skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>Larry Keeley of Doblin, a innovation consultancy, has followed this debate closely for decades and insists the answer is clear: "Creativity is maybe 2% of the innovation process. It's a vanishingly small component, and it's the part you can acquire from outside the firm."<<

From a follow up article (http://economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_i...)
The Clock is Ticking for Joost
The two books- Hackers & Painters and Founders at Work- are the only books you can talk about. Either that or after reading, everyone insisted on keeping them around as bathroom reading.
I'm not affiliated with them (I do have a $10/month account there), but http://www.medialayer.com/ has been excellent and incredibly fast for shared hosting. They run the Litespeed web server with PHP5, eAccelerator, and Zend Optimizer. The only downside is the price: you don't get much bandwidth, but this can be had as a good thing since it means they don't oversell. My blog [link redacted] is running on it, but it's new so there's not many posts. SliceHost is great if you know how to manage a server -- $20 a month with full access.
Google's "Innovate or Die" contest (build a pedal-powered machine)
Innovation doesn't have to live in software alone - micro wind generator for lower cost wind power
When the news.yc becomes one more place to post the stale material going around, it'll be useless.
God, I hope they do disrupt the economy.
b/c many yc companies live there. power and internet failures suck.
DBSlayer - SQL over JSON for easy scaling-- from the folks at NYTimes.com
now that's interesting. I had a similar idea, not one I submitted, but an idea for an app. Basically it would be for lobbyists, or groups working for a common goal, that try to talk to politicians and convince them about issues. So you'd have all these politicians in your tracking system, see who you already talked to and who not, and where these people stand on the issue. That way you can more effectively deal with their concerns.

Is that kind of what fantasy congress is?
That's a truly pretty app, I love the design.

Nice feature you have is keyboard navigation, I think that's a must have for web apps.
License plate recognition tools led to abduction arrest
Call me sentimental, but this technology sounds like something right out of Bladerunner. In the wrong hands, this could get scary (ie. if a govt. was looking for a fleeing political prisoner, etc.)
Zahid Sardar: Design Spotting: World Design Congress
Bubble 2.0 reviving a few techs
Note that MS and Oracle are both 50% below their all-time highs (unlike other software companies). Both of them were invincible not long ago.
I think with the Segway it was a different story, though: it was not widely known what it would be, there were only a few sources spilling the hype as you described it. It was simply an issue of marketing. With 3d printers, everybody can form their own opinion.
Is that the chance for non-YC startups to take over? ;-)

Are there no WLAN-enabled coffee houses nearby?
We wrote a bookmarklet to count the number of words in the active textarea (then later as a prompt, so we could write the app collaboratively in SubEthaEdit)
Consumer Group Demands XP for Vista Victims
E2 sounds even better than I thought then..

This just proves how difficult it is to cut to the truth..
An MzScheme question: How the heck are you running News.YC on top of it? The web servlet stuff that comes with PLTScheme feels like a pain to setup (lack of a good tutorial is the problem I think).
Someone other not related to the company or I can sign for my cofounders?
facebook groups (together with news.yc) is how I found my UK co-founders (I'm from the US)
really interesting! nice post. thx for sharing your experience
Guilty on 5 and 3.
You can sign for your co-founders - the person signing has to be a director of the company so it probably has to be a co-founder. If you have specific questions about the H1 you should contact the Buxfer founders - they're the first YC company to successfully get them.
Definitely - on that note my biggest piece of advice would be to find an immigration lawyer that has a good trackrecord of success. There are so many grey areas in this business it's better to leave it to a professional to worry about the small details.
I fully support the decision to award Al Gore and IPCC the nobel peace prize. Wars are started for many reasons and global warming will definitely be one of them. Darfur is just a taster.
"If the business is every widget under the sun conglomerated into this giant application, there's no real technology there. There's no noteworthy computer-science problem being solved."

try to solve computer-science problems is a reason why startups fail. it doesn't matter if there's no "real" technnology - the thing could be built in lego bricks as long as it solves a USER pain it's irrelvant.
What about a random/stumble twitter and a twitter gallery?
First the elevator and now this. And the rent is almost $3000 (Isn't it?). There is no better place? Where are the other yc companies?
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Well, due to a server misconfiguration I managed to bring down the demo and from looking at the logs (after reading this article) I realized someone hit our demo site about 2 hours ago (and got a 404). Perhaps I should have been more obsessed with YC. I'm going to rush to bring it back up, maybe someone will double check the demo later in the day. I should have read this article a day or two ago...
Your site seems to require Open ID and Firefox or Safari. Why ostracize a large number of people this way?
The mission is way cooler. Better restaurants, cheaper rent. Justin.tv.
Thanks for sharing this. I'm in Ghana, and earlier today I had discussions with two US nationals who'd like to join in my startup. I'm surely going to watch this thread.
The reason behind Open ID is to limit early users number by a kind of simple barrier. We are not yet able to handle all users at this early stage. Early adopters are usually advanced enough to sign up for OpenID (especially given we have an affiliate program with myopenid)

