skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
a couple things I get from Max's story, one that has certainly been told repeatedly but is none the less quite amazing:

1) at 22 - he was not trying to be the CEO - he was hacking away at someone else's startup.

2) He was lucky enough to hit it huge with PayPal - but the result they achieved was a direct result of that 18 hours a day mentality and tenacity.

3) Age 29 or 30 is no time to be retired, lecturing, or enjoying long winey lunches at Boulevard - this is the classic "go out and get it phase of your life"

4) Starting a startup with 100 million in your bank account makes it much easier but is no guarantee of market success.

5) And for all of those winter 2008 YC applicants that didn't get the call (myself included) - the greatest startups in the valley did it without YC - so can you
That should read:

def foo(n):
n = [n]
def bar(i):
n[0] += i
return n[0]
return bar

Python really needs a scoping syntax to allow assignment to closed variables.
I found this in my bookmarks, but I don't remember how helpful it was: http://iptables-tutorial.frozentux.net/iptables-tutorial.htm...
staunch. Blaming the way I express myself is not gonna get us anywhere today. The fact of the matter is you understood it, now let's do something useful plz.
This is a good example. I'm guessing you didn't only tell them the idea, you opened up your books, detailed plans and possibly even your code.

A potential sale situation is different from taking the first steps on the idea. You had already started building the company.

I think managing the disclosure of sensitive information is a totally different topic (one which I wish I knew a little more about).
Read this while you are on the plane heading to meet investors
Could any one suggest a good book on Vision. Something like Cormen for algorithms.
The principle of least surprise can be surprising
No, thank you.

I've just been forced to learn about a new language proposal, a new (to me) set of morphisms, and a nonstandard approach to proving stuff in topology. That's a rich link.
there is a universal search system ;-)

http://www.google.com/search?q=SoftLayer+site:ycombinator.co...
High-Level to Low-Level
Such a high-level, abstract language like Haskell might be great for producing the most concrete, lowest-level code, machine code.
The Firefox guys are working on <canvas3d>.
Click + wait, probably. Java applets give you the ability to do nearly everything without installing software, but never caught on because the JVM takes so damn long to start. Flash has been somewhat more successful because it loads faster, and AJAX even moreso because there's virtually no up-front cost if you do it right.
Facebook founder sets sights on big leagues
"I cannot get foo.[3] to work"

Hey, neither can I. Quite possibly because foo.[3] actually doesn't work, it's foo[3] that works and I made a typo.

Sorry about that, and especially too bad considering how your first reaction was to consider the possibility that your version of Ruby was at fault instead of the possibility that I made a careless error. I appreciate the implied vote of confidence, but I'm aghast at the consequences.

I appreciate your taking the time to share your reaction. I'm mulling over exactly what I prefer about the point-free syntax, and the prod to think thinks over may help me understand my own views in more depth.
Hiring 10-20 people and holding enough cash in the bank that it'll last them for 2 years or so.
Great observations, in the 2nd table I listed the recurring revenue twice. I will rework the document. I know the $20k doesn't make much sense when the upside is so large but that is just where I am at right now. I can't bootstrap this much longer without going crazy, at the same time I am not in a position to just quit working which is taking way too much of my time.
Search hacker news
I love it how simple hacker news is, but it wouldn't hurt to have a search feature. I mean one could use a "dirty hack" and search with google and site:news.ycombinator.com but I think it would be more relevant to have a search on the actual db, not on what google indexed.
Employees of the companies you use have access to your info - that's my point.
And that slow-down text message thingy might be interesting for McLaren as well :)
Here are some background and pointers. I'm not a computer vision guy, but these might get you started.

Computer vision is really hard. The computational resources we can spend on the problem are orders of magnitude smaller than what we're trying to emulate in the nature. I think (IANACVS!) something like 35% of the human brain's processing capacity deals with vision, for example. So the discipline is both highly mathematical (to root out shortcuts and shrink the problem) and computationally intense. Also, it's often got some kind of real-time requirements.

