skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I find that co-founders affect motivation in a particularly in a good way because while they do keep you moving when you feel glum, there's no pressure to accept them as the reason you get up every day, as is the case with working purely for money / an investor somewhere / a boss. It's like the pressure of not wanting to let your co-founder down affects you from the inside out, because you are constantly reminded of your shared fate. They're always there to keep you on your toes, but they don't become a force for extrinsic motivation (which can easily cause stress and deflation instead of adding energy to your inner drive).
"The University of Waterloo has a policy that any IP developed by profs or grad students is owned by them rather than the university."

wow - that's almost unheard of at any good university in the US
very interesting concept for embedded comments(check out viddler.com for some idea only with video) though agreed the usability could be improved. maybe list comments in a left column?
In general, it is not a good idea to start a response with "I disagree". Makes you sound as if you are looking for a fight, when in fact you may have some legit points.
Patri Friedman's Seasteading (http://seastead.org/commented/paper/intro.html) has the same system. Much uglier, but the same idea.
Certainly taxes help, but this would target the money that isn't going into taxes -- I think there's still enough profit in the tobacco industry for a project like this to have a shot at working.

Thanks for the interesting link. I like their idea a little, but I see donating some portion of revenues to Native American charities as a far cry from hitting the nail directly on the head with a "real" mission-driven non-profit.
Have you seen trends? My echo chamber makes it seem like Django is growing quickly -- faster than RoR.

Are there good resources tracking this?

I'd be more interested in counting active developers than deployed sites. Trends on mailing list usage might be a good measure.
It's worse than that. They can be down for 7.29 hours in one month and all you get is a 10% discount. You get 25% if they're down for >= 7.3 hours.
Google's GData API is based on it. Word supposedly has an AtomPub client, so you can publish right from your word processor. It's the next step in reinventing USENET. Et cetera.

The tech isn't particularly exciting, but it provides a way to unite what are now totally different APIs.
There's a textbox on the application where you can list additional ideas. :)
I have two despair posters in my office:

http://despair.com/despair.html

http://despair.com/gettowork.html

I also had the despair calendar in '06, but not '07 because they took out the funny trivia. :-/
I enjoyed the process of the application, so I submitted another idea.

Keep them separate if you'd like to elaborate. There is a section in the application about this: "If you had any other ideas you considered applying with, feel free to list them. One may be something we've been waiting for."

I listed a half dozen.
Newfound ancient African megadroughts may have driven the evolution of humans and fishes
As soon as you start getting porn, you'll start attracting extremely aggressive spammers who could ruin the entire site.

Even high-profile sites that probably have no money problems do search engine/comment spamming like hell and don't really attempt to hide it.
Yahoo Grabs 10% Stake in Alibaba.com IPO
"When I lived there, it was very very hard to find technical people that were not "corporate drones". I knew maybe of only one or two startup (I am not sure they ended up anywhere)."

The startups are there, you just have to know where to look (i.e. have friends that also work for startups). They are very "enterprisey"; Boston doesn't do consumer startups the way the West Coast does.

The culture is also very different here: on the East Coast, there's this notion of paying your dues before you're ready to start your own thing. You're expected to suffer (probably a legacy of Boston's Puritan heritage) before you're ready to strike it big. A typical Bostonian startup's path involves working for 10-30 years at one of the area businesses in your field, then gathering up some professional colleagues and striking out on your own, often building some tool that your former employer wants to buy.

My former boss was dead-set against me striking out on my own - he doesn't believe I've "paid my dues" and have enough industry experience to make it. The idea of striking out into an unproven market, discovering it as you go along, and building your product on the way is complete anathema to the Boston startup scene. Here, you're often expected to have a customer in hand (usually your former employer) when you approach venture capitalists, along with a team averaging 20-30 years industry experience or serious research background.

