skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Because if a 10-year-old could have come up with the media being submitted, then it probably shouldn't be submitted here. Having no newsworthiness, pictures contain boring, rehashed messages, and are dangerious because they stroke the group's ego with simplistic messages, and dangerious because they become the preferred submission over time, since they tend to falsely increase a user's confidence though no knowledge has been transferred, while original, analytical thought has been stimied.
Universal Music will try to force all Internet users to subscribe to its music service
I can relate to this:

"The frantic pace of the software world will instill in you a sense of panic and urgency. You must do everything now. Tomorrow is too late. The thought of working constantly will no longer seem foreign or ridiculous. You will spend your free time feeling guilty about not working."

And need to remember this:

"Don't miss the life you have in the search for the one you think you want."
It really pains me to here so many give a knee-jerk "Gmail is the best answer," as I quite strongly feel that that is no longer the case.

When Gmail first came out, I certainly would have agreed with that statement. When I first received a Gmail invite, I placed "make Gmail address main one" somewhere on my to-do list.

Since then, however, Yahoo has mostly-replaced Yahoo! Mail with Yahoo! Mail Beta, which I strongly feel is far superior to Gmail (and far, far, far superior to the Yahoo! Mail Classic). Its main advantage (but definitely not its only) is its GUI, which contains its own tabbing system, the ability to read an e-mail in an iframe merely by selecting it in the inbox, the ability to move between folders via drag-and-drop, and much more.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yahoo%21_Mail#Yahoo.21_Mail_AJA...
iPhone Free Software Unlock Achieved, Hacker Claims (exploiting buffer overflow)
i have found more opportunity working in a cafe, and going out, than i have by working in an enclosed space. I figure

2-3$ for breakfast (egg, cereal, organic milk)
lunch will cost (12$) at any reasonable panera, etc... and if i get something else cheap for the day, that means another day i can invite someone to lunch for a networking opportunity.
that leaves me with ($10-$20) for dinner. eating just noodles does not work for me, i need to get some sort of carnivorous delight for a meal at least once a day, fish is like 6$ a pound and then you have veggies on top of that if you cook at home, or a sushi tray is like 8$-12$ for a small one.

At 28, I can not live like a freshman college student any more. I just can't think on 1800 calories of carbs. I need a more well balanced diet.

Am i wack for thinking this? I know the average age of YC is 25, and on our team we are all 27/28, with a few younger and a few older helping on the side lines.
Entertainment is the focus of the LA. Everything and everyone there supports that. Technology is the focus of The Bay Area. Everything and everyone supports that. The Silicon Valley is for tech geeks what Hollywood is for entertainment geeks.
I completely agree with you, but I don't see how that addresses my point. Picture submissions suck, but it's a waste of effort to ban them when we already have a more effective way of dealing with the broader problem of lame submissions.
That Mike Cooper seems like a real jerk to me.
We are discussing it tonight, and for those people out there with out 1 year leases, I just do not know how you wing it so much.

Right now I am on a 3 month notice monthly lease, and I have a roommate that is planing on leaving in the spring. I have verbally committed to him to stay till march, it would be really sh*tty of me to leave him early and to also not give my landlord proper notice, especially since we work in a professional environment together.

So if i am going to be decent and honest, i will need to support my $800 Milwaukee, habit until march just to keep the peace.

Of course, it might be that the only way to win, is to just think of yourself. I would rather not live in such a world, and so often times I am willing to support the consequences of being decent to people and friends. It has tended to pay off for me in the long run.
77 Resources to Simplify Your Life as a Web Designer
The Google in Cambridge is a pretty substantial operation and I believe it's growing quite fast.
"There is some satisfaction, however, for a faculty member in encountering a recent graduate who marvels at the light work load they carry in medical school or law school relative to the grueling schedule they had to maintain during their four years at MIT."

