skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"As far as I'm concerned, if KP's comment means less money flowing into questionable startups with no business plan and a stupid name that's missing a bunch of vowels, I'm all for that"

I can hear the roar out there now -- "Hey! Add some more vowels in there and crank up the business plan software!"

It's funny that everybody wants you to describe your business in as quick a manner as possible, and then there's this whole subculture of buzzwords either being good or bad. "I'm a YC company" is supposed to be shorthand for one thing (supposedly good), while "We're web 2.0" was at one point hot, but now not.

I know what the point of the pitch is, but after you get through your value proposition, your demo, and your growth plans, you want the other person to understand it's something web-based, interactive, and not an old-fashioned architecture. "Web 2.0" does that.

This is like dating a fickle person! No matter what you do, you never get it right. So I guess you need to come up with an elevator pitch that conveys the maximum amount of useful information _without_ using well-known buzz words that have fallen out of favor. Good luck guessing which buzz words are okay or not with which person.

Might as well throw darts at a dartboard. (grin)
All the news is at http://gnumonks.org/~laforge/weblog/linux/openmoko/index.htm...
So why does Google get a free ride....
Mark Zuckerberg is the Ghost of George Orwell
"anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

I get it.

Thanks!
IAC to Split into Five Companies
There are at least 3 Babson based businesses in there, and I know all of the founders personally. Either they forgot to mention their revenues to me, or both businessweek and yahoo are both fluffing things up.
So was switchhouse. No one even bothers with physical media any more for music. Books and movies aren't far behind. Games are the only thing I can think of that might work and have some steam left in it.
AOL has a strategy?
Any luck with job search engines for hiring?
We're a startup in Waterloo, Ontario and we're looking to hire computer vision developers. Has anyone had luck with job search engine sites like monster.com and workopolis.com?
Any other sources of brains?

By the way, if you're looking for a job and are ridiculously smart, send me an email. We just got series A funding and are still giving out serious stock option plans to new hires. Contact at imridiculouslysmart at gmail dot com. (Yeah I just registered that.)
'k, 8/10; I'm pretty pleased. I guessed 3 times, got only one 'guess' right. This is better than the usual quiz; there's an old C++ quiz (from ReviewNet) of 1998 or so vintage floating around, used by a recruiting co I dealt with recently, and it sucked //ass//, it has at least one completely wrong answer, and many that are arguable, or which deem correct, the ossified taste of amateurs vintage 1997/98 (sorry for the misplaced rant).
I found a wonderful group noun the other day. A Fixie of Hipsters.
Startup Takes Aim at Man-in-the-Middle Attacks
Newspaper subscription rates down
A friend just got a job at Yahoo through a friend of a friend on LinkedIn.

Also, I would contact the administrator at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. I'm sure other top CS/Robotics schools are similar, but I know they'll forward the job opportunity to all the students.
>I actually got a "beta" invite to find a bunch of "custom" searches that you can vote on and grade them.

I was messing around with mechanical turk, these are on there too. I didn't get an invite, but I did answer a few to try out the turk.
true - hopefully that won't happen here - seems to be more outside influence for sure.
a good number of startups that call themselves web2.0 companies are building [things with no substance]

That's no different from Web 1.0. In 1998, people thought all they had to do was create a "portal" for some special interest, and it would be a company. Replace "portal" with "social network" and it's 2008.
YC Summer '07 Draftmix launches: Faster Fantasy Sports for Fun or Profit
... and for me, it matters more if Rails will run faster on jRuby. The benchmarks may or may not reflect an increased performance advantage for a Rails app.

Or at the very least, be able to compile a Rails app into bytecode for commercial distribution. I would have a use for that even if jRuby doesn't run as fast as MRI.
congrats matt, chad, john and russ!
Maybe you should post this again after there's something to see. Introducing vapor won't get you much cred here.
yeah... some mockups would go a long way here
time to bootstrap that startup that makes startups.. oh, wait...
Thanks. John is mad you stole his karma :)
Not really. Their general strategy right now is to reduce costs since the money coming in is lower than expected and dropping.

