skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've encouraged my girlfriend to apply (she's smart, has a couple of good business ideas, has done a lot of design work and has a college degree in art, and has great work experience at Google among other places...she has the skills she needs to be valuable to a startup), but startups are just not her thing. I don't know if it's endemic to being a woman...risk aversion is definitely more important to her than me, but that may just be different personalities, not related to sex.

It would almost certainly be a positive thing to have a well-qualified woman involved early in a startups life, as there are definitely some differences in the sexes, and some balance would probably be valuable. But, as someone else pointed out, the number of women in the hard sciences is very low, and probably lowest in computer science. Design is better represented, but even in that, there is a much lower number of women involved than men.

I suspect the goal should be (if there is a goal to be found in all of this) to get more girls interested in the hard sciences early. Being equipped to build a technology business is something that starts young.
No Such Thing as a Free Lunch
Actually he basically says XML is a complex, unpredictable mess that is not actually extensible; while s-expressions are simple, stable, and extensible. (Though extending them is still a somewhat advanced topic.)
content issues like namespaces wouldn't be unique to s-exp's -- XML had to deal with them. i'm not sure about the readability. i would say XML wins because angle brackets delimit things clearlier, especially by the fact that they're duplicated on closing. but i might have a different opinion if s-exp's were standerer than XML, so i can't really say. some of the SXML examples on that page look really nice

---------

don't judge straight translations. if s-exp's were the standard i suspect links would look more like:

(p "here is a" (a "link" @href "http://example.com" ) )
I like the idea, but don't really like the look. Kind of messy.

And the "niches" that I'm seeing are: "Beautiful mind", "Post launch", "Break time", etc. Those aren't niches but uber-vague references to niches.
I wrote a blog post about this awhile back:
http://divyab.livejournal.com/5855.html

the post is somewhat rough, preachy, and jumps around a little bit. I would probably write it differently now after a year of start-up-ing. Also, feel free to make fun of me for using LiveJournal.
> ZoooV.com

> Read amazing stories submitted by amazing people, like you.

Always make your users feel smart. Nice touch.
Why Demo's conference beat TechCrunch40
I like your execution: the site just screams quality, and I would surely read it if there was content. But I am not convinced this is different enough from reddit with more categories, or "communities" how they call them. And they (reddit) are adding more.
Craigslist CEO Puts Profits Second
Google, Yahoo Sued By Tanzanian Tribesman
> Camera film manufacturing

Come on, do they really think that Kodak is just going to roll over and die? They'll just adapt and move to a closely-related business, like photo paper.
These are the ones I could think of. Hopefully, people more creative than I would suggest new subjects that are more interesting.
The Internet Broke the DSM
John McCarthy sent his son Paul Graham to save the world from Blub.

(I am agnostic. I googled for this biblical verse... uncannily, it is from the book of John.)
Interview: Ali Partovi CEO of iLike the most used application on Facebook
> map('x*x', [1,2,3,4])

Although it's longer, I think I prefer:

map([1,2,3,4], function (num){

return num + 1;

});

.. which is how our in-house functional javascript library does it.
What nine of the world's largest websites are running on
Google availability differs greatly between countries
Key to Organization: The Habit of Now
Use Your Cameraphone as a Visual To Do List
Matematicians searching for P=NP or P!=NP proof should wait until Paul Graham decides which of these statements is true.
Feed Each Other Opens Your RSS
she more than makes up for it in other areas though

Hey, I just resisted the urge to say something crude.
Stick with it. Nice start. I like the improved logo from last time i looked as well.
Wow, welcome to the redditization of hacker news.
I guess there might be a misunderstanding here. The idea behind Zooov is that you can join multiple communities at once, not just one. Then, your home page will show the communities you joined all in one page (but in separate sections, like Google News).

Your idea addresses the same problem from a different angle, and it's a good idea, actually. Though it's much harder to implement.
Return of 1999? Dot-coms making a comeback
Can someone make their own niche site themselves, or do you have to make it for them?
Zude: Drag, Drop And Network
i like the idea of customized social news gathering, but i'm not sure if a community structure is the right way to do it. i don't think most people want to limit themselves to a particular community of stories.

