques.

I'll certainly use it again.
Of top 25 newspapers, only 4 increased circulation in past year
It's unfortunate that it died before the iPhone/SDK came out.
How Much Is Second Life Worth?
MySpace Announcing New Ad Platform
here is an interesting video about the politics behind Google's OpenSocial
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=76383
Looking for a girlfriend who is well-educated, affluent, and Internet savvy? $55 for a thousand.
Tim is really getting it right here-- and the analogy drawn here between the withdrawal of the Google SOAP API's in favor of the AJAX widgets is spot on.

Google/OpenSocial and Facebook/F8 severely limit the scope of the kinds of social applications that can be built. A widget living inside a controlled ecosystem is not an app!

That universal social aggregator we've all been dreaming about (and that friendfeed, readr, plaxo pulse, etc. have been trying for) is never going to happen when the data usage is so restricted.

Let me authorize my app (via oauth or similar) and get real data feeds (RSS/Atom/JSON) for me to mash up and leverage as I see fit! Why can't I get an RSS feed of my Facebook friends' news feed (and not just status updates)? And give me the firehose, let a thousand filtering algorithms bloom! Once someone creates a compelling social network host that lets me freely extract and aggregate all my friends' activity streams on demand, that'll be the real social web platform we've all been waiting for, and not just a widget host.

I think this is a real crossroads for Google and Facebook-- they've both been nominated as the next "Evil Empire", and how rigidly they control their developer and user ecosystems will determine if we'll learn to love or fear these companies in the next few years. Both have recently taken steps in the wrong direction.

NB: Someone should make a try at establishing a "social news feed" standard. An atom extension with an indication of event source, type, priority, etc...
"The rest of OReilly's article seems to base itself on where the "real me" resides. On facebook vs something else."

I am not sure if it says where else it resides, I think every part of the real me (in this article Mr. OReilly's real me) resides in different parts, and in order to get complete real me you then have to combine all these graphs (networks)

if phography is my hobby, then I will probably be very active on Flickr and my social graph there is just one angel of what the real me is ... it is the real me in the world of photography, or its the real me when I am playing the role of a photographer, which couldnt necessarily be copied easily with more general sites, like Facebook or Myspace
Congrats Sama and Nick!
I don't mean this to come out as negatively as it might sound, but JRuby being faster than Ruby 1.8 isn't saying much; MRI is pretty slow.
It's still great that JRuby beats plain old Ruby in speed and also gives you Java access. The only (relatively old) benchmarks I've seen with YARV are over here:
http://antoniocangiano.com/category/ruby/
Yahoo launches Kickstart: A LinkedIn for students
Wow, I didn't realize the "List Management" industry was this productized.
Well its fully open source - heck jruby is not even hosted at sun. They simple employ a couple of contributors. There are aplenty of contributors outside sun as well.
I've been waiting for the first OpenMoko phone to come out for months. It was scheduled for October and I still don't see any updates.
Also, I think perhaps a more descriptive title is warranted here...

waxy's title: Tim O'Reilly on Open Social and Facebook (he nicely articulates why both fall short, while reframing the problem with a solid prediction)
Hmm - the quiz is interesting.
Basically testing
a) Networks basic
b) Intimate C knowledge
d) Basic algorithm knowledge

I would prefer some more questions, and some questions had answers that were not exactly wrong.
1. UDP is preferred over TCP for VoIP mainly because:

Well that is a pretty simple answer, but it's answers kind of confuse that issue. UDP is preferred because there is less overhead, and you do not spend any time trying to handle lost packets. I guess the main piece is that you ignore lost packets since they have to arrive in a timely manner or are useless, it will not help you to re-request one piece of data, because the by the time you get it the second time it is useless!

Ah well...fun diversion and it never hurts to remember random topics you haven't looked at in a while :)
Sure - Tcl of course kept all the contributions that Sun made. However, when the wind from Sun went out of Tcl's sails, it slowed down a lot.
VMS Operating System Is 30 Years Old; Customers Believe It Can Last Forever
i think second life defines the problem domain a bit too large. no i don't care to explain.
I don't think it needs to be more effective than legit spam. Send regular spam but have the links take them to an anti-spam education page, something short that they would remember.

