skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
My goal is generally "Works in Firefox, IE, and Safari", but last time I checked it validated fine. In general, I tend to think "it works" is more important than "it's right", but if I can make it right too without totally convoluting or breaking things, I might as well.

I never cut & paste from other sites. I like to understand what I'm doing - it's the best way to ensure that it stays working.

One thing that surprised me - after I got things working in Firefox, it was only about a half day's worth of effort to get them working in IE as well. I was expecting it to be much worse, given all the griping about cross-browser compatibility. So perhaps knowing what you're doing does have some benefits...
thanks for the insight. ;-D
read this
http://paulgraham.com/die.html

Paul Graham argues the fear of looking bad is what motivates people. Based off of that concept I thought of the idea of a social network kind of like 43things with the major differences being:
- you can set a timeline of when you want to accomplish the goals
-people could rate the difficulty of the goals and you have a reputation based on how many goals you complete and the difficulty of them
- could be public or private
-could be more individualized, ie finish essay for English before Friday
Learning to write from Mr Green
Ability to spawn a link in a frame, like reddit, so that you can vote up or down, while or after you go read it.
Ask YC: what is the approximate percentage of applicants with a working demo or prototype?
Just wondering...

My co-founder and I are applying without a link to a demo.

We've been working on hard problems and architectural things that need to be ironed out before features can come. Also, our idea has changed a bit...
for a second there, I thought they were actually launching a bank. Like paypal, but on facebook. Now THAT would be huge.
It lets them eliminate everyone except people who are really good at answering these types of questions. I've heard that Larry and Sergey have proudly stated that they wouldn't make it through Google's current hiring process.
An easy to use operating system for computer users in general would be nice.
MySpace not worried about Facebook
go play on cambrianhouse.com
Guess Google is not looking for talent that compliments the founders. Seems like a crazy strategy to me.
But everyone that works for Google is obscenely, certifiably smart. It's not a bad trade-off.
I got an offer from Bloomberg right out of college before going to my masters. The last interview was fairly grilling, in a social way, not technical questions.

The hardest question after I mentioned my interests in business was why I wouldn't start a company right after getting a job. At the time I answered truthfully: I thought I needed experience at a real job before knowing what it takes to start a company.

Since then, I'm convinced I could have had a fair shot at success by starting a company on the spot.

So the biggest question I would be asking if I were Google: why don't you want to work for yourself right away?
i don't know. find a way to take away some of the pain I feel as a computer user:

having to have like 30 different logins for all the sites and communities that interest me where i inevitably wind up using the same password for all of them and a similar username for most of them

feeling paranoid when i browse the internet on a windows machine even when i use firefox, run windows update, and avoid leet juarez d00d sites

being frustrated that the extension language in excel is fine for quick, minor things but doesn't scale up to real software development efforts while the users i develop solutions for have no appreciation of how craptacular VBA is

you can probably think of more.
Re: #1

http://www.musicovery.com/
Agreed, an easier to use operating system would be great for most power-users too. I'd start by eliminating the desktop and completely abstracting away the file system, instead letting you browse all of your media files at once, all of your documents, etc.

I'd do it with a dynamic start page that would let you accomplish everything from within Ubuntu/Firefox in kiosk mode. The design's the hard part, but I have the beginnings of a workable design.
I was asked:

"How many mini shampoo bottles should you order annually if you owned every hotel in California."

The reason for questions like these is not to see what answer you come up with, but how you reach it. It's also a cool hack because you can get a good idea of how creative someone is in just 15 minutes.

It's also a bit of a personality test. My interviewer said that about 20% of people won't even try or get frustrated and angry after just a few minutes.
I'm writing a practice app, which was my second idea but I think I have a better chance of getting a version 1 done quickly. (Not planning on applying to YC this round. I may be ready by next summer though)

Basically, it's something about MMORPGs that's never been done quite right. I'm sick of trying to explain how it should work, and want to show people instead.
"social networking and content-sharing platforms", from the article
Introduction to Algorithms - MIT Press
I have some ideas on my blog:

http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/

See for example this discussion on using lifecasting to encourage good behavior in a world where few people are genuinely religious (you could also combine this method with a traditional religion):

http://mindrosity.blogspot.com/2007/07/justintv-vs-god_07.ht...

http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~wwu/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi?board...
Huge bias--they've been invested in by Bezos.
It's called OSX.

What could be better than a powerful unix machine with a beautiful and intuitive GUI? And also "just works" out of the box.
Thing is-- if it wasn't free then most hobbyists probably wouldn't bother.

Many people, when they aren't able to obtain the tools they need to do what they really want, settle for what they've got. At least, until they can afford it, if that ever happens and assuming someone doesn't come along and offer a free version in the meantime.
Why do you think Powerset's pr people are able to get so much and such positive press.
Sit your grandfather (or person of similar age) in front of OSX by himself after only an hour of instructions and see what happens.

