skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started on computers since before my earliest memory -- my parents got me SimCity and I played it every chance that I could. My inner hacker spawned in stages, though, I'm not sure there was a specific event. There were more general things, like loving to read, but there were also situations where I had to figure out how to let the library let me have an adult card. It's these that make the better anecdotes.

Here are some examples. I used the computer so much as a kid that my parents used to try to stop me. First they put a password on the boot-up. I read everything I could until I learned to flash the BIOS. Next they installed this enuff computer time restricting system, which I spent a ton of time breaking. Over a period of two or so years, my actions provided the first line of bug testing for the Enuff programmers. Boy were they furious. Eventually I built a keystroke recorder, and that stopped that for a while. They couldn't keep me out.

Other hackerly things I liked to do included turning the scripting languages in games into other games. I wrote a really cool RPG in Starcraft, for example. I also learned how to automate tasks in 3DSMax, which was really fun.

At some point I hacked college entry, and I was in there way earlier than authorities thought that I should have been. By this point a 'hacker' identity was already written for me, but most of the interests started way, way earlier.
Wonjun..that's a very unique name...I know a kid named Wonjun in real life. I never thought I'd see a second.
If they're de facto cofounders and they have no equity, then either you're cheating them (and they don't know they should have equity) or they don't have much faith in the project (and prefer salary to equity).
i know a wonjun on yc news and a couple in real life.
That's about the 6th or 7th Wonjun I've encountered in my life.
yeah I do like posting here a lot better than other places

even when I don't agree with people here, at least they have valid logical arguments as well; i don't miss debate class anymore
Really nice pictures :)
As the son of someone who recently went through a cancer scare, I'm really excited about this stuff. I used to think chemotherapy was such a primitive therapy - flood the body with poison and hopefully it will just hurt the cancer - but this is a game changer.
A startup I worked at received investment from a group of investors. While doing due diligence the investors said we made it easier for them because we were using Microsoft technologies. They turned out to be really bad investors who were real PITA.

I guess I am trying to say it only matters to people you probably don't want to do business with. They should care about how capable you are not the platform/language you chose to use as a tool to show your capabilities.
Ethical Advertising for Web Apps
I trust that you're not going to complain if they quit your project for a project that does offer them equity.

FWIW, no one is indespensible in a startup; some are merely harder to replace than others. I'll bet that "original idea" guys are getting equity even though they cease to be indespensible.
Acorn BBC Micro and Sinclair Spectrum. BASIC. Various Usbourne books. I wrote a text editor on my Spectrum in BASIC. It was too slow at keeping up with your typing, so I figured out enough about Z80 assembly to write a little routine to speed up the slow bit.
Later I made a sort of GUI front-end for my Spectrum, inspired by the Macs at school.
> Australia, France, and Germancy can find a way to act without US leadership (or in spite of US opposition)

Opposition? How is the US forcing anyone to burn hydrocarbons? (France is going nuke in a big way so Germany may end up dependent.)

Euros are constantly saying how they're the economic equal of the US. If that's true, "US leadership" isn't all that relevant. Moreover, if the claims about a carbon free economy are true, doing so would be incredibly lucrative.

When someone insists that something is incredibly profitable but they're not trying to get as much of that profit as possible, their actions refute their words.

