skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I was quite happy with Yahoo Games when I was a Windows user. I played Chess, Hearts, Euchre, and more on Yahoo Games. Once I had any problems with Java applets, however, Yahoo Games became a casualty of those problems. I literally spent at least an hour a day on Yahoo Games before switching to Linux. At that point, Yahoo's technology got in the way and I looked for non-Java alternatives. Unless you have no chance of having non-Java competition (I'm thinking of my local gas company here), it would really be a shame to lose potential users because of your technology choice.
I could be wrong, but I don't think you've done many Yahoo fantasy drafts if you think people are really OK with the draft interface. The reason I've continued to use the site over the years is more that the rest of the interface isn't that bad and that the alternatives are worse.
I think what you're really talking about is commitment. Personally, I find I can "stick with it" and persevere much more easily if I'm committed to something. Maybe those startups in Ycombinator that give up are not totally committed. When things start to get tough, maybe they begin looking for other options. If there were no other options, their commitment would be stronger. The so-called "burning the boats" strategy.

I think that's why it's so hard to do a startup in your spare time, while holding down a full-time job. It's not really a commitment and that makes it so much easier to give up.
Lawrence Lessig says the law is strangling creativity [video]
"I'd love to hear your suggestion for a replacement." Windows XP.

When deciding what OS(or whatever) to use try and focus on more than one thing. Otherwise you end up focusing on the wrong things. I average less than 1 hour a month messing with my XP box at home. So for me messing with other desktop OS's is a waste of time.

PS: I have written low level networking code for Mac OS 7 though OS X, BSD Unix, and Linux so I know the alternatives far better than most people, but IMO as a home desktop windows just works. And at the end of the day don't you have more important things to do with your time than muck around with your OS?
I'm sorry, but no one has the right to compare themselves to Steve Jobs.
Excellent resource. Thanks.
I think the Java vs. Flex debate is out of place here. The way Matt's comment re Java fits into the discussion has more to do with the amount of attention that most Fantasy Sports providers are giving to the domain. In that context, I think Matt is on the money. The big providers are not keenly focused on the problem. I'm an avid fantasy sports fan, and my experience has been far from optimal.

The killer part of the app is that it offers the ability to bet online and get quick gratification. Draftmix hits the action player's sweet spot, and I suspect apps in this area will drastically outperform their season-long counterparts. Anyone familiar with gambling economics knows that the action players and casual gamers drive the economy.

The argument about skill vs. chance in the comments of the TechCrunch article is interesting. I think it's easy to make a compelling argument that success in the short term format might require more skill than season long formats, but legislators have demonstrated that compelling arguments hold less value than one might think they should.
Defensio launches (new spam filtering service for blogs and social web apps)
Wow. I live in Akron, and have been working up a business plan. As you might imagine, there aren't as many funding opportunities in NE Ohio as there is in say, Silicon Valley. :) This is exciting.
How did you find your cofounder?
I'm a grad student at Stanford looking for a cofounder but haven't had any luck yet. All my friends are extremely busy working in lab. Should we organize some kind of a meetup?
Luis Villa: SaaS is free software's biggest challenge
New UK Search Engine looks promising
There's no formal limit, but if the new page is half your submissions that's a sign you should probably be more selective.
Does anyone else besides me think that the iPhone is not an invention?
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=metaphor
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=58444
Funky! :) Going to grab a beta account and test the hell out of it!
Looks like you are doing Chinese math:
http://www.tjacobi.com/50226711/what_is_chinese_math.php
The guys running FB are a lot smarter than the guys running AOL were. From what I remember, AOL didn't have a hackerly culture even at the very beginning.
gOS: Using Web 2.0 applications to form the core of an operating system
I've always had an instinctual resistance to using lots of outside building blocks unless there was a real compelling reason. Now, it sounds like using javascript libraries like
scriptalicious causes performance problems. Did I read this right?

