skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
More info:

What is fbFund?
fbFund is a fund focused on continuing to create incentives for the development of applications on Facebook Platform by accepting applications for $25,000-$250,000 non-recourse grants from anyone interested in building their business on Facebook Platform. The grants will not come with any conditions except that the grantee use the funds to build their company on Facebook Platform.

What is the total investment in the fund?
Initially, the fund will make available $10 million in capital. This may grow over time.

Who is eligible?
Any individual or company, anywhere in the world can apply as long as they have not raised any formal venture funding.

What companies are involved?
fbFund will be administered by Facebook and funded by Accel Partners and The Founders Fund.

Will there be any equity granted in exchange for the investment?
No, Accel Partners and The Founders Fund will have the right to fund these companies first, but beyond this, no equity or debt will be associated with any grant made.

Who is participating in fbFund?
The investment committee will be comprised of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO, and Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebook vice president of product marketing and operations. Facebook board members Jim Breyer (Accel Partners) and Peter Thiel (The Founders Fund) will also be part of the committee. Additionally, the fund will rely upon an advisory council that includes Reid Hoffman, founder and chairman of LinkedIn; Josh Kopelman, founder of First Round Capital; and Rajeev Motwani, professor of computer science at Stanford University and early advisor to Google.

Why are you forming this?
We are forming this fund to help grow the Facebook application ecosystem. By decreasing the barrier to start a company, we hope to entice an even larger group of people to become entrepreneurs and build a compelling business on Facebook Platform. We hope this is also a funding model that other venture capitalists will follow.

How will you decide on investments?
Anyone will be able to apply for an fbFund grant from the Facebook website. All proposals will be reviewed by the advisory council and then approved by the investment committee. The goal is to get decisions to potential grantees within the month that they apply.

How does an individual or company apply?
Initially, you can mail your business plan to platform@facebook.com. In coming weeks, we will set up an online submission process. Submissions are being accepted immediately.

What will be the criteria for selection?
We want to see the most innovative and ambitious proposals for building a business on Facebook Platform.

How long will it take to hear back from the fund?
The goal is to get a response to the applicant within 30 days of receipt.
No undo vote does make me think a bit more carefully when I'm voting on something though. The only time it becomes a problem is if I accidently click on an arrow, which I think has only happened once for me so far.

Adding undo wouldn't add clutter, just see how reddit does it.
Why aren't the nodes labeled?
There's "does worse than fat local client" (but better for development and hence a worse-is-better situation) and then there's can't do it at all and will always lag behind so much that it doesn't make sense to think about it.

Are you going to put up servers so that I can solve large-scale quadratic programming and machine vision problems? Are you going to ask me to run a non-linear optimization routine written in JavaScript?!

You expect me to accept circa-1994 graphics in games? You expect me to pay for that?

What kind of dreamworld are you living in?

Google Spreadsheets hemmorages, huffs and puffs if you have more than several dozen rows - it robs power users of most of their keyboard shortcuts and has no kind of extensibility at all. It uses up dozens of MB of RAM with a blank sheet. It's a real Excel killer alright. Which is amazing because Excel has only seen minor, incremental improvements in the last decade.

You're telling me quasi-3D games I played in 1994 on a machine 300x slower than the one I'm using right now constitutes approaching parity with local native code?

In several years, a language like JavaScript will run on the machines available then the way C++ runs on today's machines. But when that happens, machines with many cores will be ubiquitous, and the ridiculous lag will still be present - would you like to run your embarassingly parallel program with 1 core or 32? (1 of course, it's online! Wowzers!)
This article confuses Y Combinator type funds and traditional incubators. The biotech funds listed in here are incubators and have almost nothing in common with Y Combinator.
How did you meet your YC app team?
College?
Prior collaborations?
Pure randomness?
We tried to explain that to them, but by the time they talked to us they had already written the paper and they didn't seem psyched about the idea of changing it.
I've been getting this for years from my domain... I don't think there's much you can do short of fixing the SMTP protocol
Thanks very much for that reference. That is a very interesting paper and I didn't know about it before.

Here's an html version: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html
It depends on your relationship with your family. What you describe is not always the case.
> the really intensive javascript apps just use way too much memory in Firefox, especially when you have 12 hour Firefox sessions

I suspect that huge improvements in the state of Javascript interpreters will really start to change the equations. If JS is Lisp in disguise, there's no reason why JS engines can't start to benefit from the decades of evolution put into Common Lisp runtimes.