The reason behind requiring Firefox or Safari is simple enough too. We have not enough time yet to support every (even popular) browser. We'd like to spend time doing essential things, not tweaking HTML and CSS these days. Again, early adopters are those who are relly interested in using our app at the early stages and they seems to have no problem using FF or Safari to access our application.
Next Gen Wind Power Generator - Popular Mechanics 2007 Breakthrough Award winner
I think he was asking for the painkillers as an excuse to approach the tourists. After that he didn't seem like a stranger anymore.
peer1, rackspace, serverpath, ev1, dreamhost, joyent, amazon s3/ec2 -- hosting comes in various flavors and at various prices.

check out the forums at webhosting talk: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/

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It's cool that NYT is releasing some of their code as open source projects, but I'm not sure I understand this particular project. The first thing I thought of when I heard "SQL" and "JSON" in the same sentence was "oh please don't let this be some client side JavaScript SQL thing"... it basically exposes your database as a HTTP service: you send it SQL in a HTTP request and it returns JSON in a HTTP response. Where's the authentication? What's stopping someone from doing "http://myserver.com:9090/db?DROP%20TABLE%20articles" or something?
I take it the admins don't edit submission titles anymore...
That explains it all!
Great job.
How is this related to the resonance frequency of the belt? Is the system efficient only at certain frequencies? Do you need to select a belt to match current wind conditions?
Damn, that is impressive! But... Does it really scale? I sure hope so.
My passion is awesome, your passion is lame
Hi robmnl, thanks for the encouraging comments. Unless your real name is Louis, we haven't received an email from you yet to add to our private beta test list.
Powerset?
Does anyone know what's going on with powerset.
I tried to join their powerlabs program to get a closer look, but so far I haven't heard anything.
Anyone know when they are going to really launch?
If you are looking for Java hosting then www.kgbinternet.com is excellent. I used to pay close to $15 before the CAD (Canadian dollar) got stronger. Still, they are much cheaper and better than other hosting services.
That's strange, I sent an email to web@streamfocus.com - can you send me an invite to my email? It's in my profile. Would appreciate that very much.
Seriously. There's nothing more un-SF than living in a high-rise apartment building with asshole landlords. It's much better to live in a 3-flat building with a near psychotic landlord for the real SF experience.
Any chance to get private beta invite?
L1 is an expensive visa (I have one). E2 is very hard to qualify for - but your plan does sound like it will work, as long as you have the qualifications.
"Data visualization is more a medium than a technology"
"When used judiciously, swearing can be hilarious, poignant, and uncannily descriptive. More than any other form of language, it recruits our expressive faculties to the fullest: the combinatorial power of syntax; the evocativeness of metaphor; the pleasure of alliteration, meter, and rhyme; and the emotional charge of our attitudes, both thinkable and unthinkable. It engages the full expanse of the brain: left and right, high and low, ancient and modern. Shakespeare, no stranger to earthy language himself, had Caliban speak for the entire human race when he said, "You taught me language, and my profit on't is, I know how to curse."

- Steven Pinker
in what sense is the L1 expensive?
Hi Rob,

We are building a natural language interface to databases tool. I figure that forms, key-word and hyper-link interfaces have their limitations. Our orientation is mostly scientific/technical, but we figure that if we can deliver a solid, usable solution, there will be many, many uses.

But of course there are significant challenges. :-)

take a gander at our demo clip for VLDB.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWio8bHq4wQ
Cool tech! My only concern is noise levels... anything that oscillates at high(er) frequencies is bound to produce a lot of uncomfortable noise.
wow thats really cool. between this and dean kamen's stirling engine, i have a feeling the third world is in for some major changes in the next decade or two.

really awe inspiring :)
The Case for Google
our idea stemmed from a recent trip to tahoe. we were bummed because we wanted to rent a sailboat, but we couldn't because they were all too expensive.

however, when we got there, we noticed that there were about, oh 2000 boats sitting unused in the water.

i was an only child for 15 years, so my mom made it a point to emphasize sharing :)
After they finish porting it to Hurd.
I wonder how much power it would generate if you had a gazillion of these things lining our major highways. I bet there's nearly a constant 10mph breeze from all those cars.
How To Submit Your Executive Summary To A VC
The VC process from an entrepreneur's perspective has many steps, which I will cover in the ensuing posts. The first step is submitting your executive summary. There are lots of ways to submit your executive summary: cold channels (e.g., cold email or cold LinkedIn introduction), through introducing yourself to a VC at a networking event or through a 3rd party introduction (e.g., a lawyer or mutual contact)...
So is this the real deal?
This is basically just a database proxy, but allows the responses to be transmitted as JSON, which is cool because it can interface with just about any other server backend that supports HTTP requests and can parse JSON.

