skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
TopCoder - your opinion?
Hi,

What's your opinion on TopCoder.com and similar algorithm solving competitions like ACM? Anyone competing? I think it is a really good way to improve one's thinking skills -- granted, it does not measure your complete skill set(as programming isn't just algorithms), but algorithms are essential.

I think most people in the web 2.0 space are in it mainly for the money. The applications themselves are mostly pretty trivial from an algorithmic point of view, so I am really curious what's your opinion on this.

Or is everybody just on the road to change the world (with apps like twitter), and doesn't care about competitions like this(where hacking and bright solutions are still appreciated)?
Just bugged with the looks. Thanks for the eclipse link. I will try that out. Or 'go back' to emacs.
Achieving the Partnership Trifecta
Partnerships are a great way to help boost the value proposition you can provide for your clients, especially when you are just starting out with tight cash flow and a small sales budget. Here is a method I have seen work many times.
you are laughing as if you are very confident about your answer ... well I am not as sure as you are what exactly PG does ... but I doubt TC calls up PG or anyone else for that matter on daily basis to find out whats new... and maybe PG doesn't do it but a lot of other VC's do (check this interview video with Michael Arrington about how to get on TC http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/11/how_to_get_in_t.html ) ... if I am going to work with YC I would expect them to help me with these kind of stuff ... I mean that is the whole point of YC (don't start with saying they are not a PR team and they are not there to create news for you, I know that) .. but the way YC is structured (which I think is great) is to mostly give you advice and support ... And this kind of support could mean more than anything else to help you launch your business, create traction and gain users, specially with Disqus that is late in the game, and needs the support of bloggers, and has many competition, and there is only a need of one of these services on each blog, and it has been proven that its not so easy to get dominance in this field
I didn't know Uncov did positive. I'm kind of tempted to bring back doomedstartup.com.
Awesome! Thanks for posting this.
Five times as many must have believed they needed cofounders. Either way I still think the take home message can be that successful single founder companies aren't an insignificant bizarro event.
If you'd like to know EXACTLY how much time you spend on news.YC (and when you spend it), give me a shout (tony@rescuetime.com) and I'll give you a beta invite code to RescueTime.
What makes software companies so different from the technology companies on the list that were once startups (i.e. products not services)?
I think we need a cultural shift that places less emphasis on grades and college, and more emphasis on results and direction. I think most people will still go to college, but there need to be socially endorsed options for people who don't want to go to college, or can't handle college. But yeah, I agree that the educational system needs to be fixed, majorly.

My mom still wishes I had a college degree so that I would have the stamp of being a bona fide "educated person". She knows I am doing fine and that I have options in life, but she thinks it'd be great if I went back and finished my BS. At least she gave up on the idea that some day I'd grow up to be a neurosurgeon... :-)
This was surely a factor: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4783
I've always been fairly disappointed in every 'vectorizing' tool I've tried. I have yet to try this one but the examples look incredible.
"you are laughing as if you are very confident about your answer"

FWIW, brezina is a cofounder of YC-funded Xobni, so he has the inside scoop.
I'm asking the maximum value of n you could be offered such that you would still accept.
my thoughts too.
What will happen to you as you grow older:  you will go "meta"
That's my guess anyway. It's certainly the case with me. As I have grown older, I have focused more on the "big picture", thinking about things at a meta level.

Any similar experiences?
Looking at that on the old CRT I'm using until my laptop comes back from IBM, the anti-aliased screenshots look very blurry. I could take or leave subpixel hinting on my LCD, but I actively dislike anti-aliasing on a CRT.
If I spent any significant time using Mac OS or Windows, that might be useful to me.
Most (maybe all) of the most ambitious people I know waste more time than they'd like checking email and visiting news sites. Including me. I added noprocrast partly because I wanted it myself.
because they get shit done
I wonder why people do that sort of thing except as an exercise:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=+this+works+perfect...
Auctomatic's Collison Brothers now part of the Irish High School Curriculum
pay particular attention to the photograph (not sketch) of patrick in the top right. we've managed to get him to stop wearing that labcoat but that evil grin still remains.
oh thats interesting ... so maybe he should be kind enough to answer the questions and give us his insight!!! I would find that more useful and interesting :)

and congrats to him as well for xobni they have done a great job
College happens to be a pretty good place to meet co-founders.
What happened these days is that company like Google and Microsoft higher smart and experienced students.

If you have 3.2 GPA and have experience with open source, you're qualified to be interviewed.

If you have 4.0 GPA, you're also qualified.

If you have 4.0 GPA and have experience (internship), you'll get an offer :).

It's both. Everybody wants the best talent available. For students coming out the school, GPA is what differentiate them the most because companies do not expect them to have tons of experience. They're hiring talent.