Come to think of it, what if a JS engine got fast enough that the browser itself could be written in Javascript?
Dear Found+Read:

Cool URIs don't change. http://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI
For now, we're getting some nice incremental improvements. Firefox 3 Alpha is worth using just for the improved JS engine.
Whats your business model?
Great and light weight. I would like a clone.
I guess they picked their thesis and wanted to stick to it no matter what. The problem is that the thesis just doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The only fund that seems the slightest bit American Idol-like is Seedcamp and only because the companies they fund are dubbed winners.
not to mention the american idol analogy thrown in, which suggests that YC/TS and the traditional incubators that the article confuses YC/TS with actually announce winners and losers. so they are really confusing the YC model + traditional incubators + business plan competitions all at once. sort of surprising that was written by kauffman folks.
http://media.arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.media/540/su...
Well, the useful parts of philosophy tend to drop off and become other fields...and so what's left becomes "useless" by default.
Went to college with one partner, went to high school with another, another was a roommate of someone I went to college with.
Free training trial for Flex
Lobotomy. Now the conversations are much more interesting.
You're absolutely right, in some aspects. Some things will always be better done locally; it's ridiculous to contemplate writing a 3d game without access to a 3d API, for example. And it's silly to have a ton of cheap processing power sat under your desk pretending to be a 3270.

So I wonder if the future is going to be client-server at all? Perhaps the arrangement will be that in exchange for using the services of webapp X, you contribute your processor to act as part of the distributed processing for the backend part of that webapp. Your request might end up being processed on your machine, or it might be processed three thousand miles away whilst your machine is processing someone else's request... If peer-to-peer file transfer applications (or, you know, natural history) have taught us anything, it's the value of distributed, decentralised, cellular systems. The webapps we're seeing right now are incredibly primitive, and have barely scratched the surface of such things - but when they do, when people start talking JSON or AJAX or some other ETLA to each other's browsers rather than to centralised servers, when the only difference between a web browser and a web server is that the browser has the GUI loaded - then we'll really see the value of webapps...

...hmm. Excuse me, I may be a little busy for a while...
a preview in the editor looks like a must indeed, for that and other reasons.

More comments:
If I'm editing a presentation, switch windows, and go to the presentation list, if I choose one and click edit, the working presentation is automatically saved (gasp) and the editor does not come into focus either (although that might be KDE's focus stealing prevention at work).
Facebook Groups
All excellent suggestions. Altho I am unfamiliar w/ Body Language I will check it out. Just working through the Carnegie book now.

Also, I believe Code Complete is by Steve McConnnell.
Which Facebook group? Is there some special for entrepreneurs/hackers?
Elementary School, and then High School.
One partner is my best bud from high school, the other is my wife (who I also met in high school).

Perhaps someone can answer this for me: Would the wife-as-a-partner thing have a negative impact on our chances at YC?
It's the beginning of a pattern.
Thanks. Someone recommended the second book to me before - I mistakenly read "Ender's Shadow" and was mildly disappointed. Will be sure to pick up "Speaker" on your suggestion.
Brilliant. Double up-vote (if I could) on Musashi's Book of Five Rings.
Preview in the editor... done.
Thanks. You hack at all?
I think you mean before Thales.
Doesn't work on my machine (Ubuntu 7.04)

Why is this even here, I thought this was NEWS.ycombinator.com? If I wanted stuff like this, I'd be on Digg.
<<Over time, you'll see webapps take over more and more markets from the desktop, until there's nothing left.>>

Maybe. I think for this to be to be the case there needs to be a better thin client than the web-browser as currently conceived and perhaps higher level ontology (OWL?).

But I am willing to be corrected. Do you think JS-browser integration as it currently exists is powerful enough for the stuff you are talking about?
Subscribed. Thx.
The biggest one and a good starting point is probably "Web 2.0 (Entrepreneurs)".

http://pitt.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2208499259
These jokes are probably even older than Internet, that's why they basically don't work on modern Unices.
Though I'm still pretty new to news.YC, I think another appropriate and parallel question is this: Does news.YC want to be Digg?

I've seen quite a bit of replication of content across news.YC/Digg/Reddit. Can't we pretty much assume that news.YC readers also peruse Digg and/or Reddit aswell? I do.
I think the up/down voting system is intrinsically flawed. A better system would be something like a monetary system.
It works fine for me, the only thing that I miss is when submitting an url you can't write the text to be seen in the comments page.
He's my roomate in college.
Overall 8/10. It does everything it needs to in a really clean way. It's reliable and consistent.

My biggest nitpick is reading the grayed out font on visited links, submission text, and a few other places. My brain wants to skip over grayed out text so much that it requires an almost conscious effort.
Project Looking to find best practice of web 2.0 marketing
Major research breakthroughs in the last 10-15 years
When the transistor was first introduced in the late 40s there was quite a bit of hype surrounding it, but I wonder if anyone fully appreciated the significance of the development at the time.

Same goes for the world's fair in 1893, when Tesla's AC generators were first introduced to the wider public. I can't imagine that anyone realized how significant this was. Well, maybe Tesla.

