skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've always thought of the reddit logo as exceptionally hideous, childish, AND unprofessional -- we scored a hat-trick!
Do I detect premature optimization?
GNU Smalltalk 3.0 released
'Piracy' is Often Fair Use, Study Says
Substroke - language for drawing dynamic (data-dependent) pictures
It's not select based, it is event based, utilizing the relatively new support for event-driven IO in the Linux and FreeBSD kernels (kqueue/epoll).
The Matrix Cookbook - A free mathematical desktop reference on matrices
Here's my "startup" diet:

Breakfast:

Steel cut oats - $.89/lb at Whole Foods in the bulk bins

Dried fruit (raisins, cranberries, blueberries, pineapple, papaya, etc.) - somewhere between $1.50/lb and $8/lb, either in bulk or pre-packaged in the bulk section at Whole Foods

Walnuts or pecans - $6-$8/lb from the bulk bin at Whole Foods or Nob Hill

Brown sugar and butter - small enough quantity that it barely counts. Probably $.25 each day.

Total price for breakfast: Probably a buck or two...I've never added it all up. It's surprisingly filling and enjoyable. I sometimes skip lunch, if I know my girlfriend will be home early, or if I'm meeting someone out for dinner.

Lunch:

Rice - cheap as free. I have a rice cooker ($20, or $179 for the "fuzzy logic" one that I now have that can do brown rice), so it takes little human time.

Vegetables stir fried, or in a fried rice - Whatever is cheapest at the Nob Hill or Milk Pail. The cheapest stuff is what is in season and tastes best and is most healthy. So, that's what I buy. It's about $2 per day for lunch.

Cashews or tofu or eggs for protein (I'm vegetarian). About $.50 per day.

Sometimes, I'll make enough hummus and stack of flatbread for two or three days worth of lunch. That's super cheap. About $1 per meal. One <$1 bag of garbanzo beans is enough for a huge bowl of hummus, though the tahini and spices can add to the price a bit.

Total lunch price: Probably about $3. Prep time about 15 minutes.

Dinner:

Girlfriend is home for dinner, so she determines that meal mostly. It's either eat out, order a pizza, or eat various crappy carb-filled meals. Pasta is a staple. Mostly still pretty cheap when we eat at home, even though a lot of it comes from boxes.

Add a bag of apples or other fresh fruit and some various nuts from the bulk bins for snacks, and you've got a balanced healthy days worth of food.

I tried ordering from Amazon, but ended up never having all of the stuff I needed, anyway. You've gotta have milk for boxed mac and cheese. Eggs for a lot of stuff. Fresh cheese for good sandwiches. Bread (and I like the good stuff...crusty sour dough and such). It just doesn't allow one to build complete meals. I have been known to "wing it" by picking up a few fresh items from the asian market that's walking distance from here, and buying large quantities of the dry goods every two or three weeks...in order to minimize time spent shopping.

But, the fact is, that I'm less productive when I fall into a rut of being at home all the time. Sometimes dramatically so. Getting out helps.
I wish I could search by UPC.
Hopefully what I created is elegant enough for people to want to use.
Woah, woah. Craigslist may be ugly, but it's a UI masterpiece. The ugliness of MySpace comes at the expense of the UI, which makes it infinitely more shitty.
Behavior Driven Development is "not worth it."
i wish i knew flash this well when i needed to do powerpoint presentations for classes.
Seems like this script does a top level document search for nodes to apply it's PNG fix. This can really hurt performance for sites that have complicated layouts. Sometimes it's best just manually code your own png fix solutions (fix exactly the image and div nodes you need for each page, rather than conducting a document.getElementsByTagName.. sweep)
I'm pretty sure almost any niche has some sort of profitable business waiting to be monetized by a blogger with a decently sized, trusting audience.
No wonder, so is your content - exceptionally h, ch and u, haha! :)
For $5 Million You Can Buy Enough Storage to Compete with Google
I was hoping for some advice for those of us in slightly less ideal circumstances :-)

I'm charged with assembling a team of people for a new project and I certainly don't have access to the kinds of people or money PB has. It's tough trying to find great people when you have a lot of constraints.
Sorry, I wish I had the answer. Even with our resources, it's still difficult. The sad thing is that there are a lot of great people out there working away at bad jobs. One of the things I try to accomplish with my my blog is to convince them to quit their bad jobs and try something new. I believe that it will be good for them, and good for the world.
"I'm currently in the planning stages of building a hosted Java web application"

Errr... why am I not surprised?
Breathtaking. I must see it in person. Can't wait.
There is No G.com, Y.com, M.com, Why Not?
This is highly misleading.