I don't know why we need this huge cultural shift and stuff like that because clearly our current systems are working fine.

There are outliers (people who have 4.0 GPA but sucks at coding), it's unfortunate but everybody has to deal with outliers everywhere and anywhere.
Its called a PR firm

Neither Disqus nor YC has a PR firm.

I think the main reason Disqus gets attention from bloggers is that it's designed for bloggers. They know better than anyone what a pain it is to manage comment threads.
Well, not necessarily disagreeing with you, but as it happens, I used BigHeadLab's search to find the thread that I linked. I searched

"http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/"

(no quotes) on the site http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/ and the first result was the one I wanted (although the link format that YC uses has since changed, so I had to hack the URL).

I tried this Google search, and the result did not appear:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22http%3A%2F%2Fnyc...
I know these guys and they're legit.
Since wrapping the C versions of sin() and cos() would be too much overhead using JNI, just redo the whole loop in C and call that.

Alternatively, write new library functions that make the normal calls and then use Csin() and Ccos().
could you give some points about Q1 and Q3 as well?
Leadership by consensus does not work, as anyone who has belonged to a high school club or organization knows.

Worked for us at Viaweb and Y Combinator. Works for most of the 58 startups we've funded.

And btw, you're misinterpreting my analogy about the plane, but I'm out of stock on "no, what I meant was" so I'll leave it as an exercise for readers who care to figure out how.
Hmm. Apparently "Y Combinator" is translated as "Y-Combinator" in Gaelic. Who knew?
I had a fair number of very general theories when I was young. They just weren't very good. Maybe it would be more correct to say that one will think more successfully about the big picture.
Q1: They were energetic and smart.

Q3: We liked the idea because it was clearly something the world needed. Comments are badly broken on most blogs, including even big ones like Techcrunch. I have no idea how big the market is in dollars. It's not worth thinking too much about anyway. Startups evolve. It's enough to start with something you know people need.
You could do a public google spreadsheet.
Just got an invite code today. Thanks! I am up and running. It looks very well-executed.
They have a Hypnotoad.
btw that is actually a genuine artists impression of patrick. thankfully we've got him to stop wearing that lab coat around the apartment but he still sports that evil grin from time to time.
VCs cut off startup's oxygen
This is a company that had a product that was well engineered, but didn't get initial traction. This is not an uncommon situation: No product plan can survive contact with the market completely intact.

Sometimes only minor adjustments need to be made, but sometimes it takes several months (And really, many of the big-name overnight successes that have become household words took several years of adjustment to start getting significant traction.)

But the faustian bargain with venture capital is you take a lot of money, hire a lot of people and you shorten your runway dramatically. In this case, the technology is good the idea is good and extremely flexible-- but the company will never have a chance to find the market position where this technology starts turning its value into revenue and profits.

Its too bad. I'm sure some company will acquire the remains, but odds are pretty good that they won't understand what they have, or won't have the interest in it to make it what it could have been.

This story is particularly keen to me because I've followed Teqlo- they are one of my competitors as I am building a similar technology. Near as I can tell, by myself (well, I'm the only programmer, I have a partner whose doing marketing and project management stuff) I've been keeping pace in terms of development speed (they had quite a head start though.) My product too has evolved in the problem it is attempting to solve as I get to better understand the market... but as a solo guy with no outside investment, I don't have the pressure of a VC firm. If my first attempt to market the product fails, there are 3-4 other possibilities that will be easy to try. (And at essentially no cost too...) Hell the hardest problem has been figuring out which market opportunity is the best... that's been harder than building the software itself.

So, for the majority of you who will not get VC funding for your startup- don't lament. Go without and enjoy the benefits of being able to be flexible- to find the right niche and to make adjustments if things don't go as planned, with the the fear that you'll be strangled in your sleep by your investors before you get a chance to adjust to the market reality.

If you have to do your startup part time to make ends meet, remember Matt Muellenburg did that to create wordpress and there's scores of other examples. (My partner is working %50 time right now in fact.)

Don't fret over finding investors-- build it, and if they don't come, you can adjust until they do.

BitGeek

PS-- for those who will think I'm a hypocrite for having a partner after authoring the "don't get a cofounder" article- we don't operate by consensus, and while they have a good chunk of equity, and we generally agree on things, we have none of that tension that cofounders have because the buck stops with me... and when we disagree, the partner gets to try their idea and see if it works.
Maybe you'll be funded now.
thanks for the response, and I am happy to see these as your answers to my questions
I see your point now and we are in agreement ... I kind of mentioned that myself in the last sentences too
Critique our startup: HeavyInk.com
Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other goodies thrown in.

The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways.

There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).

