skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting point, how do you measure "usage" of a Facebook App? Most of the things I see just take up space on the user profile and display random bits of information (like top friends, ilike, etc). So I'm guessing the number of users are simply the number of people that have the app installed. Is there a good way to measure usage?
i disagree. the interesting points aren't about food -- for example, it's a case study in how a lot of smart people, over a long period of time, can fool themselves -- in fact, the movements to improve software engineering have the same kind of faddishness as nutritionism.

another interesting point was how being "scientific", and looking at individual factors in isolation (e.g. vitamins) missed the forest for the trees, and did more harm than good.

another takeaway was the extent to which "studies" are pushed around/mediated by big political interests, e.g. the meat lobby and the marketing muscle (the suns, microsofts, and Extreme Programming vendors of the food world) that have a big interest in keeping the status quo.
My first sentence is not odd at all if you take the low-carbon folks seriously.

> But a treaty is still important, because many smaller nations will conclude that if the huge emitters aren't going to change, there's no real point in sacrificing themselves (to some extent, this was Australia's rational for rejecting Kyoto).

What sacrifice? The low-carbon folks claim that it will be cheaper. If they're correct, how will hydrocarbons be an issue?

> If the rest of the world gets it together on global warming, then you'll get a free ride.

That's assuming that the IP rights are worthless. I'm prettty sure that they'll be worth quite a lot, arguably far more than the development costs, and a lot of that money will come from latecomers, or if you prefer, "evil deniers". The relevant metaphor is "land grab", not "free rider".

Of course, the low-carbon folks could be wrong, but if they're correct, they make huge amounts of money and do good. Why are they trying to avoid the former?
Shanghai is an enormous startup hub.

Bangalore and Mumbai (formerly Bombay) are also quite large from what I understand, but I haven't dealt enough with that market to know exactly how large they are.
The D.C. area has a pretty healthy startup scene.
Homebrew Science
Django doesn't want feedback from IE users. Show me an IE user with something intelligent to say!
Here's one: Don't let your co-founder also run another, related startup at the same time you're getting yours off the ground.
Do you own Amazon call options or debt?
Facebook provides a count of "daily users," which would be a pretty decent measure of usage.
LA is not that good for startups. NY is better one.
Just how cheap are we talking... less than $50 a month?
Daily active users is based on "touch points".

Touch points are:

Canvas Page Views

Link Clicks in FBML

Mock-Ajax Form Submission

Click-to-Play Flash

So Facebook requires some kind of daily interaction for a user to be counted.
Eliminating wars by killing everyone
Is such a thing feasible? Would you classify it as terrorism?
Bangalore.
Pollan's latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is worth reading. http://www.amazon.com/Omnivores-Dilemma-Natural-History-Meal...

The overall organization is little forced at times, but the research for each section is really interesting.
Amazon S3 Now Has An SLA
Interesting online collaboration tool from Minneapolis-based startup, Yugma
Why would it matter? I'd be dead!
What language(s) do you use for your client / server architecture?
I'm exploring a new business idea and need to choose a client / server architecture. This is internet based, but it won't work through a web browser, so I'm going to have to roll my own stuff.

Clearly there's the Java approach, but are there any other good options?

The server doesn't have to be cross platform, but the client does.
At $90 / month for 500 people to collaborate, I'd say they aren't charging nearly enough.
The gist of it is a 99.9% uptime guarantee.
I'm just having a little fun based on this

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=64839
The page you put the ad on is the content you provide.
The Hacker's Diet is an interesting approach to weight loss.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/
1. Unless you're switching programming paradigms, learning a new language is trivial if you have a copy of the API to reference. It's all just syntax and libraries at that point.

