skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, although he abandoned Infogami to start reddit, which he left to start the rest (and that's after starting a few other now-neglected projects like the Alex Kozinski Site (http://notabug.com/kozinski/) and a proto-Wikipedia at http://theinfo.org/).

He appears to be very smart -- but a little too brilliant (http://taoyue.com/stacks/articles/brilliant-men.html).
Java developers finally realize the party's over
. . . because privacy groups hold all the cards in today's political economy </tinfoil-hattish snark>
ding ding.

Personal salary surveys are considered so inaccurate that HR firms won't bother to do them. I saw something similar with salaryscout.com.

HR pros usually ignore salary data from employee sources.
(via http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/10/i-hate-it-when-comedy-co...)
Okay, so I admit the headline was a bit silly. But some people are going around saying that targeted ads and such will make Facebook worth that much and its something worth looking at.

How would you have valued Google before Adsense and Adwords proved themselves?
Object Orientation shouldn't be treated as a religion to which you must strictly adhere. You just want some useful concepts and abstractions to express your code in terms of. I don't want to see "LEFT OUTER JOIN" sprinkled through my code, as that's not a concept that is relevant to my application logic. Nor do I want to spend months implementing some idiotic "Object Oriented Design Patterns" because it's the current fad to join the Church of Object Orientation. I just aim to have some nice, clean concepts with which I can write simple and elegant code.
Ever programmed in a "Higher Level Language"? The model of register-based computation has been abstracted away! Seems OK to me.
I've enjoyed reading the comments on Fred Wilson's blog much more since he implemented disqus. Maybe we can get Arrington to implement disqus as well so I don't have to read any more comments from Fake Steve Balmer.
Point Taken,

However, while there is room for growth in the area, I don't see any dramatic advancement for those of us living our lives today... perhaps 10 or 15 years or so.
He makes a comment in the Q&A about using a restricted photo set. And the other answer, I think, is that he's an academic rather than representing business interests.

I don't see why someone doesn't clone the game but pulling flickr and picasa photos. With the scale he's talking about with gameplay, that knowledge of the photos would be very valuable to one of those two existing search engines and could come together very quickly, like, say, a few months.
First YEurope Startup Soup.io launches public beta
First YEurope-funded startup Soup.io launches public beta

The first startup funded by YEurope (http://yeurope.net/), a YCombinator (http://ycombinator.com/) inspired (not affiliated!) hatchery based in Vienna, Austria, just launched their public beta.

Soup (http://soup.io/) is a mixture of a tumblelogging and lifestream aggregation platform. Soup simplifies publishing a stream of content by reducing mental overhead and removing barriers found in traditional blogging software.

Soup allows users to both post microcontent and aggregate their digital presence from other web services using RSS feeds or a bookmarklet.

While the lifestream aggregation arena is quickly becoming crowded with competitors (most recently with the launch of Paul Buchheit's (http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/) friendfeed (http://friendfeed.com/) on October 1st), Soup competes strongly with a broader scope and a refreshingly simple, Ajax-driven user interface.

You can start using Soup right now at http://soup.io/ --
no sign-up required.
NSFW in U.S. (disable image loading first)
The secret agents firing at you didn't make it uncomfortable?
I working on my own article. How Facebook could be worth 20 Trillion dollars.
The other burning bush.
Hmm, looks interesting but it fails the windows test.
TechStars: Intense Debate launches open beta.
20 Things You Didn't Know About Living In Space
Lack of gravity on the spine causes astronauts to grow an average of 2 inches. Is that permanent?
persai.com

edit: oh, you mean what do persai do? I think it's some kind of "intelligence" application to notify you of stuff you're interested it.
Well I'll still be there!

It can be a YC interviewees (but really everyone welcome) meetup. Nov. 4th is the date when a lot of us will be together in one city, so I'd like to meet some people then.
Well, the Red Sox did win the world series.
They were still the sickest search engine at a time when search was the biggest money maker on the web. Also, people have a bad memory about Google, but they didn't IPO until they were making a billion dollars.
The more meetups the merrier!