So: please check out the site, and give your feedback, either here, or in the HeavyInk forums (http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1 )

We really do take all feedback seriously, and have prioritized various features and bug fixes based on customer comments.

Thanks!
Our team of 2.5 engineers (two real engineers, and one half business guy / half engineer) have spent the last three months coding up HeavyInk.com in Rails - it's a mashup of an Amazon.com style retailer for comic books (individual issues, graphic novels, subscriptions to issues, subscriptions to graphic novels - you name it), and Facebook style social networking (yeah, I know: "Oh, God, not ANOTHER social netowrking site..."), with some other goodies thrown in.

The comic book retailer space is a bit crowded, but after doing a bunch of research (see details elsewhere at news.ycombinator: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75296), we concluded that the existing firms all failed in major ways.

There are some cool technologies under the hood (Coco/R for Ruby to parse out details on authors and artists from free-form human-readable text descriptions), and a lot of cool code reuse (Sanskrit, Beast, etc.).

So: please check out the site, and give your feedback, either here, or in the HeavyInk forums (http://heavyink.com/forum/forums/1 )

We really do take all feedback seriously, and have prioritized various features and bug fixes based on customer comments.

Thanks!
Because the founders are really smart, capable, and driven. Same reason YC picks almost every company. The actual business idea is less important than the founders, as pg has said frequently.
That's awesome. I wish I was a cartoon character.
Apparently I sat the Leaving Cert exam (there's even a question on when), which is kinda odd, since I never did. Is dropping out really so unacceptable?

Well, at least they got the clothing right.
The website looks slick and I'm a big superhero/comics geek. I signed up and will poke around when I get a chance.
Looks good, just one thing, in my browser (firefox 2.0.0.8 on linux) the signup button display is funny.
Yep. It worked fine in 2.0.0.7 on linux (that's what we used during devel), and then Firefox released 2.0.0.8, which regressed a bit, and reintroduced an old Firefox bug. There was uproar (we weren't the only site that looked bad in 2.0.0.8) and the Firefox team expedited the release of 2.0.0.9, and the site looks great again.

We actually held off on the announcement until 2.0.0.9 was ut!

So: consider upgrading Firefox right now, and give it another shot!
Awesome, thanks!

Go rate a few of your favorite comics, and then click the "recommendations" tab up top - we've been getting a lot of compliments on this feature.
On Pg2: "In Japan, we have tradition to value cute things high," a Japanese user, Yukihiro Matsumoto, wrote.

Hmmm...does the NYSUN reporter know who that Japanese user might be..?
why do people read uncov?
Am I the only one that's actually too afraid to want to know?
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/11/08/heavyinkcom-a-mashup.ht...

Boing Boing! Congratulations. The pagerank gods have smiled upon you. Let us know how much traffic/repeat traffic that gets you.
But somehow I only met pretty girls. I must have done it wrong.
Assholes.
That is probably the easiest route :P
Ye gods. I'm skinny, but somebody needs to pin that guy to the ground and pour some lard down his throat or something. Then again, if they ever decide to do 'The Nightmare Before Christmas' with real actors, he'd be a shoe-in for the lead role. :)
I meant between all those that get shit done what happened here ... I thought that was clear???
That's awesome. Is there an English translation available?
Good luck! The days when I bought comic books are long past, but your site is inspiring. Perhaps I'll find something new worthy of buying.
OLPC "Give One Get One" program starts Monday
On Monday you'll be able to buy the "$100 laptop"... for $400. Of course, you're actually buying two, one of which will go to a child in a developing country.

Sure, the processor might be slower than some cell phones (433MHz vs. iPhone's 620MHz), but these things are so fun looking, I might just have to get one. Plus it's for a good cause.
As an entrepreneur he is spreading his wealth. We are no moral police to check his indulgence. There is no need to idealize him.
When you return and build a house get a good architect and post the pictures here :-)
When you're browsing for titles, it would be nice to put page navigation links at the bottom too aside fromt he ones at the top.
Gigaspaces targets 'the Digg effect'
"The platform is used to scale out applications across commodity hardware in response to demand."
I like the site overall, but here's some initial gripes:

"20% off Everything and Free Shipping on All Orders"

Could probably stand to qualify this with 'Special Offer' or if it's something you always do, 'We always offer...' or something. Maybe it's just me, but the way it just sits there right now, my first thought was something like, "Is this place going out of business?"

Search results page is a bit confusing, and it would be really nice to have an advanced search so I could exclude fields (first search I tried was for Priest (example: http://www.amazon.com/Priest-VOL-3-Min-woo-Hyung/dp/15918201... - if somebody can tell me how to make a link into a single word on N.YC I'll clean this up). It doesn't appear you have the series anyways, but it would have been nice to specify that I was searching for a Title and get a 'No Results' page instead of browsing through 3 pages of 'Not What I'm Looking For'.