Userplanes is an example of a product that sounds great, could have been great, and then was crippled, underused and never delivered what it could have.

But isn't it interesting to see such a giant fall? I really think they are an example of a company that could not handle a disruptive innovation.
Google's platforms seem to be designed to be free.
You are free to do whatever you want on them, but the overall use of them will drive up the usage of their core products. This increased usage of the core products will continue to drive the growth in an organic way.

I don't know that there is any lock-in, Google docs allow you to freely export your files. This new Android looks to provide a browser that you aren't forced to use Google with.

I really liked the Android announcement. Getting into the cell phone market directly would be a huge risk for Google, they do not have the expertise in the hardware and manufacturing business they would require. So they made the best move I have seen in a while, they decided to make the massive partnerships and develop a platform that they could leverage many phone maker's business.
Those are specific to the email you invited, so they won't work. You'd have much better luck just emailing me and asking nicely.
Gamma function: an extension of the factorial function to real and complex numbers
Game-changer: Asus Eee PC a win for Intel and Linux, at Microsoft's expense
Bram's Law: The easier a piece of software is to write, the worse it's implemented in practice.
Acknowledgements from Scsh Reference Manual
I think having someone support you through the rollercoaster ride is worth it. Although, most spouse's risk tolerance will be lower than the entrepreneur's.

A spouse is kind of like an anchor...that complains every time it gets dragged behind you :P
i take care of my pet projects and blog at http://blog.ekini.net ... tehre is also: http://www.ekini.com :P
share your sites to ubelt8 :)
Google Is Fifth Most Valuable Company in the U.S.
Interview with Digg Co-founder Jay Adelson
I don't have a spouse so I can't really answer the first part of the question but being solitary definitely works for me. It's easy to get a lot done when you don't have any distractions.. albeit pleasant ones sometimes. :)
I think what is equally important was their extensive use of open source packages of all types using both Java and Python. Xen, Hadoop, and Boto just are examples showing that more often than not, open source is the way to go.
Reclaim Reddit: Greasemonkey script to remove Ron Paul stories
Sure, but I/O can be parallelized too. The argument is not specific to CPU at all.
10 types of programmers you'll encounter in the field
Spam: They still don't get it
Right. Exactly
I got married in the middle of YC. Went to YC, went home to get married, went back to Cambridge, went to honeymoon, back to Cambridge. It was pretty crazy.

Financially it was fine, my wife has a good job. It's far better to have two people living off of one income than one person living off of zero. (I had my own anyway, but even if not, we could have swung it due to that.)

As far as being productive goes, it depends on your relationship. One of my cofounders is pseudo-married and his girlfriend pushes him to work harder. Another has a recent girlfriend who absorbs far too much of his time and mental effort. Being married has no bearing on this, it's all in how you handle relationships.

Also there's more to productivity than the quantity of working hours. Someone who makes you happy (which better be your spouse) increases your output when you do work.
I can't wait for the TechCrunch story 2 months from now that declares Draftmix profitable. Knock it out of the park boys.
Prediction: Ten years from now Ron Paul will be remembered mainly as someone whose supporters exposed a flaw in the naive implementation of vote-driven news sites.
At least one of the JRuby committers (Ola Bini) is working for Thoughtworks. So even if Sun dropped JRuby, other companies would probably take up the slack as in this case.

JRuby makes sense in terms of enterprise software/consulting as well and probably doesn't need sun's upport to survive and even thrive (though of course Sun's support is a huge positive).
MooMonth - a full javascript calendar
I saw Vince Neil at lunch the other day.
Open Source, Lego-like Computer Modules Running Linux
That hypothesis is clear, and I agree with it. I am a fan of Ericcson's work, but I disagree with certain examples that are often cited in articles like these. There are many reasons, the first of which I mentioned above.