It's intuitive to those of us who grew up with computing. To everyone else, it isn't.
Good neetings are things you go into not knowing what the answer is -- they're for synergy. Body language, group particpation, and consensus building are important.

E-mail is for presenting an case, making a conclusion, and asking for agreement. It's a longer format where you get a chance to speak in a one-way fashion.

The phone is great for immediate decision-making: the server is down and I need to know whether to ring the alarm bell or not. With the phone you can get a lot out of voice inflection that you can't get with IM or email. In general, written format is very tough to do humor, nuance, sarcasm, and negotiation.

BTW, the term "meeting" is way overrated. If you're doing work in a group, do the work, whether it's at the water cooler, Starbucks, whatever. There's a whole science involved in making a good meeting, but I'd just focus on the work and make the communication format fit the goal. Use common sense. You obviously can't make a marketing strategy using IM, email, or twitter, so some kind of meeting/workgroup is in order. Likeise, if you've stopped five people working to tell them the code just built, you need to do a little thinking about choosing better formats.
Good for them. This solidifies that they'll buy outstanding Facebook applications instead of recreating them internally.
Here's one I wish someone would take from me and spend lots of time perfecting. I've been trying to get around to it, but have other stuff to do. It's on my "fun weekend hacks" list.

I have a commute that's about 30 minutes each way and 1 hour lunch every day. That's two hours I want to fill by reading printouts of interesting text and listening to interesting audio on my iPod.

For me PG essays would be the ultimate example of texts I want to read and Venture Voice (podcast) would be the ultimate example of what I want to listen to (others would obviously have different taste). I've gone through that stuff repeatedly and tons of other similar content, making it difficult to find enough new stuff to keep me entertained.

A site that let me assemble text-printout "playlists" and iPod playlists for a week or more in advance would be great. It requires measuring or guessing how long a given text (or book) is to see how long it would last and organizing the audio into chunks that are optimal for my given time allotments.

It seems kind of a weird maybe or niche, but it arose from a real problem I have and I think it could be pretty big. There has to be more people like me that want really targeted text and audio content to consume on their commute.
A program that scours the obituaries to reverse-engineer email addresses and online identities so that people that you've met online can find out you've croaked.
God, I'd love to start a bank or a currency. That's where all the real money is.
Well, I'm curious. Want to try explaining anyway? :)
There is a learning curve no matter what. Otherwise you have a tutorial and not an OS.
The PR is so damn good it will probably cause expectations to be completely out of whack (usually a problem startups do not have to worry about).
It worked out pretty well for my father, who's 80. It probably ruins the experiment that he had been using (well, failing to use) Windows for years previously, however.
Try looking for places where there is quality content and people who would enjoy that content if only they could find it. Where this occurs, there should be lots of potential to generate value, by matching people with content they might like.

For example, last.fm does this for music, del.icio.us/digg/reddit/news.yc for content, and I'm sure there are lots of other examples of services like this.

Here are two areas where such services, to my knowledge, don't exist: web comics and blogs.
Check out http://dailylit.com it does a little of that for a fairly small amount of books.
Let me Guess, Xobni is some kind of AI application to deal with emails. It probably classifies emails nicely.

(My Guess is based on the fact that they want an AI person on their job postings)
Facebook launches fbFund to invest in Platform developers
I have to say i like the idea. Have you applied to YC?
Thats awesome, too bad loopt isnt available on T-Mobile (yet).
id like to see an extension to expensr.com's app, to text message my expenses in!
I'd also like to see visual voicemail integrated into gmail or yahoo mail or aol or any client, but real visual voicemail...with voice-to-text technology for the message to be right in your inbox and a click to call back link or button.
Location based gaming: playing games while moving around in your town with an iphone-like device (and having your location matter in-game.) You could port any kind of game to this concept: counterstrike, racing, even monopoly. Or pac-man, chasing your friends around the block. Or Sokoban, pushing giant boulders through Fifth Avenue.

I had this idea six years ago. I'm appalled that it still hasn't happened. Of course, very few devices have GPS chips, and operators are wary of sharing the location of their customers with random companies. But still!

