skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably getting enough funding up to start working full time on it. I am loathe to quit my day job before I have at least enough cash to last 6 months or so stored up.
My boss on a conference call making my IQ drop. I'd better put on my headphones now.
PG where is your "plan for spam" for Hacker News???
TheFunded.com - New School Linkbait Or Old School PR Trick? Great Viral Tactic.
More people means that each one of them would need to be brought up to speed on the problem, and then each time we try something out, we'd need to communicate amongst us to make sure this new approach wouldn't adversely affect (too much) what the other folks are trying out. Communication overhead is O(n^2).

There are two stages a software project goes through. In the first, you're exploring the design space and trying to figure out what the constraints are. There's no architecture yet, because an architecture is a reaction to a set of constraints, and you don't know what those are yet. So a change anywhere could result in radical changes to the rest of the codebase. You might find out that the approach you were trying just doesn't work at all and you need to scrap everything and start again.

In the second, you have a basic architecture and a set of users that are happy with the product, and you're trying to incrementally refine it so it has broader appeal and users like it more. Here, developers only need to be familiar with one section of the code, because the basic architecture is set and changes should be fairly well localized. Things like tweaking a UI widget, or adding a new feature, or changing look & feel.

The first situation requires that all developers be familiar with all parts of the code, and so (given the O(n^2) communication overhead) is best done by a single person. The second allows developers to work in parallel on different features, and so is best done by a large team.

This also explains how to reconcile The Mythical Man Month (which recommends a team size of one, plus supporting cast) and open-source software like Linux (created by thousands of volunteers across the globe). Brooks was writing about software systems before they're delivered, when the architecture is first emerging. When Linux was new, it was created by a single developer too. It's only after it became moderately useful that it was opened up and people started contributing patches.

I suspect it's also behind much of the acrimony between the static-typing (Java/C++/C#) and dynamic-typing (Python/Perl/Ruby/PHP) camps. Dynamic languages are much better in phase 1, because they don't enforce interface boundaries when you don't yet know the interfaces. Static languages are better in phase 2, when you have clear interfaces and the hordes of programmers need to know what will or will not break things outside the area they're working on. You can use dynamic languages for this too, but you need to essentially reinvent most of the features of static languages through documentation, testing, and assertions.
I was just commenting on the fact that apparently you have a problem, but not the resources to solve it, it seems that the communication overhead for even one other person would help you see the issues and details needed to solve whatever problem it is that is being dealt with.
I'm interested in hearing more about this, too. It sounds like the two offerings combined (service plus storage) make for a complete hosted solution. Is this correct? And how are domain services handled? By a third party?
I met one of the RescueTime guys at the Miracle of Science meetup in Cambridge (his name escapes me, unfortunately) a few weeks ago. They are very bright and seriously committed, with an excellent product and idea. Good luck! Can't wait to see you guys in some of the YC photos this winter!
ME TOO. Amen, brother. I have vague ideas and have the feeling I might be onto something but concrete ideas elude me. :-( :-(
The thing that confused me about Random Walk down wall street was that he spends the whole book explaining that all strategies for investing are useless, and then in the last chapter he gives out advice for investing.
I noticed it, but it felt very readable to me.
of course, if you are not looking for seed funding (or angel funding) and looking to raise a serious series A then you will have problems... but I think if your market is in fact not too big, then you must avoid raising too much money, since there are only two scenarios where you'll actually be able to raise that much money for a project like this:

1- you raise money from an idiot, i.e. someone that really doesn't know what they are doing. You are always better off not doing that no matter how much they give you

2- you can prove the idea will work, and you can gain the trust of the investor in you and your team. In this case you might be able to convince a good VC to invest in the company but you will then have to give up the majority of your shares in the company

If the market is in fact not that big, why would you have to raise so much money! do you think its reasonable! And if no VC out there can tell how big this market really is or how good the potentials of this business (which is already making money, a rare case!) then maybe there is something theyoungceo can't see, and maybe its really not as big as s/he thinks it is

Anyways, I have a feeling this post is a bit about possibly finding some potential investors rather than getting advice. Which is fair, but not sure if these advices are really what the theyoungceo is looking for.