California and the US are both brands whose impression, like many brands, often has nothing to do with reality. Suggesting otherwise, especially with bogus arguments, is foolish.
I think hackers are a critical component of technical teams and therefore should be rewarded with equity/options.
The ultimate analog hackers tool ...
Curently writting my own in Erlang ... again ...
They are paid based on a milestone. Milestone is spec'd out and they are paid based on attaining that goal. So technically I do get unlimited hours.
OK you should receive it shortly.
Web applications are a lot easier to develop. I think too many people are still applying methodologies that applied to more "traditional" forms of software development. If I have a good JavaScript hacker bail on me a week before launch, I don't think it would be extremely difficult to find another good JavaScript hacker.
I'm not happy working, but I enjoy doing research, learning and tinkering so it seems like a good fit for me. There were a few reasons why I dropped out, none of which were because I didn't like what I was doing.
How can it possibly be that we can exhaustively search an infinite space in a finite time?
Obscure and Ugly Perlisms in Ruby
Neat tricks with iptables
Sigh... Obviously errors should be able to propagate up the call stack. But that propagation needs to be done explicitly. Simply tacking "throws IOException" onto your function header isn't enough; it's still too easy to mess up.
Right. Which didn't ruin AOL (the company) it made it better. What ruined AOL was the shift away from them to broadband.
research for prostitutes.likebetter.com, of course
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26036
If you talk to college and high school students, they will have a completely different opinion about Facebook than Matt's. For many of them, it is their primary form of communication - above email and oftentimes even cellphones. To some extent, there's a large generational gap on Facebook with respect to its hardcore users. To high schoolers, us professionals "just don't get it."
"Can't bullshit" sounds like a good thing.

I'm not disputing harder to hire, I'm asking whether harder to hire is a negative or a useful indicator.
Sometimes: http://www.boeing.com/history/narrative/n024boe.html
Facebook came out at my school during October of my freshman year. It's a whole lot more compelling when everyone you know is truly on it, except for a couple luddite hold-outs.
So if your exit target is Google, you might as well save them time and increase your valuation by using Java and GWT.

Ugh :(
>Milestone is spec'd out and they are paid based on attaining that goal.

Hacking doesn't work that way; software engineering does. If you don't understand the difference, your startup is in trouble.
Mac Market Share Rising at Cornell University
Eight of the Worst Spreadsheet Blunders - Avoid Million Dollar Mistakes
How "work at home" scams actually work
>pg's articles and talks are for publicising yc.

I don't think so. PG was writing essays and giving talks about startups before YC.
Threadless Is No Longer Placeless With Retail Store
At what point do VCs learn to believe in bolder ideas? There are VCs outside hubs, right?

If the trend if that many more small startups with bold ideas start to win, other VCs have to become more bold, and so the difference between, for example, the Valley with their aggressive VCs and other areas would diminish.

I do agree with your basic premise though.
The only way I see this as possible is if you sit down with a "front end" graphics guy and create every page. Then have the programmer put the code behind it.

But beware the code that is written it will be hard for another programmer to pick up on. Everyone writes code differently and it is just suprising in one language how many different ways there is to create a solution.
Oh, I don't know anything about Plaxo, other than what they do. Never had any use for it.
Facebook sucks in a lot of ways. I'm not a fan, in fact I'd actually quite enjoy seeing Zuckerberg crushed. There is just very little else online that facilitates shared experience.

Myspace has zero interest or ability to push itself further. Google hasn't really thrown its full weight behind orkut, not least because they have a much better money maker they need to protect. So the next generation facebook killer will probably have to be a startup - which means they have to be significantly better to attract users and reach a critical mass.
>If a series of statements might get interrupted halfway through, there needs to be an indication of this or else it's very easy to create bugs.

You can mitigate this by relying more on return values and less on side-effects. If the higher-level code depends on some side-effect, why not place the side-effect in the higher-level code after the function returns?
They'll still have to rewrite. The "infrastructure" he was referring to was GoogleFS/BigTable/MapReduce and their other massively-distributed backends. You don't have access to them if you aren't Google.

I've heard that GWT isn't actually used by any notable (= public has heard of it) Google project. Could be wrong though; no inside information.
The ten worst presentation moments
Milestones are comprised of objective and goals. Hacking can easily be structured as either a goal or objective.
This is always a tricky problem in business. If the algorithm isn't sophisticated enough, it's not effective enough. If it's too complex to be easily understood by the people who work with its results, then they wash their hands of it. "Why do we have 700 yellow shirts in stock?!?" "I don't know; the computer did it."

