skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
or instead use lighttpd with FastCGI and web.py. something like this... http://webpy.org/recommended_setup
"And as a very nice gesture, he replied."

lol

nice gesture = option doing otherwise/expectancy of doing so

(values: 0..0.5..1)

at least you inspired me to make this formula!
Probably the fact that the marketing really is: "add truckloads of markup to everything you write using this bunch of over-engineered standards and, magic!, you have the semantic web".

I guess that if you want to see this semantic web happen, they should focus their marketing efforts on website designers (as opposed to content producers). Most web designers are willing to drink any Kool-Aid you feed them.
heineken? Do you know there are better beers out there? ;)
I think Paul's logic here is subtly backwards...

"It doesn't matter much where a given individual went to college."

From Y-Combinator's perspective, yes, I'm sure that's true. The people they're looking at are self-selected, and pretty much guaranteed to be smart, motivated and well-educated, which means that all Y-Combinator needs to do is worry about how they think - not where they were taught.
But that's after the fact. To someone deciding what college to go to, or where to send their children, I think the choice is still very important.

"someone with a real thirst for knowledge will be able to find a few smart people to learn from at a school that isn't prestigious at all."
True, of course. But where does that thirst for knowledge come from? With the right support, or the right teachers, perhaps that party animal would have changed his ways. As far as I'm concerned, _that_ is really the purpose of good schools.

In Y-Combinator terms, it's not that they make a founder more likely to succeed: it's that they make him more likely to try being a founder in the first place.
>> I don't think YC encourages people to keep trying with an idea that doesn't work. Rather, they encourage them to drop the idea and find another one. Many YC startups have switched their idea even during the initial 3 months.

But you imply that if you keep switching ideas, it's guaranteed that soon you'll come up with the right one. What if you don't? How then do you account for the time? Where do you get the money that you spent back? There needs to be a clear line - if young kids are dropping everything and moving to Boston, that situation can only be maintained for so long. How do you determine when that is before that becomes personally ruinous. I see that a note is left that YC funded hundreds of startups. Great. how many went anywhere? What happens to the rest? Are they still in Boston? Did they move back? Can they still attend YC dinners? Does Paul still take their calls if they don't make it? Or are they in some weird limbo where they need to go back to "real life" but have to account for lost time and opportunities? Paul is not your father nor is he the father of any of these young people trying this. If you make it, great! But if you don't ... (sounds of crickets). Well let's just say I doubt he'll offer you room and board until you find the next thing or get back on your feet.

>> It's fairly common for a failing idea to still be a failing idea 10 years later.

Yes it is. It's also fairly common for a failing idea to become a huge hit on the 11th year because something in society changed. Entrepreneurs are usually a bit more right-brain oriented and can see patterns in social dynamics which is why they are more likely than others to predict how to profit from emerging patters. But predicting a change and timing it exactly are two different things, as anyone on Wall Street will tell you.

>> Many YC startups have switched their idea even during the initial 3 months.

That's my point exactly. How do you determine if you're wasting time or just one idea switch away? What if by the time you hit your idea the market is in the course of moving away from it? Do you get invested in continuously to keep trying? Who's paying your personal bills during this time? Does Paul write a letter explaining what you've been up to for 6 months if you go back to school? Are there companies in Boston that will hire you if you don't make it so you can stay around while you think of the next YC idea?
While we're on the issue of the news.yc user interface, here's something that pisses me off every time I view comments: the comment author's name is buried in a sentence-long thing of text, and hard to pick out. Make it more noticeable, please.

Paul basically said he doesn't give a shit, which is pretty stupid considering how many people visit the site regularly, and how poor the user interface is. Just because spacer gifs don't directly affect the content, those kinds of poor design techniques influence the user interface and make it crappy, which it has become. Paul, you know good designers-- get them to make it look good.
Is cyberwarfare a serious threat?
Ha! It was me who wrote the "white males" comment.

I write the way I code. Start with as big a generalization as possible and fix my edge cases at runtime...