The rules of aptitude assessment are much different for children and adults; the returns per year is not simply accumulative. First, the curve isn't linear. Second, the curve looks different during different ages. Forgive me if this is obvious, but the reporters never seem like they know. The ten years from age 3 to 13 is a different ten years from age 23 to 33. If you learned a language in the former interval, you'd be a native speaker; in the latter, no matter how hard you work, you won't be. The "early" brain is a completely different creature from the "late" brain (which is why I think youth education is far more important than teen+ education). It is also early in life when particular natural affinities develop. If there were two TigerWoods, let one start golf at 2, trains until 18, and deprive them for 8 years. The other starts at 10, trains until 26, and bring them together to compete after a refresher for the early start, I would bet on the early starter.
You should organize your writing visually.

I don't want to read it cause it is all on paragraph.
Ask YC: Critique my Facebook app
Check it out, let me know what you think: http://apps.facebook.com/spreadarumor/

Every Facebook app I've used so far does 1-2 redirects when you first access it and lands you on a generic add application page with a bunch of checkboxes, expecting you to grant it access to all sorts of information without any hint of what the app is or why in the world you would want it- I find this incredibly annoying as a user.

I tried to make the user experience in my application as pleasant as possible. The app does not redirect you, instead it shows screenshots and explains what the app is and why you might be interested in using it.

There's a link to login that pops up a login dialog (again instead of redirecting to the login/add page) so that the transition from reading about the app to using the app requires a minimal number of clicks and page loads.

Also, URLs are very descriptive so when you send them to others they know exactly what is being linked, for example: http://apps.facebook.com/spreadarumor/about/Sumeet_Malakar-5...
He did raise a ton of money through the Web in a short amount of time... for better or for worse, all that upvoting has some power to it.
There is a simple reddit fix. Rather then hosting crappy parties in different cities they should work on story filtering. So that users can filter ANY news title. there a simple work around for Ron Raul supporters, They can misspell r0n p@ul.
I'm Spider-Man! If I can be married and fight the bad guys, you can start a company. No spider-sense requiered.
I think it'll actually be harder to lock an Android phone than the NYT thinks. Google will make Android available to the public. Any phone worth hacking should be able to have its OS / firmware updated. It shouldn't be too hard to install this new clean (not gimped) version of the OS on the phone, much in the same way I can install a new OS on my computer. The only issue is whether or not the hardware drivers are readily available to make this clean version of Android work. Yet most phone companies release both carrier-specific and unlocked versions of their phones. Unlocked means available drivers.

So yeah, maybe you'll need to do some leg work to unlock your phone, but it'll be much easier to do than with the iPhone.
If these guys can eventually monetize a small portion of each buy-in, that could be big. Are there are plans to incorporate real money in place of the fantasy dollars?

This could also be big with young college sports fans. Have you guys thought about targeting this audience via a facebook app? I'm sure there are already plenty fantasy sports fantasy sports fb apps out there though..
Its too late for him. There is no good left in him. Darth Vader betrayed and killed, your reddit.
Do we really need an app that helps spread gossip? I admit I haven't installed it and only took a tertiary glance at it...but if it does what it looks like, I think you should use your talents for Good and not for Evil :-)
looks pretty solid, clean, and well put together

Personally I'm pretty much burned out on typical facebook apps like this ( vampires, zombies, egg hatching, and so forth ), but I could see a lot of my friends using your app

what did you write it in out of curiousity?
I'm married, and I'm planning my first start-up next summer. My wife doesn't have to work, so she's planning on being a co-founder. As we've worked through ideas, we've purposefully thought about businesses that she would be interested in and passionate about. We've settled on one, and she's starting to work on the start-up now while I'm finishing school.