First of all, a $5 million cluster could only serve a small fraction of Google's customers. Google is estimated to have nearly half a million servers worldwide... there's a reason they have that kind of capacity.

And more importantly, Google's most valuable asset is their employees and intellectual property, which is worth a hell of a lot more than $5 million (according to their market cap approx $200 billion minus their datacenters, offices, etc)

But their point that with $5 million you could build a significant cluster is a good one. Definitely not Google-worthy though.
the reason why people go to these site is simply because of the "mr me too" effect. Everyone goes there because everyone else goes there ( except for -i- and a few others who are more likely to be found in place like this one, although every now and then, someone from thoz sites escapes and find themselves here )
yeah it seems simple, that's good. And bypasses the framework, that's very good.
Overheard at CES  2008
Jay-Z, HP's star endorser, uses a Mac
World's Largest Television Unveiled
No worries!

I had some issues with a sudden spike in load so I just added an extra machine. Hope that will get me going for a couple of days :-)
It's pretty similar to the previous Casting Spels in Lisp tutorial in that it's overly cute and loquacious but does manage to approach a heady topic with some degree of innocence.

It's more targeted as an intro to Haskell for the light hobbyist, really.
Kind of juvenile. Interesting if you've never heard of the concept before, silly otherwise.
Monads in Python (with nice syntax!)
Yeah, I don't think it would be too hard, you just need a microcontroller, digital compass, a bunch of vibrating motors, and a power source.

Vibrating motors:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_i...

Digital compasses:
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/categories.php?cPath=23_83
Build Huffman Compression in Ruby
Victory shall indeed be mine.
One thing I always liked about the Arcades was that in general, companies like Sega and others would put out machines that were far ahead of the home consoles. The average person simply couldn't afford it, and therefore did not mind dropping in a few quarters for the eye candy and interactivity. Today, this would mean that arcades would need far more than ~$600 playstation 3 power, but rather, hardware in the thousands of dollars to make this worthwhile, particularly when some gaming enthusiasts already spend a huge amount on high definition gaming pc's.
That's actually good reminder. I probably should spend more time trying to convince some of my unhealthily comfortable friends to take a chance. A lot of them express the desire to, but tend to chicken out. Anyway, it's encouraging to know even you have difficulty with this :-) Thanks.
I tried to reach the site he built few times today and it was down every time I tried to open it. Ouch.

Proxy Error

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.
The proxy server could not handle the request GET /.

Reason: Error reading from remote server
You raise an interesting point, since most of what circulates about crowd wisdom these days is the Surowiecki book citing Galton's study. What you mention here is more like the Spiral of Silence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spiral_of_silence

I don't think voting in its current form is good. I am much more fond of a prediction market-esque, or virtual economy (the specific term eludes me at the moment) implementation. Nevertheless, here is a possible way to answer your question about the aim.

A hypothetical case would be, users upvote in appreciation (or to bookmark), with the side effect that more appreciated items float higher, and receive greater visibility, acting as a filter. The catch is that it's to the benefit of other users.

To that, I'm not entirely sure why it works (as in, why it became popular). I don't click arrows much. I clicked yours because I appreciate your reply, 3 days after :-)

Which shows another glaring problem. Current voting mechanisms let these votes go stale. I'm upvoting on something 7+ days old. You will receive a point but not know the context of it. Anyhow, that's another topic.