2. Do it when you're comfortable with the language.

3. Why would you learn a new language if the one you're familiar with is the right tool for the job? I can only assume you're looking to pick up Ruby on Rails or Django instead of PHP. From my experience, Rails development is orders of magnitude faster than PHP if you're using it for the right project.
http://byiq.com/1m1m/
For tarsnap (online encrypted backups), I'm using C99 (no, not C++, not C#, not D -- just plain C) and am aiming for POSIX compatibility on the client except in a few places where OS features make this impossible (e.g., reading file flags). On the server-side I'm using C99 and POSIX + BSD extensions (the d_type field in struct dirent is the first example which comes to mind).

Depending on your application, you may find that other languages are more suitable -- on the server-side, for example, you might want a language which does more to protect you from foot-shooting -- but I don't think you'll be able to find anything more portable than C.
Do you also enjoy candlelit dinners and moonlight walks on the beach? If so, we might be a perfect match!
>I am sure a lot of us (not so fortunate ones) realize our best abilities while working on something we really love.

Why is that unfortunate?
Unfortunately, without a hard drive, OO and Pidgin aren't too useful, unless you're going to carry a thumb drive for that stuff.
hehehe, sorry, I'm not looking for a serious relationship right now ;)
The ability to have users actively go after advertisers to get contact pushed to them at any time seems like a win-win advertising model. I swear some other compan[y/ies] has/have done this before - does anyone know who? Also, given how unpopular (in my opinion) their usage of MTV on their site has been, could they pull this off and be profitable?
It's common problem of startups: undercharging.
They serve beer and wine in coffee shops in California?

Strange.
there wasn't much in there...
Google's OS dreams calling on Linux
For anyone considering a host - be sure to check out webhostingtalk.com - you will find out whether your chosen host has had issues with others. You can also find some great deals from top hosts there ...
PopSci 's 6th Annual Brilliant Ten
Next time try whoishostingthis.com instead of whois - quicker for knowing who's hosting them.
I could query whois for a list of IP addresses by piping the list through "xargs -n 1 whois". It would have been rather more complicated if I wanted to query a website.

EDIT: Here's the code in case anyone's curious -- note that most of it is just a list of domain names:

echo anywhere.fm adpinion.com fuzzwich.com slapvid.com versionate.com auctomatic.com buxfer.com heysan.com octopart.com socialmoth.com virtualmin.com weebly.com whitenoisenetworks.com writewith.com xobni.com iilwy.com jamglue.com scribd.com thinkature.com justin.tv audiobeta.com flagr.com inklingmarkets.com snipshot.com sproutsys.com wufoo.com clickfacts.com loopt.com | xargs -n 1 | lam -s 'www.' - | xargs -n 1 host -t a | grep 'has address' | cut -f 4 -d ' ' | xargs -n 1 whois | grep OrgName | sort | uniq -c | sort -srn
Not including China and India (which I don't know well enough to talk about), roughly: SV, Boston, {Seattle, Austin, NYC, London}.
How is Chicago?

I would expect it to be a great city, since it's 24/7 and has a huge finance industry.
yeah, that would've been a disaster.
Thanks a lot for your suggestion.
Maybe Japan?
I asked this a while ago... here's the responses:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43195
Certainly there's quite a bit of startup activity in Tokyo, but I'm not sure it's dense enough or advanced enough to call it a hub.
MediaTemple anyone?
I think it depends on what you're trying to do.

High speed, highly-engineered portable code for lots of people? I'd go with the C suggestion. Fewer people and wanting to work at a higher level of abstraction? Pick one of the 4GLs or 5GLs. Different languages and platforms are good at different things. For instance, there's been a lot of bad-mouthing of relational databases lately, but for some things you just can't beat 'em. You wouldn't want to use a screwdriver to pound in nails. Games don't scale up like business apps do, and collaboration plays differently than e-commerce.
Looks just as useless as every other SLA I've seen. Even the longest outages only get you a 25% refund, with no compensation for incidental damages. Furthermore any outage due to force majeure or "the actions of you or any third party" is excluded, which can easily be construed to mean just about anything.
I concur.