Almost all the startup founders I know here fit that pattern. Avici's founders had all worked for BBN for about 30 years. Avid's technical founder had worked for DEC for several years. I think much of Stratus's initial team came from DEC. Cybersmith's team came from Stratus and DEC. One former employer spun off of Cybersmith. Another's founder had been a trader on Wall Street (this was a financial software). One of the other places I interviewed was a spinoff of Eze Castle, where the product had originally been developed.

I'd recommend Boston for any older founders in the audience. Move to Boston, spend 5-10 years working at area companies while you build up professional contacts, and then strike out on your own. Boston doesn't have the prejudice against older entrepreneurs that you'll find in SV, because for most of the industries here, age is an asset and not a liability. Plus, it's a good place to raise a kid: the Boston suburbs (particularly to the west and northwest) are very safe, have good schools, strong senses of community, and lots of leafy wooded areas.

Nearly all the young startup-type folk I know - the ones without families, at least - are moving out to California though. Their youth is an asset and not a liability there, and they get to work on generally cooler problems.
YC News Tracker: A better way to read comments
It's funny, as a result of this policy half the profs at the school have companies on the side and are obscenely rich.
I've got that hanging in my office... very few people actually notice it...
Google Buys Jaiku.
Google buys social mobile startup Jaiku
Thanks Waleed - nice work!
I get mixed reviews about being in the politics space. For one, our company is set deeply in the politics space (so already have a bias toward wanting to change politics with technology). We think PoliticalBase is a pretty cool product, but we've heard from people that investors shy away from politics. What's everyone's thoughts on this?
I don't want to do it with RSS; I want a web site that organizes the information. I want the recommendation page of Reddit with a better algorithm and stories across digg, reddit and other social news sites. There is probably no reason to limit it to social news sites.
I unfortunately frittered away the morning watching all three episodes, not knowing that it only went up the mid-90's. I'd like to see Cringley do another one for a commentary in the last 10 years.

It's funny how things have changed. Towards the end when they were talking about the uncertain future, as a viewer I felt like someone from the future that traveled back in time. They talked about, what's the next company to dominate? I wanted to say "Google!" at the screen.

One thing that I was kind of surprised about was that both microsoft and apple were both seen as "the little guy" against the big IBM. Only apple, however, seemed to mature its image to the "hip revolutionary" whereas Microsoft grew to be viewed as "borgish"

I see the same type of attitude change for Google in the last year. Often called "industry darling" last year, Google started getting bits and pieces of flack. You can't please everyone, naturally, but the whimper has intensified, especially after PG's "MS is dead" article, which put Google in everyone's sights. It's easier to collectively hate the big guy.

On a separate note, it would seem from microsoft's actions of winning the browser wars and letting IE languish, etc. that they really just didn't get and missed out on the boat with search and the internet. Surprisingly, Bill was on guard the whole time. He was paranoid about the Next Big Thing, and surrounded himself with a ton of smart people and always looking to dip into different markets. And still, with that kind of vigilance, search engines slipped through.

So in a way, that's a bit reassuring (for us at hacker news), that in our fast paced technological push, there's always room to create new markets within a single lifetime. And PG's probably right that big companies have more to fear from us the unknowns rather than other big companies--and it's not just because he's enamored with startups.
Anyone work for Facebook? Been banned for 48 hours and don't know why
I have one FB account. I have not spammed on Facebook. I have an open dev account and an empty application.

I got an official Facebook warning about one year ago for creating a group "For every 100 people that join this group Apple will donate a laptop to a needy child." I think it got to 250 people in an hour and then it was gone.

I had a middle name listed on Facebook as "rupertmurdochsucks" which was kind of a running joke. The only thing I can think of is that I recently contacted support about a bug that switched my class year to "Alum." They told me how to fix it and I did. But then maybe the CS person reported me for having a fake name, which seems really stupid, especially because they won't tell me what is going on.

I emailed disabled@facebook.com as instructed and just got an autoreply.