I think The WELL was structured similarly to this site.
Yeah... I probably could have worded that better. My intent was obviously to emphasize her product design, marketing, and business relations skills. She reads this forum btw.
The community boxes look like ads.
XML is a pain to parse properly. Have you seen how large XML libraries are?

It's also complex in the fact that it adds extra bytes. Imagine a 10 Mb XML file....now figure out how much of that is space wasted on closing tags.
He is kind of right, since he is talking a about extending the basic XML _syntax_, not about creating or extending XML vocabularies. Obviously his solution with reader macros only works in Lisp, and he seem to be proud about that, but it kind of defeats the purpose of a platform-independent exchange format.
Facebook/Microsoft Plot Thickens
Great, but I need C++, Perl, then C#, Java, PHP, Python and all kinds of crappy languages to support that format.

Lucky for you, Greenspun's Tenth Rule (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun's_Tenth_Rule) comes into play. All of those languages actually have Lisp embedded inside them: "Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
They can't yet; but the plan is to allow it later. I need time to understand what's involved in building a community and maintaining it so I can put the right governance model in place. For example, if someone creates a community, do they get the right to censor it? Who decides what's considered spam and what's not? Voting or the admin? Things like that.
I like the notion of how constraints help. I think that's pretty key, prevents feature creep and the rest, which could easily overwork a full time team that gets to ambitious.
Something like that, yes, but attributes (a (@ (href /path))...) are ugly in particular.

So use :named attributes instead?

(a :href "/path" ...)
This kind of feedback I can only get from someone seeing the site for the first time and reporting their first impression. Thanks a lot. I'll see what I can do about it.
Aw cummon! I thought this was the ultimate cap - tail recursion? roundhouse kick? Chuck Norris? haha?
YCU
Coming up next: LOLPaulGrahamz and ICanHasLisp?

We can only hope not.
Just as if a smalltalk enthusiast proposed exchange of serialized smalltalk-images as the universal solution for data interchange.

That's not a bad idea, and as I understand it, the Lisp operating systems back in the day passed actual objects back and forth between programs instead of strings.
Paul Graham is so good, he's written 735 contributions to this list but hasn't even been tempted to send them.
I think you should plan on making that a feature ASAP. My interest level just went down when I read that it's not available now. Giving people the tools to create a community is a very powerful concept.

I think your idea could really work waleedka, get that feature out now and refine it as you go.
Lol. When I landed on the home page, my first thought was "Why did this guy post a link to a site that hasn't launched yet?"

I thought it was one of those parking pages chock full of ads. You really might want to change the design a bit...
Cutting The FaceBook/Microsoft Deal Rumor Off At The Knees
"emergence"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence

The article is from 2004, but the idea goes back to Aristotle.
Actually s-expressions are pretty good for documents too. If you start to use lisp you'll probably wish everything was in a sexpr.
Ask YC: who gives away free money?
So, I know most people here want to do the start up thing so as to be financially independent, getting all the work out of the way early so as to get onto the really cool hacks. But, our economy being as robust as it is, surely there are very rich people who would sponsor random promising hackers to do whatever, instead of slaving away for 6 months -> year on one very specific and narrow problem domain.

Our creative hacking, logical rigor, and awesome platform for idea modelling can have such a much more fundamental impact on society than all the web apps in the world. That's why pg's hacker philosopher idea is so cool! Who else is positioned like we are to revolutionize the world of thought? So, my question is, where are all these smart investors, with a vision bigger than just the monthly bottom line?

I, for one, do not wish to research ponies and rainbows. That is not to say they are bad, but I have other interests.
> how many Rails developers could track down CRuby bugs?