Also why is the name of the company not mentioned? (specially that the company is already out there and doing business!)
@theyoungceo: you could always try to convince someone that has better connections and influence than yourself (like pg and others like him) to make a small investment in your company, but in return s/he could def help you to raise the funding you need a lot easier (if possible to raise it at all for this company)
Abu Dhabi Company Buys A.M.D. Stake
I like this one:

What you can't ask: Do you take drugs?
What to ask instead: Do you use illegal drugs?

Hum...
If I am not mistaking HotOrNot is also running on Amazon's S3, and they get some serious page views
here are some stats on Amazon S3, IT Exceeds 99.99% Uptime

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/amazon_s3_exceeds_9999_...
Its for exploring MySpace
Which Y Combinator backed companies are still alive?
There's a well-known effective attack using "rainbow tables" that's far more reliable than the crude approach of just Googling for the hash. There's tons of rainbow table based cracking services for MD5 on the web. Just google for "Rainbow Table MD5 Crack" or "RainbowCrack MD5".

This is just yet another reason to salt your passwords with bits from a good random source.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbow_table
We were considering using EC2 & S3 for our upcoming launch, but we did some calculations, and found the minimum cost for 24/7 service comes to about $70 per month not including data or bandwidth charges. Once a site has greater usage and needs to scale, it seems hard to beat, but for the early days it doesn't seem to make financial sense.
"Orbital - Doctor?"

I'm at work, and my work playlist on anywhere.fm has a bunch of Orbital on it...very soothing. :)
IE: The Platform That Amplifies Facebook
ok my criteria for whether they are alive or not is to whether they have updated their blog in the last month at the least or not..

Alive: Weebly, Virtualmin, Jamglue, Scribd, Pairwise, auctomatic(blog returns error but they'r brand new so..), Bountii(again no blog but new), draftmix(no blog), fuzzwich(no blog but new), anywhere.fm, Xobni, i'm in like with you, Justin.tv,

Dead: Thinkature(Dec 2006), Shoutfit(site doesnt even load!), Flagr(Dec 2006), Versionate(July 2007.. just 4 posts and then mysterious disappearance without a word), Octopart(oct 2007), Buxfer(oct 2007) [if u guys are still around please dont chase me down with a hacksaw or smthn..]

can't say: adpinion(in beta but if i remember right they'v been round quite long and have no blog so... no offense guys if ur workin ur asses off...), Socialmoth, Heysan(tho i think they are alive),
Your post demonstrates bigotry against Hindus - no reading between the lines is necessary. Before you post ignorant comments, perhaps you should read the Bhagavad-Gita.

What if the best coder you had ever seen happened to be a Hindu? If you still thought twice about this person based on their religious belief, I would think twice about your judgment.

Most (all?) religions require their followers to take something on faith, which implies suspending scientific, critical judgement. And most people believe in some religion (computer scientists included - Knuth is an obvious example).

In other words, beliefs have little to do with intellectual ability/productiveness/excellence in software. Get over it.
Big Head Labs, fix your search! (please)
Something appears to be wrong with the html. It's not processing or somethin'.
The last song I heard that really blew me away was "The Catastrophe and The Cure" by this group. I agree that it's good coding music too.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=56825

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73791
I think loopt might be alive too, but hanging by a thread. I remember pg saying on many occasions that loopt is yc's least successful company. Probably not worth mentioning, though. Please check sarcasm meters prior to downvoting.
OpenSocial on Facebook (Sort-of)
Why does the phrase 'my science' make me uneasy?
Found a summary of a book on "lateral marketing" from a previous "Ask YC" thread that's helpful, though obvious.

