skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I completely agree with this article. And a startup that could efficiently tap into people's hunger for fame and recognition on a broad basis could become a destination for user generated content that far outdoes current web 2.0 offerings.

"We observed that users cite a variety of reasons for posting content online--chief among them, a hunger for fame, the urge to have fun, and a desire to share experiences with friends"

What's interesting about the notion of reputation and fame is that, for a user to feel like they belong or are "having fun" or a held in esteem by a group of people, that group needs to be a compatible reference group meaning, they need to have things in common (this idea was touched upon in the article "The Problem with Social News" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50015 and the discussion of homophily, meaning loosely birds of a feather flock together). For examples, entrepreneurs are much more likely to be concerned about the opinions of other entrepreneurs than other people. I take more seriously the music suggestions of people that have the same tastes as me (obvious, right?).

So if everyone on a site could be plugged into a compatible reference group, the fame and reputation motivation could be leveraged across much larger populations of users, not just the ones that want to be, for example, on the top viewed videos on youtube. Each user would be compared against those users with which they have common interests, so the idea of having a reputation becomes more salient, so people spend more time contributing, and the content becomes better for everyone at an individual level. Lots of sites are able to harness the reputation motive on subject specific areas (like Y Hacker news), but no site has tried to harness the motivation for reputation across all interest groups. Definitely email me if this interests you because it fascinates me and I have plans to build such a site.
How To Get $200 Back If You Just Got An iPhone
In the US you never write a thesis, you write a dissertation (document) based on a thesis (idea.)
Secrets Revealed: How Magicians Protect Intellectual Property without Law (pdf)
Actually I think its the problem solving questions that they ask you. I may be mistaken,since I don't work there. Theres an article in businessweek or b2.0 about it right now. Things such as "You are shrunk to the size of a nickel..preserving your density proportional...and put in a blender...you have 5 seconds before the blades start moving - what do you do?
You have a point. The post is most useful for people who are in a situation similar to the one I was in: coming from the outside, unfamiliar with the culture, and trying to break in on merit alone.
>SFU one of Canada's best universities? Care to elaborate? I always thought that Waterloo and University of Toronto were the best.

For universities with medical programmes, I'd say that UToronto is at the top, closely followed by UBC and McGill. If you're not interested in medicine or law, though, I'd say that Waterloo and SFU are pretty much tied, with UVic coming second.

>Of course, Canadian universities seem to vary less in quality compared to institutions in the US.

I'm sure you could find people who think that any of the universities I've mentioned are Canada's best university; to a certain extent it will depend upon their field. That said, few would dispute that all the above are better than UCalgary, UManitoba, York, or Carleton.
The infrastructure behind Google, Yahoo and even Microsoft is not just a bunch of machines plugged to the same Ethernet switch... They're building datacenters from scratch.
The New iPod Touch
I wouldn't have thought Glasgow even had a university much less one that produced a really nice implementation of a modern functional programming language.
For an anonymous sex service marketplace? This non-problem would be easier to solve by adopting less conservative laws in the first place.
iPhone Users Get iScrewed
A demo of I'm in like with you, which CN fails to understand
Do you know what is the reason behind this color scheme? Maybe it's easier to read in crowded trading rooms?
Interesting. Wikipedia thinks the two are synonymous:

"In academia, a thesis or dissertation is a document that presents the author's research and findings and is submitted in support of candidature for a degree or professional qualification."

[from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thesis]
An iphone without the phone.
Sure, but it's still an easy problem. Building big data centers is definitely a problem these guys face, but it's by far not the biggest or hardest one. The software infrastructure and algorithms are much more daunting problems.

Let me remind you that Google was a small startup very recently, and that was during the "dot com bust".
No, I'm also considering people we invite for interviews.
It's pretty common for business research companies to sell studies for lots of money. McKinsey, Forrester, et al. use their reputation to sell content, and the content propagates reputation.
Npk is correct, but it's a pedantic distinction. Most people, apparently including the Wikipedia editors, just use the two words interchangably.

Edit: yikes. Somebody went on a downmodding spree on this thread.
Ok, a lot of people seemed to be commenting about this, so I pulled that point out of the footnote and up into the body of the essay.
"Good" colleges are a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the best students organized online and randomly picked some backwoods institution and applied there, it would instantly become the place to be. Meanwhile the previous top schools would be left with the second-stringers.

It bears repeating: out of the top 10 richest "U.S. Americans", 4 inherited it; of the six who didn't, one has a degree (Warren Buffett), and 5 are drop-outs: Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Larry Ellison, Paul Allen, and Michael Dell. Woz dropped out to start Apple (he went back to school only after he was done working there) and Jobs dropped out of Reed College here in Portland. (We're all very proud of him.)
It's dramatically different not just technically but also in what it does to the subject's life.
I like the color scheme.