Don't let me discourage you though. Since I don't know much about the field, I don't know any of its successes. CV researchers have produced useful systems.

1. Image transform methods: looking up the 2D Fourier transform might be a good start.

2. Variational methods. These are hard to explain as they relate to vision, but if you read the first few chapters of Sussman & Wisdom's Structure & Interpretation of Classical Mechanics, you'll get an idea of what they're talking about.

3. Anything that involves sensors also involves noise. At my school, the first stage of the graduate CV track is a course based on [Papoulis & Pillai]'s Probability, Random Variables, and Stochastic Processes.

4. One of my classmates was involved in object modeling with manifolds. A manifold is basically an n-dimensional shape that follows mostly-Euclidean rules like a sphere, torus, or pretzel. I have no idea what to recommend here, because my curiosity about manifolds and repeated frustration in my efforts to find out more about them ultimately landed me in grad school. Watch out for that.

5. Obviously I know more about software than hardware, but you could definitely do worse than reading up on commonly-used sensors. A midlevel text on CCD cameras would be the way to go here.

6. You can read up on Visual Perception in humans. When I took a class on this as an undergrad, it was a senior-level psych elective. A related field is Psychophysics, which uses methods from physics to study sensory stimuli (e.g. acoustic waves) as they relate to perceived experience. See #s 1 and 3 above.

Hope some of this helps.
I like to pirate music as much as the next guy, but I can't get behind arguments that go like "The music industry isn't giving us fair alternative to outright stealing music."

Music is probably the cheapest it's ever been right now. Nobody buys $5 'singles' CDs because they can get the MP3 of it legally for 99c. Gone are the days where you need to pay $20 for a CD from a music store, since you can get all of the tracks for half that, assuming you're cool not getting the physical media (like cover art).

Ultimately, music piracy happens not because the RIAA is mean or information wants to be free or any other positive sounding reason. We pirate music because we can and we won't get caught and we now have a bunch of moral arguments in our back pocket we can use whenever we want to feel like we're actually not doing anything wrong.
I use DrScheme every day. It's pretty good and getting better - they just added autocompletion (only for the standard library, not for your own bound variables) for example.
The reason there isn't a definitive text on vision is that vision doesn't work. Algorithms work, and so to have a definitive text, you just collect up all the notable ones that work, and write about them in a book. When you have a totally unsolved problem like vision (outside of certain highly constrained domains, like robot soccer, where the colors are guaranteed, or industrial tasks, where basically the whole scene is guaranteed), you basically have to choose which methods that currently don't work might have a chance of eventually leading to something that does work. There are many possible sets of choices for that, which is why you can't really have a definitive text.
Besides Slime, there's also the Cusp plugin for Eclipse (although I haven't used it):

http://bitfauna.com/projects/cusp/index.html

And for Scheme/Emacs there's Quack (google quack.el)
You're not doing anything wrong when you share music. Intuitively everybody knows this already which is why everybody does it without thinking twice. File sharing is just not a moral issue and never has been.
there's this: http://nycs.bigheadlabs.com/
Is it just me, or does a genuinely useful product directed toward an under-served market with lots of money to spend provide no evidence of a bubble whatsoever? Xobni saves me time and makes my work life easier almost every day. No matter what the market's doing, there's always room in the market for products like that.
That's Hot.
What do you mean 'work'? There are many highly nontrivial successes in computer vision. Take a look at some of the examples here: http://yann.lecun.com/exdb/lenet/index.html

They're pretty surprisingly effective. Or how about melanoma detection and discrimination from benign lesions here: http://scholarsmine.umr.edu/post_prints/00312091_09007dcc803...

Or with this thing? http://www.polartechnics.com.au/IRM/Content/products_solar_o...

Mathematics was hardly cut and dry before Bertrand Russell wrote Principia Mathematica, but that book still have tremendous value (if only as a beacon!) There was plenty more to discover in geometry when Euclid wrote the elements.