It's a free market, and Facebook's valuation is whatever someone is willing to pay for a piece of Facebook. If Big Co purchases a piece of Facebook for $500 million, then someone at Big Co made a guess that either the software, the community or the people were worth that much.

Mind you, I don't think that Facebook has a 10 billion dollar valuation, but that's a moot point, I don't have the $500 million to purchase those shares.

My hunch on the Facebook deal, though is that Microsoft is trying to beat Google to the punch and wants to provide search services to Facebook. The software, community or people might not be worth that much to them, but I'm sure that keeping Google out of Facebook probably is worth $500 million to them.

What's the worst case scenario for Microsoft? Google doesn't get Facebook's search, Facebook goes poof in a couple of years and Microsoft is out $500 million. No big deal. Microsoft's cash reserves are well over $25 billion anyway. They have to spend it on something. Might as well spite Google with it.
S3 & Django.
Yes, good wine, beer, and Soju cocktails. And you can even drink it outside (if a coffee place has tables outside).

Plus, you can go with shorts at work, it's ok to wake up late, and sometimes work from home, as long as you get you sh!t done.

Plus, plenty of free food and drinks on the kitchen.

And plenty of things like that, that you just wont find in 99% of the companies on the East Coast.
Waterloo, Ontario.

The University of Waterloo has a policy that any IP developed by profs or grad students is owned by them rather than the university. In addition Waterloo was the first school to do co-op in engineering when it was founded in 1957 (and still has the largest co-op program in the world.) This adds up to an ungodly number of startups coming outof Waterloo. Something like 10-15% of all startups in Canada.

The UW computer science school is actually named after David Cheriton, the Waterloo grad who introduced Sergey and Larry to investors, and made a few billion out of his stake in Google. More damningly perhaps, Microsoft hires more engineers from Waterloo than anywhere else :)
The system has a hard drive - as the article mentions, drivers would be easy to set up. Linux has had stable NTFS drivers for a year now.
I'm in the DC area. I can't really say I notice much startup vibe. Anyone interested in getting in touch?
Woz did the Cream Soda Computer, and the Apple I and II on his own (though he had Job's support after Apple I). Bill did BASIC for the Altair on his own, and Yahoo was just David's list, to start.

There's a distinction between the seed stage and the regular early stage that I'm trying to point to.
Its strange, but I think they may have found an interesting equilibrium point where they can reach larger organizations but without alienating smaller firms. I have no idea what their numbers are like but it'd be interesting to see where the numbers go at different price points.
seen this used before for another project but for the life of me can't remember where... they standardized this comment system into an install even...
Is Marc A. actually a VC? I think he's been an angel investor in a few startups, but that's not equivalent to being a VC.
Considering her audience was likely quite technical, that presentation wasn't exactly enlightening. Hopefully she verbally expanded on the bullet points substantially.
there are a couple at Softlayer.com too
i'm willing to bet dhouston breezed through the critical reading section of the SAT
I'm majoring in Facebook, how about you?
I got banned from facebook yesterday and they still won't tell me what I did. I feel lost. It's a lot worse than getting banned from Digg.
Part of the reason for SV's attraction for tech startups (besides Stanford) was that it originally was a much more 'family friendly' place than contemporary San Francisco. Naked people, free flowing booze, drugs and late night parties are more important to media than tech hubs. Hence the difference between Hollywood and Mountain View.

And is there still a place left on earth with any kind of entrepreneurial activity without Indians and Chinese involved? People from those cultures have for centuries spread out all over the world, leaving everything behind to follow trading opportunities. Outside Japan and Korea, their diaspora seem to own pretty much anything worth owning in both Asia and Africa. And quite a bit of America as well. At least from my experience, they seem about the unlikeliest candidates for the 'corporate drone' stereotype one can possibly choose. Once the general population in those countries starts having access to even 1950's level of US higher education spending, there's bound to be a lot of entrepreneurial activity there.
A web2.0 startup simulator
a website where you signup, launch a startup, hire hackers, develop features, and exit before the bubble. done in 15 hours during a blitzweekend session.
>> Always.