Anyway, Loopt is a step in the right direction.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Location-based_game
I don't get everything being discussed in the powerpoint linked in the article, but it seems like the result is he figured out that none of the current techniques they've been using to make progress on the P != NP problem will work. So that means going back to the drawing board.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativization
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/fortnow94role.html

Anyone else have enough background in Complexity Theory to enlighten it some more?
It is expected that any claims of a proof for P != NP would explain how they have overcome these barriers in their proof. Otherwise, few would consider looking at the proof carefully.
A social music site / including music client and music store for classical music. Both last.fm and iTunes suck for classical music, which has a completely different set of concepts from pop music. Composers, conductors, orchestras, choirs, movements, etc. It's a smaller market, and the people are less technically inclined, but they're richer and less likely to pirate music.
How does he do with the mouse? From my experience, people over a certain age just never quite get the mouse. Touch screens are the ideal solution, touch pads would be fine except the ones on laptops are too small, and trackballs are a whole lot better than mice because they let you seperate the action of clicking and moving... too often I see older computer users accidentally moving the pointer when they want to click.
How many of you have internet access on your phones?
It's a heavily biased poll considering the ppl at hacker.news, and not indicative of the mainstream, but I was wondering if people use a lot of mobile web apps.
By focusing on simple yet powerful tasks, like photos, news, and email and making the entire GUI these tasks in blindingly large fonts, you can make the experience obvious to uninitiated users.
very intensive operations, not sure if you could get enough subscribers to justify the costs?
Now I'm curious about this. They list 71,245 under "shop by store."(1) However, I think this number may be low.

Are inactive stores listed in that directory? I'm sure Yahoo is billing for more than a few stores which never got beyond intentions.(2) We set up a test store a few hours ago "filmat16.com."(3) It's not been published yet so there's nothing there. It's also not listed in the directory by name (although this may be a function of time.)

If the $5b sales figure is correct (and I wish I could remember the original source of those numbers) and we use the 71,245 store count that's $70,180 per store/year. Reasonable?

Also my original estimate didn't take into account the (currently) $50 setup fee or fees for credit card processing (outsourced, but surely they make a bit from that), DNS fees, advertising revenue, etc.

In any case I think Yahoo has made rather a lot of money from their purchase of Viaweb - which is good for people creating startups which might be bought by Yahoo etc.

1) http://shopping.yahoo.com/stores/sd.html Is it reasonable to assume every store listed in that directory is a Yahoo store?

2) If that number is in any way related to the percentage of people who don't send back rebate forms it could be huge.

3) Not a completely for testing purposes; we're going to sell some 16mm films that have been sitting around in a closet for years. http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html
A social fashion site. Categorize your entire wardrobe with photos, favorite brand, sizes, date of purchase, photos of you wearing combinations, links to friends, that kind of stuff. If girls would program, such a site would have been invented around 1997 - instead we got slashdot.
What should Paul Graham write?
Suggest what topics Paul Graham should focus on in his upcoming essays.
check out http://buxfer.com I think they let you text in expenses.
I agree. I built my grandparents a computer from scraps and it ran swimmingly, but they never could manage the mouse and the home country just doesn't look the same on a cathode ray tube. They were politely disinterested.
TC40 Keynote Conversation: Mark Zuckerberg
Django's session/user framework uses a salted hash. Does anyone have any critiques of their method?
"Give me control of a nations money and I care not who makes the laws" ~ Meyer Amschel Rothschild
Analysis: Why Some Web 2.0 Sites Will Never Attract Big Ad Dollars
thanks...thinking about signing up for it.
thats not really true. I won't post details, but I seem to run into situations daily where a certain rule gets applied in a variety of permutations over the domain of browsers.
You're welcome. :)

PS: Hope I'm not being too cynical but I really do believe that this is about protecting their IPO. If you look into who's funding this, you'll see that it's the same people who funded FB. What they just did is better and cheaper than buying an insurance on a $5B property.
I think there is a YC funded company doing this already, I'm sure someone here will remember the name.

My fashion idea involves you being presented with a bunch of different outfits and picking which ones you like to train a recommendation engine. Then, the site recommends complete in-season outfits (with affiliate links)
The recent stuff is easy, but google seems to not do as well once pages aren't already accessible from the front page.
I'm working on this now... Feel free to take a look.

http:/www.ziptuck.com
If I can ever take over Equatorial Guinea, the first thing I will do is create a currency backed by Equatorial Guinea's massive offshore oil reserves.
shoutfit
Macro news. I get the news in my RSS feeds and its damn near useless.

These events tell me almost nothing about the world. The signal to noise ratio is not good. I don't want to know that another 6 people in iraq have been killed in some incident, I want to know whether the situation there is getting better or worse, is it happening in a new area than before, does it involve a new group of people...big picture stuff.

This is the kind of info you typically get from reading feature length editorials but I don't have the time.

I want big picture news and global trends, complete with graphs and visualisations to give me perspective on an issue, delivered to me in an RSS feed.

Also I want to be able to subscribe and unsubscribe to different issues that I wish to follow from start to end.

Already exist?
No, I don't have a team of hackers and I am just now learning to "hack" myself. If someone wants to collaborate email me at abiek13 (at) aol (dot) com
He understands and uses the mouse; his problem with that is not the concept, but tremor. The first mouse he ever used at home was a trackball, but he hasn't had much problem switching to the scroll-ball mouse that came with his Mac Mini.