Can anyone help me out?
For certain definitions of the word "guarantee"
Idea Week, Day #2: Server-side video processing of life-casting robots
_I_ am not for sale! (for less than 10 million)
I heard this is still the case in California by state law. Are there any other places where professors own all of there IP?
point of curiosity: according to your site, valleyschwag, who was your inspiration, recently decided to close up shop. what do you think you can do better/cheaper/faster to keep the same thing from happening to you?
It was fun to write. Ideas for improvement are welcome. As well as bug reports.
I would get in on this IPO if I had a large amount of spare cash burning a whole in my pocket.
Was Twitter too expensive? I think they priced themselves out of an acquisition by going after the $5m. Jaiku probably sold for less than Twitter's Series A.
Something there got me thinking... how much do guys at a startup actually sleep? Four hours?
My YC idea:  User-created-language
What if we could communicate beyond words?
The idea is fairly simple. Creating a database of images for each word. For each word in the dictionary their will be images (that best describe it) uploaded by users. Now someone can write a a letter and most of the words, if not all, will be converted into images and sent to the recipient who can also decipher the message after attempting to read it.
I want to create a real interaction in messages. One that goes beyond words.
To make it smart, I will use the a YCnews voting style for each image.

BTW, I can use one more hacker
Chimps choose more rationally than humans
We just launched PayScroll ( http://www.payscroll.com ) and I've been trying out various ads system. Adword, Yahoo Search Marketing, Text-Link-Ads and almost PPP (payperpost). Here's what I have been seeing so far. And bare in mind, this is with a $200 budget.

Adword - Expensive. we are bidding around $0.15 - $0.25 CPC. Clicks comes from search and sites. And also you got charge for impressions. We had to pay $$ for impression from a campaign that brought in zero clicks. Remember, Google is stock is at $600 for a reason. If you have a huge budget and can place high bids, it might work for you.

Yahoo Search Marketing - Slightly less expensive and lower CPC with more click through. We signed up through Yahoo SB account and you get $50 sign up promotional credit but the catch is you have to deposit min $30 so you get $80 to burn. So a plus if you have a small budget. No cost per impression just pure CPC.

Text-link-ads - So far not a whole lot of clicks with $125 worth of links. Total links we bought - 5. Main purpose is increasing your pagerank (wishful thinking?). Promotional $100 so overall we paid $25 out of pocket.

PayPerPost - Pay per post sounds interesting at first. And we submited an opportunity through PPP direct. Basically PPP direct is you make an offer to the blog owner and the blog owner will decide to accept your offer to review your site, etc. We did not go through because the offer was pending for days for some reason. So no deal there.

Again this is what we are at with $200 and might not hold true if you have a huge budget of 4 digits to burn.
My goodness, you have an inspiring attitude. Thanks for the great post!
Where they were relying on freebies, we license art and print it on demand. Where they had (for some time) web devs stuffing bags a few days a month, this uses a fulfillment shop from day 1. More details in the TechCrunch article (including comments from ValleySchwag's guys):

http://urlbrief.com/e81862
Breaking: Google Acquires Jaiku
Thanks! This will help keep track of the hundreds of new comments when pg posts a new essay.

It would be nice to have something that lists the monitored threads. For instance, if I wanted to track the progress of this thread, it would be a lot easier to have a list from YC Tracker bookmarklet than to remember and search for the title "YC News Tracker blah blah."
This is a bad idea, it isn't precedent until a higher court affirms the lower court ruling. So she is screwing everyone with her poor case. Let someone come along with a stronger case and appeal it with more chance of it being sent down to the lower court.
Another proof that the first to market is not always the winner. In case Friendster wasn't proof enough.
More, hopefully. I don't think you can actually be productive if you're a complete zombie for extended periods of time.
Another nice feature would be to have the comment notification automatically show on monitored threads without having to re-click the YC Tracker toolbar link.
It sounds like you have something really good going on.

Hosting, servers, and other expenses will go up as you get more users, keeping the user experience fast and pleasent will be hard. Getting that $1 up to $2 would be important.

