skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's something similar I wrote a while ago based on my experience:

http://extantproject.wordpress.com/2007/03/05/being-smart-is...
It would probably be the subject of fewer jokes if pg wouldn't mention it so much when it's still in stealth mode.

It seems like every time a "How do I use Lisp/Scheme for my site?" topic gets posted, pg mentions something Arc does well that current Lisps don't, but we never get to see any of it.

I'm not complaining, or asking for him to release a beta when he's not ready, or anything like that. But it's human nature to get annoyed when someone claims to have something awesome and won't show you it.
why not?
seriously.
hey, we'll be there
In bottom-up design, the most fun part is implementing the lower strata.

Runner-up: when you've just blindly written 1000 lines of Haskell code, then you run it through ghc and it typechecks on the first try.
I never thought of it as functional - looked more like little islands of imperative programming to me (I guess I will have to check again).

I think fast interpreted is probably even overstating it, it makes all sorts of compromises. Erlang was also designed for very high availability - so that must cost something as well.

I guess we will see what happens, but I am very skeptical about erlang (not sure why, just a gut feel).
Heh - I am reading slashdot again - its actually kind of nice these days (its a slower pace) - and it brings back good memories.

news.YC is awesome.
We are in!
Hmm. Interesting idea, but I see several extremely big problems.

First, you're relying on patients to triage themselves and determine if their condition is life-threatening. You do not emphasize that the service is for CLEARLY non-life-threatening problems. It should have a huge banner that lists some symptoms and says to call 911 or drive to the ER immediately. Maybe there should be a system for a triage nurse to monitor the "symptoms" of the people who sign up and call them if he/she thinks it's serious.

Second, if someone signs up and doesn't think their illness is life-threatening and then dies, you/your company can be potentially liable for that. I have a feeling insuring yourself against that will be expensive.

Third, the brand is really horrible and the site isn't exactly easy to navigate. But you mentioned you need a UI designer (I emailed you), so at least you seem to recognize that.

Fourth, I would not pay 25 dollars for this service. Maybe you can work out a deal with the hospital to pull this fee out of the flat ER cost. That would be awesome and you'd have tons and tons of people use the system, especially if it's well advertised at the hospital.

The idea is cool and for major trauma centers in metropolitan areas where the wait can be greater than 7-10 hours, it could be extremely valuable.
"Do nothing" is not called a competitor, it's called a barrier of entry.
See you guys there
this is sage advice. it doesn't have to be entirely white label, but i dont feel like you're going to have much success marketing directly to end users.

if you're into branding though, remember, you are not making software for ERs, you're making software to help people wait in line, and your first market is ERs.

think about it.
This is a big problem at a lot of data centers. It's very rarely made public. It's bad for business, ya know. I personally know of one incident (at a major data center) where some bad guys stole a bunch of super valuable gear by lowering it out of a window down to street level.
"Barrier to entry" of a market is the cost in time and money it takes to become a possible source of a solution in a customer's mind. "Do Nothing" and "Do it yourself" are still very viable options for consumers even for competitors who have successfully managed to enter a market.
I think the walls to the garden have to come down at some point
When major services start using a platform that allows their users to interact with users on foreign services as if they were local, that platform will win. From what I understand, Opensocial could be that platform.
dfranke and I will both be there...hoping to see a few others.
You mean the people who are smart enough to buy Fastpasses?
Foundations and Trends in Web Science, Journal Volume 1 Issue 1 [pdf]
Tom Perkins being interviewed on 60 minutes as we speak (it's 8:05pm on Sunday)
Thought someone might be interested. Tom Perkins helped found Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.
I think CakePHP is the new VB since you can easily install VB6 on any Windows computer and make apps for (at the time) 95% of computers (and for Parallels now as well), just like PHP apps run on almost any existing web host. Also like VB6, CakePHP apps are based on a very simple language (BASIC versus PHP) while Ruby is different in some ways than languages most programmers are familiar with. Finally, CakePHP and VB6 both evolved from very popular languages used by hundreds of thousands of people for many years (BASIC, QBASIC, regular PHP), while almost nobody used Ruby before Ruby on Rails came along.

Finally, on all three points, I'm comparing and contrasting Ruby on Rails. Ruby itself is nowhere near Visual Basic--QBasic might be a better comparison.
The server side is already prepared for this. There's nothing much to do. All the big web languages run as multiple processes (or threads) and so do all the big databases. I think we'll see a lot more server consolidation, which we're already seeing with the 4-core and 8-core machines of today.
I'm definitely happiest when I'm in the middle of creating something I can't wait to see finished. The other really fun part is standing back and watching others use it. Every time I create something that's truly useful I'm as satisfied as if it was the first time I'd ever done it.
Google actually doesn't have better search results than Yahoo. They just do a better job monetizing each search.
Thanks anaphoric. The stuff you were looking at it still very, very early so expect to see great improvements in then near future.
There's nothing wrong with starting indices at 1 (or n).
It might be also useful for parents with small kids. If you got a 104F fever on Saturday night you just take some pills and sleep over next day to see how it goes. If your kid get 104F you don't want to wait for your pediatrician to open their office on Monday. (Or, if your kids put a pill in his nose and it won't come out at 9pm; that happened to us).

