skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
but the % share is a good reason to turn down the deal if you have other options. I just think it's to know what yc investors are told behind the curtain, and how much you are worth. It's nice to know what expectations you should live up to.
I'm using the Dedicated Virtual service, which I presume isn't as bad as some people describe Grid. My site doesn't have the traffic to test it out. Also, Nitro is another service I know little about. Has anyone had good experience?
Good luck all.

For how much people put into these applications, the feedback upon submit and resubmit is notably lacking. Pre-deflation of expectations?
It's hard to draw conclusions here, since there are important details left out in the article and there was no link to the actual paper.

While I can't argue for comprehension of economics by chimps, I think chimpanzee have a grasp of how to cooperate with others in order to ensure their own survival and after that, the survival of their offspring. If they didn't, I don't think they'd live in social groups. Therefore, they should have comprehension about sharing and giving.

So the result could be an indication of how much cooperation is required to survive in a particular chimp society. But even then, I personally wouldn't be so quick to jump to that conclusion, because something like cooperation is learned (I have no proof, but I can't imagine one knows how to cooperate from birth), and different troupes of animals have different learned cultures, even within the same species--especially if they are social animals.

Animals have culture--i.e. knowledge and behaviors passed from generation to generation through learned experience. There are two cultures of Killer Whales, but they are genetically the same species. One culture beaches itself to hunt seals and the other eats fish only. You can probably find video footage on youtube of a mother training its young to beach itself for seals.

Only specific cultures of apes know how to crack nuts with rocks and others fish ants out of trees. Only the macaques in japan wash their sweet potatoes before eating them.

The last case is also interesting because the exact moment of that particular innovation was observed by Japanese scientists back in the 50's. A young macaque named Imo found that she could solve the annoying problem of sand in her sweet potatoes by washing them. The scientists found that the innovation spread from Imo to her mother, and then through to her playmates. The last to adopt potato washing were the males--especially the high ranking males.

Amazingly, that wasn't the last innovation Imo had. She also learned to separate sand from wheat by throwing it into water (wheat floats, sand sinks), instead of picking it out one by one. This behavior has also spread to the other macaques in her troop. I think they all still do this to this day.

So besides that tangent about animals having culture, if cooperation is indeed learned and passed from generation to generation, I think it'd be premature to say that ALL chimps are more selfish in their cooperation. One might only be able to claim some--and from a particular troupe.
Interesting, and cool you tried it (sounds like Uberman if it was Steve Pavlina).

If you feel inclined to try again feel free to email me, I might be able to offer some help.. You can compromise with an Everyman polyphasic schedule..
Armed Robots
Google's revenues are largely dependent on the behaviors of inexperienced users, especially ones who can't tell the difference between text ads and actual content? No way!
Josh Kopelman posted an interesting, similar article from the WSJ a couple weeks ago: "How many of the top 20 visited Web sites of August 2003 are still in that ranking? Nine"
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=59361
Getting started with Rubinius
Project Agape who is behind the Causes Facebook app uses the following:

* mySQL 5.0
* Ruby on Rails
* 14 application servers, 2 database servers and 5 boxes in reserve
* 3 Image Servers (2 Squid, 1 image source)
* Apache 2 on Image Source
* WebApp servers have 2GB of ram
* 1 server for serving static content
* 26 Mongrel services per box
* 4 GB of RAM per box
* 50 - 60 MB of RAM per Mongrel service for a total use of around 1.5 GB of memory set aside for Mongrel

Additional:

* A pair of F5 Loadbalancers
* All systems running FreeBSD 6.2
* memcached
* nginx (not pound)

Specific Rails technologies used: nginx (not pound), Evented Mongrel, squid
From: http://www.nonprofittechblog.org/interview-with-joe-green-an...
took about 15-20 min to fill out application. would be cool to be accapted but not the end of the word if not. i think many of you rely way too much on YC. If you truly have a good idea and good team you can make work without YC and/or any funding. in any case, good luck
Ah, yes. Now that you mention it, I remember it clearly (OK, not really clearly, but I do remember it). Of course, that makes me wonder how much can be gleaned from the application without an idea. But pg knows his business far better than I do.
You join YC so you will be able to tell stories about how pg supplied you with cup-o-noodles for several months in exchange for 6% of your company.