Like, "If this were a real spam you would now be prompted to buy X so that we can steal your identity and sell you fake products that could kill you. Good thing it isn't!"
Bigtime, The lists are worth a lot of money because sending out mailers to people who won't act on them is expensive.

I'm simultaneously creeped out and impressed by the Comcast commercials that offer to target ads by age, sex, voter status, and other demos. They cross compiled all sorts of databases to get that info.
Ask YC: Spouses
Have any YC founders been married? How did you handle things financially? Were you able to focus on your company without feeling like you were neglecting your significant other? Did you feel like you could have been more productive if you had be more solitary?
I came across this a couple hours ago while reading Solove's book The Digital Person. There are several pages devoted to all of the different lists you can buy. Apparently there are over 550 companies in this business (as of 2004).
Stackless python does absolutely nothing to help with scaling applications to multiple cores. It allows you to write asynchronous applications to better utilize a single processor for operations that depend heavily on IO (or otherwise waiting for some resource).
Now that's the ultimate cold call.
I think the M means thousand, not million. Also, this is probably per use of the list (they insert ringers to check).
very very true.
I see 20000 new startups by next summer.
You're right, I'll fix the title. Apparently M when used in marketing is actually the roman numeral M. I wonder if K was already taken by some other marketing thing.
$55 seems quite cheap for a million addresses.

I wonder if you can get a volume discount. Buy 3 databases, get the 4th free!
true - but at least someone is trying to fix it hehe
http://www.inboxmarketinginc.com/resources/glossary.php#c

quote (CPM): The M stands for the Latin mille, meaning "a thousand."
The GPhone: So Open It Could Be Closed
Married - finances are tight - best if she can work at something relatively well paying. I have time for her, always (money comes and goes, but a good woman is something to hold onto!). I could be more productive alone, sure. But I'd also spend more time "out looking" or stressing about being alone, so the stability helps a lot too.
does seem like lala... and speaking of which, the screenshot on lala.com looks almost exactly like anywhere.fm

(confession: I have never used iTunes before)
Swapit.com was a spectacular failure as well.

You can't just slap Web 2.0 branding on bubble 1.0 ideas and expect them to work. How long before we see collaborative filtering for online dog food purchases?
Given the expected 2% conversion rate on direct mail, you'd still be doing pretty well if you forked over the $55 to send out a personal ad. :-)
Alibaba.com and the rise of entrepreneurial China
Ask YC: Is Google trying to own everything or simply have access to them?
Last week was OpenSocial and today their mobile platform Android. To some extend both these platforms have the same approach, they are both open, Google is giving easy ways for developers to come up with new applications and the possiblity of the developers reaching a lot more users in a much easier and faster way, and Google is constanly looking to add new partners (major ones) that would also support these platforms. One thing that I find interesting here, is the comparison between the new ways of creating platforms and possibly setting new standards. In the 90's everything seemed to be closed and platforms were mostly used to set standards and create lock-in situations and exclude the competition (Microsoft was the pro here). Now it seems like the opposite, not only everything is open with Google, they are in fact working hard to get others partnering with them, instead of trying to compete with them and trying to exclude them. I don't personally believe that Google is doing this merely because its better for the end users or developers. The web has changed many things and creating such lock-ins are not possible anymore. So Google will not have any other choices but to open up and share. But the question for me is whether this is another way to approach the situation and by these new movements, Google will in fact be able to set the standards and create a new kind of lock-in (I say new since its not excluded to Google now and others have access). One thing that is more clear is that by offering the platforms Google is making the information at least accessible for themselves. Without doing so there will be walled gardens all over the place and everything would be excluded to those networks. And by knowing Google's mission their access to all those data is vital to their survival and their leadership in the market. So maybe the main question is whether Google is doing these so they can insure their access to all these data, or they actually have other plans behind the scene and will be able to own a lot more than simply having access to the data(in which case other companies will also have the same access to some extend).
Drop.io launches - collaborative file sharing/workspace - could be good for startups
Two Free Conferences: Fake Steve Jobs and Personal Branding
A Look Inside AOL's Platform Strategy; My Conversation with Userplane's CEO
"AOL may not be totally clueless after all. "