This reminds me of people who dropped comp sci to drink beer and scam chicks over in "business school".
Any time... The correct title is Grammar Police :)
It's cool stuff... definitely worth it if you're an Outlook user.

(I wasn't even paid to write this comment!)
I'm sorry, all of these blow. I'd prefer the nonsensical adjective + animal to having to explain to someone how it's "Browser with a z-a-r". Talk about negating word of mouth. I'm sure I'm not the only person who'd rather type 14 letters that I can remember than 6 letters I can't be sure about.
it's the only thing i've ever not sucked at, so it's not like i have a choice in the matter.
ok, for now, it seems like the same debates that always rage when making a budget. you can either be honest with your self and try to spend less, or you can lie to yourself and not have enough.

I am strongly in the camp of planning for the reality of the situation. when it comes to entertainment, its less than 5% of the budget, i think this seems fair. That is 2 dates at the movies, 2 nights of drinks, or one SCCA race a month.

as for food, i might be able to get by on ramen, but i might also miss out on other opportunities if i was out and about.

also, unlike many of the teams applying we nearly have a product ready to role now, for us this is all about the networking and so our strategy is quite a bit different than the make it go strategy, for us this is about a life style shift, its about committing to the start up and if that means moving to silicon valley, this might be the kick in the pants to do it. From my stand point that means that the wives will most likely move too. They may not move at first, but i suspect they will want to move out there.

If you want to see a demo of our app in adobe air. you can find it at: http://s3.derby.adobe.socialhelix.net/zcalendar.air

Our goal is to start serving two customers by jan'08, which would be before we leave, and have a revenue potential of $1,000 - $20,000 a year depending on how well our app works.

You can see an early demo we did for one of our customers last year at http://info.socialhelix.com

Our biggest fear is how do we scale our application, do we have all of the kinks worked out, will the security model of the web keep shifting, etc...... How can we do this full time?

Just recently some of our team finished paying off their weddings and cars. I am just trying to figure out what it will cost us to go out there so we can make a decision on what our next move is.
Readr -- my latest site.  Feedback is appreciated.
Dating? Wives? Relationship balance?
just curious how many of you are dating someone or married to someone?

and if applicable how has your startup affected your relationship?

how do you balance the jealousy between the start up and your significant other, and vice versa?
Are you in New York? Do you ask from the perspective of an insider or from that of someone considering a move there?
Programming isn't enough of a drug on its own? I get high when a cool hack works.

My operating systems course in college had a liquor cabinet in the CS lab (we needed it). I wrote a good portion of our final project while tipsy. Oddly, it didn't seem to make much of a difference.

Other than that, no. I'm a square.
Redefining the Architecture of Memory - New York Times
Just considering. We're not tied down anywhere.
If you are on a budget, one of the first things to cut is extraneous expenses. By cooking for yourself, you can have the possibility of better tasting and more nutritious meals, lowering your food budget, and saving time.

Why spend $12 on panera when you can make a chicken breast sandwich for $4?
I use both. I have 3 email accounts, two of which have a webmail interface and one that does not. I primarily use Thunderbird but don't delete messages for n days (well never for gmail) so I can also check with various webmail accounts. Among other nice things the ability to filter out HTML is a "killer feature" I simply can not live without and have yet to see duplicated in any webmail interface.
"Mathematics is still the queen of the sciences"

Absolutely. Yet somehow, even Rota (in his isolated world) doesn't fully comprehend the magnitude of this remark...

Cariovascular or strength training for physical exercise.

Meditation or religion for spiritual exercise.

Mathematics for mental exercise.
What point? How many of his "good ideas" became multi-billion dollar companies? People who say "ideas are a dime a dozen" rarely know what a good idea is, let alone come up with them. Ideas, maybe. Good ones, no way are they a dime a dozen.
There are so many variables to tease apart, though. Are more companies raising money out west just because there are more good companies out there? And the fact that companies are more likely to get funded in the Bay Area doesn't necessarily mean they are better companies. It might just be that angels and VCs are looser with money out there.