I can't find any indication of being able to authenticate with the HTTP request. So I assume this means you would need to ensure the connection between the web server and DB proxy services were locked down, meaning no access outside of the subnet between the severs. I guess since the service pools connections to the actual DB that is where the authentication to the DB is handled. However like you say if someone could get access to the DBSlayer they could get access to all of your data, if this were the case. An option would be to just use SSL if it were supported. There is a bit more overhead with this, but if you are not needing to make tons of frequent queries it should be fine and sufficiently secure. I cant find any info on if SSL is supported..

Still though, if it could be made secure I like this because it is so universal.
How about generating power from speed bumps?
Dude, you guys are making it so freaking hard on yourselves. You have the right to be in the US for up to 6 months I believe without a working visa. Assuming you are a startup who the fuck knows that you are working when you are not supposed too. I say come in as a visitor and while you are here for "fun", make the connections and taste the waters. If everything is running smoothly then you can contact the Immmigration in place and make the necessary changes. YOu will be surprised how much can be done if you sit down with them live and tell them you are building a 100 million dollar company, but you need his/her help to do it legally.
That's my take
Powerset is simply a bunch of hype and money thrown in the windows. You can build an engine much better overnight using the Yahoo answers and AnswerBag APIs.
This week's (Oct 13th) Economist ('Chinese peasant') issue
.. paper, yes, but it's got a whole section (ie many pieces) on the rapidly increasing pace and form of innovation and what it means. Just thought I'd give everyone a heads up, read it at your library (subscriptions sometimes arrive faster than at bookstands) or look for it to come online. <p>This is unconventional I know, sorry... </p>

(More than just this one:

http://economist.com/specialreports/displaystory.cfm?story_i...

btw)
The next logical step is to take it to the nano level and make a paint that will make electricity when it gets a mild breeze.
I love it. Look like the kind of program you see in CSI.
voip startup, nothing social about it
You can probably change the resonance frequency by dynamically adjusting the tightness... It seems possible to make a rudimentary mechanical device that would do this.
The problem with the next generation of energy isn't creation, but storage and distribution.

Efficient batteries mean more progress than most generation breakthroughs.
no way, that's brilliant.

I very much believe you that there are many challenges. In case we both meet on Nov 3rd, let's have a chat, I'm really curious on how you do that.

I could definitely see many uses for this, develop this thing further.
Here is how to wear a tie: don't button your top button of your shirt, and don't tighten the tie to your neck.

Many tie wearers cut off circulation to their heads to a certain degree. Bad idea.

Also, ties can be designed really well. I have a few that are made from older ties with nice high-contrast silk-screened patterns.

Given how good they can look as an accessory, and how impressed many people are with them, they should be worn more often.
why not? make it special
seems like solid advice. it's sad but true, in our foray into the SV world we've realized that without our few, lucky family-friend contacts we'd still be somewhat lost.

it's amazing how a little experience-tempered advice can really jumpstart your creative motor, and get you not only working, but working in a productive manner.

i can't tell you how many brick walls we've hit and how valuable it was to have someone show us the easy way around.
Yes I too am skeptical. I work in the area of natural language interfaces and when I hear their claims I cringe.

My own feeling is that NLIs can be useful, but really only in closed domains. In fact my own efforts are toward NLIs to relational databases.

If I understand their approach, they are building semantic indicies over large sets of documents (e.g. wikipedia). Sure you can match the user's query using these indicies but the inference thereafter certainly must be very weak. Yes any functionality this gives could probably be achieved with simple IR based techniques.