Alas that a female news.ycer is an edge case. Even when they punch holes in my unified theory of all male startups, they are infinitely more pleasant than bus errors.
Online Newspaper in English and Hindi
Disciplined fun is more than impulsive or hedonistic fun
I don't know. We don't ask people what their grades were or what honors they got.
As far as I know, I think that you don't need to use the verb to fuck to tell the truth.
Well, I pay for the board and lodging... but yes, strictly speaking, they own me. :) Seriously, the word that best encapsulates my relationship with them is probably "guardian".
Two points:

1) You don't own the cats, it is the other way around. The cats own you ;)

2) Cats are the most advanced civilization on earth, and we are all their slaved. Only that we don't realize ;)
> You don't own the cats, it is the other way around. The cats own you ;)

I know that, and you know that, but try explaining the concept to a dog lover. ;)
Or "this is what happens when you lend money to people who can't persuade anyone to lend them money"...
Amazon & Google To Enter eBook Business
Credit unions are useful too, for similar reasons. There's a difference between borrowing a little money to lever yourself out of poverty, and borrowing an obscene amount of money so you can buy that dream house your salary won't stretch to half of because You're Worth It.
Image Compression: Seeing what's not there
Anyone who can't spare $100 and change a month for a bare minimum plan shouldn't be going into business. Many full time jobs these days don't even come with health benefits during the first 1-12 months.

I second going the ehealhinsurance path.
> Sure guys think about sex every 3 minutes but we're not a bunch of women clubbing apes.

I dunno, you can see plenty of women clubbing apes in Sheffield on a Friday night...
Yes, because human motivation is always simple and one-dimensional, and humans never find themselves caught between conflicting goals.
In college sometimes my housemates would buy this tabloid called the "Weekly World News" that always had ridiculous stories. One of the regular features was editorials by "Ed Anger" that were obviously trolling for angry letters to the editor. This looks just like an Ed Anger piece.
Canada's Hottest Startups
How do you manage complex projects?
More specifically, what tools or systems do you use for stuff like mapping/designing systems, planning, research, notes...?
I find Plone/Zope to be the single most intimidating code base in existence. I tried for years to scale the learning curve...and never got past the "hmm...I'm not sure why, but it's working now...I'm not going to touch it again" stage.
Forget London and Paris: An Inside Look at Europe's Coolest Cities
Finally! Search capabilities on Google Reader
I've been using mod_wsgi for some time (I think trac recommended it). Interesting that this blog post is getting so much attention.

For apache (and I'm a fan of apache) it doesn't get any better.
If it's true that Sun first approached them seeking patent royalties, then NetApp won't lose goodwill for striking back.
From Rails to Django - Visual Difference
> add truckloads of markup to everything you write

It worked for RSS.

What's over-engineered about it? RDF is elegant in its simplicity.
My last job was at a startup (they preferred the term 'early growth faze company') developing mobile security software. I was in charge of all of the development efforts and personally built the first generations of the Anti-Virus, Call Screener, and SMS Spam Filter for SymbianOS. I left because I was dissatisfied with the non-technical management above me.
Something Going On At Twitter?
We use integrated project management/ task/action management/ workflow management /content & contact management : http://www.streamfocus.com (public launch in the near future)
Google Says No To Net Taxes
Software engineer at a major storage systems manufacturer. It was an indefinite term contract and they downsized.
The first was a group of college friends who wrote software for handhelds. It was really fun, and made enough to keep us above the grad student poverty line. We also always had nice(ish) computers. Given my low expectations, I count Scrawl as a success.

It was (effectively) cannibalized to start PatientKeeper. We raised ~$70M in venture and our software is now in use at an amazing number of hospitals. Though it hasn't had (I love this euphemism) liquidity event, I count it as a success. We employ ~90 people and touch thousands of physicans and hundreds of thousands of lives.