Check out RuneScape http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuneScape they have a good model.
Maybe Jaiku is technically superior.
Markets in everything, virtual reality edition
this was so much fun to read.
That would be really nice. I'm storing the thread IDs in cookies, so I have a list of them. But I'm not storing the thread titles. If I do, the cookie might get big if you track a lot of threads. And, since cookies are sent to the server on every request, a big cookie could affect performance (although it's probably not noticeable at all on broadband). I'll have to think more about it. And, maybe check if I can have the cookies be set to client-only. If that's doable, it'll solve the problem.
Awesome post! I really feel good about submitting my application now.
Why? Discussion is supposed to change one's mind about its subject.
A homework generator seems like a nichey thing that you could do on your own, without investors.
That depends on the number of rounds. Granted with one round you should accept anything. But, if you have more than one you can set a minimum bound and punish people who give you low bids.

AKA Round 1 accept 10%
Round 2-100 accept 1%?
vs.
Round 1 reject 10%
Round 2 reject 25%
Round 3 reject 40%
Round 4-100 accept 50%
You discuss ideas with partners, not with potential competitors :)
Unfortunately, that's not possible with a bookmarklet because it doesn't execute unless you click it.
This criticism doesn't apply to palish more than many other things YC has funded. I assume a homework generator was just the starting point of making things easier for teachers.
Some criticism:

What would be the point? Sure it might be technically interesting to code etc. but this just introduces inefficiency to communication.

There's a reason we evolved from cave paintings and hieroglyphics to written form.
You can sleep 4 hours each night if you take naps throughout the day.

Not only does this increase your total awake hours, it also improves concentration and acuteness.

If you are interested in studying sleep effectiveness, try to pick up a copy of Why We Nap by Claudio Stampi
You're right. Funny how the Florida theme parks of one's youth tend to blend together.

Slate has a good (though somewhat old) explanation of both Universal and Disney's systems (http://www.slate.com/id/2067672/sidebar/2067676/). If its numbers are still more or less right, using Fastpass reduces your wait time to about 15 minutes when you come back to the ride during the window you've been assigned.
Nothing Says "Buy" Like "Free Shipping"
Absolutely true. He could have wound up being the creator of THE major bug tracking system, used by nearly all web developers, large and small, and have created a major company that makes loads of money off of providing services, enhancements, training, etc. to the massive ecosystem of users that he created.

Instead, he runs a small, fairly non-influential company that sells a pretty minor, non-differentiated, proprietary bug tracking system that nobody in the mainstream tech community uses.

Dunno - sharing worked pretty well for RedHat and MySQL.
Google is like a 1-company bubble, where instead of the acquirer being the general public investing in an IPO, now it's the general public investing in Google, who are spending the public's money on daft startups.

That's a pretty clever workaround to Sar-Ox.
Ask YC:font and size preferences
\w+([-+.']\w+)@\w+([-.]\w+)\.\w+([-.]\w+)*

While recently reading a regex pdf, I was wondering why I was having such trouble concentrating on the rather compressed material.

About a few pages into the book (my progress was slower through this book than any other technical book), I decided that it had to do with the fact that the zoom was set to 80%, and that It would probably be easier to comprehend the expressions if the text was larger. I zoomed in to 200%. Much better.

That made me think:not only have I been reading pdfs like this,but I have also been hacking for all this time with the default Visual Studio/Macromedia font,Courier New or Lucida Console,size 10, and it has probably hampered my performance, alot, in the form of unnoticed syntax errors,etc, and I have pretty good vision. With that, I decided to ask fellow hackers;

What is your monitor size and,
What font/size do you code in?