Still I am curious about how this will all go down once they launch a public interface... Still, I will be pleased if they actually show something of value. Time will tell.
I like that, I wish there was a system that allowed us to share resources wisely. The thing is, the burden to put your unused resources into a web database is too high. This should be a system that would work automatically, that connects you with the people that have a surplus of something you need.
Ahhh, I just found it - google marked your email as spam for whatever reason. Thanks! (and you sent it from a gmail account too - hmm - could be a problem) I marked is as "not spam" so hopefully that will help for the future.
Oh an another thing, I was very polite and considered when I requested to be a member of their power labs. And four weeks on now and no response. I consider that to be a bad sign.
i'll admit i've been a google fanboy for quite some time (pre-gmail, even).

it does remind me, however, of ebay's meteoric rise during the dotcom boom. i remember my dad driving to me to school everyday and listening to npr. for a year or two, it was this stock and that stock, IPO IPO IPO, unprecedented growth, will the rise ever stop?

and then it did. google is going to run into the same problems that microsoft has right now. they are just going to be too damn big to accomplish much of anything. they are always hiring, and that doesn't seem to be doing much to stave off the 'albatross stage' of a company's life.
That was our first startup idea with Organon Technologies. We realized that it was going to take us a couple years to build it out, so we switched to streamfocus.com instead. Good luck!
seems like a question pretty much anyone related to any startup is going to want to know the answer to.

in fact, all of these questions do.
I have produced license plate recognition software, at least enough to extract the plate text for subsequent OCR'ing.

Paul Graham/Ycombinator weren't interested, so I gave up on trying to sell it.

In theory, you could setup a webcam in a back garden and scan all the traffic going past in realtime.

I am now working on other software, which is a shame, as Pretext is pretty nifty.

http://www.sanfransys.co.uk/ (not a US company)
heh reading that article made me think the exact opposite.

facebook's application platform feels like spam. i have yet to find more than 2 or 3, out of the many hundreds, applications worth installing.

linkedin is great, i just wish it was a little more 'i'm not a business executive' friendly.
I just looked at your demo - nice job! If you're interested, our application streamfocus.com might be a great platform for you - perhaps we could collaborate?
Did you try talking to governmental and non-governmental agencies about your software?
What is your objective? If your objective is to help the environment, then this won't work; you are replacing coal/nuclear-generated electricity with gasoline-powered electricity, using a combination of of extremely inefficient mechanisms.

If your goal is to get free electricity by leaching off of cars, without regard to the environment, then it might work. But, there is a huge fixed cost to manufacture, transport, install, and test the machinery, and a non-negligible variable cost in maintaining the system.
google already has a social network (kind of). anyone heard of orkut?

please, heed my advice and dont get an account. whatever email you use will be immediately and forever pummeled with brazilian spam.
i dont think so at all, look how much time people invest in facebook, and they dont even get anything tangible or useful out of it.

now think about how much more time people would invest if they got cheap access to, say, a sailboat out of it, or conversely if they got a tidy return on an otherwise dead investment.
That's a little too binary for my liking. I wear the analog variety.
I don't see any swearing, though. How is this relevant?
The wind cars generate is not causally related to fossile fuel. Solar driven cars would also cause wind. And even now, generating additional energy from burning the same amount of fossile fuel can hardly be bad for the environment.
Well I will tell you that it was quite an effort. There are lots of moving parts under the hood - a theorem prover, search mechanisms, spell checker, etc.

It took several years to get it to the current beta. The nice thing I have tenure as an associate professor in Sweden so I can grind on this problem with little interference and a quirk in Swedish law lets Anaphoric Systems (our company) own it. The sacrifice has been that my publication rate slowed down. But honestly I don't really care (that much).

Still I have been told that it is hard to sell a generic database interface tool. I have had lots of advice to specialize in one vertical or another. But which one to pick?

My own dream would be to sell it on the database tools market as a general solution.

Still if our Anaphoric Systems start up fails to get traction, we will probably just open source the whole project -- and I will get back to publishing on areas like causality, probability logic, etc.
That exactly is the point.
No, I only talked to other OCR companies, who didn't reply.

Maybe I should give it a try, thanks for the hint and the positive response.
I don't see what they know that Google doesn't. Google certainly has no shortage of people familiar with symbolic natural language processing methods. It's not like Google hasn't read the major papers and books in that field. If the Xerox technology Powerset licensed has been published anywhere, Peter Norvig and lots of other people there have almost certainly read it very carefully.
"Investors will examine the creation of IP very carefully in such a situation as they don't want to buy into a law suit."

Unless the "IP" (a bullshit weasel word if ever there was one) is YouTube.com, in which case investors are eager to pay billions of dollars for a site where 90% of the compelling content is copyrighted by someone other than the person posting it.
How many of you YC applicants are non-hackers?
My friend and I are both pretty geeky, especially by comparison to normal people. We can both poke around in CSS, and set up a simple CMS. As far as code goes, that's the end of it though. We plan on working with developers, leaving the actual coding to them, while focusing on the overall flow and design of our site/apps.

How many other applicants are in the same boat?
My assumption is that it is for read only access to specific tables, which is perfectly sensible and safe.
Quantum Suicide
There is nothing insulting. I am saying the truth. Reality is not always pretty. Go to any techie party, and you will see what I am talking about. Too bad that people just neg. for the fun of it.