Sometimes it's best to leave the most complicated algorithms to NASA. I'd be curious to learn the bottom line results of this effort.
You're right about "development" part, especially for the initial feature set. I do consulting, and I estimate efforts for initial development vs maintainance as 5% : 95%. If you aim at millions of users, probably it should be 1% : 99%. It might be easy to find or replace somebody who does that first 5% or 1%. It will be difficult to find somebody who has commitment to hang on for the rest of 95% to 99%.
Pmarca: The web and mainstream consumer behavior in 2007
I worked on designing something along these lines in a bioengineering design class I took for fun freshman year.

The idea (for us) was motivated by the work that Ram Sasisekharan had done in his lab along these lines:

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2005/nanocell.html

Some food for thought:
There's a lot of control that wrapping stuff in nanomaterials could offer (targeted delivery/delayed delivery)- but the issues that you run into include material compatibility (the biggest problem) and difficulty getting to especially tricky organs like the lungs.
pmarca: 12 questions for the producers of the new Bionic Woman
If you have all the answers why ask the questions?
> Many of the most useful technologies started out as trivialities.

... and the vast majority of trivialities remained just that, trivialities. Looking at a handful of successful technologies and then tracing them back to when they were trivial is vulnerable to selection bias.
To be pedantic, no one is suggesting that FB is worth "nearly as much" as Google: even at an (absurd) valuation of $10 billion for Facebook, that is still less than 1/18th of Google's current market cap.
Rumor: Tagged Platform will mimic Facebook Platform APIs
'95 - '96
Some of those numbers seem extremely inflated. Sure, I can believe that 95% of "all users" watched Internet video in the past three months. But 32% of all users listen to music on their cell phones?! Nearly everyone I know has a cell phone, but the only people who use them for music are the iPhone users.
CS discussion:  "We did not appreciate that the computer could be as versatile as the pen."
Even then, widespread aversion to hiring from one of two equally productive groups creates a big incentive to break the mold. And that incentive will only keep increasing as long as no one steps out. In the limit case, you pretty much have access to an 'unlimited' pool of free labor. This line of reasoning does presuppose a reasonably free country, though.
Thinking about your career: Everybody Wants to Rule the World
A word of caution...100% of zero = zero. If you spend so much effort trying not to share equity with anyone, you may end up owning all of nothing.
Some Notes on Tim Bray's Wide Finder Benchmark in Python
There is a tall free number to get around using 411: (800)FREE-411. It has some commercials but it saves you a buck from not using 411. I wish I came up with that idea...
Umm... what do you think GOOG-411 is?
When I was a kid I loved playing Dark Castle. It was a game for the Mac written by Jonathan Gay (I still vividly remember the splash screen). A friend of the family noticed my growing interest in computers and showed me how to decompile the game. After giving me a few glimpses of the source code he recompiled the game and then left the room.

I think he was fully aware how fascinated I was and anticipated what I'd do next. It was probably what every kid would have done in my shoes: I decompiled the game, made a few changes, recompiled it and was exremely pleased to see "Dark Castle - programmed by: John K" on the splash screen.
WiFi update helps eye doctors
Myths and realities of nano futures
It seems the act of acquiring does a lot of damage all by itself. One thing that would probably go a long way would be if the acquiring company kept the acquisition process short, sweet and easy.
There are other good phones, it's just that most of them are produced by a company with a braindead marketing department (read: Nokia, and its E70, which Maddox raves about here: http://www.thebestpageintheuniverse.net/c.cgi?u=iphone).

Another good phone that is pending release this month and could not possibly be any more open is the Open Moko, a Linux-based, completely-open-sourced option which I think could easily compete with the iPhone given some time. Check out http://openmoko.com . It's what I'm waiting for, anyways....
pmarca: Quote of the week: Filmmaker Ridley Scott on his first three creative projects
When I was his age, I was playing in a hard core industrial metal band (and then only when it was convenient), working part time in the video room at a television station, and sometimes taking classes at community college. He's done all right.
Good for them; sounds like a great store.