One really useful metric in all of this would be comparing the Bay Area's percentage of VC-backed startups that actually succeed to that of Boston and New York. That would help cut right to the long-term relevance to success that funding has in the first place. (The idea being that bad companies are unlikely to succeed even if they do get funding and that good companies are likely to get funding even if they're outside the Bay Area).
Ruby on Rails VS Django - RailsEnvy.com commercial #7
Funny -- I am migrating away from gmail and back to yahoo's web-mail service. Unlimited storage, great UI. w00t!
Does it integrate with Facebook? If it doesn't I have no reason to use it...and I imagine a lot of people outside the TC50K won't either...
It integrates with facebook status updates. nothing else yet, though we're definitely considering a lot of options.
Wow, thanks for the info. I'm glad to learn when I've got the wrong idea- I must have misread their forum posts on why they did it that way.

When we tried using mixed case without quotes it always converted it to lowercase internally- It reminds me a bit of OS X's file system handling, in how it worked- It accepted Mixed case, it just didn't care ;)

I'll look more into it, thanks.
-Colin
better off as a widget than a full site. best of luck
Facebook conference for developers and marketers
I like the GMAIL interface, I run it all day long(literally).

I've used other webmail like the new and improved AOL and Yahoo, but it's too feature rich for me,it takes up too much processing power of my 1.4ghz aand 512mb ram puter and I am already used to using GMAIL.

At work I am forced to use outlook, but would much rather use thunderbird.
Captology - how web services are designed to motivate and persuade users
Also checkout www.captology.tv for some interesting insights into webservices delivered in video format.
good question...lol
>Programming presents you with a problem and allows you to eventually solve it provided you don't quit.

lol... That's a great quote.
I am married with a 3.75 year old daughter (she insists on the .75).

The two main issues (of course) are money and time.

The money side is "easy": the key to success is to have enough money to cover the time spent on the startup. If money gets tight, the startup will be one of the targets of much negative emotion by your s.o., yourself being the other main target. This is not a comfortable situation.

The time side is hard! I wish I knew the answer to this. Talking about the startup when you're not feverishly working on it can be a bad thing when patience wears thin on time spent on the startup. What is helping alot is total focus on s.o./family when not working, and then working at times unseen. (My recent strategy has been getting up pretty early to get in extra work before everyone wakes up.) What has also been very helpful is getting finished. An almost finished startup is much easier to imagine succeeding than lines of code on a screen. So launch ASAP.

Good luck, and don't do the startup unless you absolutely have to do it - thats my excuse.
I disagree. Browsers still do not let you embed your data (files) into submitted pages conveniently. We are still unable to easily grab a file and email it to 5 people using webmail. Moreover, even slightly complex documents (i.e. with MORE than just text with basic formatting) are pain to email/consume with webmail.

Or try emailing me a snipped of source code preserving syntax highlighting, formatting and fonts&colors.

Webmail is in stone age when it comes to feature set and usability. It has one HUGE advantage (mobility) but that's about it.

Most people are fine using it because most people, understandably, are not sending each other "documents", but I would describe a typical personal email rather as "short message".
Ron Paul was just a poor example for what you were trying to describe, particularly as a reddit specific phenomenon. Ron Paul appears to be "unusually" popular on reddit, digg, slashdot, youtube, myspace, and facebook (where no sockpuppeting should be possible) among other places. Could there be 100 people inflating those vote? There probably are. But Ron Paul's popularity is a more complex phenomenon and distracts from the general case.
Where (specifically) are you getting a $3 breakfast and networking? (I know that you're not talking about Il Fornaio, Buck's, Hobee's, Late for the Train, Flea Street Cafe, etc.) Or, were you just winging it?

Is this essential networking or is it talking to someone else while being away from work? (No, the waitron doesn't count.)