Probably a lot of them, if they tried. Because Ruby is so poorly specified, I frequently read the interpreter source code to figure out how things are supposed to behave. CRuby is really well-written in some ways and really poorly-written in others. It's poorly written in the sense that it's a painfully slow line-by-line interpreter. It's well written in the sense that the code is very clean and well-organized: I can usually find answers in the source faster than I can find answers in the pick-axe book.
Nice indeed, but how about attribute names that themselves contain colons, or maybe start with a colon? XML/HTML is less restrictive in this regard: all that matters basically is spaces and '=' inside a tag.
I have a very reliable lossy compression algorithm for you if interested. It's extremely computationally scalable as well.

I just map all values to 0.
"Girl" isn't a pejorative unless you're determined to take it that way. It has nothing to do with age; it's part of an informal nomenclature, as in "girls and guys". I know many women who refer to themselves as "girls" -- including those in their fifties and sixties -- and/or use "grrl" in their online names, and there are even groups like LinuxChix which use "chicks" in a hip sense rather than a belittling one. "Girls' night out" is another example. I would even observe there's an inflection point where women above a certain age prefer the term and consider it a compliment to be referred to as such, as youth and vitality are desirable connotations.

And groups of women do refer to wanting to find more "boys" -- the terms "men" and "women" both seem to connote some kind of stodginess, probably because most people's models for what men and women are, growing up, is parents, teachers, and other authority figures, all of whom are tragically unhip.
Paul Graham can put n > m pigeons in m holes, each hole having no more than one pigeon.
The page looks good, I like the layout, the only thing I would change is the header.

About cool the startups sidebar, that would make a great community!

What do you think about that?
What languages/frameworks did you use?
Paul Graham doesn't need Viagra. He is NP-hard.
My impression is most Rails developers are not C programmers.
Not sure it matters too much for sites that have login page that aren't https, but better not to email people their passwords (clear text). It also indicates you're probably storing passwords in the clear, see http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000953.html
Oh dear -- linkrot!
Why does News.YC show xyz.domain.com as just domain.com? Eg:
Though I notice that it sometimes does (abstractfactory.blogspot.com shows the full domain) and sometimes doesn't (james.hotornot.com shows as "hotornot.com").
i think both JSONs above are a bit lispy :)...

{"p":{">":"this is a","a":{"@":"http://example.com",">":"link"},">":"."}
Fun at-home version of the guess-the-weight-of-the-bull experiment. Last Easter, we put a few hundred small chocolate eggs in a large jar. We had 14 people at the house, and we all guessed how many eggs were in the jar. The closest guess was off by about 8%, and the worst were more than 50% off. As a little test of the wisdom of our crowd, we averaged the guesses. Their average was 3% off the right answer.
What do you mean by ponies and rainbows?
The crashes were due to running out of memory. As a temporary fix, Rtm moved the oldest objects.
No, turns out the system was just running out of memory.
Hmm, I just thought of another.

Paul Graham named his fists: "(" and ")"
It's a little known fact that the P in P=NP actually stands for Paul Graham.
Ask 37signals: Pressure to grow?
What..in the world...

People don't do startups to change society. They do it to get rich. Changing society may or may not result.

People give away money either to feel good about themselves or to help accomplish a goal.

If a rich person's goal is "to change society", and a startup's goal is "to get rich", then the rich person will only invest in startups that will change society in the ways the rich person wants it to change. Which is what happens already.

But if a rich person's goal is "to get richer", then they'll invest in startups that they think have a decent chance in getting rich, regardless of whether or not they change society.

Therefore, the current system actually invests in more startups than your system.

So what are you proposing?