At the risk of being a tease, I'm not ready to talk about the third.
Need a partner to apply to YC with?  Fill out your half of the app and find like minded people
I just wanted to say that most people who read news.yc, read techcrunch as well, so maybe we should stop posting what we already get through our rss readers. just my 2 cents
Before architecture: Victoria Bicycles (startup @ 17), Moondog BBS @17 (Used a commodore 64's random access floppy drive to create a dbase sytem), Business Design Consultants (Used an IBM PC w/ Watson soundcard and Dbase to create touch tone ordering system) @ 22
Maybe not all Google employees agree with what their HR dept/management does ?
Don't you mean Flight Club?
Reminds me of those 'the house of tommorrow' cartoons they made in the 60s.
Model.

In UML.

Use whatever tool works for you. I like Enterprise Architect. Lets me break apart any kind of complex problem, whether it's components, hardware, logical structures, rule systems, etc. Plus it's programmable so I can take some of that design work and translate it into working code quickly.

A lot of guys, especially in start-ups, don't get modeling. They think you're trying to plan too much. The trick is to model quickly and at a high conceptual level. That gives you your organizational structure (within 20% or so) to manage complexity. You can still code and adapt quickly. If you over-plan (or model), however, you limit your options and force a lot of decisions up front which might could wait for later. That's counterproductive.
Weak satire.

Really, though. If a credit-unworthy person can't pay back a loan, and a lender takes a bath on it, well I'm fine with that. Let the one declare bankruptcy. Let the other write it off his taxes. Fine.

There's just one thing I don't want to do: Have money stolen out of my pocket to ensure that either or both of the above idiots are protected from their own bad wagers.
I like this thread. Never met Paul or Jessica. Hopefully some day.

In spite of all of the hero worship here, I imagine they're regular people just like us. (Well, almost like us.)

Having a forum with a little 2 way communication grounds things really well. Thanks.

(Aside: This summer, I had the good fortune to personally meet Joel Spolsky, whose writings put him in a class with Paul Graham, IMO. I couldn't stop thinking what a regular guy he was. This is good news for mere mortals like us. If they can do it, so can we...)
You do know who the writer is, dont you?
I use mod_proxy to reverse-proxy to paste.httpserver. Much better, IMHO.
There was a piece at the new Institute for the Contemporary Arts in Boston. The whole exhibit had interplay with the digital side of life, but one of my faves was a blown up picture of a bomb exploding with very low compression quality. Those 8x8 bins so common to image compression routines were a few inches across. Looking close, it was easy to imagine an ideal, abstract contour in each 8x8 square, despite the clear picture from afar. I liked that effect a lot.

I think it was part of Super Vision, which looks to not be part of the permanent collection.
http://www.icaboston.org/exhibitions/exhibit/supervision/
Sometimes I use news.yc as my filter for techcrunch. Other times I selectively submit stories from there that I think are of interest here.

I'd prefer that people keep submitting from techcrunch, but selectively. Problem is there's no karma downside to indiscriminate submitting.
A Facebook for the Few
And some businesses fail witin the first week.
Even reddit, the developers of web.py, aren't using it anymore.
Don't shoot your eyes out.
Seriously: http://wickedlasers.com/
Google Books: Embed Book Clips Into Websites
Animation for the Masses
The comments here by people who don't recognize TFA as satire are funnier than TFA itself.
E-paper with Photonic Ink
ou should connect with hacktracker and see what you guys can do together as far as mashing up your services
I've recently used nginx to reverse-proxy and load balance to both paste and mongrel. Much easier setup. If you're doing a custom app I tend to think this is better than running a big Apache up front.
I was thinking the same thing. Bokonist feel free to email me and we might be able to set something up. bradleyt (dot) marsh (at) gmail. I'm the one who built hackrtrackr by the way.
So far this thread is setting the record for deleted comments, as people who responded angrily realize it was a parody.