Me: 15.4wide, Courier New/15 (starting today)
What you really need is a greasemonkey plugin :)
It is truth that we have evolved, but if you want to take it in that sense. Imagine 5000 years from now, would you think it will be easier for human beings to read those images or English, Chinese? Imagine a lady in Romania, a kid in Senegal (West Africa) and a adult in Antartica. If they all received the same message in images or plain English ? Which one would they be more apt to understand assuming they never spoke or heard english? The point is not even that. I think we can make messages say more and be more interactive. That's just my thought and I like your constructive criticism
Uberman, anyone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uberman%27s_sleep_schedule
Nice post.

I'll always remember watching Monty (the less-famous robot) grab a beer bottle from someone's hand at the pre-startup-school reception. That really was like being in the future.
Domestic disaster response (i.e. Katrina II, Bay Quake) using the internet and commercial supply chains to provide sheltering:

http://disastr.org

Lots of room for mapping apps, GIS, route finding, and an enormous capability to handle traffic spikes.

Slashing the risk of financial transactions in the developing world through a free-market inclusive biometric digital ID standard:

http://guptaoptions.com/4.SIAB-ISA.php

Just too big for a start up - they really need BigCo involvement to get going.
The Jessica Alba instantiation feature of EC2 must be new since I last read the docs. What's the API call for that?
I agree there are slight advantages to images, but there is still something lost in translation.

How would explain a concept such as searching? Or a hyperlink?

Granted those are some contrived examples, but whatever problems we have with text and losses in translation, we'll also have (perhaps to a lesser extent, perhaps to a greater extent) in picture messaging.

These are just my 2 cents.

5000 years from now, I hope we would have advanced enough to instantly translate (correctly) from one language to another. Or just speak one language.
That's true. Look at advertisements, which use images to appeal to people who aren't fond of text. For example, beer companies use images of attractive, smiling people, beer, and women with enormous breasts to vividly explain that beer will make you feel good. If you're transmitting a similarly primitive message to your Senegalese pen pal, a series of images is the way to go. But if you want to know what it's like to talk about politics using just images, read up on Pakistan's recent election, and take a look at all the people waving placards with Musharraf's mug on them. That's what happens when you want to 'talk' about complex issues without using big (or any!) words.
Angel financing: How long until I get the money?
Written by and Angel in Toronto, Canada
A Small Talk on Getting Big (how Twitter dealt with its scaling woes)
hah! no need with my neuro-transmitter 3000!
Ask YC: Does it hurt to apply more than once?
This may have been covered before, so apologies if it's a dupe.

Does it hurt to apply more than once? That is, once you get dinged, is there some sort of "uh-oh, it's that guy again" that happens the next time around? Or do each time you get treated like it's your first time up?

I'd like experience applying, if nothing else. But I don't have a co-founder and don't want to hurt my future chances by using up any of my "free karma" on a long-shot application.
I think the CIA or KGB might have a job for you :)
It's funny, I totally remember that air-high five and the teacher comment thing. I happened to be standing right there (probably hovering, trying to get my 30 seconds with you know who ;).

Anyway, thanks for the read. You trying again this time? Good luck.
There are two ways to look at this. First as an embellishment to ordinary communication methods (which includes email). That would be a more entertainment-focused product, which may be interesting.

The other direction, which I hope is not what you are hinting at, is a universal mapping of words to pictures. From what I know, historically and theoretically, this is impossible. For one, universal language attemps have failed (esperanto being the largest ever and it's a dud). For two, not all word forms have concrete representations (try meta-concepts, the concept that represents, and even "meta-concepts" itself). For three, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis

Language is a statistical thing; every new utterance communicated adds more data to the pool. Hence, even while there are dictionaries, the very second a definition is written down, if somebody uses the word, the definition is no longer perfect. In conjunction, there will never be a "best match" picture for a word.

If this is really your idea, consider not doing voting on pictures, but rather making a gigantic, associative map of words across languages. That will have immense educational value.
It's worth mentioning here that akkartik has built a really cool tool that shows the changes on any web page since the last time you visited it. And, it works automatically because it's a plugin, not a bookmarklet. Check it out:

http://hystry.com/