If you can put your brochure in the "packet" the new parents receive from pediatricians or hospitals, that might help.
You're talking about automatic parallelization. There's been quite a bit of research done in this area, but the results aren't that great. Some languages (particularly functional ones) are better suited to automatic parallelization than others, and it's pretty doubtful that you'll see a good automatically parallelizing compiler anytime soon, especially for an imperative interpreted language like Javascript.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_parallelization for more info.
There is a distinction between competitors and alternatives; "do nothing" is the latter. I'm not foolish enough to think there are no alternatives, but I do believe there are no competitors to my service right now.
"Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great"

- Twain
Look, I'm not trying to argue with you. I've been in a spot with ideas that didn't have competitors too. First thing I was told was that there's always competition.

Now you can look at it as alternatives, but if you are competing with these other alternatives in the mind of the prospect, guess what? They're your competitors. Alternatives that people have to doing your thing is called your competition, even though it might not have a logo and an office.

You can split hairs and try to call it something else, but that's the way I was taught. And I don't think splitting hairs will help much. You are in competition with the status quo, with inertia, with the tried-and-true. Your main goal is to get people to try something new. As far as I know this is a well-established piece of sales and marketing knowledge.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Sell-More,-Make-More-by-Knowing-Yo...

http://www.businessknowhow.com/marketing/knowcomp.htm

http://opinionatedmarketers.blogspot.com/2006/12/other-day-f...

I think you've got a good idea. Good luck with the implementation.
Users of this service aren't allowed to "get ahead of" anyone

That is rather clearly the whole point, but I'm not going to argue with you--I'm just alterting you to the fact that the public response to this will be overwhelmingly anti-elitist. As such, any advertising should probably be targeted.
>or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration.

Wow, these are all in the same unit?
Interesting. I'm starting to see a lot of business-related terms that mean different things to different people in different fields (for instance, "securities" means "bonds" to a tax accountant, but "stocks+bonds+etc" to a financier). I'll certainly be careful with such distinctions when talking with investors, clients, etc.

Thanks for the input.
Cringley's point is that this could lead to industrywide wariness and hatred of Google, unfortunately. MSFT was known for dirty tricks, and galvanized much of the industry against them. Maybe they're paying for this now to some extent.

If you'd think twice before going to a GOOG meeting to pitch your startup and, if they're interested, start "opening the kimono" during due diligence... Well maybe they wouldn't be first on your list of companies to sell to.
Four Reasons Why the Entertainment Niche is Great for Online Content Entrepreneurs
If they don't reveal the judging criteria, how are the teams supposed to improve?
He said give, which means no obligation other than to the federal government.
There is a lot of potential for really clever marketing. I'm thinking something like bus billboards that read "Hit by a bus?" :-)

I'd definitely use this if it were available in my area.
Do you think thieves are more commonly stealing valuable equipment or specific valuable information?
Actually, you don't pay anything for those fast passes. If you have a ticket you just get them for free next to the ride. Everyone can do that.
You points are valid, and I don't take a hard stance on this debate, but I highly disagree with how it's called the "nature vs nuture debate," as if it's one or the other.

Learning calculus at age 10 is no small feat; it's one of many examples there are, but you are right, I can't say it can't be taught. However, research evidence will say it's very difficult.

I don't remember the name of the experiment, but this is fairly well-tested, as follows. Take n beads and lay them in a line in front of a 5-year-old. Take the same number of beads and make another line, but space them apart wider. Ask which line has more beads. Usually the kid will say the more widely-spaced line has more. This is caused by an immature perception of quantity. After a few years, this error "magically" disappears. Logically, if you don't understand descrete quantities you won't be handling high-level math.

The other example is reading. Most kids begin recalling episodic memories from age 3; reading starts later than that. Sho Yano was reading the New York Times at age 2. He played Chopin from memory at 3, with no training at all (the story goes, as his mother says, that she was in the kicthen and he just climbed up on the chair and started playing). There is simply no case to be made about it being a taught skill.

Again I'm not discounting the importance of rearing, but there are cases where innate genius is the primary factor in skill development, and again, I believe Mozart falls into the genius category. Beethoven, maybe the hard work category.
>How would you raise consumer awareness for a service like this? I've tried a few things (mostly offline), but none successful so far.

