skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I realize that - I was being sarcastic. If someone is a great coder but didn't finish the sixth grade, I'd love to talk with them. But in all honesty, there is definitely an entrepreneurial mindset present at Stanford that is lacking at many other top schools. I wish more of my friends at Berkeley wanted to take the plunge to go at it on their own. Big names and comfortable salaries entice too many recent grads -it almost happened to me.

Craigslist also hasn't been the best for me. It's not that there aren't good people, its just that you get inundated with literally hundreds of replies. It's tough to sort through the riff raff.

I've had better luck getting help through entrepeneurship groups like SVASE, because at least the people there truly want to be a part of something rather than earn a few bucks as contract labor. Again, I realize there are good people on Craigslist, but I've learned the hardway that one bad hiring decision while your product is in development can grind you to a halt. It's all about boosting the mean and decreasing the standard deviation of your applicants; picking out a diamond in the rough is hard.
prototype + ExtJS
Power and Your OS: Linus + Jobs, Why OSX is the Best
I remember before February 2002 there wasn't even really a history feature, so you had to save all your edits to a text file in case someone vandalized it. The site has sure come a long way since then.
Rejected YC Winners Voting
I want to throw an idea out there.

How about we set up a seasonal voting mechanism, that allows us to track who of us were rejected, and who of the rejects we consider the very best - a true gem that YC missed.

Anyone up to programming that?
It's never the case that even close to all the cells in the visual cortex are being used. It's always a tiny fraction of that.

This is also true of any individual transistor in a processor. An ALU contains hardware to perform many operations, but at most performs one per cycle. You can increase utilization through parallelism and pipelining, but you pay for it with more synchronization and control hardware that only switches on to resolve conflicts. And nowadays, half of all the transistors in a CPU are part of a cache (every cycle, you need a word or two, but get the whole block). You can't conclude that they're not making a contribution to output from the fact that they're often inactive.

No, I think we just haven't figured out what to do, not that we're limited by computational resources.

Based on what evidence? We know that the brain is hugely complex. We know it can sort through hugely complex problem spaces at least some of the time. Doesn't it seem like wishful thinking to assume both that the brain is really inefficient and that most of the problems it solves actually have simple hueristic solutions?

I'll step up and take ownership of the end result of this argument: If what you say is true and understanding is all we lack, why have these problems proved so stubborn?
Do you attribute most of the difference in performance to the OS change or to the implementation change, though? (I'll never use Windows, but I've been considering using Lispworks again on OS X for a few things.) I've always used LW with Emacs in the past, not the LW IDE. I use Aquamacs for almost everything now...and SLIME is great.

What Lisp libs are you using, if you don't mind my asking? I'm trying to figure out why CL-Memcached is slower than freaking PHP and Python for most things (!)

- dcphillips /AT/ runbox /DOT/ com
If anyone is considering building apps in this area, I'd strongly suggest checking out OpenCV.

It's _far_ more powerful than Pixcavator, well supported, liberally licensed, and provides some really awesome high-level API's.
One of the more interesting things about web media vs print media is that web media's impressons are actually more documentable than print media's.

Hand a person a newspaper, and it's really quite iffy whether or not they caught or noticed a 1/8 page advertisement on page 23 in section C; give them a link to a readable source, however, and (as long as the text isn't too small) it's more or less guaranteed that they've received an actual impression from the advertiser. A documented and documentable impression, even. This becomes especially important as it takes place without the use or waste of paper.

I guess one of the major stumbling blocks is actual expense as it relates to documentation. I remember thinking about how Gmail works. For example, which would be more valuable: content itself or documentation about who has viewed a particular block of code with some content? The NY Times would say that the content/articles are more valuable, thus allowing its advertisers to gain exposure being in close proximity to them. But without the ability to be funded or paid by advertisers, their content becomes less "valuable" by definition.