You should allow logging in with the user name as well as the e-mail address.

The upgrade/downgrade links give me no feedback, but that may be because I'm using Opera.

I'll be checking up over the next week or two. The news is good from what I've seen so far.
Automating Facebook Interaction using Ruby and WWW::Mechanize
Valleywag just can't quite pull off the high moral tone thing. They should stick to their core competency of mean-spirited gossip.
only 16 GB?
Next, let's take a look at random MySpace profiles to see how active they are. Personally, I find it mind boggling that people can be looking at these ugly and disorganized pages, but there is no mistaking it: MySpace users are very active.

The mistake is assuming that people spend a lot of time admiring the pages. The homepages are absorbed quickly, at which point pople move on to listening to music, looking at pictures, commenting/messaging, or looking for more people. You can waste hours browsing through profiles, it's a lot like wikipedia clicking. It's also a lot like people-watching on a busy street.

I log into facebook if I get a message from someone, or meet someone new irl and want to add them. I putter around for a little while, maybe play with a couple of gimmicky mashups for a few minutes. Then I log out and don't check it again for weeks.
Looking good !!!
ActiveState announces the Open Komodo initiative (nice IDE for RoR, PHP etc)
10 Future Web Trends
What a silly premise. Everything becomes cheaper as time goes. As a happy iPhone user, am I pissed off at the price drop? Of course not! I got plenty of value for being an early adopter.
The Python ORM Problem
Not being physically painful is more important than vague associations with Bloomberg.

Also, use lighter fonts or more interline spacing.
Adam Gomaa suggests writing your own mapper around SQLAlchemy. Django [http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2007/sep/04/orm-wars/] and Pylons [http://groovie.org/articles/2007/09/04/sqlalchemy-declarativ...] devs share their thoughts.

[seems to be a bug, I tried to add this as 'text' for the submission, but it didn't show up]
bloomberg doesn't like changing things because their biggest and best users are old men. changing the background would be a big dice roll.
Child robot with biomimetic body (video)
Another video:
http://www.reuters.com/news/video?videoId=61204&videoCha...
I don't think that it is entirely accurate to equate news delivery with music delivery, nor do I think the lessons from journalists are entirely relevant when it comes to building a social platform for music playlists. Cultural objects (e.g. music,art,fashion,film,literature etc.) are substantively different than news articles.

The news is largely valued for its accuracy, timeliness, and topical relevance to a reader. Music and other cultural objects are valued for their enjoyment, which is contingent on individual personal preferences. I'm skeptical of a platform that would use domain-specific talent to create playlists for what comes down to individual personal preference. Domain specific talent makes much more sense regarding news where the relevance can be easily determined because it is largely topical, whereas the relevance for music is based on personal preference, which can't be determined through domain specific talent.

I'm also not convinced that more meta-tagging is the answer either. If I tag a song with a mood, genre, style, etc., it will help a user find that song based on those new categories. But in the end, finding new songs based on categories isn't that helpful because what matters is finding songs based on individual personal preferences. For example, I might know I want an energetic, intense, electro-rock ballad, but defining that domain doesn't guarantee I will like the results. People rarely like all the songs on an album, and as far as domains go, albums are very tightly defined domains. Likewise, using Uber-Dj's as domains don't seem to be the best answer. After all, their playlists are based off of their preferences, and, regardless of how much they "know" about music, unless their preferences are like mine, their list will not help much.
I'm surprised it took Paul this long to realize this about universities. A little less than half way through high school I realized that the entire process (get good grades to go to a good school, get good grades there so you can get a good job) is crap. I decided that it was more important to spend my time in high school learning what I cared about then to obsess over GPA.

I never got around to finishing my college degree, I left about 2 years into it and got a job because I ran out of things to learn in college. I've worked for a series of both small and large companies and I've found that most companies also don't care where one went to college (Google is a big exception to this). Most companies simply don't value people that are fresh out of college because colleges don't teach people the right skills.

It's true however that in good schools there are more smart people and you are more likely to meet interesting people, but that doesn't mean you need to go to a top school, just live close to one.
It isn't. The tech is interesting, the content is not. As for what it does to the subjects' lives, I don't really care.
It's silly in that the author means, by search engine, a clone of Google's architecture:

"A crawler gets the Web pages off of that pesky Web and onto your beautiful disks. You'll need lots of disks.

Then you need to index these pages--say which page has which words. This will tell you that Janet Jackson was found on the www.superbowl.com page. Usually, indexing happens locally on the disks where your crawler dumped these Web pages. Hey, why move them?"