If buttons (like 'Subscribe To Issues') aren't going to be an actual link (i.e., your pointer doesn't turn into a hand when you hover over it), there should be some sort of mouseover effect to indicate it's not just a dead link (and maybe a click effect, too, for people with slower computers / connections that won't load the next page straight away.)
My personal blog once got linked by BoingBoing.

The machine glowed fiery red, just before it caught fire and died. :-)

Hopefully the fact that we've got a dedicated box with extra memory for HeavyInk will stop a repeat of that story...
RUBY GALORE!
I was aware of that possibility. Still, implementing a standard encryption algorithm shouldn't be hard.
they also picked out the key influencers (a-list bloggers) in that community and either met them face to face (e.g. fred wilson @ demo day) and/or sent them personalized, polite emails asking them to try disqus. then it trickles down from there ("if it's good enough for fred wilson's blog, it's good enough for mine."). "the tipping point" by gladwell has other examples of this.

their product is inherently viral, too ("what are those cool threaded comments on your blog? powered by disqus?")
is this all day?
the ratings don't work in firefox 2 on osx.
Here's what's special about Disqus's business model/idea:

1. They have a grand long term plan (provide blog readers a centralized place to manage discussions on the web). They're sort of a social network in that way and their value will increase exponentially as their user base does.

2. They have an easy route to gaining the critical mass, by providing bloggers a simple plug-in that gives threaded, voteable comments, as well as some extra kick ass functionality. So they have a ton of initial value even with no user base.

3. They have a path to revenue. Large blogs would gladly pay for the service. And they could form their own ad network, as they know who reads what blogs (interests). There's also a lot of moving going on in the web publishing space.

I feel like some of the competitors you've mentioned have parts of the puzzle but Disqus has the whole thing. Given all that, it's pretty easy to see why Y C would fund these guys.
lol...Spanish, English and really shitty German.
You are not alone mate.
No, but display advertising is more about brand awareness and opinion-- it's not a direct-response game measured by CTRs.

A better question is if anyone has been influenced or reminded of a brand or product as a result of an ad served in a non-search context. I know I have!
Can you get recommendations without having to log in, too?
Amazing iPod Prior Art
Is this idea stupid?
A mix of like yc news/myspace/meetup just for 'start-up'-ers?

A few features:
-Meet people looking for co-founders

-Find people looking to co-found

-Rate peoples skill i.e. skill, endurance, persistence, attitude

-Organize demo days in your area

just a thought.Can I get some feedback please?
You're already skewing your feedback by titling the post "is this idea stupid". It should be more like "what do you think of my idea?"...and yes, it's stupid....j/k
I was looking for a slightly more resourceful response! We dont have the cash to hire someone although we could certainly afford to buy a book and begin to learn. Any suggestions?
It seems like everyone here has an idea and wants other people to follow them. If any of the YCnews lost souls are to come together many will have to abandon theirs.
Nah, Cisco did the same thing.
As far as "help" goes, yes; but that's usually on an occasional, part-time basis.
I have been thinking about same area for quite a while and not able to convince myself because there are many different sites with some partial information. And startup market has not large user base..
larger market <= more user and some day that returns more money compare to site with less user base.... well thats my thinking..
Its seems like a very competitive space and relatively small. Right away you are limiting yourself to entrepreneur types who have limited capital and hence arent an ideal target.

Mayve think about other larger groups that might have the same characteristics

Good luck!
do u have any links/books which gives more detail about what you have typed in this?
Also, what is a "...a hybrid between a social networking site and a traditional blob..." ?
It doesn't really seem like you are doing much that couldn't be accomplished with an existing social network. Or at least an OpenSocial / Facebook app.
Are you trying to make money from it? If not, it might be a good idea. I don't think anybody will want to pay for it, and advertising tends to be poorly received by your target users.
We switched products rather drastically. The original product was a web service operating system for old people.
Yeah I would more want to do it cause there is a need from what I can see.

I'm not interested in making it a huge revenue generating site.

As long as it sustains itself, I'd be happy.
Not looking for any money on this, as long as the site pays for the server and domain name costs I'm happy.
I haven't been in SF long but I find it fascinating how much people care about the valley popularity contest. Nobody, including Ted needs to be friends with the whole bay area to make a great company. Startups are about great products and customers who somehow pay for them. In the end VC's and customers don't care if everyone likes you or not. I understand the need to create a buzz but too much stock is given to what amounts to glad-handing, over-networking, pseudo-friends.
Wow. Dude. Please post more of your intellect!
Mean-spirited Valleywag gossip on iminlikewithyou (interesting tidbit about YC interview)
I must point out, however...

Facebook - 10? 20? lol