No, rarely. The Second World War was party about resources, in that Hitler wanted lebensraum, and the proximal cause for the USA getting into the war was Imperial Japan's desire for the oil and territory of the Dutch East Indies. But Japan only wanted to take that because its wars of conquest got it embargoed. Had it stayed peaceful it could have just bought the oil, a much cheaper prospect. So, it's more like the oil was an issue because of the war, not the need for oil causing the war. However, Vietnam, Korea, WWI, the American civil war, and the war for independence... what resouces are you talking about?
Facebook's fbFund Takes a Mulligan - Requires All Applications to be Resubmitted
Apple 2.0 Dell vs. Apple: 10 Years Later
Microsoft's Ballmer: Google Reads Your Mail
Twitter Prepping its Mobile Ad Units? It was bound to happen eventually...
The only reasons I can think of for getting banned are spamming or multiple accounts. I've heard of developers getting their applications booted, but I've never heard of someone getting banned themselves! Probably the worst site to get banned from (besides Hacker News, that is!).
How about Tallinn? Hardly a tech hub, but from what I have heard (never been there), a bit of a startup scene.
I really wish they provided a translation or something. These popular math articles are rarely any good :-/
quality linkbait.
rms you have a habit of getting banned :)
That might explain why Ruby on Rails is kicking Django's behind despite the fact that more people code in Python than Ruby
:) tell me about it... I actually got banned from Digg twice (first time for being a member of a pay-to-digg site, second time for submitting my "adult" site multiple times. The same NSFW site on reddit got me modded up.)
I have one FB account. I have an open dev account and an empty application.

I got an official Facebook warning about one year ago for creating a group "For every 100 people that join this group Apple will donate a laptop to a needy child." I think it got to 250 people in an hour and then it was gone.

I had a middle name listed on Facebook as "rupertmurdochsucks" which was kind of a running joke. The only thing I can think of is that I recently contacted support about a bug that switched my class year to "Alum." They told me how to fix it and I did. But the CS person reported me for having a fake name, which seems really stupid, especially because they won't tell me what is going on. I also had a group that promoted Kratom, which probably goes against the facebook Terms of Use but the group co-admin didn't get banned and the group is still there.
Interview with an Austrialian start-up founder
"If one wanted to buy you in three months, what's the lowest offer you'd take?" (huh?)
I'd like to ask PG: Is this assuming things are going fantastically well, or not so well but not so badly that we don't at least have a potential buyer?

Clearly the second option would result in the lower number, in which case we're basically valuing our time and sacrifice against a scheme that did ok but not great, and telling YC what we think their salvage value might be.

Giving a high-end 3 months upside potential is the other possibility.

Or should I just give a number for both?

Maybe I don't understand the point of this question?
The story is called "The Giving Plague", by David Brin:

http://www.davidbrin.com/givingplague1.html
Calling Chicago a 24-hour city is overstating the case a little bit. There is some startup activity there, though.
Users' complaints to FTC show another side of Google
300 (the movie) hidden online business teachings
Hand wavy economics. I love it.

The fact is,people, that economics is not a science. Unlike the (more) axiomatic world of physics and math,economic principals hold true much less in the real world. Yet for some reason, people think that they can formulate theories about how economies work in certain situations. This is tantamount to trying to predict which way the wind will blow.
why not something higher level (e.g. python)? just curious
What if by trying to deploy said virus, you started a war? Because not everyone, myself included, wants to lose their warmaking ability and/or skills.
Dare Obasanjo's Thoughts on Amazon's Internal Storage System (Dynamo)
And the refund is... in S3 credits!
The top 10 reasons Web sites get hacked
If You're a Web 2.0 Startup Don't Talk About ROI!
We used to think ROI was the way to measure an investment but with Web 2.0 there are so many possible returns that it's no longer practical. But guess what is?...
PBS: Triumph of the Nerds
1996 PBS documentary

here's part 1 of 6-
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2ZLZsGAfYU
This seems kind of silly. Maybe I'm just cynical, what could you learn from this class that you couldn't by just reading the documentation?
Hunger is not arbitrary. The nervous system tells you what to eat. If you stay with substances that were around during humanity's long evolutionary period, you'll do fine: Meat, vegetables, fruits. If you spend more than 10 minutes worrying over it, you've already lost.
A list of sites designed with Ruby on Rails
Server Side