I guess a more direct answer to your question is: Nobody.
There is no one smart enough to seek you out and understand what you are doing. You have to network which means lots of "ponies and rainbows" until you meet the right investor.
This is pretty cool! Your idea is good, but the implementation needs improvement. Please keep working... if done well I'm pretty sure I would use this!
I think it would be great if we have a community for low-budget startups to help each other. Getting new users is hard. And you don't get a real appreciation for how hard it is until after you launch. That I learned from my last project. So, I created the "Post Launch" community because I realized that there must be a lot of people in a similar situation like mine: launched and trying to market their startup. I hope we can use it to share marketing ideas, arrange banner exchanges, and so on. Is that along the lines what you're thinking?
Gizmodo:  Latest firmware neuters the iPhone . . . upon re-review, don't buy the iPhone
From Gizmodo:

I was planning to change our "Wait" verdict to a full-on and rabid "Buy". That wasn't because of Apple, but because of the cool apps being offered by independent developers. All that came to an end yesterday after the new Apple firmware 1.1.1 neutered the handset. With this, I'm going to have to move our recommendation from "Wait" to "Don't hold your breath." I'm done with this handset until third-party apps come back.
For some reason, parts of that site look extremely familiar...

Nah, I'm crazy.
From the Gizmodo reviewer:

I was planning to change our "Wait" verdict to a full-on and rabid "Buy". That wasn't because of Apple, but because of the cool apps being offered by independent developers. All that came to an end yesterday after the new Apple firmware 1.1.1 neutered the handset. Sure, unlocked iPhones were broken. But more importantly, Apple wiped away the powerful programs that helped push the iPhone to greatness. With this, I'm going to have to move our recommendation from "Wait" to "Don't hold your breath." I'm done with this handset until third-party apps come back.
Paul Graham is so good, he can make the tower of babel from oatmeal and fingernail clippings.
I am a libertarian capitalist, who has made a reasonable amount of wealth. This article is good, but it ignores several institutional sources of "unfairness" in common parlance. The most obvious ones through history were slavery, government-sanctioned racism, widespread sexism and so on.

Leaving those things aside, today active government policy promotes borrowing vs saving (through Federal Reserve credit policy), and actively bails out Wall Street speculators - who made a mint during credit bubbles.

Common people aren't stupid if they feel at times "the system is stacked against me". It often is stacked against them. I am no socialist, but libertarians recognize that the fastest way to push people into socialism is to institutionalize unfairness this way.
Read "Purple Cow" by Seth Godin. Implement.

To oversimplify the ideas in his book, Godin says that the old methods of marketing are essentially dead. The only way to market efficiently is to build compelling ideas directly into the product rather than saving the innovation for the advertising.

In addition, I'd recommend reading "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a stimulating, accessible book that presents the fundamentals of how ideas spread through a populace. Pay close attention to the idea of stickiness and see what you can do to ensure that your product is sufficiently sticky.
Record stores:

Answer: Do for record stores what Barnes and Noble and Borders have done for bookstores. Borders is a place to go sit, enjoy a sandwich (or a cup of your favorite caffienated beverage), and browse books for fun. Make a 'record store' a place that people can go to enjoy music. Have live music playing during the day, like modern chamber music. Make the experience fun and interactive. Add places to sit and relax. Have jukeboxes with big libraries of quality music, that people can download to their ipods.

Newspapers:

Technology will have to advance a lot in 10 years to replace newspapers, and maybe it will. But the internet needs to be able to deliver something that people can carry with them on the subway or in the airport with minimal fuss. Personally, I'd like to see newspapers be smaller and more portable. I want something like a magazine that I can hold in my hand and isn't gigantic cumbersome mess like newsprint.

Used bookstores:

Answer: Similar to the record store issue. Used bookstores have a problem in that used books tend to be dusty and smelly. Extra steps need to be taken to be sure that the experience of visiting a used bookstore is a pleasant one in spite of this.

Coin-operated arcades:

Answer: Once again, the answer is a viable public space and pleasant customer experience. That's what movie theaters and mini-golf courses have in common. Do people really go play mini golf because the game is really that fun? Mini golf is fun, bur more importantly it is a social event. That's what Arcades were, when they were popular. I think theaters are declining partly because catering to teens appears to be cheaper. So for most people, going to a theater is not all that fun.
I'm just surprised LISP isn't on there.
You've already asked this before. Last time it was funding for intelligent design (no, really?) and now it's a idea modeler?
>I want something like a magazine that I can hold in my hand and isn't gigantic cumbersome mess like newsprint.