It's like the story in the Bible where Esau sells his birthright for a bowl of lentils. Genesis 25: 30-34
Gmail doesn't: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56768. Dunno about Calendars or Reader.
Knee-jerk reaction: And make it even SLOWER?
Basically. Although, for what it's worth, some users do understand the concept of a Sponsored Link and prefer to click them over organic (aka 'computerized') results. Something about trusting someone more if they're willing to put money into the advertisement.
I think last time me and my buddies applied, I left the main idea part blank, then threw like 15 into the "anything else" section. Didn't get an interview, but did get a little bit noticed.
I've seen 4 or 5 of these power suits coming out of academia in Japan. There seems to be a ton of research aimed at the rapidly aging population there. Definitely a business opportunity.
Just occurred to me after reading this article, ("Google plans software, not phone" ~ http://www.australianit.news.com.au/story/0,24897,21432315-1... ) that Jaiku could be part of the google software.
Maxed out on social software
MacBook With Gold and Diamonds -- Best Seller @ HipPop Community
24kt Gold Macbook Pro Finished
Google & IBM giving students a distributed systems lab using Hadoop
When I want to immediately engage in a financial transaction, I always click on the Google ads because I know there I will find someone selling me something rather than useful pure information
Just curious, if you live in the U.S., do you still feel in touch with the Indian market? I'm Indian but I've lived in the Valley for about 18 years... I took a trip there last year, and I was blown away by how much has changed.
In every market you've got to have one guy that just wants the money and tries to think of a way that no one has ever thought of before. Funny, the web application market is very similar, you have people setting the standards (youtube, flickr, digg, twitter) and you have people that want the money, yet don't want the originality (Soapbox, Zooomr, Netscape, Jaiku). I don't know if it's right or not, but sometimes trying to make the money gets you more (http://uk.techcrunch.com/2007/10/09/jaiku-bought-by-google/).
NAND Storage at DRAM speeds. 800Mp/s
;) looks like a sly smile to me. I interpret it as evilness instead. What are you going to do?

Sapir Whorf probably wasn't the right article to cite. There are studies which names escape me now. But long story short, there is no solid mapping between pictures and concepts. The textbook example is "what is a chair?"

What picture would you use? A four-leg? A stool (what is a stool, actually?)? A lazybone? A king's throne?

Read this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototype_Theory
It's good practice for when you launch, where, if you're lucky, you'll get to watch your hit count go up. More likely, you'll put all that work into actually building the app and nobody will notice. ;-)
He has a point... TDD is already out of style because it's not flexible for code evolution

The new trend is BDD: Behavior Driven Programming.
It's a cross between automated functional testing and unit testing...

http://behaviour-driven.org/

What's good about it is that it also serves as a requirements spec, and since it's more flexible - it doesn't feel as tedious. There are already mult implementations in most major languages
It took me a lot longer than 20 mins to give the sort of concise, well thought out answers that the application asked for. If you were able to do that in such a short amount of time, kudos.

We haven't been holding back on our idea for YC (and I agree, I wouldn't suggest any entrepreneur should wait for YC's acceptance as the green light to start their business).