How many outside networking meals do you think you should have per person-week? (The answer probably depends on the team-member, but it's never 21 because some of those meals should be with other team-members and for some team-members the number is probably around 2.)

As far as your diet "requirements", are they really different from those of a grad student?

BTW - If you're paying for every networking meal, you're doing it wrong.
I totally agree with the other two posters. This could make a useful blog widget, or a clever facebook app, but as a stand-alone site I wouldn't use it.
more useful - dwarfurl.com with some stats as well.
One question. How did you get the domain name?
Yeah, but it means you're on the hook if things break. I switched to Gmail a few years ago, and I love that any Gmail breakage is Google's problem, not mine.
If she truly loves you, then she can help you when you think about giving up, or need her to handle bills while you build your ladder. If she does not, or is selfish, then keep liking here and keep loving your startup.
I'm glad im not married, have no kids, and can manage to survive on the minimum if I must. That said, a lot of people out there aren't so lucky, but ultimately it comes down to what you really want. If you want to continue working for a useless paycheck while the job requirements go up, then dont apply. If you would like to risk it all for the slim possibility that your idea/product might succeed, then by all means go for it. YC here I come!
Your daughter's good at math. I didn't learn fractions & decimals until I was about 7.
Indeed not. From reading the article, the more correct word would appear to be "disdain".
$35,000 is a lot of iPods...
a combination of boredom at a job, and snapnames.
I compulsively changed the ver parameter to look at your other front page versions, and I think ver=1 is better. When I tried your link (ver=3), I didn't immediately get what you were trying to do. The tag line "See everything your friends do online" was more informative than seeing the Photos + Blog + Videos equation. The equation image is too cluttered and made my mind wander off into other directions.
Well, hey, if such people can choose your coders for you...
thanks. we're testing different versions o fthe front page, and this is the one that's done the best from CPC ads... though i found it less informative. i thought #1 would do better, but it doesn't perform as well.

for those who are curious, try http://readr.com/?ver=1 .
i'm not sure if i agree with you or if i think the exact opposite is true (i.e. if it integrates with facebook i'm not sure anyone outside of the TC50K would use it)...

cool idea though. the massive images on the first page are a little strange. and the second page would be better if it fit w/in one screen.
Yeah my partner and I arent't very experienced programmers, but (like everyone with an idea) we think our idea is awesome. We are looking to partner with a third party on the programming side.
Not only the funding but the contacts and guidance that YC provides is priceless. If YC accepts us, it will be a very life altering situation.
The images are a bit fuzzy looking. Also, the tagline is a bit of a mouthful. How about: "All of your friend's updates all in one place" instead of "Readr delivers your friends' latest updates from around the Web.
Nile perch. [Stunning Pic of a beautiful species]
That's pretty cool -- I like to check those outside facebook, but right now they are junking up my RSS reader
Netscape is now Propeller
Those front page and screenshot JPEGs are horrendous. Either up the quality a lot (and increase file size) or move to a more suitable format like GIF/PNG (better idea).
i appreciate the feedback. the reason i opted for smaller filesize is because i'm not sure if anyone but web folks would notice the difference, but i'd be curious to find out if they do.
I like the idea and think that the design is clear. Your goal is to facebook-ize the Internet. This seems similar to facebook notifiers in their ecosystem.

What do you think your is your biggest challenge? I think it will be very hard to get a critical mass without FB jumping on the idea and opening up their ecosystem to the entire Internet. That is always where I thought they are headed.

Good Luck.
1. Yes

2. Adversely.

3. Balance? What balance? Well mine is in another country until winter. This wasn't exactly by choice though, so the decision itself was easy.

Good luck, and don't do the relationship unless you absolutely have to do it - my advice:)
All in all it seems like a pretty reasonable idea. It makes a lot of sense to aggregate all this info into one place.
Indian Start-ups Lure Silicon Valley Cash
"We built a backyard cannon, and you can, too"
I've been using for a few weeks now and I think it rocks... Great way to aggregate friend related feeds from around the web.
The new bloglines beta.
Bad link?