If your app is db-bound then use your favorite language. If it requires a lot of CPU time, you'll probably want a language that compiles to native code. Lots of choices there so look for the most productive one given your performance constraints.

Is your application highly distributed, or in need of fault tolerance outside of the database? Erlang might be an ideal fit. Can you build the entire thing out of Java libraries? Then Java's probably your best bet, but...

If you're building something and expecting tons of of concurrent users then you'll probably have to write most of the code from scratch. So keep that in mind when picking a language.

Client Side

If your client is very GUI-based then most cross-platform toolkits may not feel native enough. You might want to consider writing writing separate clients for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, If a purely native feel isn't necessary, you could use your favorite scripting language and GTK+, or wxWindows, or QT. Or Java and Swing or SWT.

If you have a unique, or web-like, GUI then maybe Mozilla's XULRunner would be a good choice.
Feasible, no. Terrorism, no. Immoral, yes. Desireable, maybe.
Idea Week. Post ideas you don't plan on implementing.
Having trouble thinking of an idea for a YC application? Thursday looming near? You can take a few of mine.

Each day this week, starting today, I'll post an idea that I'd like to see implemented, but don't have time to work on myself.

Please join me in this empirical study of the value of ideas and post your own!
Your question is a bit like saying "I'm building a house. What tools should I use?" Any answer we can provide will be based only on our personal preferences and our own projects. Be clear about what you're trying to build and we might be able to be clear about what will work well and why.

Or, I could just say you should build the server in Common Lisp and the client in Python with wxwidgets because that would probably be my first thought.
Real live-blogging, live comments, and a comment API (Day #1, Idea Week)
I'm waiting for the day when someone cracks jokes about Lisp that don't involve parens. Still, 50 years on, I'm really not holding my breath.
My idea is a web service that lets you date Jessica Alba.
We were going to build a web service to make the college application process easier for students, but don't really have the time right now.

If you like the idea, check out sites like prstats.com or mychances.net (very poorly implemented, but good ideas IMO). Also, let me know and I'd be happy to share our early research with you.
Finally a site where a lower user ID is actually important.
Here's one I'm dying to implement: user-generated reporting website for the wait times on the rides at Disneyland. I swear Disney distorts these for easier crowd control.
I imagine the interaction with other students and their experiences is extremely valuable in the same sense that you don't necessarily learn technical skills from YC, but being in the right environment makes your existing skills that much more effective.
The Highlights and Lowlights of Usability in the World of Open-Source Software
Wouldn't that be one that you sell for $50 million?
So what happens if someone suggests an idea but changes his/her mind later and wants to implement it after all?

Perhaps it would be better to just ask people for ideas that they are willing to share -- without any implication/suggestion as to whether they plan to implement it?
If you stay in one of the Disney-owned hotels, you get to skip the lines on all the rides. It's a little more expensive, but it's worth it, since you wait five minutes, tops, for any ride.
They do distort them for easier crowd control, but they only overinflate wait times.
They are forced to build a better, more useful, competitive product so that they, their investors, and customers all benefit.
The Atom Publishing Protocol is now RFC 5023
Just a guess, but the point of the question may be to gauge your long-term aspirations and risk tolerance.

If he'd applied to YC, Mark Zuckerberg would probably have answered differently than the Reddit guys, for example.

A former YC founder told me to just put down a number in the 5-10 million range.
i meant to say, earlier we find something we love the better, so that we could start realizing our abilities sooner.. :-)