On Windows, he never seemed to get the difference between situations calling for left click and those calling for right click, so the single-button mouse was a relief.
Exclusive interview with BinaryNights, makers of Forklift
Find out about the crew and the new features in Forklift, the file utility that replaces the Mac OS X Finder.
Oh, one more! A web consultancy that advises start-ups about i18n, translation, local laws, cultural differences, etc, so they wouldn't think: "Foreign countries are scary, let's conquer the domestic market first." Then we, the Dutch, could actually have used great sites like Amazon, Facebook, Ebay, and Craigslist instead of the terrible knock-offs that won here, solely because they were available earlier.

Seriously, Europe is a huge market, and if you wait until you're big in the U.S., you'll be too late. It's the internet - the rest of the world is just one hop away!
There's several questions in there related to probability. I think that's pretty important to a lot of what Google does.
A really good quality standard CSS layout.

I don't mean the stylesheets - no, those come later - no, I mean a really good, one size genuinely does fit all, semantic HTML layout. Does blogs, does galleries, does comments, does discussions, in a single well thought out semantic HTML format.

Then you have a library of CSS templates that people can use. And people can upload new templates. And each template gets checked, to make sure that it represents each element properly, and works across browsers (yep, that's a validator).

The business model is this: advertising on the template inspection pages, so that the "greek" text on the layout pages is all advertising.

Advertising is split with the authors of the pages which are downloaded - you copy the CSS to yer drive (downloading the zip file of the CSS + images) and the author of the template gets a cut.

How do you prevent fake downloads distorting the figures? Up to you, but I think you can filter based on IPs.

But the real key is that semantic HTML on the front end, because once you have that, it's easy to do the rest. But that part is a genuine hardness.

Or you could, you know, write the software for this:

http://disastr.org
Check out http://developer.where.com/jin/devprogramfaq.jin
Cool! Best of luck, if you do it well I think it could be a big hit!
already has multiple implementations: http://www.in-duce.net/archives/locationbased_mobile_phone_g...

there's one not listed, that's a variant of pokemon; pretty fun
I forget the name (when I saw it, it was only available in japan - though the company is French)
Am I missing something obvious about #14? Or is it something dumb like "Don't tell your friend when your birthday is"?
"... The poster mentioned Melbourne was the 'artichoke end of the world'. Googling for 'artichoke' on news.yccombinator.com has no results. How frequently does Google spider most sites anyway? ..."

Yeah the search here sucks. My attempt at finding stuff is to

A) save it on my blog so I have the original copy I can then search via google

B) in FOX: site: http://news.ycombinator.com search+term

Look one way to get around it is for someone to spider the site and link back (damn I lost the link .... someone has a search site where???), another is to get a google box for what USD$5K and integrate google search. As the site grows, search is becoming important for historical articles, phrases or people who you want to ascribe a comment. Guess this is what's meant by users loving new features. I'm just glad there is somewhere for stuff like this to be discussed. So while search sucks, it's not integral, for me at least.

And by the way the word "Artichoke" is a vegetable reference from Wallace & Grommit, "The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallace_%26_Gromit:_The_Curse_o...
Here is some current data on how the general population uses mobile web apps. This was posted by danw here on this forum:

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2007/08/partial-state-...

To summarize: SMS is the dominant mobile app (by a wide margin), and the US is far behind most European countries in mobile app usage.
"... I had problems finding stories from before the switch to putting all comments and news stories on item?id=x, because a search would go to a broken link. ..."

Deleted node probably. Means it's been deleted or removed by user and/or was probably edited because it was "spammish" or poor quality in nature.

"... so if you find a story with a broken link, you can just switch comment?id=x to item?id=x. ..."

This one I noted after some changes in the code probably about 2 months after I started using it. I save all my posts and the links started breaking (link checking). The term was changed from 'comment' to 'item' (guessing) because it was shorter.
the list would be more valuable to those looking to steal identities.

How do you think I win all my elections?
Before the update, items were broken down into 'comment' and 'link' (not sure if link was the object, it might have been news) but their ID numbers didn't overlap so I assume PG combined them because their was no reason not to, except for breaking old links.

The links I was trying to find weren't actually deleted, I just wasn't finding them because I only recently figured out I need to change the link to 'item?id='
"... By adding rel="nofollow" to a hyperlink, a page indicates that the destination of that hyperlink SHOULD NOT be afforded any additional weight or ranking by user agents which perform link analysis upon web pages ..." ~ http://microformats.org/wiki/rel-nofollow#Specification_2005...

Damn I just thought of one problem though. "Rel=nofollow" on low priority submissions means google will have low(er) priority search? Is that right?