This is the kind of thing with huge mainstream appeal which means you need to market to the mainstream. PR is the best, do you know any reporters at local newspapers? If you raise some money or have some money, you can also buy advertisements in newspapers or magazines or hire a true PR firm to get you press hits.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=65100
I think what's important to most users is what they can do with the machine, not the technical specs. There's not much you can do with a brand new midrange computer that you can't with a midrange computer from three years ago. Graphics-intensive games are the only mainstream consumer application that comes to mind. Until a year ago, my main computer was a laptop made in 2000. The main limitations that prompted me to replace it were its low screen resolution (1024x768) and maximum RAM (512M).
Yeah it's a biz term.

Perhaps non-intuitive, but the point is that you have to figure out how you are getting customers, whether that is changing their mind from "option X" to your service, or changing their mind from "doing nothing" to your service.

Some businesses don't bother to do that work, instead just saying "I have no competition" -- I'm sure you know that you don't want to go there.

As a side note, I'm really curious as to why I was down-modded up above there. I was simply trying to share stuff I know. Don't know why it would tick anybody off. People are welcome to have different opinions, and I'd like to hear about them instead of getting down-modded. If I'm wrong, I want to know about it! (That's kinda the point of commenting to begin with)
If my team had gotten in, we wouldn't say anything. There's no point. The first thing we would do would be to buy a beer on the plane ride home and start coding. See ya in 5 months.
Shoot...totally forgot about this.
Anyone going to Web innovators this week?
One of the ways I know that we're in a bubble is the frequency with which I am now meeting intelligent young men who sincerely and with every appearance of unselfconsciousness tell me that they want to be founders of startups as an alternative to joining the workforce and learning their trade.

This is really the only comment I have a problem with. Do they really say "as an alternative to learning their trade" as if the workforce is the only place to learn?
Each little well thought out part that works, and what I learn from novel situations that I've not dealt with before. Seeing progress and seeing the solution unfold as I explore the problem domain in greater depth and breadth.
the people who are telling you to go off on your own are also financially interested in the phenomenon of selling teams of young engineers to big companies

I can't believe people still write stuff like this. Doesn't anyone stop to think how little investors make when that happens, compared to the returns if a startup keeps going?
PCs being pushed aside in Japan
The Man Behind the Google Phone
I'd need about two mil to retire comfortably I'd say. It's far easier to get to that from one million than it is to get to one million from $5,000. Hence I'd be seriously screwed, especially at that age, If I found myself with $950k and had to lose it all, whereas had I not made the bet, I'd probably be at most 5 years from retirement.
Yeah, I like that: 'Constant Gratification'. I think that is in essence what keeps coders going.
Usually CPU latency for a web request is very tiny compared to network/DB/IO latency, though.
Two million to retire comfortably? That's quite a standard of living. Supposing you're earning 6% interest and expect to live to 100, that's a budget of $10725 per month. That's enough to spend the rest of your life living in the penthouse suite of a cruise ship.
Dfranke, adhering to the constraints given shouldn't the correct answer should be a very large negative value for n? There's no upside to increasing the value of n; you're only putting yourself further at risk.
Seeing it work the first time. Maybe this is just because I haven't built all that many things, but it's always been an incredible feeling so far.
http://www.pandora.com

http://www.last.fm

I hope they merge eventually.
I thought the same thing then I realized she's right. If you want to learn the trade of being a corporate cube drone you're going to have a lot of trouble in a startup.
or immediately take 3 shots each at the bar. that's what we did.
Anybody from the Philippines here?
Hi! was wondering if there are any YC readers from the Philippines who would like to meetup?
Workforce experience reminds me of the old story about the shoe salesman who goes to look for a job:

"I have 20 years experience", he says to his prospective boss.

"No you don't.", the interviewer replies. "You've had 6 months of experience 40 times over."

The corporate trenches are sort of like that. You do learn some stuff, but not much, and you learn it awful quickly. 90% of the interesting aspects of my "trade" that I've learned have been on my own.

Corporate work (for developers) seems ok (but not great) for gaining domain expertise. It is a great way to meet people with domain expertise. Other than that, it's not good for much. Large organizations seem considerably less than the sum of their parts.
or get your car robbed and laptops stolen, that's what we did :)

(followed by long islands and jager bombs. and yes, our data was protected by dropbox, we didn't lose a second of work ;))
sounds a bit like a shadowrun...
Also, the temporal relationships is definitely there. I'm not sure how much of it exposed in Labs right now.
Report Gives Hope To Fla. Man's Cancer Killing Machine
No no, I'm not saying California isn't a good place to be. Let me elaborate.