So what are some major research results from the last 10-15 years that you feel will have a large impact?
It depends on your age and level of education. Goedel, Escher, Bach was mind-blowing when I was 19. Four years (and some college) later it's a tedious bore.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Memories of My Melancholy Whores" is pretty great.

Oliver Sacks' "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat" is full of amazing case studies that will help you construct a personal theory of mind.
Wil Shipley thinks Apple is getting too greedy
CMU professor gives his last lesson on life
By encrypted mail, I meant end to end, pgp style encryption. For this to be of much use, Google (nor anybody else) would not have my private key, so all they see is a wall of random bytes.

The very core of what makes Gmail so enjoyable is that their expertise in free form search allows me to pretty much stop caring about organizing my mail at all. I generally just hit archive, and rely on search to retrieve whatever I may need to later. No web mail client can provide such a service against encrypted mail.

At the same time, it is Google's access to my mails' content that allows them to show me 'relevant' ads. Without this ability, providing Gmail for free will get a lot harder to justify.
our mothers introduced us. he's my cousin.
I rarely downvote on something but I think that having that option does no harm.
Maybe on reddit downvoters are more likely to be thoughtless, I don't think that is a problem with news.ycombinator readers.
It would help a lot to have the same statistics for downvoters on Y combinator.
Every point of friction the user encounters when trying to use a product is point where they will stop and do something else. Desktop software is too difficult to try out. People are scared of spyware. Configuration and system compatibility can be a huge hassle. Under Vista, there are a zillion security warnings to click through. And in business environments, computers are often locked down. Forcing users to go through that just to try your product will turn off the majority of your site visitors, resulting in much lower sales.

Another key factor is that with web based software you can do continuous releases, which is key in a competitive environment.

The only things that should be written as desktop software are applications that absolutely cannot be done in a desktop environment ( like games and P2P file sharing). But even then, doing it in Flash is better than requiring an actual download.
i installed this on my phone. it works pretty well, considering they are having to work with an incomplete reverse-engineered toolchain, just like all the other iphone developers.

at work, it pinpointed my position perfectly. when i got home, it said it didn't know any of the nearby cellphone towers, and locked up my whole phone. oh well, we're living on the edge.
FogBugz is Developer-Driven (Thank Goodness)
Joel and his crew are so very user-driven in my estimation because they themselves are the users.
"... Would the wife-as-a-partner thing have a negative impact on our chances at YC? ..."

Well it sort of depends on the makeup of the team. Imagine your on the Starship Enterprise and you have to beam down to an unknown planet. Who do you want on your team? Well you want Kirk, probably a science officer (Spock) maybe the medical officer (Bones McCoy) , possibly the Coms officer (Uhura) and a maybe a RedShirt to get blasted away if you come across some real nasty situation. [0]

So lets assume you are Kirk. The leader, human in touch with his emotions instincts and has the ability to make decisions but passionate and aggressive. Lets assume your other partner is Spock. Total nerd. At best unable to read human nuance, emotion at worst totally miss the poker move Kirk thinks up to save the day. At best he/she coolly out-logics the best Roumlan, Klingon or Borg enemies they face. Then there is Bones. Bones is also all empathy, human and the thinking conscience always trying to get out of sticky situations with the least harm. [1]

For each episode all three at some times came into conflict to resolve a difficult situation. Sometimes it was Spock and Bones butting heads over the most direct decision compared to the decision that caused least harm. Another time it's Spock advising Kirk not to take such rash action as trying to remove all the Tribbles as they do sooth the crew and saved the day as in "The Trouble with Tribbles" [2]

I guess what I'm trying to say is your wife may have the latent skills you need in your team that has to be identified. Identify her character skills. Is it all logical and calm like Spock? Passionate, rash and gambler and decision maker like Kirk? Or is she able to read into people and situations that baffle both Kirk and Spock as Bones can?

You need all three character types to succeed in any Starship (I mean startup) adventure, and YC interviews can also be included. Each personality contribute to produce a successful outcome. Choose the wrong combo and you'll be just another RedShirt in the application process.

PS My experience is that if you can determine this you can work to plug the gaps. Not all people are creators interested in building. But they may be logical analytical and empathetic at the same time.

[0] You can substitute these "old-skool" trekky characters with NexGen Pikard for Kirk, Warf/Data for Spock and maybe Troi for Bones ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Tribbles
OpenOffice Conference Coverage Barcelona - Initial Thoughts
5 Lessons from CEO Diane Greenes long, slow slog with VMWare
Does it have OpenDocument support?