Also, I understand the need for obfuscation, but to improve page load speed? How?
Yes you read it right. Anything you load into the browser, both in terms of size and additional http requests, is a performance hit.

Obfuscation helps improve performance speed by making the variables as small as possible while avoiding name collisions. In practice this probably means a file full of one-letter variables, instead of things like elemResult

Every byte that is in your Javascript that has to be downloaded to the client is another millisecond or more of response time. This is the reason why I wouldn't use huge honking JS libraries unless I was really sure I needed them (call me old-fashioned). Interestingly enough, looks like there is a case to be made for package libraries, where you download one file and it explodes into both the CSS and JS part of your app. Makes sense to me, although I've never tried it.
Prototype 1.6.0 and script.aculo.us 1.8.0 released
Security Corner: Cross-Site Request Forgeries
Facebook: Enabling Irrelevant Marketing
The Chilling Effect (vulnerabilty, discovery & disclosure)
Smaller variables to have less going down the line? Sounds like striking out the pitcher to me.

One of my constant struggles has been where to build HTML that has to be built on the fly, server or client? On the server, lots more bytes to ship down the line but less javascript to run once it gets there. On the client, 10% as much data to send, but then lots of javascript to run to assemble the HTML. Anyone else ever struggle with this problem?
Facebook's Core College Student Users Laugh At Attempts To Use It For Business
if you're using rails, just use the asset packager plugin. it's awesome. and gzip your javascript and css -- use mod_deflate if you're using apache. that's all you really need. and mod_expires, if you want to get an 'A' grade from the yslow firefox/firebug extension.
I don't know what that reference means, but welcome to web app optimization.

There are a couple of apps that can convert any HTML into their dynamic counterparts. You can also do some XML/XSLT/XHTML stuff, or you can load and pre-cache in the background, which might be your best bet. Depends on your architecture and what you are trying to accomplish. I've used all of the above. I'm sure there are lots more options.
mine is ubelt.com
On Craigslist. I put an ad up about my current company and that I was looking for a cofounder. I was contacted by two people. I contacted the first, but he never messaged me back. I corresponded with the second for a bit, and after a few emails we realized we had met before at a hacker party called Super Happy Dev House. We met for lunch, and the rest is history.

You should come to the next Devhouse http://superhappydevhouse.org/SuperHappyDevHouse21. It's on Nov 10th in SF.
I hate 'arguing' this way, but no it is not.
Straw man:
Presenting someone who defends a position poorly as the defender, refute that person's arguments, and pretend that every upholder of that position, and thus the position itself, has been defeated.

He was presenting me as someone who had no experience with a startup, thus shooting down my arguments about the ease of starting up. Explain how this is incorrect?
He presents me as an individual with no experience with startups. He then uses that to attempt to shoot down my arguments.
I strongly recommend finding a friend you've known for a while who's willing to start a startup with you. You want to have more holding you together than just the company. Isn't there someone you know from college?
The nature of the idea, as in how it exploits a well-known psychological phenomenon? Better-quality search results was a technical advancement for Google, but I wouldn't say this is quite of the same nature.

No doubt it's a beautiful plan, but unlike the Brin-Page paper, the ideas behind this has been around for a good while. There are plenty of ideas from research that can be similarly incorporated into a stronger advertising machine. For example, variable interval reinforcement is the most effective conditioning paradigm, which would be very useful for advertisers. It's fairly well-known, but not many companies are in a position to employ it.
Sorry. In major league baseball, the pitcher is often a terrible hitter, easy to strike out. "Striking out the pitcher" means doing the easy thing that almost anyone can do instead of focusing on the real problem (in the baseball analogy: striking out the good hitters).
"Every byte that is in your Javascript that has to be downloaded to the client is another millisecond or more of response time."

How many people still use 1KB/s net connections?
I'd agree about applets. They look ugly in the main, trying to make them not look ugly and out of place is very hard.
Startup time is very slow, and they do stick out like a sore thumb saying "1990s! 1990s!"