Thanks again, for following up. Don't agree entirely, but a good point nonetheless.
Haha, that's very interesting. What else are you doing with that query string?
The Sexiest Geeks of 2007
More advice for new Y Combinator founders
-Get ready for high highs and low lows, and practice keeping yourself in the middle or you'll never get good work done. You're going to be pretty sure your company is dying at least once a month, and it usually isn't. This is very important and very difficult to learn.

-Focus on the product, especially in the early days. You'll have time to make deals later. Now, you've got to build something great.

-If you hire, do it very slowly and carefully. The culture of a company is set very early, and so is the quality of the team.

-Don't be afraid to change your idea if the market seems bad. Early is a good time to do it. You can change your product, you can change your team, you can change your sales strategy, but you can probably not create a market. Good startups surf someone else's wave.

-Figure out what the important things are, and spend lots time on those and little on the rest. Lots of startups work very hard, but on the wrong things. They still die an untimely death.

-Watch out for fights and brewing tension among cofounders (ie, make sure everyone feels they have a reasonably fair deal). I've seen this derail more early startups than anything else. And, if you are really sure you have the wrong cofounder, fire fast.

-The startups in my Y Combinator 'class' that tanked the fastest were the ones that spent the most time worrying about option grants for members of their board of advisors and the least time on their product. Could be a coincidence, but why risk it? Build your product.

-Great products, technology, and people win the day in the long run. History backs this up. Do not be afraid of competitors without them, no matter how much money they raise or how much noise they make.

-It's most tempting to give up right before you're about to succeed.

Best of luck,
Sam Altman
Spending 30 minutes or an hour reading the results of an intelligent/knowledgeable spending hours/days/weeks of their time writing on a topic is a damn good deal from my perspective.
Should Web Giants Let Startups Use the Information They Have?
Jobs to India? Turns Out Outsourcing Does Work!
Might I suggest Google for finding out?
Fairly sure he meant elitist.
12 predictions for Enterprise Web 2.0 in 2008
That last point is so true!
This are some great tips. Ill live by these.
I can't agree with the second to last point enough... People are paranoid about competition and copycats--- it's a waste of time and energy.
I wrote a reply but it started turning into a blog post of sorts.

http://flipzagging.livejournal.com/440929.html
Jerry Yang offers sneak peak of Yahoo's future: Life!
Which YC startups have tanked?
Automatically Version Your CSS and JavaScript Files
> Fail. Is this supposed to be a joke?

Don't think so; it's entertaining and shows actual working code that progresses over time such that a reader can see how basic concepts work.

Maybe I just like cartoons; where's Mr. Bunny's Guide to Haskell?
This sounds neat. Reminds me of Cinderella (my all time favorite java application): http://cinderella.de/tiki-index.php
Sam, thanks for an awesome post!

I have one question. You say the following:

>>> Figure out what the important things are, and spend lots time on those and little on the rest. Lots of startups work very hard, but on the wrong things.

Product is number one, no question about it. What else do you consider important and what do you consider 'wrong things'?
, too?
AWS would charge you about $1 million a month to load and store 1 petabyte, which sounds good until you realize that Google also has several hundred thousand processors.

If you only needed 100,000 small EC2 instances, that would cost you at least $10 million a month.

Now suppose you need 1,000 managers and engineers to deliver all the same services. If the average cost is $10k/month each that's another $10 million a month.

So even with some pretty naive assumptions, the storage cost is less than 5% overall.

GOOG's own 2007 statement ( http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/revenues_q107.h... ) says their operating expenses were closer to $1B for the full year, which is about 4x this. It also says they have closer to 12k full time employees.

Given that http://glinden.blogspot.com/2008/01/mapreducing-20-petabytes... claims to be doing 20PB MapReduce jobs, they obviously need a lot more than 5PB.

Still I bet their storage component is a lot closer to 1% of the total operating costs.
Nice post Sam. I wonder about #1, though. How do you tell the difference between when you think your company is dying and when it really is?
Ask News.YC: How much time and effort do you spend on SEO techniques to gain traffic?
...and if you've had successes in the past what did you do? Did you hire an SEO firm or do it yourselves?