A good computer vision book, even one that simply cataloged important successes and failures, would be quite valuable. It's not that it hasn't been written because it can't be, it's that it hasn't been written because no one has really gotten around to it. Good textbooks require a massive amount of effort to get right.
news.yc suggestion: RSS Feed
Why not have an RSS feed of, say, the top 50 stories. I know that they're constantly moving in and out, but it should be doable. You're all hackers after all ;)
It doesn't work in the sense everybody most wants it to work, which is to slap a cheap CCD camera or three on top of a mobile robot and have it tell the robot everything about its surroundings, like human vision can. Yeah, if you point a camera at a very restricted specific set of objects, all lit the same way, and all in generally the same basic configuration, you can do some vaguely useful statistics to get some information out of it, but that's kind of a painfully limiting thing.

Put it this way: At Anybots, we have a robot with 16 cameras on its head. We pump all those cameras back to an operator station, stitch them all together in a vaguely fitting-together way, and then project them onto a big bank of monitors. Plop a human operator in front of the monitors, and he knows exactly the orientation of the robot, the configuration of its limbs, and has basically a 3d map of the entire scene and a model of the lighting, minus occlusions. I'm pretty sure nobody knows how to write a computer vision system to do that. I'm not even sure that anybody knows how to use the overlap in the cameras to figure out how to make a coherent nice projection of the cameras onto the monitors.
You're fooling yourself, man. Maybe it's because you're only considering music.

Think about all of the software firms that make money only when people buy copies of their product. Is there nothing wrong with handing out copies of OSX or Photoshop just because it's easy?

Both industries are trying to fight the same battle, that their product is now easier replicated than purchased legitimately.
Sure, it doesn't work like magic. There's still a decent case for a book...
prototype is fairly annoying. i use it daily but prefer moo and jquery.
Computer vision is classified under AI in wikipedia. That pretty much sums up what we are trying to arrive at here.
Aftermath of Sony Betting Its Game Division to Help Its Movie Division: over $1 billion in losses
Read venture hacks? http://www.venturehacks.com
DRM-free? And I mean not only without copy protection, but also without a watermark identifying me as the original buyer. iTunes does the latter with it's supposedly DRM-free tunes.

It's just that if I can't sell the MP3, it's price should be compared to the price of a CD minus the resale value of the CD (up to 50%, I guess).
How about a link to that, then, on the top bar, since everybody wants search?
You can also have a look at Blueprint, a CSS framework, which:

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

http://code.google.com/p/blueprintcss/
Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper in high-rez - A 16 billion pixel image!
> Scaling IS NOT a problem startups without money face.

Maybe I'm kind of confused because it's late and I just drove through the Alps in the dark and I'm tired... but scaling doesn't have anything to do with money or not... no?
It's interesting -- I started writing this exact definition of "works" in my post above. Anthropomorphic bias, right?

Even with this understanding, though, I can't wrap my brain around what you're saying above. Computer vision doesn't "work" (for our definition of "work") because it's not feasible to get enough processing power together:

O( 3e10 ) neurons * 100 Hz/neuron = more cycles than you can rent on an NSF grant.

We've definitely got some exponential growing to do before we can even start meaningful experimentation. Does that mean no work should be done in the meantime?
2007 Free Software and Open Source Symposium Recordings
And counting!