It's just one possibility. An alternative (not necessarily the best one, though) could be a personal spider that starts somewhere and is intelligent enough to find what you're looking for without crawling the entire web. Or a peer-to-peer search engine, to share the infrastructure between the users. Or a search engine that only crawl in the subset of the web you're interested in (i.e. you manage a list of domains per user profile).
It's not a bug, the text field is only used if there is no URL (to ask a question). If you provide a URL the text is ignored (not quite sure what the reasoning behind this was).
Well, this article may very well defined the Django ORM problem, but calling it a Python ORM problem might be pushing it a little. Also, I'm not sure who declared the Django ORM the clear winner of the Python Web Frameworks.

Also, the next Google won't be using SQL Alchemy either. The truth is when you get that big the law of leaky abstractions comes to bite you in the ass. You can only ignore the fundamental issues that these "frameworks" abstract away for so long. This allows you to build prototypes and medium sized applications easily but sooner or later you need to learn the details and most likely build a custom framework around it that solves your problem. As your application becomes larger chances are YOUR problem is significantly different from the AVERAGE problem and as such you can't use average tools.
I posted back on programming.reddit about this. The correct move is to use Elixir and SQLAlchemy. They're different tools and you can really put each of them to work.
Just because operating systems all look the same from far enough nowadays doesn't mean no innovation is possible. As an example, we are slowly moving from the old file/directory organization of files to a less hierarchical system (tagging). Or maybe we could destroy the notion of files completely?

The horse and carriage worked quite well, too.
Race for 'next big thing' in Silicon Valley
Wow that is a lot written about very little. Some abstraction == good, brittle == bad.
I'm sort of suspicious of the "semantic web" stuff. On the surface, it looks good, but there are some architecture astronaut type people that I've seen involved and who I don't trust to "make something I want". Maybe it won't be this huge thing that takes everything by storm, but will find some niches where it's really that much better than what we've got now... What do you guys think?
A sailor racing across the world would be dead boring in real time. It would be interesting to watch a half-hour documentary summarizing a couple months worth of travel.

Then again, I guess that's true for all kinds of reality TV we've seen so far, including justin.tv.
If there was a way to empty the Atlantic ocean, we could build a cool railroad between Paris and New York. Too bad it's not gonna happen.
Natural language search is something that the average search engine user would consider a "cool feature" at best.

But natural language search that works would be HUGE.
Now that all that information is aggregated into one convenient place, it doesn't really provide an edge, does it? ;-)
No matter which way you cut it, this price cut leaves me a little angry at Apple. A 33% price drop in 2 months definitely sends the wrong message IMHO.
I bought the iPhone on day 1, waited through all the activation horrors, and apple is essentially telling me I was foolsih to have done that.
I am not buying another Apple product for at least 1 year.
Apple on track to sell one millionth iPhone by end of September
Most people are dead boring in real time; a sailor, an astronaut or any other kind of explorer is just a little bit less boring than a teenage girl buying whatever crap.
A peer-to-peer search engine sounds good. The difficult part is convincing users to donate the resources for your cause.
I don't like the color scheme but it's bearable. Do take Paul's advice, though, and at least double the interline spacing. Maybe also increase the font size by a point or two. People are going to want to skim through the category names, so underline them or put them in a different color than the surrounding text.
BookSwim is Netflix for Books
"Leaving it open-ended with a "just keep trying" approach only gives you the impression that if you just hang on, maybe next month will be that special one ... or the next month ... or the next one ... how then do you know it's not next year? Or the one after that? Or next decade? There are plenty of entrepreneurs whose idea was a decade ahead of its time. What happens to them after they maxed out 50 credit cards and mortgaged their homes?"

I don't think YC encourages people to keep trying with an idea that doesn't work. Rather, they encourage them to drop the idea and find another one. Many YC startups have switched their idea even during the initial 3 months.

It's fairly common for a failing idea to still be a failing idea 10 years later. It's fairly uncommon for an entrepreneur to come up with 40 failing ideas in a row. Usually by the 4th or 5th, you've stumbled onto something decent.
When I get rich I'm going to take YC's approach and fund about 40 different girlfriends a year with a little money rather than just one with millions.

The economics have changed. With a recession looming, it will be less expensive than ever before to fund a girlfriend or mistress. They'll just be happy you're one of the few percent not worrying about getting his car repossessed! Sure, in the old days, you had to buy them a big shiny rock and take them jet-setting all over the globe. Now? Why, you can use open-source software and services like MySpace and Facebook to entertain them for free while you're gone with one of your other "investments". You can even hook up webcams all over the apartment to make sure they're not cheating on you while you're out cheating on them! Track them with Loopt and monitor their activities with Twitter.

You'll be sitting pretty while 95% of the people your age are stuck living at home because it's too expensive to move out and all the jobs pay minimum wage. There's never been a better time to win the Darwinian Game of Life while simultaneously investing in porn futures to exploit all the frustrated L^H... almost-winners!