I've got a startup that's facing a fair amount of keyword competition. Ranking in search engines is going to take some time. Purchasing advertisements is possible, but our budget is limited. Any advice?
Unless Karvay didn't know which instrument he's playing, the performance is an interesting PR piece, but not much beyond that.
122.164.125.114
Here are some quotes that will help you "Think and Grow Rich"
If no new or current users/advertisers/customers/etc care about what you're doing, and no one in the company has a plan (or, more commonly I think, a desire) to fix it, you are probably in bad shape.
Good:

-Things that will get you more revenue

-Things that will get you more users (and thus hopefully revenue)

-Things that will make your product better (and thus hopefully more users)

-Things that will get you great hires (and thus hopefully better products)

-Focusing on the right market

Bad:

-Going to events at business schools or 'networking' with the people that do
I'm guessing most haven't heard of Ted.com

That's the place to go if you want to learn from Big Thinkers around the world, in any category, It's been around for quite some time now.
Without naming either company involved, two companies from Stanford started approximately simultaneously with pretty much the same vision. One group spent months (literally) drafting employment and consultant agreements, filing patents and trademarks, setting up various shell corporations to shield themselves from liability, etc etc and then hired an offshore development team to build the product.

The other guys just built the thing, only coding and talking to users, and were delighted to find that everything else could be done retroactively. They had tons of happy users before the first guys had anything but a gigantic stack of legal documents, nicely written but protecting nothing.

By the time they pitched the same VC, company B had probably a 1000x lead in user traction, with a growing spread. Easy decision for the VC firm. A is dead; B is a massive success.
Hence the word "else."
1. Ridiculously overpromise on what you're going to create ("the Macintosh of X")

2. Come out with a marginally interesting clone of something that's already been done to death (wikis, blogs, CMSs, project management, todo lists -- must be highly data driven). Promise to do one feature a day for a month or so and keep it up for about half a week

3. Merge with other sites that are doing better

4. Do jack shit - actually, work on ridiculously overambitious "side projects" on "the weekend". A book is a suitably ridiculous project. Also make sure everyone knows that you read a book a week. The world trembles before your intellectual might.

5. Take your share of the money when the people you're mooching off of get bought

6. Bitch and moan

7. Run like hell

8. (Profit was at step 5.)

9. Blog about all this to make you look like a fucking genius and say that you "finished" things you briefly mentioned doing but never actually started.

Yes I know, he has money and I don't.
This article reminds me Why I Hate Woodworking Conceits.
100 Million Copies of Vista Sold, Says Gates
Not much, really. Now that we're already broken up (mostly because we generally don't want to control each others' lives), what more could we do to harm each other?
Times Online's Silicon Valley at Oxford podcast
Reid Hoffman amongst others..
A Chilling Idea at CES
Hi,

300K pviews a month is pretty good. Can you point me to your blog? I would love to check it out.
Imagine if startup A joined startup B to provide their IP management processes. Don't discount the skills and value-adding that startup A would have learnt for their next startup or providing these services to other startups.
> In Defence of (0/:l)(_+_) in Scala

I didn't know Scala had ASCII porn... :-|
I think, given the similarity in wall decor, that Augustus may also have owned my house in Ohio at some point. I hope archaeologists aren't upset at the changes I've made.
I'm pretty sure the recording industry's future revenue model is not Guitar Hero.
BBC article about over 50's startups. Who here is older than 30?
Just curious. After reading this article, and being 38 myself, I thought it would be interesting to ask the Hacker News community who here is older than 30, but creating a startup?
Make something so good that it spreads by word of mouth.
Econ Nerds
On the other hand, being unintuitive doesn't mean a language is better, either.
Most useful article I've read in a long time. Grat for rails developers who wan't to put stuff out there fast.
Ok, so it's a slightly different architecture, but it's still really an evolution of the single-process select-based server. To do anything "application like" - running code in ruby, php, python - you apparently (correct me if I'm wrong, because I'm just going from what I found after 5 minutes on the site) have to farm things out to FCGI, so you're back to the Apache model of separate processes - noting of course that unlike some people erroneously think, apache's processes each have a select loop, so it's not just forking processes for every connection!