The worst part of it is that Blu-ray still isn't considered the industry standard. Maybe they should've made a Blu-ray attachment for the PS2 instead.
Is 25 enough? http://news.ycombinator.com/rss
In any other industry if you can't make money because nobody wants to pay for your product (no matter what the reason is) it's because your business model sucks, not because you're a 'victim'.
News Websites: The Horseless Buggies
Piracy is stealing, whether the music industry sucks at business or not.
For 4, try Calculus on manifolds, then Differential Geometry (both by Michael Spivak).
How do you interact with your REPL? SBCL is designed around SLIME. I find it virtually unusable without it.
Really? That is a lot. I noticed a factor of two when I moved from CLisp to SBCL, and I was under the impression that CLisp is generally the slowest implementation.
Yes, it is a bias. I think it is a big mistake to try to solve the problem by emulating how humans see because we don't know how humans see (here's a rant of mine on a related topic http://inperc.com/blog2/2007/10/12/%e2%80%9cbrain-inspired%e...).
I don't think we're doing that much processing to do vision. It's never the case that even close to all the cells in the visual cortex are being used. It's always a tiny fraction of that. Yeah, we have a bunch of cells that neuroscientists think are somehow related to doing vision, but there's no evidence that they're doing some kind of horribly computationally intensive thing all day long. If they were, we'd see it on MRI's as soon as we put a picture in front of somebody.

No, I think we just haven't figured out what to do, not that we're limited by computational resources. I think there are a bunch of pretty strong assumptions hardwired into the brain, so we can see physical objects, but then you can fool us by showing us images that mess with the assumptions (aka optical illusions).

(Not that this is a particularly useful idea, mind you. I'm not about to solve computer vision. It's just a random philosophical idea.)
How about to type:

your_search_here site:news.ycombinator.com

in Google?
This has been requested many times, and users are begging for it. PG, is there a reason why it's not implemented? If the implementation is hard, then maybe you can use Google or bigheadlabs's solution!
Google will even pay you to use their solution.
The music industry sucks at business, whether piracy is stealing or not.

The moral debate isn't even very relevant here because regardless of whether downloading mp3s is stealing or impolite or a sin or whatever, in 25 years nobody will even remember that record companies ever existed.
that's what I was reffering to when I wrote "search with google and site:news.ycombinator.com"
This Man Wants To Control the Internet
Brain activity differs for creative and noncreative thinkers
The Secret World of Bandwidth
A fair question. Looks like other folks are doing the bulk of the coding:

http://demo.openlibrary.org/about/relnote
Can Nedit send expressions from the file you're editing to a REPL? I think that's a requirement for a decent Lisp editor.
SBCL recommends SLIME, but I see no evidence that it's "designed around" SLIME.
Confessions of an Economic Hitman
it's interesting to get the big picture at times...
I second that! CSS Mastery by Andy Budd is great. After reading that book you will really understand the box model and positioning, as well as a bunch of other stuff. Of course learning CSS goes together with learning to write well structured mark up also.
Berkeley Grad Seeking Stanford Cofounder
"Get a cofounder" is perhaps the most ubiquitous and undisputed piece of advice we aspiring entrepreneurs receive when reading startup self-help books, talking to investors, or trolling blogs.

It was advice I should have taken. I outsourced our company's beta development to India, and I quickly learned the hard way that contractors are very different than partners. I didn't know how hellish outsourcing could get.

I need someone to work with me to pull the all nighters, write code (which I can't do), and be there for some moral support.

It's not that I didn't want a cofounder; it was just that this mysterious person was hard to find. I'm sure part of the reason it was tough to find a cofounder is that our product isn't very glamorous (we use emerging web technology to help schools and families prepare for and stay connected during disasters), but it was also hard because I went to Berkeley.

The top grads from Cal don't want to start companies, they want prestigious jobs. Business majors like me go become investment bankers or consultants at Goldman Sachs or Bain. The CS guys all work for Microsoft or Google. Why don't Cal grads take risks? Why can't we learn from the success of our rivals across the bay?

Anyway, I want to jump ship. Is there a hacker from Stanford who wants to be my cofounder? I'll even wear red at the big game.

Yes, this post was obviously somewhat sarcastic, but I really do need help. I have a cofounder already, but he brought money to the table, not coding skills, and a hacker is what we need. My company, LReady , is about a year old, revenue generating (through non-web operations) and is completing its beta software.

If you are a Flash/Flex/ActionScript god (or just a fast learner), we want you to build the messaging backend to do this: www.lready.com/schools using tools like this: developer.ribbitphone.com. We have some money, so we can give you a small salary, and if things work out, you can stick around as part of the founding team. We are located just north of San Francisco, but will be moving closer to the valley shortly.