I still plan to be there on Nov. 4th at 7pm at Lobby 7.
They Write the Right Stuff
An example of exemplary software writing from the folks to who maintain the code that run space shuttle launches.
I've been working on various startup ideas for the past several years, trying to find something that really grabbed and inspired me to work on it full time. Nothing was doing that, even though I had worked on several different things.

So, I took a step back and looked at my life and the ideas I was working with to try to find out why I kept getting bored with them. Finally, I realized it was because I didn't personally care about what I was doing. Many of them were great ideas that had a real market willing to pay for the software, but I kept fizzling out because I didn't care one way or another if the product ever made it to market. Sure, the potential money provided some motivation, but not enough on its own. I needed the end product to have an influence on my life.

Lately, I've been looking at problems that affect me personally, and I'm much more inspired to follow through with them. Granted, I still have several things on my burner at once, so I need to narrow down to a single one and just get it done, but so far, working on something I care about is much more productive and inspiring for me.
Anyone remember this?

"Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain..." -- SJ

http://www.informit.com/discussion/index.aspx?postid=d1e63fd...
Now I need something to aggregate my friendfeed, tumblr, and soup.io feeds.
Thanks, glad to join the party.
Not exactly a security person, but methinks there's some truth to the claim that Windows machines are more secure than Macs if only because Microsoft has to have a team of people thinking about security 24/7.
Game Programmer Interviewed
I take that back. I thought this was about a clickable logo in general--not about the homepage specifically.

I guess it is ok to not have the logo linking to the homepage from the homepage itself. (Though there are certain sites that I like to have open and click on the logo to refresh the content.)
i think he's sincere in saying he doesn't quite care about the relationship between uncov and persai. he just hates the stupid quakery we have here in silicon valley. it resonates quite well sometimes, there are indeed some really really really stupid things that get pitched and funded here.
sun is a storage company now: http://www.sun.com/storagetek/index.jsp

/tongueincheek
I like the idea. Not just for choosing careers, it's also a good source for startups that have a general idea but aren't sure what particular group of users to focus on first, and what special requirements that group has.
Freeing the Dark Data of Failed Scientific Experiments
Resources for Maximizing Your Conference Experience
Here are some resources and ideas to help you maximize your conference experience.
"start reddit" ?
You must admit there's some irony in Joe Random lecturing Steve Jobs on how to run a business and using the word "arrogant" when doing so.
interesting how he gets flustered when asked if he is trying to model the real world, doesn't the real world have side effects? Don't people perceive the world as having all kinds of interacting state?

Of course it does. We would be crazy to try to re-implement the world the way nature does it. DNA is the worst spaghetti code ever created.
Side-effect free concurrency does not have to be the most natural or intuitive way to model things- it should be an attempt at finding the best way.
Yeah he definitely didn't start Reddit. He joined up with the Reddit team in December '05.
Is Google Worth More Than The Rest Of Big Web Combined?
What makes an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur?
The Pirate Bay Sees a Future Without BitTorrent
Inspiring Ricardo Semler lecture at MIT
Free Proxy site
Ok, Facebook is not worth $15 billion. Its not even worth $500 million. I want this meme to end now.
Ask YC Hackers: Best text for learning to develop apps for Mac OS X
I know all of the cool kids (myself included) are doing web apps, only deigning to develop for the client side through AIR, Gears, etc.

That notwithstanding, I'd like to dip my toes into the water of OS X development. What's the best book for getting acquainted with it? Bonus points if you know of a book that's going to receive a Leopard-inspired update soon.
Sorry. That was a misstatement.
No.