If a website is slow, and looks ugly users are going to be less likely to use it.
It was rhetorical. I didn't do the math. So sue me :)
That battle has already been fought and won by another fantasy sports company. See CBC v. MLB.
Speaking as an adwords advertiser here in the UK where the big G has 80%+ of the market (if you include aol) I welcome some competition
I agree re: skill in short format leagues. What it would come down to, should we ever end up in court (which we're taking great pains to avoid) is convincing a jury that we meet whatever test their state applies to a game to determine if it is a game of skill or not.

We're staying away from states where that test is too stringent (i.e., many states ban games that involve any luck at all). In the ones in which we operate (39) the test is typically that luck is the predominant factor. We feel that given a large sample we can mathematically prove that a player can win over time regardless of luck. We're certainly seeing that so far.
Blitzweekend: design, build, and launch a startup in one weekend!
I recommend homeless shelters. They're surprisingly good hackers and are willing to work for very little equity.
Ask 37signals: How has open source helped or hindered?
Zinger thief!

http://reddit.com/info/wbt3/comments/cwc5a
Can I get a greasemonkey script that removes all articles about Facebook from tech sites please?
Have you got a product idea? If so then start building something right-away and talking to people about it -- promote it, attend barcamps, democamps, etc.. Eventually you will find someone who believes in it and will want to work with you on it and refine it, i.e. a co-founder.

My present founding team consists of people I knew, trusted and was friends with prior to starting work on my product. But they did not start working with me at the same time I started out.
I found my cofounder (or more accurately, he found me) via weekly video game sessions in college. Since our startup deals with games, it seemed like a natural fit.

More broadly speaking, I suggest starting with "what kind of person do I need?" and go from there. For example, if your idea is to build a social networking site for environmentalists, I would see if I had any friends studying Environmental Science. Or if you're a business guy in need of a coder, I would hang around the Computer Science department.
I am a few years out of college, but I still find Facebook useful for knowing where the beer is at.
I think Huxley had it right.

Know something about everything and everything about something.
-T.H. Huxley
From wikipedia:

An invention is an object, process, or technique which displays an element of novelty.
logmein.com is amazing.

for those who dont use it, you run their version of a vnc server on your pc, and then you can load what is basically a browser version of a vnc viewer from their site.

so, basically you can vnc into your pc from any pc with an internet connection. pretty sexy.
Heardit? A Podcast Interview with the Reddit Co-Founders
I have a few Stanford friends. Do you have a link to your prototype, a screenshot, or some sort of product description that I could forward to people?
New Feature: get kicked off News.YC on demand
Maybe, but there might be prior art. I remember a Popular Science article last year about some Chinese phones with this technology.
Ironically, I got banned by noprocrast upon submitting this, because I had maxvisit set to 1 to test it.
Yeah, maybe I should give this a shot. The problem is that almost all of my college friends are also in grad school, so it would take some serious convincing....if only we didn't love science so much...
Interesting feature.. I think this falls under the heading of Keeping Honest people Honest.

Of course it's easy to get around. Log in anonymously, or use a proxy, or any number of other things- The point as I understand it isn't to hold you iron-fisted to the whims you had when you set it up, but more to act as a gentle reminder.

"Hey, it's been 2 hours already. Stop wasting time on news.yc, and get back to work"

There have been some similar program that extend the concept, and read the title of the browser window to let you graph your productive time. I can't find any at the moment, though.. There's certainly a lot that could be done in that area. Maybe someone will apply for a Fall 07 YC to track productivity effectively.

On thinking about it, I was reminded of this link from MyDreamApp (A contest to pitch apps for the Mac)

http://mydreamapp.com/contestants/view/danlundmark/
In a chat room, eight years ago. Full story here:
http://www.dnjournal.com/cover/2007/may.htm
Cheers
Sahar
http://www.conceptualist.com
"The rest of the group was laughing at how the article was focused around me, as if I created the whole site myself."