Email me at chris@lready.com if this is interesting. I actually don't care so much where you went to school Xeven Berkeley, my alma mater, is fine.
The implementation can't be that hard ... come on ... it's about doing some query on the database.
they should have - but they wanted to help their movie arm...
not to mention they should have thought about putting out (by helping blu-ray to become the standard with ps3) something easier to program for...

then again MS will also eventually lose money on the 360 as well, for making faulty hardware which we added a 3 year warranty on. Estimated cost: 1 billion.

Looks like Nintendo will be the big winner in this war
beautiful ! now ... can you put a link up there on the ... erm ... menu bar ?
With a strong, strong honorable mention for IBM. They make the main processors in the PS3, Xbox 360, AND the Wii.
That is really not the case. Search is a hard problem.
Stanford degree does not necessarily a good hacker make.

Re-word your request as you will turn off good hackers if you restrict based on the place they went to school. Most elite hacking skills are acquired outside of a classroom anyway.

Interesting about your experiences outsourcing to India. I've met a few startup founders locally who have done that. I'd never thought about it before, but I guess it could be beneficial to those who need certain tasks completed and are strapped for resources/time. We have too much pride in writing our code but I'm sure for some it works.

You should try posting on craigslist too. You might find a software developer that way.
It's foo.[](3)
After all, what is search, really, except to look for things that are already inside of us?
Building Decision Trees in Python
That would be a better turing test. If you talk dirty to it, and then you feel bad about it after the fact (because of how it responded) - then it has passed .

Some may say "aroused" by it but the thought is too disturbing.
Open source natural language processing?
I'm new to natural language processing and was wondering if anyone knows of a good place to start.
Blog of Startup Path101 - Very Revealing
Exactly. I use it even for sites that have search - it's much more accurate.

And if you search a site often, you can create a macroexpansion for the address bar - e.g. in my browser (safari + sogudi) "w lisp" expands to http://www.google.com/search?q=site:en.wikipedia.org+lisp

Don't ask others to solve your problems, solve it yourself.
Great book.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/19489/Confessions-of-an-Economic-H...
"Looks like Nintendo will be the big winner in this war"

Pretty sure NOT.

Now that MSFT has eaten Sony's lunch (and is (eke-ingly) profitable), its only a matter of time before they consume Nintendo. You know the drill, embrace and extend, fast follow...
It's at the bottom....
As I recall he plans to do it, but wants to spend the time to make it good (and we can assume he doesn't have many big chunks of free time).
What specifically are you trying to do and what language are you using?

For Python, I like NLTK at http://nltk.sourceforge.net

Java has something similar, though I've not used it, at http://opennlp.sourceforge.net/

There are tons of other Java libs around, per usual.

I know of a few Lisp and C/C++ libs, but I've never used Ruby or PHP, etc.

As far as reference books, I mainly just use online documentation and references (Google it.) I also like an older Lisp book by Mellish, but it doesn't use the latest techniques or anything.
Blaming entrepreneurs and hackers for how they express themselves through what they build isn't going to help either.
In general, yes. In news.yc's case, no.
It would probably be a good idea for the main page to allow for auto detecting the feed so it shows the little RSS icon in the location bar.

I think something like this is all you need in <head>

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Hacker News" href="http://news.ycombinator.com/rss"/>
yes, it already existed, but most people won't know that unless they see the orange button in their browser's toolbar indicating that the feed was autodetected.
I read your proposal and think you're overly optimistic with your numbers. Seriously, if you can prove your numbers, bootstrap yourself with the help of your credit cards, family & friends. If you can't bootstrap yourself, and you can prove your numbers, ask for more money. $1M profit in one year for a one/two person operation is incredible.
Some companies that provide search programs off-the-shelf.

http://www.approximatch.com/

http://www.data-essence.com/ (stealth)

At the end of the day Reddit has search...eventually this site too..