It's nice to have the vocabulary, and associated granularity, for idea-forming.

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/5/lateral-marketing-n...
Is Google Launching a Mobile Network?
http://mashable.com/2007/11/16/google-mobile-network/
I'm the opposite; too many ideas coming and going all the time and not enough time to do anything with

though, maybe that's for the better as I would end up pursuing a lot of things that had little or no substance
This was posted yesterday:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/11/15/loopt-may-be-friending-...

They seem to be doing pretty well.
I would choose something like 1appp.com (as in "1 APPlication Platform") if I were you. It's sexier. And it's available.
Octopart seems very much "alive". Their last blog post was a mere 3 weeks ago. They've had similar gaps in blog posts before.

Buxfer seems to be doing fine as well.
CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They're Cool, and How To Use'em
I'm so glad I don't work for the government.
my criteria for whether they are alive or not is to whether they have updated their blog in the last month

GI, GO. At least half the companies you mention as dead are still alive. But I would not want to say precisely which, because dying is not a sharply defined thing. Startups not infrequently come back from what seems to be death, and we wouldn't want to hose one that might by publicly declaring them so.
If you're considering "cloud computing", you should also check out Joyent. (http://www.joyent.com/) They're different than Amazon EC2, though... rather than just being able to scale up by adding additional virtual servers, your servers are also "burstable" up to the maximum physical capabilities of the physical machines. Pretty cool stuff. I just got an Accelerator for my in-progress Facebook-powered site, so we'll see how it turns out. (By the way, Facebook applications get free entry-level Accelerators...)
You can see the list here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Combinator

You'll be interested in the "Status" column.
E-Ink: Seiko High-Res Super-Thin EBook Reader
Not to mention the fact that you have to do a lot of work up front if you want to make the thing work right without taking big risks.
Unity, oneness, singular, and harmony in Swahili is 'umoja.' I looked to see if it was available, and it was taken, no surprise. However, youmoja.com is not taken.
PG's advice is good for YC but I blame myself for taking it seriously. Now, after nearly a year of work and tons of personal savings spent, we're seeing quite negative reaction from the first wave of investors we've approached: everyone wants to see 2 year projections of revenues and they want those numbers to be huge. That's discouraging.

We never thought about "revenues after 2 year run" because I preferred PG's approach of focusing on "building something people need". His take on having a business plan with "shiny revenue projections for next 2 years" is that a business plan does not matter much, since the business will change, and in the end writing it won't be that hard for a couple of smart hackers. Well... not really, especially if you're faced with questions like "how exactly you are going to get users"? And my honest reply (I haven't brave enough to give it out yet) has always been "well... you give me the money and I will hire someone with a good answer". Don't get me wrong: everybody agrees that we're solving a very real problem and there is money to be made, but the lack of clear understanding of where we're going to be in 2 years is our big problem right now.

My approach, influenced in part by PG's essays, is to focus on making people happy and "evolve" organically. This does not fly with investors at all. It's depressing: Facebook is losing money, nobody knows for how long, it is older than 2 years old and commonly considered "successful". Meanwhile, investors want us to make money, and tons of it just to get an A-round.
You're probably thinking too big. I have that problem often. Sometimes, the best ideas are the simplest ones.
EC2 on its own is pretty comparable to a "standard" hosting setup.

This is their "small instance" setup.

1.7 GB of memory, 1 EC2 Compute Unit (1 virtual core with 1 EC2 Compute Unit), 160 GB of instance storage, 32-bit platform

The usual thought is to use dynamic dns to point to a server you have setup in an EC2 instance, so yeah a third party.

However, this isn't really an all or nothing proposition. You can certainly plug and play different components in to complement your existing setup and still save money / increase reliability.

If you have a solid setup, but are exceeding bandwidth limits you can move static files to S3.

Want better testing rigs, you can make EC2 instances for each and just turn them off when you're done.