>It seems to be an odd move for Skinnycorp to take on the added costs and management overhead of a brick-n-mortar store.

It means they're making a lot of money and they get to try retail and compete in the real world. They can afford one unprofitable store in the worst case scenario.
Google Top Interview Puzzles
Website monitoring service with Ajax desktop interface
If, holding talent constant, a developer costs $100k in the bay and $65k in Ann Arbor, Michigan, then Ann Arbor startups have a pronounced recruitment advantage. That's all I'm saying.

The conventional wisdom is, "go to the Bay Area, it'll be much easier to find smart developers." It is, in fact, very easy to find smart developers in the Bay Area. Unfortunately, they work for Google.
the worst part is that google started making 'acquisition noises' with the jingle guys (free 411) before goog 411 launched. google had some meetings with them, talked about the business and learned everything they could, but i hear the jingle guys (free 411) discovered it was all pretense, as google was actually just doing research for their own free 411 service (goog 411) that google was actively developing at the time.
> Also there's the empirical argument: I can't think of one industry in history whose growth made the established centers irrelevant.

How about textiles, after the spinning wheel came to Europe and the cottage industry developed?
I remember in my 4th grade class trying to convince my teacher that I would be able to deliver a shooting game by the end of the week for an oral presentation on how to construct things. Though I had no idea what to do, I did it.
This already happened to me. Early on I realized that grades weren't that important and the best thing about going to school was having time to take huge intellectual risks with few consequences. In addition to the basic computer science concepts I learned, I also took on personal projects that caught my interest.

Through these projects I learned new ways of making things using current technologies like Ruby on Rails, Python, Mapreduce, Amazon S3 (and friends), Lisp, and other technologies that someone simply fulfilling the graduate requirements would likely not have learned. I also met great people along the way who were far more impressive than any programmer, designer, or manager I've met in the industry.

Oddly enough, now I'm in grad school, hacking the iPhone for a degree.

Eventually, I imagine that my continual curiosity will bring me to the startup arena, or perhaps to the international sphere.
Graphical programming would be a 'killer app' for any language that can implement it first. Reasoning about code visually will not only make programming more accessible, but it will allow us to apply spatial reasoning skills to the task of writing applications. Flow-based programming seems to have the best chance of getting this sort of thing off the ground: http://www.jpaulmorrison.com/fbp/
I'm such a person. I haven't read Friedman, but I'll be happy to ramble on about Rothbard for as long you'd like :-)
First, your post would have been comedy gold if those had been real demo URLs.

Second, consider making the demo launch a POST from the landing URL. That should stop the crawlers you won't have in the first place.
Lose.

"Paul Graham... argues that... web startups themselves are commodifying."

Uh, no. He says they are hugely increasing in number. In fact, I think if anything that will increase the gap between the best and the worst of them. They are becoming even less of a commodity than previously, which was not at all.
That's a great challenge. I'm curious how you implemented this.

The Zapper (or Famicon Light Gun): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NES_Zapper#Technical_overview
The Fakebook Generation
Yes, but it is a hard thing to plan around. Can you really know who might want to buy you?

Good advice from an old boss: DO NOT include words like kludge, bug, garbage, or swear words in code or checkin comments. All production code has kludges, bugs, and fscking garbage in it but making it easy for a due diligence auditor to grep it can't help.

[True story, at MusicBlvd.com I was ordered to write a SUID root program to move html files from staging to production directories. I protested but wrote it anyway and named it kludge.c. After we were bought by CDNow I found out they had a SUID root bash shell on _every single frontend machine_. Kludge indeed.]
1. Didn't APL try something like this? Special characters sound like a win. Super/subscript notation sounds like a lose (syntactic regularity, readability).