I actually think it's a shame that there aren't more women founders. There are many problems that women face that could be solved with software. A single hacker fresh out of college won't think of these problems much less solving them. Even then, single male hackers would be terrible at solving these problems. Theres a huge hole in the software market that's begging to be filled. Having a my wife as a founder is a strategic advantage. She thinks of a lot of things that I would never think of. And, she's worked in high-tech before. I'm career changing.

Besides, we get to work together, which is something that we've dreamed of and worked towards for years.
Measure distance in n dimensions with Pythagoras
Very simple, but there are some good examples here about how you might do this to quantify similarity in users based on their expressed preferences. Simple techniques are often best.
Perhaps not, but I don't really expect the app to take off anyway. Just needed a simple idea to implement and get familiar with the facebook api and fbml.

That said, it seems the only apps that do take off on facebook are uninspired concepts such as Vampires, Zombies and KissMe.
yey secrets.

looking good ;)

paul, socialmoth
Poll finds nearly 80 percent of U.S. adults go online
That's not a flaw - that's grassroots democracy. It looks messy because it is. You should worry more about the tidy politicians who seem to just coast silently into first place. Why do they not need to engage with the public or stir up any passion?
"why the whole industry needs to negotiate a single contract between one cartel of buyers and one cartel of sellers."

Partly because each talent has so little power than each company if they negotiate one-to-one. You can see that in the countries (like Japan) where there are no strong union like SAG to represent majority of the talents. What happens is that talent's agents get a lot of power over both parties (in the case of actors) or the production take advantage of the talents (in the case of writers or staff).

Once I have worked for Japanese TV series filming some scenes in Hawaii. The principal actors arrived at 9 in the morning and immediately filming began at the airport scene, then went through all day at various locations until 1am (yes, 16hours straight), then they started filming at 6am of the same day (so actors and staff took only a few hours sleep). They did something like that for 4 days and returned to Japan. I don't think that kind of schedule is allowed in SAG or AFTRA productions.

And actors can't change agents easily, for agents have great power in casting (not like in US). In such situations it's easy for agents to go for its own interest and take advantage of actors.

The negotiations can be adapted to the new media; I think SAG had a special arrangement for "interactive media" (including video games) so that the company didn't need to re-negotiate every time to reuse the materials.
IPhone's success spawns generation of imitators - and challengers
The only people who will remember Ron Paul for dominating social news sites are the small percentage of people that use social news sites right now. Among the mainstream, he'll be mentioned as a candidate who was very successful in marketing himself and raising money over the internet.

I expect he will run as a Libertarian after he doesn't get the Republican nomination; he'll probably do much better than your average Libertarian candidate.
Very simple, but there are some good examples here about how you might do this to quantify similarity in users based on their expressed preferences. Simple techniques are often best.
Written in ruby, with the help of the following great technologies (most are ruby gems):

- ramaze, the simple, modular web-framework (ramaze.net)
- sequel as the database ORM layer (http://code.google.com/p/ruby-sequel/wiki/CheatSheet)
- mongrel as the webserver (monkey patched with swiftiply to use eventmachine: http://swiftiply.swiftcore.org/mongrel.html)
- facebooker for facebook api calls (http://chadfowler.com/2007/9/5/writing-apis-to-wrap-apis)
- haml for html templating (http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/)
- sass for css templating (http://haml.hamptoncatlin.com/docs/sass)
- analogger for logging (http://analogger.swiftcore.org/)
- postgres for db backend (and sqlite for dev)
Does anything not mediocre ever take off on large social sites?
He definitely has a lot of legitimate supporters. They're still a minority though and yet they dominate Reddit as if no one else existed. That's a flaw in the system. The entire group of people who support him are acting as a blindly loyal voting bloc and upvoting anything with his name in it. This is essentially how the neocons were able to game their way into control of the USA. A small group of blindly loyal fanatics working together can have a disproportionately large effect (just look at 9/11), especially when the system is highly flawed.