EC2 and S3 are great tools, but you still have to do the homework to make them fit your needs.
Message sent. Hopefully Google doesn't spam filter other @gmail accounts :)
The list needs maintenance though
Perhaps this Random Phonetic Name Generator would help?
http://utilitymill.com/utility/Random_Phonetic_Name_Generato...
The "randomess" of your salt is irrelevant. With rainbow tables you will find every letters+digits combination shorter than X chars. So what really matters is if your salt is long enough.
The Michelle Bach situation is interesting. Assuming the facts are true, she in fact arranged an interesting although slightly unreliable option for herself here. Had the price gone down, she could have tried to divest her holding to the customer and made them wear it.
I think I can pretty reliably say that Fuzzwich is still chugging along

There are quite a few more alive that I personally know about, but I will leave it to them if they are interested in divulging their status.
a very small thread, but yes, i think they are alive
If you read a blog post to decide whether to stay in or get out, you most likely are not going to the tier 1 schools.
Study Shows Google Favored Over Other Search Engines by Webmasters (in robots.txt)
Old Dogs and Y Combinator
The market doesn't need to be a quagillion dollars to need sales and ops guys; I still dont' quite understand the point of "sizing a market" -- I have already proven that there are plenty of people who want the product badly out there, and always thought that would be enough. No matter what you invest at what percent, this one has a lot of proven traction already and is more likely to be a winner than most deals (I think). I think what I'm getting at is the question of: what do you do if the VC model just isn't quite right? It seems everyone assumes there is no business growing with them.

Also:
-theyoungceo isn't naive enough to believe that investors are scouring news.yc for deals, although he'd love to be proven wrong.
-i didn't mention the company name because i know everyone knows everyone in SV and it might be unprofessional to be discussing this here from an investor's perspective (IMHO)
Skeptical about personas?
Australian court sets June date for Google case
AJAX, DHTML and JavaScript Libraries
Apple considering raise for Jobs?
Business Idea: real time collaborative music via the internet
Like this, but executed better: http://www.ninjam.com/

What do you guys think? Heard a proposal from a guy today, and it doesn't seem completely out in left field in terms of the idea itself. The proposition (as always, sigh) is that I make a prototype to get funding, which makes it sort of difficult to get that excited about, but you never know.
I'm surprised that criminal lawyers are grouped under "suckers". Spend a few years as an assistant DA or public defender, then start up a practice dealing with DUIs and what not. How much boring research could be involved?
Is Russia's tech future in Israel's tech past?
Cat Stevens, foreigner suite. Something none of you have listened to and probably never will.
Reading VC Interest
This article does a good job explaining why I should stop saying "how is 100K good for a programmer with an MS when an English major right out of law school earns blah blah blah."

I actually attended a top 5 law school (for one semester) before getting out and going to grad school in engineering instead. I agree with the statement that "thinking like a lawyer" is a bug, not a feature - it wasn't just that I didn't want to be a lawyer - I felt that getting wired like a lawyer would do actual damage to my brain and my character.

I have friends (yes, they genuinely are still friends) who do often exhibit the lawyer tendencies identified in this post, far more often than my engineer and science friends do. Yes, there's pettiness, bluffing, and intellectual dishonesty in all fields. But these are traits that are encouraged by the culture of law, and discouraged by the culture of engineering.
While similar reasoning ultimately influenced me not to go to law school, tier 1 schools are not overly difficult to get into for someone who has already figured out the game. (A la Paul Graham's infamous essay.)

Frankly, the problems of which the post speaks are really all rooted in the same problem: there are too many people graduating from law school already. The competition allows the firms the luxury of such monotonous work.