Korean carp are a becoming a huge problem on the Mississippi and related rivers. Here's a video clip I shot in 2005 of carp jumping around a boat on the Mississippi. (I'm the one holding the camera.) We tinkered with plans to build a fish-catcher to tow behind the boat and scoop them up but couldn't get past the problem of what then to do with tons of carp.
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fLUd8Z-3zoo

If .jpgs are the nile perch of social networking, does that make video links the korean carp? Argh, sorry.
And like a true programmer, you also have a version 0 :)

http://readr.com/?ver=0
ah, yes, I do it see it there in bold.

perhaps you can make it bolder? :)
I can see how exciting and satisfying this can be for the Twitter team. There's nothing like watching your creation start to grow on its own.

I can also see how this helps Twitter's overall growth.

But I still can't help thinking - doesn't this mean that Twitter can only monetize 10% of their traffic? Given the choice between 100K web users + 900K API users, and 200K web users + 0 API users, which one is really preferable?
Make sure she understands what a startup means, and that it's a serious endeavor. No one wants to be pushed aside for someone's hobby.

That said, your relationship probably has to be serious too. Sometimes you're not going to have time for her. She has to understand that you can still be "working" even though your day job ended four hours ago.

Don't keep her in the dark. Show her the things you're working on. If she starts snoring don't assume it's because she isn't your audience: maybe what you're doing is genuinely boring.

Start joking about the things you'll buy when you're millionaires.

I'm in a serious relationship. I haven't started a startup yet. But the same issues have come up as I learn how to hack.

*I'm still looking for a hacker friend in Kansas City (are you one? dgouch at gmail.com)
Gmail is great, but why would you ever rely on a 3rd party for a main form of business communication? I like having my own servers, but I build in lots of redundancy, so that I'm covered. No matter what happens.
Moray eel jaws similar to those of creature in "Alien"
That's "portmanteau," although "poormanteau" gives some really interesting mental imagery.

poormanteau: getting stuck with spork.org or spork.net.
Non-web people may not be able to point out exactly what makes those images so terrible (though they probably will), but they will know that the site looks un-professional. I would suggest moving to PNG's.

Other than that, the site looks very good. I'll be interested to see where this goes...
I use desktop mail (Evolution) unless I'm on somebody else's computer. The biggest reason is that it lets me keep all my mail in one place. I don't want to have to log in to several different web mail accounts, use different UIs and have to remember which account different messages are in.

My primary address is on Gmail, and I do use the web interface when I can't got to my laptop, but I prefer not to.
I was hoping that TC20/40 was going to be purely about the startups... looks like a lot of established companies are going to steal the show and overshadow the smaller guys with their press junkers and PR releases. That sucks :(

And we hoped TC20/40 was going to be better than DEMO... yeah right.
The iPhone:  400 dollars up-front and up to 3000 a month.
cold fusion deja vu? "Radio frequencies can ignite saltwater, making it a potential fuel"
Netscape Social News Rebranding to Propeller.com
Fastmail.fm + Thunderbird. IMAP is the best thing since sliced bread, and with the web interface, I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Sorry for the food analogies; I'm hungry!
I guess you have to copy and paste the think.
I agree in that version 1 looks much better, maybe because of the picture.
I think it would look better using version 1 image and tag line with the learn more and join now! links.

About design, you should change the headers hover background color (I just can't read the text when it's hovered).
One last thing, don't use the stile tag in HTML elements, that kind of code is very difficult to maintain, use your stylesheet instead.

Congratulations about your site!
Alan Patricof has found new life in the Big Apple's web startup scene
Its a hard and fast rule that kicks in before the submission goes onto the site. Ways of modifying the effects of voting happen later and are more subtle.
The Holy Grail For Mobile Social Networks