In the near future, everyone alive will have an ancestor who founded a start-up.
Loads slowly
I leaf through most sites beyond the main pages & I was sure this was updated.

- working with ideas

- dealing with investors ('we supply not just advice but protection')

- why ability to give advice is scarce

- why bootcamp description is inaccurate & undesirable

- people want to create startups for independence

- explaining why the wrong type of external control (of business) is fatal

- power shift from funders to founders (that would make a good article)

- explanation of yc "do no evil" equation for founders & investors

The "news worthy" bits for me are some of the statements made within the page, that may be implicit in a lot of articles, talks or comments made concrete and explicit in this article.
"What do you have, in reality? Google (intelligence connections), YouTube ... doubtful to have gotten off the ground if one of the co-founders wasn't coincidentally related to Jim Clark ... and MySpace, a "startup" which seems to have been "started up" by Fox itself ... and Facebook"

And del.icio.us, and Flickr, and Reddit, and Digg, and GMail, and JotSpot, and Picasa, and Twitter, and Blogger, and HotOrNot, and LiveJournal, and Scribd, and AddictingGames, and so on.

One of the most annoying things about starting up is that everyone assumes you're doing it because you heard about YouTube or Google and want to be though guys. No. I have no desire to run a $100B company. If I end up building one, it'll be by pure accident, like if my market niche is bigger than I thought and nobody bothers to buy us out.

Instead, I'm a startup person because my math teacher founded ClearPoint and sold it for $40M or so. Or because a friend of my dad sold a company for around that amount. Or because the dad of a friend founded Avici and cashed out at the height of the dot-com boom, when it was worth $3B. Or because a friend of a friend started Avid and ended up with a few tens of millions. Or because a coworker was an early employee at Stratus and ended up with a $3M house.

You probably haven't heard of any of these. That's the point. There's a lot of value-creation that goes on in the economy that isn't reported by the media, either because it's in an unsexy field like memory chips, or because the companies get sold before the media discovers them.

It does happen, though, and it happens to people who are fairly ordinary. All you need is a unique angle on some problem that nobody else has thought of.

(And actually, I'm doing a startup for a bunch of reasons other than "to get rich". When I chose my present job from a bunch of offers, it was because the founder said the company's mission was "to innovate", yet I eventually found that meant "I get to innovate, while you implement my innovations". Startups are really the only place where you can truly innovate, because it gets squashed at nearly all companies.)
The state of the art is better than the rest but still does not work in every case. I think there is a lot of room for improvement.
you should start a blog, in the vein of leveragedsellout.com. Seriously, that was good prose
Financial Times - The new internet independents
Hubris is not arrogance and IMO the top googlers are not exhibiting either.
Go to the center part of the blender, which doesn't spin?
I know what it was about instantly, but software geeks are not your customer. Your demographic probably needs some flash glitz but get to the point quicker.
So the conjecture of the essay is some combination of the following:

(1) Conditional on having applied to YC, YC finds that having attended a prestigious college makes one no more likely to be selected for interviews.

(2) Conditional on having been selected for YC interviews, YC finds that having attended a prestigious college makes one no more likely to receive YC support.

(3) Conditional on receiving YC support, YC finds that having attended a prestigious college makes one no more likely to succeed in the market (here defined as visibly thriving within about a year).

Given the initial essay's strong emphasis on market success as the ultimate verifier (paragraphs 5-8), I thought the main idea was (3) -- but if interview invites/subjective-evaluations are a factor, some amount of (1) and (2) are mixed in, too.
Note that the list is in reverse order. We'll have true AI sometime before the semantic web. The Singularity will straighten out all the messy html.
Google is a total slut for a high GPA, make no mistake about that.

Google also has a list of schools that are considered top-tier, and if you're not from one of those, you're unlikely to be hired. I don't believe Google has always been this way--and I think the pressure to raise the hiring bar in so many artificial ways comes not from any elitism, but from the fact that Google is hiring way too fast, and the folks at the top know it. By ruling out everyone below a quite high academic threshold, they've cut down the number of applicants under consideration.

I suspect, but don't know for sure, that if you have a long track record of producing good results, you can still get hired by Google. I received a recruitment letter from them, but never followed up by going through the hiring process to find out if someone with a couple of two year community college degrees (and no computer science classes at all aside from AP high school classes--I tested out of all of the computer-related classes for my degrees) could get hired there, based on the strength of accomplishments, alone. The letter came two days after I accepted funding from YC, and a few months after we started making money with Virtualmin, so it wasn't really of interest at all. But now that I think about it, it would have been an interesting experiment.
There's no "right" answer to this kind of puzzle. The purpose is to see how you think through problems.

The 5 second limitation makes it a little less useful for that purpose, though...and, in general, I've never liked this particular puzzle question.

Besides, the center part of my blender does spin...it's what holds the blade.