Matt you've got to learn to better appreciate your team, future Steve Jobs or not.
I was in your position about a year ago and wrote a post about possible idea sources. You might find it useful

http://www.pumperknickel.com/?p=7
This is wonderful. I'm off to limit my visits to daily, or maybe twice-daily if I login once in the morning and once at night.

Will this kick you off in the middle of writing a comment? That's my one qualm about it - that I'll start writing a response and then won't be able to submit it because maxvisit has timed out. Maybe exempt the comment-posting URL (it should block you from further reloads afterwards, though)?
Good. This was despicable behavior on the part of Yahoo.
The Cheapest New Cars in Norway Are Electric
That's a pretty sweet feature.
You could wait a couple years, when it's a good bet that 90% of your college friends will want to leave grad school. They'll take much less convincing then.
Another drawback of DRM: what if the DRM supplier changes?
Or form school, in my case my co-founder is my neighbor, I know him since we were six, thats like 22 years ago.

The thing about close friends is that the friendship will help you a lot when discussing the business, there are a lot of business that break out because a bad relationship among founders.
Awesome addition, I'm sure I'll get around to turning on noprocrast sometime. ;)
In a couple of years that business idea will surely be done by someone else.
I think that the best time for doing something is now.
I could be wrong but with rails 2.0 it's built-in - so no more need for bundling plugins once it's out (unless you want javascript minfication)
i wish i could downmod for cross posting from digg.
"Using Web 2.0 applications to form the core of an operating system is genius"

What happened when there's no internet connection? (or what happened if someone block google)
Yeah. I definitely will. I am also giving PLINQ A try. This, all because I am finally realizing that concurrency is the future.
Ask YC:  What is the average Facebook user like?
I am particularly interested in specific examples of the form: ~k% of Facebook users would be interested and able to do activity X.

For example, would one expect the average Facebook user to be a creative person capable of suggesting interesting ideas?

Would you expect the average Facebook user to be interested in interacting much with friends? And if so, what sort of sophistication could one expect in such interactions?
During application season, you might want to make sure it still lets you in to edit your application.
Lessons Learned from our YC Interview (with Tips!)
Is -8 a record?
Ever since that night we've been together.

Cofounders at first sight, incorporated forever.

It turned out so right,

For strangers in the night.
I would just focus on finding good friends who are hackers.

The co-founder relationship will form naturally when/if both of you are ready to start a company. You are in a great place to meet good hackers. Who knows, maybe some of the friends you are meeting now will become future business partners.

One of my co-founders was just a friend in school who I worked together with on projects. After school, we began working at the same company before starting to talk about leaving to do a startup. But if I would have asked him in school I'm sure he would have said "are you crazy".. Some people just need some convincing :)

Another co-founder is a cousin but we've been talking about this stuff for over 10 years so that choice was obvious.
Can someone post how to do italics and code indentation?
Google's OpenSocial with Ruby on Rails
It doesn't stop at non-appreciation. Matt literally beats team members when they can't get features completed on time. I can post my bruises to flickr if you want?
Paul, this is a cleverly elegant solution!
Bitch, I told you, I only beat you because I love you.
Log Off and Get to Work
Actually, with virutalization you can have best of both worlds. Just run a VMWare or Xen instance of Windows XP inside Linux and you can switch back and forth on the fly for that type of stuff. It works great for development.

The problem is paravirtualization still isnt supported in the x64 kernel. So its still too slow to do heavy tasks in. And you still need lots of ram and cores if you want to do lots of simultaneous work.
For italics use stars, for indentation use indentation.
Will this kick you off in the middle of writing a comment?

No, it doesn't apply till the server tries to generate the page following the submission. If you want to know what it's like, just set maxvisit to 1 and try it.
For mnemonicsloth to make a strawman argument, he'd first have said something like "some people say <poor argument for $x>" and then go on "however, <picks apart argument>, so we know $x is false". Therein lies the fallacy -- a disproof of a proof of $x is not a disproof of $x.