Perhaps the reason people reacted so violently is that they can imagine some reasonable arguments that sound like these. I.e. this is a case of people being made maddest by statements they worry might be true.
Hmm. I would have started smaller. I doubt Sabeer has enough to pay for all this himself. That means he's going to be at the mercy of a bunch of investors.
For-Profit Crusade Against Junk Mail
Wired: "How Mark Zuckerberg created the web's hottest platform."
How do you know it? Http header viewer shows Reddit use lighttpd/1.4.13.
Venezuela considers a ban on all but 100 first names
Goodbye, Hitler Adonys Rodriguez Crespo, Hochiminh Jesus Delgado Sierra, and Dwight Eisenhower Rojas Barboza.
iPhone Pricing--A mistake or a clever plan?
I only post techcrunch articles that I think are relevant to YC News. Twitter has been a popular subject on YC News so I submitted the article for those that would be interested. If you do not find the article interesting then don't vote for it. It really is that simple.
Cheap laser spy microphone
They Write The Right Stuff. Old, but still very interesting article.
How to create companies from university ideas
It's a good idea, and fills a real need (I say that as a doomed, not-a-genius single founder myself), but I think you'd get more people willing to post if you asked for less information on the form.

The form should have just two questions, really: "What are some ideas you are interested in working on?" and an email address.

Potential partners can discuss all the other details between themselves.
Nortel Goes Shopping
Well my beer drinking varies by season. I'm in Atlanta and it's hot right now, so Heineken fits perfectly. In a couple months I'll move to other stuff.

Don't underestimate that green bottle though. Some of my best work has been with its help.
Is Enterprise Software Failing The Innovation Test?
To be honest, I somehow missed the possibility that it was a parody, as well. Which brings me to something a little 'meta' as far as this goes: What are some good heuristics / algorithms to determine if something is a parody? :)
Follow up from reddit comments:

http://tpmcafe.com/blog/coffeehouse/2007/sep/05/staging_nuke...
Where to Spend your Marketing Dollars First
Zombie Pfizer Computers Spew Viagra Spam
"We found it!" - Search finally implemented in Google Reader
Concerning trend in commenting on news.yc submissions
Based on the few number of comments in most discussions on this site, you'd assume everyone's just reading for the links. Which is cool, I guess. Anyway, the only exception, it seems, are threads on Paul Graham essays in which everyone and their mother has something to say. We're talking something like an average of around 1 comment for most front page items vs. probably and average of 40 comments for anything PG's written.

Is everyone just sucking up/karma whoring by agreeing with PG? Or is PG the only thing worth talking about here? As I think the real value of having a community of hackers is talking, I'd really like to see more general chatter. Am I alone here?
The Dirty Secret of Campus Credit Cards
Captain Cuckoo (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44964) strikes again.
Unfortunately, Google Reader now doesn't work in Opera:

http://groups.google.com/group/google-reader-troubleshoot/br...
For the first time in 10,000 years, farming is not the dominant industry
Apple knew as they were releasing the iPhone that the iPod Touch was on the way. Since the feature set of the iPhone and the iPod are so similar (minus the camera and the phone, basically), Apple would have a hard time pricing the two devices too far apart from each other. While the iPhone apparently was worth the premium for a lot of people, in the DAP market no one's going to shell out $500 for an mp3 player. Ultimately Apple will sell more iPods and more iPhones with the price drop.
Some stories are more interesting to talk about. I wouldn't much further than that.
Mind games
"One of Britain's top scientists [Baroness Susan Greenfield] is joining the likes of Chris Tarrant and Nicole Kidman by putting her name to a new wave of computer games designed to keep the brain fit."
Cool link. The fact that this thread is already 20th on that list probably proves the point.

edit: it's slow enough that I don't think pg's planning for many people to be looking at it...
Yep I agree. Obviously I wish I'd waited to buy the thing, but my will power failed me on that one.
Just wait 'till the one that plays whatever song you're thinking about and make phone calls completely autonomously comes out in November...
The more I read about Mark Zuckerberg, the less respect and admiration I have for him... lots of bad vibes around him.
With the current political climate, I don't think such a litmus test actually exists.
No, you are not alone. But what do you propose? Like danielha said, some stories are more interesting to talk about than others. On the features page, I suggested separating ask news.yc posts into another area, so they don't move off the front so fast and perhaps get more discussion going as a result. However, no one has really up voted that suggestion. Another alternative is to have a different site that is more of a message board like webmasterworld, but for hackers. After all, this is Hacker News, not Hacker Discussion. This is evident in the fact that it is geared more towards new links than open discussion topics.
Thanks for the pointer (ha ha). Cool site - they get extra points for playing Satriani in their intro video.
What a silly move. Upside is so minimal and downside is HUGE!
I don't think people are sucking up, because a lot of the threads for the most recent pg essay were disagreeing with parts of it.