And this is why I think open source will be the future. . . scaled efficiencies, not necessarily producer/consumer dynamics, create value.
Microsoft already lost that money (that is, it's already been accounted for on the books). They're probably all profit from here on out.

As an aside, Nintendo hasn't ever lost.
Problem is that most people, rejected or not rejected, don't want to disclose their idea.
So, part of me is tempted to use this as an example of the reason why languages benefit from a certain amount of redundancy and consistency. :)

The other part of me is quite embarrassed, because I thought I had tried foo[3] and failed. I guess that's why everyone in the Ruby community prefers automated testing!

Of course, if I thought that applying an array reference to a Proc made any sort of intuitive sense, I might have tried it more carefully. :) I still wish that I could just say foo(x).

Anyway, I'm glad you appreciated my report from the field. And of course you prefer the point-free syntax -- you know Haskell, you know Lisp, you seem to know a certain amount of mathematics. It all makes perfect sense to you, just as I can only dimly remember the time when vector calculus didn't make perfect sense to me.

But I shouldn't indulge my love for German by randomly German syntax into my English prose inserting. Unless I have a very good reason: perhaps I want to borrow the uniquely compact German word shadenfreude, or perhaps essential it is the alien character of Yoda to establish. When you break the rules in Ruby code that you intend to show to someone else (and is there really any other kind of code?) you need to convince the reader that you had a very good reason, because you're making him or her work harder to understand you.

Keep playing with the syntax for a while. You may find that it's so elegant that it is worth defending against the inevitable skeptics. And, if not, at least golf is a very pleasant way to pass the time!
Okay, I thought you were pulling my leg. But, in fact, that does work. Thanks!

Meanwhile: My head just exploded.
Top 30 Failed Technology Predictions
Thanks for your response! I'm trying to:
(1) parse questions into the "opening" such as "What is the", and "subject" like "capital of Burkina Faso"?
(2) also looking for similarities between things like "going running" and "going for a jog"
I'm not sure if both of these fall under natural processing... mostly I use python so your first suggestion sounds like a good starting place.
Wow. Our peer-to-peer bandwidth problems may be solved sooner than we thought.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a carrier pigeon carrying a 1-terabyte thumb drive."
The closest analogy I can think of for what is mentioned on article page 3 is that of using rsync to create a redundant stream of your data, then streaming it as a rapid-fire set of udp packets. Set up some feedback loops to control the sending rate but as long as the percentage of lost packets is below some threshold the receiving end can still unpack everything.
Only the devil himself would dare change distribution methods and make you click on a link to read an article!
I think the time would be better spent working on implementing the idea and winning. Once you win, you can stick your tongue out at YC as much as you want. :-)
A wikipedia/google maps mashup I wrote today
I don't understand this reluctance to share an idea for a startup. It's ridiculous, because it seems to be predicated upon the assumptions that no one has thought of it, and if they did they would go off and immediately implement it. What arrogance. You could tell them every little detail of what you have and mind and, because language is so vague, they could think it was something entirely different.

If you tell me about your startup, your first goal, before you can make me a user or (even better) a paying user, is to get me to give a shit about it, which is a formidable task.
It seems overly opinionated to me. The facts provided, at least the facts in the commentary, generally don't seem strong enough to support to drastic (though entertaining) claims he's making.
Problems with Leopard's UI
I really doubt that considering:

1) even if Nintendo lowers the price of their console, they still profit from the sale of each one; both MS and Sony still lose money on every sale of their consoles

2) game development on Wii (and DS) is much cheaper than 360 or PS3. Not to mention sales are great on Wii. Ubisoft made a killing last holiday season on the Wii. Publishers like EA that put their bets on Sony and MS didn't post phenomenal sales and profit in the same quarter. Publishers are now shifting their focus on the Wii. Consequently the Wii will probably have the biggest library (something that made PS2 king).