On a related aside, why so much news lately about how awesome Plentyoffish is and how valuable it would be to a buyer? Seems like Frind wants out?
Aaron seems to be using the wiki/notetaking/lightweight approach to a number of things, throwing things up and seeing what sticks. Not a bad idea per se but I have a feeling that each of these projects will need a bit more handholding and followthrough if they are to succeed. But best of luck to him.
Battery Hacking: 10 Quality tips from around the web
I think his complaint that Apple has been focusing too much on eye-candy and not enough on usability in Leopard is a pretty legitimate point.
Why Corporate Wikis think Wikipedia sucks
I was surprised to see that only 10% of wikipedia users ever participate while in the corporate setting 50% of users add/edit content. How do we get more people to add to wikipedia? Should your company get a corporate wiki?
Aaron Swartz is to ycnews, as xkcd comics are to reddit.
Instantly upvoted to top page all the time. It gets boring on both sites IMHO
I am learning Obj-C and Cocoa right now and I'm using this book http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-Mac-OS-X/dp/02017268...

It's excellent. I also found Apple's documentation quite good (Obj-C 2.0 stuff is great).
Guy Kawasaki's Top Ten Leopard Tips
As you can see from the image in the link, I was not using the full width of my screen as I was having an eye on some things running in the background while surfing. The window width was 923 pixels, height 770.

My screen is actually 1280x800. Even at full screen, the site requires vertical scrolling, even though the content would fit just nicely on my screen if just packed a little.

Anyway, my point was: didn't look as good as it could have when using the screen size I was using. I know it is impossible to please everyone...
Docstoc Goes Live with Thousands of Legal and Business Documents
Why should it be Sun's?
It's hard to extend your life span as they are tons of factors, out of your control, that affect it. However, you can try to simply live. Most likely, anything you engage in (including too much sport) that is supposed to help you live longer will ultimately shrink your lifetime. Just live. We are programmed to live as long as we want to (unless a car runs us over). The trick here is to not fight nature, not follow society, and definitely master the differences between "need" and "want".
In the archives of the brain, our lives linger or disappear
When I worked at the Apple Store, I was complaining to a customer that they didn't sell any books when it came to coding (everything had to do with using your ipod and beginners guides to the OS). Turns out this customer was from SV and worked for Apple, although he never mentioned what he really did. He suggested that if I "want to make money" to learn AppleScript. I taught myself by just reading tutorials online, and learned you can do some pretty cool stuff with AppleScript. However, I personally would say one should put more focus on Objective-C and Cocoa. I began doing that (many tutorials online), but soon after got into web apps and put my focus elsewhere.

So, in my opinion, get a feel for AppleScript, then move on to Objective-C and Cocoa.
Whither the Renaissance Man?
The second edition of that book is more relevant:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321213149/bignerdran...

That being said, the third edition is coming out this spring.

On a completely separate note, I would be careful about relying on Obj-C 2.0. If you want to actually release something in the near future, you won't be able to rely on it if you want to include 10.4 users. And of course, there's the issue of how great garbage collection really is...
Great! Way to go Disqus.
What about PG?
umm... can we say ADD?

I like the web.py framework he started but some of the decissions made in there have made me scratch my head.

Still, I'd rather do what he is doing, than being a code monkey/H-1B slave, for my current company.
Yah, we'll still plan on attending.
ok, the MIT campus is fucking depressing. Can't you guys find a better venue?
The Virgin Airlines story is probably apocryphal. According to Branson's autobiography, Virgin Airlines was the idea of Randolph Fields, an American lawyer with no background in the airline industry. He got a couple pilot friends to help him out with it and then approached Branson for funding. Branson liked the idea (mostly because "it'd be fun"), and funded it over the objections of the other Virgin Group executives.

It's similar to Steve Jobs' role in Pixar: he had little to do with the initial idea or execution, but put up nearly all of the cash and so ended up with majority ownership.
That's pretty cool.

But there could be a reverse CAPTCHA where spammers send images with text that OCR engines can't recognize.