I think it's quite possible that in 10 years most of us internet geeks will primarily remember Ron Paul as "that libertarian guy who was always upvoted on social news sites". Unless he wins ;-)
The better question is why?
cheers Drew! =)
Does anyone see a downside for this?

I mean, iphone/apple will continue on its merry way. Windows Mobile will continue to be frustrated (but MS won't ever let it die no matter how much money it costs). OpenMoko looks DOA now, all other proprietary ones will either fade, or just go back to being in the real low end 2 dollar plastic throwaways.

I don't really see a downside, this stuff was ripe for disruption. Kudos to google for putting serious resources into making this happen.
FSJ on Google's Open Handset Alliance
Good Point.

My point (poorly expressed no doubt) was that searching for the "real me" in any combination of websites sounds bizarre (to me).

There are large chunks of my life and personality my "real me") that fall outside my activities on the web. Even with your photography example, hopefully there are aspects of your photography experience/intent/whatever that are *not* captured on flickr.

I guess i was just responding to the notion of the "realness" of a person being captured/capturable on the web.
What about all that rain?
While the population as a whole may be savvy and sophisticated, the 2% that respond to a bulk-mail personal ad might not exactly be a random sample.
> Also there's more to productivity than the quantity of working hours. Someone who makes you happy (which better be your spouse) increases your output when you do work.

For double effect tell your spouse "There's more to our relationship than the quantity of time we spend together. A job that makes me happy increases the quality of our time when we are together."
I'm not sure he realizes that there are plenty of rock-solid http implementations that power things like web servers and web clients that everyone on the internet uses every day without too many problems. Comparing one http implementation to the handful of transactional engines he's had experience which is anecdotal at best.

It's an apples to oranges comparison anyways, because http is a communications protocol designed to live in an extremely heterogeneous world where you can't control all the variables, as well as be very easy to implement in whatever language/platform you're using.
That's a good question. I think we'll eventually see useful apps take off on social sites. The viral features of the Facebook API, namely integrating with the News Feed, have only been available since around March.

I think the ratio of useful to frivolous users of the Facebook API was much better before the new features came out. Before, the only useful thing you could do was pull down people's friend relationships from Facebook. This alone was extremely useful if you were already building something that had some substance to it.

Now, most of the apps you see are from people who are trying to capitalize on the viral featues of the API to sell ads. Instead of apps being valued for their utility, they're valued for their ability to convince users to invite all of their friends.

Eventually, the hype will die down, and some of the useful applications of the Facebook API will begin to become more prominent. Even now, I only get invitations to sill apps like Vampires and Zombies from one or two of my friends. As Facebook users begin to show more ability to discriminate based on quality, we'll see more people take advantage of the freely accessible social graph to actually do cool things.
Books and movies aren't that far behind, but they are behind. Here's a thought: a library where, to take out a book, you have to digitize part of the copy and give the result back to the library for publication to a website. Your allowed lending rate goes down if you do it badly. Add a mail-out option ala Netflix on that same website, and we're in business.
> "Hey, old man, I learned in school today that there used to be these companies called 'studios', and they would actually spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars making scripted entertainment, and you would actually sit still, in a chair, and watch it -- whatever happened to that?"

He's right on most of his points, but his vision of the future is a little absurd. People will always want good stories with high production values. Distribution is changing, but it's funny how he casts it as ridiculous that people in the future won't be able to "sit still, in a chair".
Very timely post. I was in bed last night trying to visualize how you might go about measuring distance in 4-dimensional space...

While the method presented is really simple, it's tricky to think of it as "intuitive" when n>3 without looking at a proof.
Ah, clever as hell. Nice one. Must have been rough getting it launched if it's taken until Week 9 of the NFL season, though.

Once you get far enough into the entrepreneurial side of being a technology entrepreneur, you appreciate brilliant hacking of business markets. This is a great market hack.
I think the flaw is pretty well-known.

Frankly, I'm encouraged by any non-standard candidates who actually get noticed one way or the other.