3) based on current growth rates, the Wii is already dominating 360 and PS3; Nintendo already has the mindshare of normal people which normally don't play games

Nintendo has already eaten both MS and Sony's lunch (especially Sony's)

maybe in the next war MS will be able to dominate (they have improved afterall - except for the hardware problems)... but they won't in the current one
Interesting topic, interesting researcher, lots of new information, but there's a lot of bogus here too.
I'm not saying it's rational, I'm just saying that is how people are.
Nice article. Discover Magazine also seems to be a great place to find things to read.

Anyone have recommendations for other websites that have good articles (aside fron News.YC)?
Quite an interesting read, but I think the reasoning is off because the author is comparing two types of games - one played face to face and one played online. As a chess amateur and someone who has played many tournaments both live and online, I can say that online play quality is far superior simply because people can consult chess engines and books and move the pieces about without having to load all the permutations in one's mind.

Just because Kasparov could have beaten Krush face to face easily doesn't mean Krush couldn't have put up an equally impressive battle if they were playing online.

Therefore, the surprising resistance put up by the World Team could have been due to the format (online) rather than collective teamwork.
I'm currently working on a site to help anyone who was rejected from YC (the YNot's), and anyone else, a place to collaborate, find a co-founder, and assist those looking to move to SV. I was also planning on adding a section so people could demo their startup, have them voted on, and receive feedback. Nothing badmouthing YC, but just a place to keep rejected spirits up and give them some incentive to continue working on their startups.
Kasparov later wrote a book about the event, and states in the book that he expected to win the game relatively easily.

In particular, he had a number of significant advantages that make the game quite different from an ordinary online game, and which make the world team's performance more impressive:

(1) he could see the world team "thinking", as they discussed in public their possible options, an advantage he exploited extensively; and

(2) he expected that the world team would be unable to form a coherent strategy, but rather would be pulled in multiple directions.
Can you defer student loans to start a company?
I'm $150,000 in student load debt and desperately want to leave my soul crushing 9-6 coding job. Can you defer student loans to start a company?
>If what you say is true and understanding is all we lack, why have these problems proved so stubborn?

Understanding is hard, why is this so surprising?
Hmm. It does seem interesting. Will read, digest, forget, and get back to coding...
Ars Technica posts their lengthy and in-depth 10.5 review
Watch the birth of a very early stage startup via their blog
You're right. But a few corrections:

1) Microsoft makes money on the most expensive Xbox 360 (the Elite) for sure. The margins are probably close on the normal 360, and maybe taking a tiny loss on the new Arcade SKU.

2) While the Wii is cheaper to develop for, the biggest moneymakers have all been on the Xbox 360, and I suspect that'll be true for a while. The big sellers are all multiplayer online, and the Xbox LIVE stuff is best of breed there. That said, Nintendo's going to definitely see an uptick in 3rd party games, if only because there haven't been all that many so far.

3) The Wii isn't actually dominating the Xbox 360 in the US in absolute terms.
6) if I want to email my image from fauxto or flickr to someone via gmail I have to download them it upload it. (Nobody ever mentions this elephant in the web 2.0 living room. How do you get data from one web app to another? An un-started startup perhaps?)

The main issue, I think, is privacy and authentication. The only reason I can't have gmail directly slurp my images from facebook is that Google isn't on my friend's list. Though the last time I tried to upload an image with facebook, the interface didn't let me use a hyperlink. That's not a limitation of the internet, that's just a sucky interface.

So the issue does get talked about, just not in those terms specifically.
Saying that "vision doesn't work" is like saying "audio doesn't work". Outside a particular problem, you can't generalize to that level.

Automated surveillance from a fixed camera works extremely well (VSAM). Certain object class recognition like face or pedestrian detection works extremely well (Viola & Jones). Stereo depth extraction, some systems with amazing & cheap custom ASICs, works extremely well (Tyzx). 2D object instance recognition works extremely well (SIFT). This can power SLAM when combined with stereo imagery. Object Tracking works extremely well (Collins). Traversable road classification, car detection, road boundary & lane detection, and Stereo/SFM will power the first semi-autonomous cars. All that tech works really well today -- the task is system integration.