We started slightly over a year ago, and publicly launched in April (did Techcrunch, GigaOm, Arstechnica, blah blah blah). So there were a few YC funding cycles where we felt we weren't ready, and didn't apply. We feel that now the time IS right for our company and YC would be a great opportunity.
this has some interesting applications in the vertical market of photography. I wrote some initial thoughts on this last week: http://latogaphoto.blogspot.com/2007/10/future-of-local-phot...
Thank you for your input. If you see a chair you know it is a chair. It doesnt matter if it is a couch or a chair with 2 legs, the concept is that you understand that it means "something I can use to lay my buttox".What I am trying to do is not giving each word an exact image, but each image a unique meaning. Besides think of Africans uploading 1000 photos to describe the word Pain and Americans as well. Wouldn't that be good data to use and understand how we all understand pain itself?
The author confuses correlation and causation. Google has been setting the cursor to the textfield since they were in beta and long before AdWords. I've done the same.

It's funny the author neglected to consider that Google could have eliminated the I'm Feeling Lucky Button (try it) if they really wanted to give users a chance to make the "mistake."

Actually, it's just a side-effect of making life easy for users.
So far this is the most advanced armed bot I've seen http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMkV8E2re9U
I'm not particularly impressed by the research but, then again, I'm black . . . I'm probably not bright enough to understand all this "basic calculus" and other "smart" talk.
I totally agree with you vlad. I've always attributed the cursor focus as being just good user interaction and not some ploy for more ad clicks.
have you heard of torque? its a great game engine that a lot of schools use, like ITT Tech Green Bay. A friend of mine http://justinbosar.net has started some development in torque. he does post production for hollywood movies.
Well, the distribution of asian SAT scores looks vaguely bimodal, so let's validate our preconceived notions by arbitrarily stuffing two gaussians inside. Very methodical.
EBay Launches Social Networking Feature "Neighborhoods"
Awesome. I just updated the blog post to mention your plugin and link to the latest script.
Yeah! However, it is one of those great moments where one goes out of their way to make life simple for their customers, and then notices a pattern they couldn't have possibly deduced had they not implemented their idea.
What, "Name drop to VCs"? "Do name drop VCs"? "Do not drop VCs?" ;-)
Cmdrtaco may have a point
As Paul Graham has said many times -- ideas are worthless. Y Combinator wants to know about the capabilities of the founders. Capable people are more likely to produce capable startups. Second, I assume they want more detail on a particular idea not necessarily because your idea is OMG $uper AwesomE!!1 but in order to show that you have the capability to flesh out an idea more thoroughly. Can you think through the various aspects of your idea and their business ramifications, or are you just holding up your idea like a cardboard facade?
Corporate America racked by uncertainty
Agreed on all points. The whole "warning . . . politically incorrect" thing is not only lame, but smacks of a good ol' boy telling a ribald or xenophobic story to his buddies with a wink and a nod. Might as well have just said "We all get it, but you know how those chicks and minorities whine about every little thing . . . they just don't have any sense of humor."

Don't know what OP's intended tone was, but it certainly didn't come off well to me.
It's not the money. It's the contacts.
It is the ominous Hal, asking the question, "Are you there Dave? Dave, what are you doing?" The breach into the unknown this is mystifying and satisfying at the same time. May all your future red buttons to that instill confidence.
...and soon the white devils will return with the cargo.
Thanks for this excellent post.
That's the problem when you buy proprietary software; if the company decides to stop making it, you're screwed.
I'm not completely certain we're not in some kind of bubble, but I can say that if we are, it pales in comparison to where we were in the '98-'01 era. EToys.com had a peak market cap of $10 billion. PlanetRX.com had a peak market cap of $10.8 billion, and I don't even remember that one.

Though they were and are still successful, Amazon and eBay had market caps of $28 billion and $17 billion respectively in early 1999 -- long before they had near-term prospects of showing a profit.

In comparison, $10 billion for Facebook today doesn't seem all that unreasonable.

References:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_20/b3732716....
http://www.ecommercetimes.com/story/189.html
Damn you, Bobby Tables.
Maybe some kind of "typing box" too. That way we can explain how we vote, or just type for fun. These "boxes" would be all over the page so people always had somewhere to type.
Takin' a class, readin' a book.
Today I attended my first class, 'Entrepreneurship,' and the recommended text is 'Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise' by Richard C. Dorf and Thomas H. Byers. Since you all seem well read, perhaps some of you out there might have read this book, and if you have, i'd like to hear your opinions on it, and whether you learned a lot from it. It's 120 washingtons, so I need to know if it's relatively valuable before I drop the cash.
not just contacts, they're experience no doubt comes in handy and also being able to focus on building your product while they take care of the boring legal part.
Facebook Has Competition: MySpace Platform To Launch Next Week
The most important thing is to take rejection as not so nicely wrapped motivation. Instead of adapting the attitude of 'maybe I should just quit, they don't like my idea,' take your rejection as a challenge to prove them wrong. :P
Oh no. It's reddit all over again.
Complete with people complaining every time a link they don't like gets on the front page for a while.
Complete with self-obsessed meta-discussions.

Okay, a variation on the thing I've been saying for a while now: When a link gets into the top twenty, THEN give us a down arrow.
Ask YC: What do you think of niche social networks?
a. What do you guys think of niche social networks?

b. What about a niche social network as the only feature of a site?

c. What about a niche social network as one of the features among a host of different features on a site?

d. Is there any stigma associated with the words "social network" in the VC / Angel community, now that there are thousands of these popping up each day?
that's even cooler
:) got me
I would stay away from a couple of things. One is the "social network" label. Personally I think it's overused and it's meaning is starting to expand (I think a 1990 BBS would qualify as a social network today).

You might have a hard time with niche social networks. The primary reason being that the bigger players are building tools to allow folks to roll their own networks. So the chances are users won't want to get an account for every single niche network and prefer to stick to something from within the larger networks they belong to.

Depending on the exact niche market and just how special your site has to be for that niche market compared to the generic sites you might still have a good shot at building something useful. I would prefer some label like "community" over "social network" though.

I think del.icio.us, flickr, last.fm are great examples of community driven sites that serve a niche market.

Things like "social network for wine lovers" I think are likely to fail.
Interesting shift for myspace. Going from randomly blocking third party applications from profiles to opening up their platform. I wonder if the developers that got burned in the past will trust MySpace this time.
I would change the title to something more relevant, people might be more inclined to click on it. I'm rather curious myself on how good this book is (there are no reviews on Amazon yet). Btw, you can get this book for $90 from Amazon.
I think the answer really depends on the niche you want to go after. Do XBox360 fans need another social network login/pass to remember? I'd assume not, a Facebook community probably would be easier for them.

But, I'd also assume that there are viable opportunities out there that, by the nature of the niche, would function better as an isolated specialty site. Things like a social network for elementary school children would make sense in that context.
The best explanation about Ruby's Object Model and Metaclasses I've read
I really enjoyed this, I'm not sure why people are complaining. I don't tend to watch the top 20 anyway and mostly stick to the watching the stream of new posts.
Could we call it something other than a platform? Especially since, for average developer, you already had basically free reign on MySpace's pages? Somebody in the comments there pointed out that Rockyou and Slide got their start on MySpace. Nothin' new...
RSS for the newest category, not for the front page. this way i can keep an eye on what's new without having to constantly refresh the page. the current RSS feed is pretty useless to me.
If you're stuck on Windows Outlook lets you edit any message (and you can have what you write be in a different color). It was a neat trick I used a couple of years ago.
does this work with YC?
"Do not drop VCs", I doubt it would leave a very good impression.
There are actually a number of legitimate reasons for typing URLs into Google instead of the address bar. For example, public computers in foreign countries are often configured to redirect .com requests to the national TLD. So it's much faster to type amazon.com into Google than it is to figure out how to make Amazon.com stop resolving to Amazon.cn or whatever.
If you're a smart person with a record of implementing great things, have the skills we need (see
http://www.crunchboard.com/item/22635744-Banquet-needs-a-PHP... ) but no idea of your own, join our idea - which is less of an idea and more a product at this point.