2. The first part sounds like a win for readability, but I think this might be a net lose because it could be harder to navigate with the keyboard,but maybe I'm just not using my imagination. Worse is the addition of syntactic complexity, which makes metaprogramming harder. It wouldn't be a problem if it was just a macro that compiles down to regular syntax. I'm not sure what you're talking about in the second part - probably due to my lack of experience with Java and C#. Are you saying you want the editor to display these objects in a special way?

3.

(set-macro-character #\~
#'(lambda (stream char)
(random (read stream t nil t))))
CL-USER> ~40
25
CL-USER> ~40
18

Support for ranges is left as an exercise for the reader.

4. Detecting and modeling arbitrary, informally specified state machines in code would be hard. Creating a library that provides a DSL for making state machines and displaying visual representations sounds fairly easy.

5. I'm not sure if you're asking for something like Common Lisp's macroexpand function, or Slime's disassemble command. I'm pretty sure it's one or the other - maybe both.

The notion of language support for provably correct programs (the type systems in ML and Haskell are a step in this direction) is very interesting to me, but I'm not sure it's ideal for a production language.
I wonder if my age (32), the fact that I am the sole creator(my friends are not geeks) and that is now in private alpha beta status(since 9/5/07 - much still needs to be done) will hurt my chances?

I am SO open to working with a coder/co-founder(I'm a web & graphic designer), as a main reason for establishing this startup was to get to work with like minded individuals; individuals in which I learn from.

Do you receive any notification if you are not chosen by Y Combinator?
>Its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, has even declared his quest to chart a "social graph" of human relationships the way that cartographers once charted the world.

Whether or not Facebook is worth 10 billion dollars on the market today as an acquired company is irrelevant; Facebook does represent a shift in how we are social on the internet. Hacker News does as well, but I've only met people who are willing to meet up with me in cities other than Pittsburgh and on Facebook they all live in Pittsburgh.

If nothing better comes along, Facebook will be worth more than 10 billion dollars in the long run. There's also a good chance something better will come along, and it will probably happen overnight if Google buys the old TV frequencies and licenses space on all the old TV towers. Maybe someone smart will figure out how to implement the semantic web by himself or with a YC style investor.

The barriers between the web and the real world have really started to dissolve. I know a lot of people around my age that are in long term (for 22 year olds) relationships with people they met on the internet.

The Facebook Generation is a small part of America. It's the people who went to four year universities and their friends. For all of my age-group peers, I use the descriptor Generation Y because I hope that generations X, Y, and Z are the final generations of Humanity. Hopefully by the time that Generation Z has children we will all be Post-Humans, sipping our drinks in the enlightenment of eternity.
For once the World Bank says something smart about the real causes of prosperity (and poverty)
Aaron's to read list: http://aaronsw.jottit.com/toread I bet there are some gems in here if anyone has the time to skim through.
Facebooks is like Geocities..and Ning is like Yahoo Groups.
If you take a look at the feature differences between Geocities and Facebook, you'll realize that (horrors), there are few real ones.
The way geocities worked was that people would create a home page, say something about themselves and upload their pictures to that page (ie they had a profile). Their friends could leave comments on a guestbook (now fondly referred to as a 'wall') , and people often had links to their friends' geocities pages thereby plotting a Social Graph.

There were no mobile updates which is ok, considering most people did not have mobile phones.

Alas, there were no REST, PHP or Javascript APIs...oh wait, the users did not care then, and still don't care that facebook has them.

Geocities did have sophisticated multimedia capabilities for the time it existed.

A 1980 honda is as much a car as a 2007 Ferarri.

Facebook, myspace, hi5, orkut, friendster, dogster etc are all improved versions of geocities..and Ning is yahoo groups in disguiuse
Well said. They're all important steps in the evolution of information exchange. Facebook is a lot better than Geocities as long as you don't want to design a web page, but Geocities was clearly an enormous first step towards internet sociality.