Also, vision isn't just visible light cameras. ASC is making a flash lidar that would make you drool. The "Swiss Ranger" is also good. Both can provide snap-shot volumetric 3D data combined with color and texture information, with no moving parts. They'll scale much better than scanning lidars and even multi-laser systems like Velodyne.

Add 3D processing like Spin Images to the mix, and integrated vision systems will get very, very powerful, very soon.

I like AnyBot's approach, but I think it is incorrect to assume "AI" won't be good enough and tele-operation will be king. If I were a pure-software robotics startup, I would focus on vision & navigation software, large/networked system integration/configuration/scalability utilities (like I'm sure you're building), and behavior systems.

For a text, I would recommend reading the winning papers from major vision/machine learning/robotics conferences, and the papers they reference. Grad students at CMU's Robotics Institute use Forsyth & Ponce's "computer vision, a modern approach".
http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Vision-Approach-David-Forsyth...

I would also recommend Mitchell's "Machine Learning", Strang's "Linear Algebra and it's applications", and throw in Thrun's new "Probabilistic Robotics" for fun.
any URL yet?
That's cool, let us know. Definitely no badmouthing, I like these guys/girl, they're cool.
what's your interest rate? if you can get a good interest rate and have it locked, then why not?

right now my 30k loan is locked at 2.86% - it's lower than inflation (I think)
I guess if you do, be careful, because if the startup doesn't work out you'll be even more in debt.
Did any of you read "Was Einstein Credible..."?
I've been reading "Armchair Economist: Economics & Everyday Life" (http://www.amazon.com/Armchair-Economist-Economics-Everyday-...), and the most interesting article so far was titled "Was Einstein Credible: The Economics of Scientific Method".

When reading this I couldn't help but think of YC (and all things YC-related). Any of you read it? What do you think?
That holds true for the given ruby implementation as well, since n is incremented only in the scope of foo and not in the calling scope.

def foo (n)

lambda {|i| n += i }

end

n=5

a = foo(n)

puts a.call(3) #prints 8

puts n # still prints 5. n is not incremented

I agree that the python one is strictly not according to the problem definition, but for all practical purposes both python equivalents are the same, aren't they? or am I missing something?
How to send email to a cell phone
I can see a "View other revisions" link at the bottom of the page.

http://web.archive.org/web/20010517002121/http://www.wikiped...
Ask YC about timing: When to monetize your user generated content site?
Here's a hypothetical question... let's say you have a UGC site and so far everything on the site has been free but someone needs to start paying bills so you've been looking at various options. You can add advertising (like what many sites do these days), you can start charging for 'premium' features (the so-called freemium business model), or you can start requesting donations (wikipedia model).

Each of these different montization methods has its own pros and cons and each of them has a potential to piss of users and alienate them.

So the question that I have is: what is the best time to implement one of these features? Do you start charging/advertising from the beginning or do you wait for the community to grow on the completely free model?
Plus the interest on student loans is usually tax deductible.
How the heck did you get it locked at such a low rate?
The back of the Economist says yearly inflation is 12% and it's 40% for food.
Wow, how did you get that far in debt? Law or medical school?
sounds about right for a decent university..$40k * 4-5 years
lets just say the dotbomb helped a lot... so if we do have another bubble - there will be always be a bright side
What's Leopard really worth?
A newbie still lost in C
I am in my undergraduate college and still learning C.I am newbie programmer and love the net.Which programming language should i learn to write cool web apps ,so i can create my own website as a startup.
+I have seen a lot of movies where they show cool hacking stuff ,Is it that easy ,and how could i get started to do such stuff on my own?
Drop a line if you need help. (rafael_imas@yahoo.com)
Does anyone have any idea how
Max could top PayPal with Slide?