I've been in the Bay Area for about 18 years and I absolutely love it here. If I wasn't raised here I probably wouldn't have gotten interested in startups. You read about this stuff every day in the newspapers, and when you drive around on the highways you pass by the offices of hundreds of companies. As a programmer and an aspiring entrepreneur, I don't think I'd be happy anywhere else.

SoCal is also great. I was in a high school business club and we used to go down there all the time for conferences. Santa Monica, San Diego, etc. all kick ass. The way I think of it is, NorCal is where you go to work, and SoCal is where you go to vacation.

Like I said, I really don't see myself living anywhere else in the world besides California. I just wish Berkeley students were more enthusiastic about startups.
Champion Robot Car Declared

Carnegie Mellon's computer-laden Chevy Tahoe wins the Urban Challenge and takes home the $2 million prize.
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/19661/
Intelligent Tracking system for web sites!
A common misconception is that Moore's "law" states that processor speed will double every 18 months or so. That's incorrect. In fact, Moore said that the NUMBER of transistors on a processor would double roughly every 18 months.

It turns out that they are correlated, since smaller transistors means both faster transistors and more transistors per unit of area.

My point is that more processor cores require more transistors, and thus the end of Moore's Law also means the end of more processor cores (ignoring things like architectural advancements or more but less powerful cores)

That said, I do agree that we will see an increasing number of cores, at least for awhile.

First of all, it's important to have an OS that efficiently manages the cores and the applications that run on them. This automatically benefits everyone who runs multiple applications on a multi-core machine, since each application gets a larger slice of time and fewer context switches.

Multiple cores could also eliminate dedicated components like GPUs which would bring down the cost of low end machines.

As far as programming languages go, I hear Erlang is good for concurrency, though I've never used it.
Yahoo Launches Kickstart, A New Social Network Around College Students And Alumni
If Windows Mobile can't beat Symbian, Google can't...

Symbian is one of my favourite UK companies, having been spawned off from Psion (I have a battered 3c).
Erlang is most definitely functional, although it's not as pure as something like Haskell.

In terms of speed, this is something to look at:

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=...

It's pretty fast for most things if you use HiPE.

Your skepticism about Erlang is justified in terms of "next big language":

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2007/10/09/languages-wor...

However, if you use it for what it was created for, it is very nice - it's the best thing out there.
YC reader here... from the philippines... cebu :P
One of the biggest reasons any non-geek in the US gets a computer is for email. In Japan they all have phones with email. I think long-term it's probably a real problem for Japan that an awful lot of people aren't PC users.
Marc Andreesen: Suicide by strike
for me, planning is my favorite part... :/
from pampanga
repeat after me people: do not get your science/medical info from the media.
they're mostly idiots - wait for the peer reviewed literature.
From the article, this led to the saltwater being lit on fire that got so much press coverage a month or so ago. There might be something here, but it would be many, many years before it become real.
is it just me, or do laptops seem to get stolen a lot?
AOL vs the web: Facebook vs Open Social etc etc pay walls are always evil.
the people who got in are on easy street now. all they have to do is make a product that will survive the scrutiny of users, investors, pundits like mike arrington, and the rest of the YC community in a few months.
from quezon city :)
Sure what's your email?
Shiro, you are definitely one of the lucky ones. Very few know what it is to do something solely for the joy of doing the thing itself... and the great paradox is that when that is our only motivation, the 'success' that we would have wanted had we been goal (instead of process) orientated comes easy and naturally.

This is how to let the inner spark shine -- allow whatever we choose to do to be it's own reward with no preconditions or ulterior motives. What flows from that is always perfect. And what's more, somehow serendipity starts kicking in.

All great works are created from a sense of joy, not pain. If there is a 'secret' to genius, then surely this is it. Does this help answer your question tyn?
enough that the sheriffs in my area waste tax money at hauling big construction signs, park them near parking lots, and turn them on 24/7 to remind people to lock or hide their laptops.

it's a called a trunk and valet keys. use them.
Marc hints old media conglomerates should be buying new media companies like his. Makes sense.
gOS: Where Computers Are Headed?
Navisite Suffers Massive Failure, 1,000s of Sites Down
startup in makati
I'm not a big fan of Symbian. I had to code a J2ME XMPP client for Series 60 handsets.

The incompatibilities between models and vendors is imho far worse than any browser used to be... But to be fair, I'm not sure if this is Symbian's or the manufacturer of the handset's fault.
"Web 2.0 Is On The Ropes... Kleiner Perkins Has Halted Investments"
I'd bet money all but a very few are after just the equipment itself.

Step 1) Have your cousin the janitor let you in the back door.

Step 2) Take an expensive looking gadget from the loading dock.

Step 3) eBay it for $10k.