I tend to use desktop apps for this kind of thing, but for on-the-go editing while travelling, or remote presenting, this would be really useful. All my existing presentations are in OpenDocument tho.
I used to hire him to work on software projects for my previous company (and we worked on Webmin together--him doing the hard work, me complaining a lot). He was the best developer I ever worked with, and after seven years, I finally figured out the smartest thing was to partner up and start something new with him.
Couldn't resist:

http://xkcd.com/304/
The DC term also known as ao, Co, and Do (in the trigonometric, compact, and exponential forms) is the average value of the signal over its period (if it is periodic). It is the integral of the signal over one period divided by the period.
I think the reason is simply that desktop software is in many ways already a mature field, with few earth shattering developments in the last decade or so, while web apps are a more recent phenomenon, and hence more 'exciting'.

Most of the recently hyped webapps, like MySpace and Facebook, are really apps that currently make no sense as desktop software. Their entire raison d'etre is to provide lightweight communication between huge masses of people. As people start demanding more from them, I expect them to start adding desktop offshoots in order to support more sophisticated behaviors and interactions.
0. Sophisticated manipulation of nanotubes.

1. Metamaterials (discovered in the 40s, but only confirmed in the late 90s).

2. Weird properties of DNA. Your DNA, for example, contains encodings of many of the viruses you are immune to; in certain cases they might even "spontaneously generate".
Is this Google's first dollar spent on advertising themselves?
Hmm... Logical, analytical, and empathetic is pretty much her in a nutshell. I'm more like Kirk, the "passionate, rash and gambler and decision maker."

I'm sure she'll understand (and appreciate) your anecdote much more than I ever will. She's a big time trekie, and me? Not so much...

However, this still leaves my original question somewhat unanswered. While the three of us may be a great team, I've known many people who believe that couples should not work/do business together as they feel it will inevitably lead to conflict and result in the breakup of the company, relationship, or both. I'm sure that they have some personal experiences, but how does YC generally look at this type of situation. Will they see it as additional (and unnecessary) risk? Are there any examples of husband/wife teams in successful startups?
Umm scratch that. Just now figured out how it works. Sorry.
I would be extremely surprised if YC held your relationship against you. Don't worry about it.
The Human Genome Project, or perhaps just its completion since it originated outside your window.
I don't think it's quite right to say that SftD is the second book in the series. Rather, Ender's Game is the common prequel to two trilogies that begin with SftD and Ender's Shadow.
I think there needs to be a better thin client than the current web browser, but I think that client will be an evolution of current web browsers rather than a new app.

Here's how I see it playing out:

JavaScript libraries will build increasingly more full-featured UI libraries. That's happening already with JQuery and YUI and Scriptaculous and Dojo. The increasing complexity will put increasing demands on the client-side processor, so browser makers will respond with faster JS implementations and specializing JIT-compilers (like Psyco or the JVM).

Meanwhile, SVG support will grow - it's already supported natively in Opera and partially in Mozilla/Firefox, with Safari and IE support under development. Once that's widely available, it'll open up a whole bunch of new app categories - games, grapics apps, maybe even photo manipulation if JavaScript gets high-speed array operations and access to pixel buffers. When enough people start using SVG, I could easily see browser makers implementing their SVG support to take advantage of 3D hardware acceleration.
So all those devs out there are using web apps to create the 'web apps'. Sorry, but i don't use a broswer-based text editor to create shit.

I don't really like the way you worded the question, but I think the number one reason is because it gives you ease of portability between places and that what people like.

Do you use del.icio.us? I do, because I can save stuff to it then when I go by a friends house and want to show them something, i go to my account and click it. I don't have to remember it or google for it, but I also use the regular bookmarks on my browser.

I do get your question and have to agree with this on one thing photoshop for web.
Hey gwen...what do you mean by this: "If JS is Lisp in disguise"?
We made a website together in 7th grade.

It was a different website than now, though.
"... Are there any examples of husband/wife teams in successful startups? ..."

Sure, Trotts of MT & SixApart ~ http://www.sixapart.com/about/corner/

"... but how does YC generally look at this type of situation ..."

Who cares? ... More to the point it's unethical if your team is discriminated against because of marriage. Look, yc play the good guys of the VC world ( read here http://ycombinator.com/about.html and here why ~ http://ycombinator.com/about.html )

I'd worry about the basics of how you build things and all the other things that go to build a startup before worrying about this issue. Instead worry about ....

- this http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html

- and this http://paulgraham.com/die.html
Wow. I'm sitting here in class not doing my work (Intro to Computers. Feh.) with near-misty eyes. if I'm ever hit with the cancer dart, I only hope I can be so strong.

Awesome read, indeed.
the meme of trashing anything that's not a hard science
How yahoo.com looked from 1996 to 2007 [PICS]
Does Internet qualify? :) Probably the greatest thing that has happened in our lifetime.
1. Internet

2. Human Genome

3. Nano-technology