This has already happened in the UK where the major papers have all switched to tabloid-size newsprint.
James Hong: A lesson on life...
Looks like he took rms' advice and re-made the thread without referencing ID: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=57867 .

Am I just closed-minded, or does "logical rigor" sound uncomfortable coming from an IDer?
The obscure game-theory problem that explains why rich countries are rich
Liquid Rescale (Content Aware Resizing) GIMP plugin
Paul Graham funded Kurt Godel's startup and it turned profitable.
Paul Graham is the sentence that consistently asserts itself.
Paul Graham directly experiences Platonic world of ideas and finds an investor for each of them.
A document needs to contain information (most of the time) about the layout of the document. So an HTML page is a document most of the time. The data is the TEXT and most of the HTML is there simply to tell the browser how to render the data. I think the argument above was that XML is great for creating document formats where as JSON or S-Expressions are great for sending data around.
I agree with you about the record stores. Actually, Starbucks (believe it or not) appears to be gearing up for this. They sell CD's now, but I read an article (sorry, no link) a while back about how they were looking into creating download stations where you can burn a CD while you have your coffee.

Can't say I like the starbucks vibe all that much, but it isn't a bad idea.

Thing is, do you think this would work for music as well as it does for books? For now, music can be digitized and delivered over the web more readily than books (I've bought a few ebooks, but I don't like them much). I do miss album art, but I'm not sure it's enough to overcome the convenience of iTunes. I suspect people would be more likely to stay in their dorm room/bedroom with friends listening and downloading.

Live music might bring them out, though - that's a possibility. Record stores have started to do this, too.
Paul Graham partitioned the Banach-Tarski ball, reassembled it back to two identical copies of itself and then sold the other copy to Yahoo for 100 million bucks.
Nobody uses PostgreSQL?
Paul Graham is not afraid of going bankrupt. Going bankrupt is afraid of Paul Graham.
Anybody remember the site that scans a web site and returns its technology profile (e.g. javascript libraries used, server, language, etc.)?
What percentage of your users are on IE6?
Paul Graham doesn't date Jessica Alba. On a first date, she didn't know how to implement Lisp in itself.
[NYC/Cambridge] Faux Labs, makers of Fauxto, seeking web developer
NYC/Cambridge, MA based startup

We are looking for a phenomenal software hacker to join our small team on the eve of a very exciting adventure in our company's development. We are interested in hiring young and experienced developers, and or aspiring college or graduate school dropouts. The opportunity will also involve equity, access to an accomplished and interesting network of technology enthusiasts, and a front row seat to great new web-based technology.

You'll ideally have a sense of aesthetic in relation to design both as an interface and as art.

Your idea of retirement doesn't involve Social Security.

What we want in you:

- Heavy experience with C# and/or .NET in general. (Note that VB and VB.NET are banned here)

- Experience in designing modular, object-oriented Flex 2-3/Actionscript 3 applications.

- Experience or strong interest in user interface design.

- Familiarity with high-performance, web-based applications.

- Past experience working on comprehensive development projects without close supervision.

- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

- Strong work ethic.

- The knowledge to not use the term "web 2.0" when applying for a job.

- The ability to use the aforementioned skills to build awesome stuff.

What you'll get:

- An expectation that you'll be directly involved in making the company kick ass.

- Some equity.

- Some money.

Here is a handy form to fill out. Note that we are not Wufoo, but also note that Wufoo is awesome.

http://fauxlabs.wufoo.com/forms/fauxlabs-job-application

Thanks
The importance of ease of use and simplistic design
On the server, ASP.NET and the free version of SQL Server. On the client, the Yahoo UI library, which I highly recommend, and a lot of hand written javascript. But I tried to avoid being too fancy with AJAX, so I used it only for things like editing in place and voting without reloads.

The only fancy AJAXy thing I have is the bookmarklet. Which is kinda cool, if I may say so myself :) I haven't seen any other web site use something like it.
I agree. My first thought was "Hmm lots of big adverts.. what else is here?". Then I read and realized.