Email is mike.maccana PANTS gmail PANTS com. I'll be flying to the US on November 1-5 via LA and Boston provided we make it to the Cambridge YC meeting. Otherwise, we'll be continuing on as usual - our main coders based in California, we're looking for people who can move to SF if necessary.
cough suckup cough
Google's results for things often result in places to buy that thing rather than information about it, so I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not.
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?an=dorf+byers&...
"... Live blogging is an interesting aspect of the blogosphere. Bloggers post in real-time, often while attending an event, chiming in live with their thoughts and views. This is a great way for bloggers to communicate with their readers, but it's currently not well supported in blogging tools. ..."

One start would be to create an opensource wordpress plugin + a client side browser bit of js code to support it. That way each user could support their own comment systems for each place they comment. The bit that currently alludes me is the discovery bit. How do others know you have commented on a particular site?

One way could be to publish say RSS feeds that link to sites you have commented on allowing others to discover what others have said. That or some sort of microformat that marks up some page that people read. This would not be real-time though. Commercial sites have an advantage here as they have a centralised place people can look.

Maybe the solution is to offer a commercial discovery site that acts as a registry of comments. So for example:

- user John writing using open source firefox plugin you make some comments on a third party site say hackernews

- plugin sends comments back to your open source wordpress blog, adds comments to blog then generates new RSS feed of comment detailing comments + discovery information (blog, url etc).

- wordpress pings a commercial site "CommentsRUs.com" that pulls the RSS file, parses it and either creates a new entry for a particular site, adds comment.

- user Jane who has subscribed to CommentsRUs.com, HackerNews site is notified by twitter that John has responded to a HackerNews article she has also commented on

- user Jane makes another comment and CommentsRUs.com either notifies user John or makes an entry on his homepage http://commentsrus.com/person/john/hackernews/ so he can follow the thread.

Of course this is no substitute for the original site because the annoying thing is the meta data is not captured. Then again if they did have some mechanism to capture the metadata ( http://goonmail.customer.netspace.net.au/hackerid ) you can do lots of useful things.
computer chopper? [M]! Or could be [H] too!
Great. Thanks for your kind words.

Update about sorting the links by access time: my sorting-fu on javascript isn't that great, and it doesn't seem as easy as in perl/python/ruby.

A second complication: I currently have code in there to watch out for duplicate cookies in case somebody upgraded to the script after using your bookmarklet for a while. I'll pull that code out in a few days. That should make the sorting code simpler.
The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty
I was being serious, sometimes I do find the Google ads useful. I probably should have phrased it in a way that sounded less sarcastic. :)
Things like "social network for wine lovers" I think are likely to fail.

Actually, Cork'd was acquired back in May! http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles/corkd-acquired
interesting, i was making up the wine lovers part. good to know that I'm wrong.
Connectedness to the things that matter to me is like oxygen.

I think websites that connect people to ideas and people they care about will only grow in importance and popularity as more and more hackers get the little things right (user experience), and implementing these as features of a site becomes easier and cheaper (less time and money) so that more sites can be driven by those with the best connections and insight into their community, rather than by those who happen to have the right tech skills.

At least, I hope this is what happens. It can be a lonely world out here. There are few things as important (and, for many, as difficult) as finding the right people and information to surround yourself when you exit "the system" and are faced with crafting your life experience all on your own.

The internet may already have come a long way, but I think this is just the beginning.
Interesting, so what if I have no team but a very good idea ? Should I apply so you can match teams with ideas ?
cmdrtaco does have a point. These community news sites are great when the community reflects your views, but once the community grows they stake to not reflect your views.

One way to correct this is to only get news from a group that is similar to you (for some definition of 'similar'). One attempt to do this is my Wildfire application for Facebook which shows you news from your friends.

http://www.jgc.org/blog/2007/09/problems-with-social-news.ht...

John.
reddit would like to buy you a drink, san francisco
PANTS! that made me laugh.