My point is that the application processes are where things are tricky. Even 'big slow apache' can saturate fast connections with static content. The real trick is to get the most out of your dynamic code without under utilizing your resources (by launching only one mongrel instance, for example), or running things into the ground by letting your apps try and grab too much memory.
Skribit looks sweet - is it RoR powered or what?

Are you in YCombinator?
Or maybe they would have distracted startup B and they would've both failed. Doing everything really isn't an option, so you had better pick the one thing that really matters.
In the beginning was the command line by Neil Stephenson
Yahoo!, Flickr, OpenID and Identity Projection
9 VCs You're Gonna Want to Avoid
40, and I hope I never stop enjoying new music, learning new concepts, and expanding who I am.
My brother and I are both hacking code for software based start-ups and enjoying every minute of it. We are both over 50. Why would you want to stop doing new and exacting stuff at a particular age?
I guess Microsoft beat them to it (WindowsLive or something like that).

Personally, I don't want a company to take over my life. Even if it effectively does, I suspect it is not a good marketing move to call it so.

I also don't want to be reminded that my life happens only on the internet.
I'm 38 myself and have been into this for 15 years now in various businesses and into computers since I was about 12 years old. The media often talk about 'young' startups more and also I remember reading a couple of articles that Paul Graham wrote about doing things whilst young. I must admit I find it harder to do all-nighters and now I have children there is less focus on business, but I'm still as passionate and I was curious as to what the audience was on this particular site.
Yeah, I don't think Facebook depends on SEO.

I guess it depends on the context of the site though. Good SEO generally always important (can be a kickstarter). Wordpress blogs are great 'out of the box' for SEO - maybe a company blog with Wordpress could be a good start.
This is an incredible essay by one of today's leading techgnostic writers. It's the earliest writing I know of that talks about the commoditization of software regarding open source projects.
I am 33 and love my career choice. How many other careers can be your passion...
I suppose being well-known for what you do helps more than having resources. If you have cool stuff to show, perhaps it would work better for expanding your circle of potential employees (who you still have to convince to work with you).
33 now, 34 next month.

The right age to start a business is somewhere between the age you are excited about the possibilities and think you can do something to make even the smallest ones become reality and the age at which you feel defeated by the world at large.

So long as you're in that range I see no problem with you succeeding, be you 18 or 58.
I'm still in my 20s: 0x28 this year.
You're still on speaking terms with her as an ex-girlfriend. Imagine the added burden of having her as an ex-cofounder!
How to fight with lows? Especially, what if you spend months on the product and no one actually uses it?
00100000 myself. pg is over 30, and still seems "somewhat relevant".
My new job at Mozilla
* Reads list

* Calls broker to short News.YC

* Profit!
It's great to recommend youngsters in their twenties to start something and not wait, but obviously there's no reason to discourage people over 40 to be entrepreneurs. BTW I'm 40.
On Comet, Paul Graham, and YC rejection
Because when you become a certain age, you're supposed to stop having fun, learning new things, socializing and generally having an interesting life. Then you become senile and die. Oh, and you're supposed to alienate any improvements in the human condition as well, such as cars, rap music, the waltz or computers.

I see this all the time, it's a real disgrace for the human race. I have a hard time believing that it really has to be like this..but everyone I know over 50 assures me it is true.

There are obviously 'some' happy, older people out there, so I do feel that I have a little bit of evidence supporting my belief that old age doesn't necessarily mean a depressing life. Perhaps being a wage slave their entire life and then suddenly having all the free time they want does something to people. It is definitely worth researching, this entire debacle has an aura of bold statements about life without grounding in fact.
I'm 42 and a half.

Or in hex, 0x2A

You can do some really cool things when you're in your 20s. I know I did. Why stop? Look at the cost of market entry. Kicking off a new web app startup is equivalent to what? Taking a year off and buying a boat?

The trick is: can you be as hungry when you're 35 as when you're 25? I think you can -- but my opinion is biased.