Any public breakthrough in OCR to solve the spam-CAPTCHA would actually hurt efforts to stop spammers who could beat CAPTCHAs to signup for more accounts. How ironic :)
Daily quote data for the stock exchanges is about 50 GB now. If you do any sort of intraday analysis, you're looking at terabytes of data...
http://www.google.com/search?q=start+using+cgiproxy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Write_once
A New Kind of Computer Science:  Can we study web apps in a systematic way a la Wolfram's NKS?
How would one conduct a systematic study of web apps to identify those with the most interesting behaviors? Is it possible to simulate users to some extent to make predictions about the virality of an app? Is it possible to automate our search for viral apps in some way?
It seems like such nonsense to talk about how one operating system is more secure than some other operating system since every single operating system ever written has had its ass handed to it over and over and over again by security researchers and hackers.

Having only 10 security flaws is not really better in any meaningful sense than having 20 security flaws. It's not as if you have 'more secure' and 'less secure' when you add up the mistakes on both sides. What you're really comparing is one insecure operating system to another insecure operating system and there is no solid reason to believe that computer software can or will _ever_ be secure (whatever being secure means).
Interesting choice of words, since Woz is famous for being an amazing builder, and Jobs for being basically an excellent critic.
Well, Woz stopped building things a long time ago.
Yeah I guess we can look at redoing some of our CSS as fluid to allow for more compact views on smaller screens. We avoided it for now as our graphic designer said it was more complicated and we would likely face more cross browser compatibility issues. After nailing down pretty much the whole UI, it is probably worth investing the time at that point for scaling CSS.
http://trolltech.com/

I can't comment on Cocoa. But if you know C++ Qt is a dream. They have amazing libraries that make up for the shortcomings of C++. It also makes native look and feel cross-platform development a snap. Google Earth is built in Qt. It has a dual license, documentation + community are great. Can't say enough good things about it.
Y Europe's First Startup, Soup.io
What is Web 2.0
They don't have to -- you just need the hardcore fans to. The fans, after all, have a fair amount of power over the rest of public opinion.
That's consistent with my experiences. As several commentators mentioned, I think it's such a problem because decisions about enterprise software in big organizations are typically made by people who don't understand software, design, or information architecture. Smaller companies are much more responsive. It is a mistake (which I've made more than once) to assume that a large organization will make reasonable decisions.

It used to be that a successful business started with expertise in how to make widgets or rent cars or something and then tried to figure out information management. The new trend is for people who understand information management to start from there and get into some other business. Old-school businesses, even capital-intensive ones, which remain clueless are gradually becoming more irrelevant as newer information-savvy startups intrude on their turf.

And that is rather interesting.
Whois may be scrapped to break deadlock
This is a great book to start with. After you finish it, this one is also good:
http://www.amazon.com/Advanced-Mac-Programming-Core-Unix/dp/...
Video Game Programmer Interview - October 2007
The unphysical (i.e., effectively impossible) nature of warp drive :(
If you want to create Mac OS X apps, forget about multi platform stuff - your customers do not care if your app runs on other platforms, and they will ignore your app if it does look and behave like a great Mac app.
AppleScript is nice tool for special jobs, but you do not like to write complete apps with it. It is too annoying to write, slow and hard to debug. Use it to script other apps.

If you are looking for easier development environment, try pyobjc:
http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net/
brk - yup, there very well indeed may be more factors to consider.

I'm with several other posters on this one:

- 2% + a modest first-developer salary is totally reasonable (some would even consider 2% high here)

- 2% + $0 is a fool's bargain indeed

Any remotely successful entrepreneur could scrape up at the very least $5-10k to get a prototype working. These potential co-founders sound more like guys with an idea who just want someone to develop it for them (do much of the hard work), while paying / cutting in equity wise very little.