I don't think people are karma whoring, because that would mean commenting on lots more stories. The average comment is more likely to be upvoted than downvoted, so a karma whore would comment as much as possible.

I don't want to see more general chatter. I just want interesting comments. I'd rather see no comments than uninteresting ones.
Danah Boyd: confused by Facebook
I disagree about not everything being interesting to talk about. If anything's worth reading, I think it's worth sharing your thoughts on. If you vote it up, you must think it resonates well. Even sharing the reason why would be interesting to others. If you don't vote it up, something must be wrong with it. Et cetera.
How the iPhone keyboard should look instead
Pipes creator leaves Yahoo! Starts polyvore.com
Pasha Sadri: "I have recently left Yahoo! to pursue some personal projects. .... My new project is called Polyvore."
http://www.polyvore.com
The irony is that "the rich," or at least those who own mortgage-backed bonds, probably do want a bailout for "the poor." They get the money in the end, and a lot more of it than they can recover from foreclosures.

If somebody owed me a lot of money and had no prospect of paying it, I'd love to see a third party step in and pay with no strings attached.
I think we should encourage commenting at all costs. The karma system can handle not showing you the uninteresting/bad ones.

Actually, now that I think about it, the karma system could be the reason people don't post as many comments. If you submit, you're looking at all upside. But you can hurt yourself by saying something dumb, so people opt to say nothing at all.
aSmallWorld Invitation?
Does anyone here have an aSmallWorld invitation they are willing to share with me?
People expect much discussion of a new pg essay, partly because its his site, partly because of trends in this site so far, and partly a stop-over from the old reddit days. A guaranteed-attention feedback loop, dragging in anyone with an inclination to chat or have a little limelight, lurkers and regulars alike.

I too would enjoy more general chatter (of the thoughtful, interesting kind).
Are Rich People Parasites?
Interesting site. I'd like an invite as well if anyone has any :) email in profile...
I've had a few posts deleted which were "general chatter", but were directed more towards one person. Thats understandable however as it can distract from the topic of the post. But it makes it difficult to continue interesting topics of conversation which are starting to diverge from the post. This is where I think a simple messaging system for the site would be useful, especially given the networking incentives of beginning startup entrepreneurs..

I think there may also be a general reluctance to post things which are challenging or negative for fear of either being downvoted like crazy, or looking bad in the eyes of YC if you have plans to apply. I wouldn't go as far as calling it sucking up, but it could refrain some people from saying whats really on their mind.

The rate of submissions seems to be increasing too, which can make sifting through the new postings more difficult. It also dilutes commenting I've noticed. This could be why major posts like a new PG essay seem to gravitate more discussion. I would personally be game for the idea of limiting the number of new submissions a user can post over a given time. Maybe scale this value based on karma. This would at least make people think more carefully about what they are about to post. I understand this starts to limit the "anyone can post" nature of the site, but it could reap an overall benefit for all users by reducing information overload and concentrating discussion on fewer, good submissions.

But you bring up a good point.. I'll make a conscious effort to post more challenging, thought provoking comments. I've got karma to burn :)
Announcing Protoscript - Prototyping the Rich Web Experience (from Y!)
It would be nice to have a discussion-thread-only view. There appears to be a lot of people who know a lot of things, and a lot of people learning, it'd be great to get them all communicating more.
In case anyone interested: I posted a Russian tranlsation of the article here: http://www.developers.org.ua/archives/max/2007/09/04/pg-head...
It depends(TM).
Matt, where in Atlanta? Are you working on a startup? I'm a GT grad from Dunwoody. Shoot me a note sometime--ardell at gmail.