Flickr -- that other photo-sharing site -- sold for, what, around $30 million? Paypal sold for $1.54 billion.
This (http://www.amazon.com/Introductory-Techniques-3-D-Computer-V...) is the best book on Computer Vision I 've come across. I first encountered it when trawling Stanford courses for good problem sets and research projects. Sebastian Thrun used to teach a class with this book (http://robots.stanford.edu/cs223b04/). It is fairly expensive and fairly mathematical but it is worth every cent you pay for it (imho).

Good Luck !
After reading the various comments, I was motivated to write up my own experience on how to survive Founder burnout. Below is my post.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/riding-a-bike.html

Please enjoy.

--Denny--
Prototype 1.6 has some nice new features, and mootools is cool, but jQuery definitely wins.
There are plenty of public universities that are just as good as private ones. I only pay about seven grand a year for tuition, fees, and books.

http://www.mnsu.edu/campushub/programs/coa/0708/index.html
Hmm. The YC Miss Congeniality awards.
Must have missed his other books Psychonavigation and Shapeshifting. Always nice to come back and see News.YC has moved another step closer to a Ron Paul-a-thon.
Reasonable enough, it is my gut feeling that those numbers are achievable but it is a little difficult to prove now.

There is money to be made in helping other people make more money, with Realty Agents I want to help them make more money with marketing tools and tying it all together in the 'virtual office' being OfficeZilla. I want to attack the network marketer angle with an integrated system tying the OfficeZilla features with a replicated website system, and autoresponder system.

I went to work creating a replicated website system back in 1999 that is running today it has 2400 customers and clears about 15 a month from each client. I was promised a founding position in that company, I am still a little unhappy about the things that happened between then and now. I plan to attack that segment in a different way, I am pretty sure I can hit easily that many paying network marketing clients.

I just lust after integrating the features of Asterisk PBX into OfficeZilla and further tying that into the website system that is managed inside of OfficeZilla so if you are a realty agent you can have a voicemail message about the house, click to call functionality on the website, and other neat pbx stuff that all works seamlessly inside of OfficeZilla.

I don't have any sources of capital to turn to at this time so I have to give a little away, move over this hump between having a lot of happy users to being able to have a lot of happy paying users. People will pay you when you promise to make them more money. That is what I am promising, this system will be adapted to make the customer more money. I could go on, but long posts don't work well in this forum. I am confident I am tenacious enough to pull this off!
have to do anything special?
I have the same experience too.

However, when I run though what Joel was talking about, you create a feature list with the estimate first. Keeping track of the time you spent on a feature means going down the list and putting down how much time you spent on it. Keeping track of time by just entering in a log has always been problematic for me.

And not having to keep track of interruptions is even better.
i really like your music but i hate myspace.
Non-profit ideas what to do with your money
Google Troubles Begin
Meaning = Data + Structure: Inferring Structure from domain knowledge
This is pretty old news. GOOG beat estimates for Q3 and the outlook is good at this point.
Those numbers don't pass the smell test; Interest rates (e.g. mortgage rates) are nowhere near 12%, so if those figures are accurate, all sorts of lenders are paying you to take their money. Additionally, and FWIW, I've been obsessively tracking my spending for the past 6 years, and have seen little if any signs of inflation. My grocery bills from 2003 are indistinguishable from those from 2007. (Yes, I'm a geek.)

I might be willing to buy a 12% number for inflation under some conditions, since there are lots of ways to calculate that number, and an emphasis on Gold/Oil prices and/or exchange rates might cough up a 12% figure. I'd still consider it unrealistic unless you were heavily involved in such things. However, the 40% for food seems fantastic, meaningless, or both.
Real World Guide To Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
You ought to test all methods and go with what works. One of the beautiful things about the Web is that it allows us to do that easily.
probably would help to actually read the book. besides the website having a ron paul for prez banner; this is really nothing about ron paul
FiveRuns raises $6.2M as Rails development spreads
Why You Should (Almost) Never Rewrite Your Software
I haven't read them, but it seems like Perkins's other books are about shamanic type spiritualism -- not my thing, but it doesn't discredit his other work.