These guys don't sound like they can be bargained with, but the developer could ask for $200k in cash compensation if/when the startup gets funded. (doubtful they'd go for this)
"Lots of folks ask "why doesn't sun just do the JDK for Mac?". The real answer is "because Apple wanted to do it". They've wanted to do all sorts of customization and integration that only they could do - because they own the OS."

http://blogs.sun.com/jag/entry/solaris_and_os_x_continued
Well... it's a bit easier, but more than anything, it makes it easier in the sense of not screwing it up. It's not made for massive calculation applications though, like some of the more Fortran/C/C++ oriented things like MPI. It's oriented more towards fault tollerance - using multiple computers simply because they won't all fail / be offline in the same moment.
That's what I do as well. And if the logo is not clickable, I feel that something is not right.
Yay, another useless web app.
Has anyone noticed that the site is built using the infogami codebase? (http://infogami.org/dev)
It is a universal Gui API. So on OS X it api's to carbon (soon to be cocoa.) On windows it api's to mfc and on linux to xwin. So yes, it has exactly the same look and feel as a mac app or whatever platform you choose build on. Once it's compiled it's just a bunch of native system gui calls so there is no way to tell the difference. You've probably used Qt a million times and not known it. Opera and Google Earth are both Qt apps.

Even if I was only releasing on one platform I would still use it b/c it is so simple and powerful. And what's the harm in having your app available to the other 90% of computer users?
Like a lot of UGC sites, I'm not quite clear what the incentive is for the contributors...
Fear the Recession? Get an Angel & go global.
YC Hackers: What to use to build ebay clone..almost?
Hackers out there. I need your opinion. I'm building an ebay clone (kind of). I need your opinion on what is the best way to go about this. I am considering coding from scatch via cakephp OR using a mixture of DRUPAL and cakephp. What do you think?
Miracle of Science bar?
Theres one now!
thanks, I was thinkin, I spent all day reading about tech/entrepeneur/hacker stuff, but I dont know much people to talk about it here in Mexico, so, thanks again.
I don't understand why erlang can't do massive calculations when its optimized for distrbuted computing? I would think erlang would have a good messaging sys in place - it is optimized for dist computing afterall
What are they smoking? Take the money and run.
Thoughts on Disqus and Intense Debate
Not have a high web profile, just watching stuff, trying to figure out wheres my place in all of these (if any); besides that, little experience in programming, web dev (django lately). Your website its quite interesting; drop me a line.
Adobe Flex Builder will be free to students & faculty
I'm not young enough to know everything
In the original context it was J2ME on the iPhone - he was specifically asked about Flash and J2ME support for non apple apps.
My 2c...don't!

Ebay's value is in its network, i.e the 1,000,000+ sellers that sell their wares on Ebay, and the resulting tens of millions of buyers that come to Ebay because of the resulting large selection of products on Ebay.

Even Yahoo shut down its Yahoo Auctions site recently, as it could not compete with Ebay's lead.

Instead, build a component of the Ebay site, and get Ebay users to use your tool...like YC's Auctomatic is trying to do.

It's easy to do research on what the Ebay community needs....the Ebay bulletin boards are a gold mine for such research.
"It can be really stressful especially if there is a bug in the program. That pushes us back by almost a week."

I'd love to only ever have these kinds of bugs.
I know about "Write Once", but it seems too much to expect support for every conceivable computing device anyway.

I suspect that Apple did not want to provide Sun to provide the JVM for Apple, though? Otherwise I don't know why Sun wouldn't provide it themselves.

Edit: only just saw that somebody else said exactly that, Apple wanted to do it for themselves.
Spammers have employed this technique since roughly about the time they started sending images. See here for some examples:

http://www.jgc.org/tsc.html

Also, real OCR is too expensive to do at the volumes of mail being sent today. Gmail is likely using an OCR-esque technique that has lower precision but is much faster to process a given image.
OpenDocument Foundation group abandons Open Document Format in favor of W3C alternative
As traders say (I think Keynes said it first):

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
Care to elaborate with your specific reasons?
"code monkey/H-1B slave"

Why the derogatory tone on non-immigrant workers? How is it slavery?