Unfortunately, I wanted something else - I wanted to become an expert at some portion of law and exploit my ability to keep many pieces of a situation in my head. However, the opportunity cost, considering the competition, did not seem to match up with the expected reward.
I was able to solve one of my holdups using news.yc. I needed a fair amount of money to buy new servers, get really good co-location service, pay for incorporating, and cover some other expenses. By posting to news.yc my need and what I thought I could do (will do) I was able to find someone to buy-in a 5% stake of what I am doing. The news.yc forum is a powerful medium. In all I found a partner willing to to give me $20,000 (its in my bank now) so I could make things happen. 5% may seem like a lot but I figure I still own 95% and have no need to go out and look for more money.
Well, I like the simple approach to web development that web.py offers and the fact that you get to essentially lay out your own directory structure and pretty much create your own framework. But what really attracted me to Pylons is the interactive web based debugger. If you haven't seen it yet you need to give it a try. In "development" mode it will give you a page with the actual traceback and you can interactive inspect the stack, check the value of variables or just run arbitrary python, all over the web. Makes debugging a lot easier.
This is the poorest PowerPC history article I've ever seen, and in addition the author displays a great misunderstanding of computer architecture.
If somebody literally believed in a multi-armed, elephant-headed monstrosity up in the clouds granting wishes[1], I would THINK TWICE about him. I reserve the right to THINK TWICE about people who are completely deluded. As an employer, might I still exploit this person's labor? Quite possibly. But you better believe that modern-day medievalists give reason for pause. Most people are only nominally religious, or behave so, which is expected.

Sorry for repeating myself, but when I say something that is 100 percent reasonable, I don't really like taking a lot of shit from people.

ignorant comments, perhaps you should read the Bhagavad-Gita

The day I read the Bhagavad-Gita or Rama-rama Ding Dong for that matter in order to reduce my ignorance is the day I die.

which implies suspending scientific, critical judgement

...which implies stupidity. I know, I know. That's the problem. I don't want people suspending scientific, critial judgement.

[1] Or whatever the hell it does--it's not relevant.
What field isn't monotonous, though? IT work is boring, repetitive, and relegated to the back office, cut off from life, the outside world--even sunlight--and the only interesting and creative part of business: the start (though how exciting or fulfilling is it really to be hawking another useless widget or service to someone who most likely doesn't need it?).
this list isn't extremely accurate. in fact i think it is overly pessimistic.
Turning the iPhone Into a SpyPhone
Watch out in case you signed a contract that explicitly claims ownership of all your work, regardless of "nights and weekends" spent on your startup.

Also, watch out for non-compete clauses.

Both might be de facto safe if you have a cool employer, but an investor's top interest will be the protection of the IP of the company. Things that look risky are to be avoided, and a violation of a contract is a major risk.
1. This sounds an awful lot like the story of NeXt, from making their own custom hardware, to the super advanced software development environment that they eventually tried to sell by itself for other platforms. Too bad there was no struggling, mainstream company to buy them that they could have then taken over from the inside.

2. Half way through, I was thinking, it would be fun to contrast this with ITA as bad and good examples of how to start a Lisp company with a bunch of guys from MIT. And then he says he works at ITA! So, lesson is, if you're going to start a Lisp company, don't make Lisp the product, make it your secret weapon.
Name initials may influence grades (and sports): study
Creative Startup Capital 
Creative financing for technology and online startups.
Van Roomen's Problem
Study Compares States' Math and Science Scores With Other Countries'
Ycomb Wins Top Social Bookmarking Site! 
This is great news!
It's called ONE, it's an application platform. Okay then, so I suggest runonone.com (and don't forget runon1.com).

By the way, I enjoy coming up with domain names, so if any other News.YCer wants help with a name, just email me.
Because science is based on open, repeatable experimentation -- making it inherently community based. Wolfram often has a hard time making reasonable attributions -- a major criticism of "A New Kind of Science". But for a transcribed talk, it's reasonable.
pr0dpr0n.com (available)

http://wiki.43folders.com/index.php/Productivity_pr0n
But somehow when it comes to keeping the whole system coherent and unified, that ends up being something I have to do.

I've heard it is a horrible place to work due to an extreme level of micromanagement. If you can bend to his will, it might be ok.