In other words, it's not about presenting a person as a poor defender, it's about presenting a poor defense. Cutting straight to a person's worth as a commentator -- as mnemonicsloth did -- is argument "ad hominem" ("to the person").
This has to be the first time in the history of the internet that a website makes provision for you not to waste your time on that same website.
Good job guys!!
When we started Viaweb, I was done with grad school but Rtm and Trevor were still in it. That worked out ok. Grad student procrastination is actually quite a powerful force. It's ok if some founders are still in school, so long as (a) the ringleader isn't and (b) the ones still in school are willing to put a good deal of time into the startup.
Speaking of yc.news settings, what does "showdead" do?
awesome insight on the interview process - thanks for posting this
TBNL could speak HTTP directly too. I'd be interested to see a mod_lisp vs mod_proxy benchmark with Hunchentoot.
Revealing Errors by Benjamin Mako Hill and Aaron Swartz
Seems the author is a fan of LinkedIn and Plaxo
The #1 lesson we learned from our interviews is to be prepared.

Pitch everybody you know on your idea, and have the smartest people you know poke as many holes as possible, and address them. Then do it over again.
Spam/otherwise inappropriate posts/submissions are marked by admins as dead. This removes them from the view of everyone that doesn't have showdead on. It's a great way of avoiding claims of censorship -- it's all there to be viewed if you want.
honestly this guy sort of bothers me, since when is being a banker + charging interest such a freckin noble thing.

I have no doubt his program has helped many people and don't mean the chap any disrespect, but they are making money off this, so I tend to not place him in the saint category that the media does.
>since when is being a banker + charging interest such a freckin noble thing.

When you're providing an important service to people that no one else is interested in serving.

kiva.org doesn't charge interest, has this guy done micro-credit on a much larger scale than them to earn the Nobel?
"A hacker is someone who hacks"... bah.
I think that is good advice. If we had tried to show our demo to groups that had never seen the product before, we might have been better prepared. We'd be ready to anticipate and answer questions before they come up. We also would have probably learned about preparing our data so that anything not flattering isn't included.
Can someone post how to show a star in a post?
Paralellism is the future. That means, to some degree, functional apps.
I went to a small liberal arts college, so I knew my co-founders through class and other social circles. I had an idea, one co-founder said "I think it could be done." The other guy, we asked to join when we saw him walking back from class because we were talking about getting someone who was a good hacker.
Don't worry, it doesn't apply to those pages, just news.
Feed Fluffy Greasemonkey Script
Unfortunately there's not currently any way.

(Though you can use all you want * * * in code.)
Just saw this on userscripts.org by chance. I don't know what Fluffy is (some Facebook application apparently), but I imagine this is something hilarious: now you can install a script to automatically take care of your virtual pet? In other words, a script to remove the nuisance of having to care for a virtual creature which you wouldn't have had to install to begin with? I am just amused by the thought of all the Facebook applications ticking away automatically in the background, and users being free to simply socialize again.
The Facebook Ad Backlash Begins
My problem was worrying too much about being prepared. I felt like my life depended on it and got too nervous. I dont really show nervousness, just start saying stupid things that I wouldn't normally.

Had I walked in totally chill and hang loose I feel I would have at least done better. The more you can convince yourself that you really dont care the more relaxed you will likely be. At least that is my $.02.

In retrospect, I'm so thankful YC gave us an opportunity to interview though. The lessons learned on pitching to an investor were so valuable, as was the advice. Even not being funded by YC it is a win-win in one way or another.
All I can say is Wow!!
Fake Steve Jobs talk turns into on-stage three-way
there..I helped you tie the record
What beautiful HTML code looks like [Pic]
U.S. Internet Advertising to Double to $42 Billion Over Next Four Years
limeade -- I'm a grad student at Stanford too. Drop me an email, I'd love to chat about this and other topics. My email address is on my user page.
This isn't HTML code -- this is PHP code.
Not even close: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=71155

Seems like we have a fairly prim audience here...
I upmodded both of them