skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Gee yep. Sure enough (sheepish grin)

I must have stopped reading it fairly early, because looking at the cover I don't remember any of it. I remember the first book, however -- that super guy they brought back for Ender's training and the planet and all. It's been a few years, though. Good thing I kept all the books.

Apologies for the poor memory.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFZTAOb7IE
It is very good if you get some feedback from them before the announcement date, but it is certainly not bad if you don't get any interaction with them prior to that date.
Trevor Blackwell calls it tweakability. http://tlb.org/busywork.html
I didn't explain myself properly. The planet is almost certainly there.

The atmosphere, color, etc.. of the planet is still in the speculation stage.
I really don't want to crash this party, but has anyone taken a look at the date of the new? It isn't exactly..."new".
"the pressure is on, but guess who ain't gonna crack"
Nu is what I call a language remix. Combine the syntax from one language with the runtime of another. It's relatively easy to do; we should be doing more of these. Backward compatibility be damned.

---

The ruby/smalltalk connection is a bit of a red herring; the 'inspiration' from them seems to be just inserting symbols in the argument list. Perfectly doable in lisp, just not very conventional.

http://akkartik.name/lisp.html#bind
Yahoo: Bringing Geeky Back
Argh. I never said SV was the only place for startups, just that all other things being equal it was the best.
Here's the song that plays at the end:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RthZgszykLs

http://dump.zetopia.com/Portal%20-%20Still%20Alive.mp3

Lyrics:

http://www.steamfriends.com/forums/showthread.php?p=5255
Day Jobs
Might anyone have any tips on finding day jobs which are not immoral, pointless, demoralizingly stupid, or energetically draining?

It's a rollercoaster. One minute, Google thinks I'm the hottest thing. The next, the interviewer is fired (literally), and I'm talking to interviewers claiming about my 'junior' status and how I haven't used Access.

I know that if I take a fulltime job, there won't be many hours left in the week for my own project. HAs anyone had any luck negotiating for a fulltime position, and then just dropping one or two days off the schedule?
To the submitter's credit, this is a fairly popular website that was hacked, and that's interesting.

Then again, because it's Ann Coulter, I think I have to agree with you.
I understood what you meant. The wobble prediction method is a lot more mature than various models of planetary formation. And the planet cannot be directly observed, only properties about it inferred from the wobble. No spectral measurements of the planet or its atmosphere were made.

It'll be great when we can start making direct observations instead of doing a lot of inference.
look forward for announcement.
Questioning functional programming
Making programming pay: Ruby, Smalltalk and Lisp  Revisited
It might be unfair for you or for developers on the iPhone, but it will at least be a step forward for the end users. Hand-picked software is better than no software at all.

If there is no competition, the quality of the software is dependent only on Apple's standards, which are generally quite high. I doubt the software that is approved by Apple will be crap.

I still agree with you though-- it should be freely open.
I was gasping. I'm in shock. I used to dream about something like this. =)
I would expect that in a more perfect world PG (or an equivalent) would also say "We also like to give feedback and point out the things that would have made us more interested had it been included."
you found me.

i'd love speaking tips/feedback in general. or tech whatever.
That's crazy. I used to think if anything like this happened, I'd be one of the first to be aware. I guess not. O.o
I suggest waiting and seeing if you get into YC but in case you don't and you still need to eat (I like to eat too) then I would suggest looking on Craiglist for a job.

If they really like you ask to see if you can work 3 weeks a month and take 1 week to work on your project in there office on there computer, that way you are there available to them but they don't have to pay you.

That is what I am doing and if I get into YC I will be in a position to quit entirely and only work on my project.
The numbers are meant to be general, not absolute. Note that I put "depending on region" as a disclaimer for some folks who "might" object.
Out of touch with start-up funding? Ouch. we've been at it for 8 years....
Primariy point is to show that there "is" a gap. Be it the Atlanta, Boston, SV, Ft. Wayne, Charelston, etc.
Angels and angel groups have different models. So, don't judge many by the actions of a few that you are familiar with.
Angels individually invest $25,000-$100,000. But as a group, can do $250,000- $1M plus(rare).
Knox Massey
Hod Lipson: Robots that are "self-aware" (MP4, 28Mb)
Yahoo accused of misleading Congress about Chinese journalist
in Ukraine poor people used to use a first free 4 seconds to talk, but after that per-connection fee was introduced.
The 1.7TB drive on the extra-large instance seems strange to me. Who needs that much non-persistent storage?
No worries. I will keep in mind trying to submit links to sites other than mine. Thanks for the tip.
To Flip or Build, that is The Question
Ask 37signals: How to go from clients to products?
Sagan intended this as an allusion to Thomas Carlyle. 'A sad spectacle!' exclaimed Thomas Carlyle, contemplating the possibility that millions of planets circle other suns. 'If they be inhabited, what a scope for pain and folly; and if they be not inhabited, what a waste of space!' Contact is not the only place this allusion occurs in Sagan, who previously quoted Carlyle during a conference on extraterrestrials; Google makes a video of the conference available online.
The only thing worse than flying is open source code
Old, but actually interesting to see that things have progressed (for open source code, not airlines) for open source software in the last 2 years.
Amherst generally wavers between being the top ranked, and second ranked, liberal arts college in the country, based on the US News and World Report rankings.
Is the instance storage faster? I know there is discernible latency with file transfer between EC2 and S3. Having faster local storage for each instance could be very beneficial for swap space or temp tables, if your servers need a lot of it.
The on-off star spent 215 years off, according to Wikipedia.

A Fire Upon the Deep, set in the same universe, is excellent too.
I think we knew you were launched when we read your application, but we'd archived that by the time you arrived for the interview.

One of the weird consequences of dealing with very large numbers of startups is that you really can't remember anything except essentials. When the 19 new startups showed up for the first dinner this summer, I probably could have only told you what 3 or 4 of them were doing. The rest had to remind me. (Of course, once the summer gets going, I keep them all loaded in memory all the time.)
I've been thinking about how to ban people effectively. Do you think there is any use in making the banned person appear to be functional, though in fact impotent?

Comments could be seen from their account only, same with submissions. Voting/modding would appear to affect the total, though the number being tracking is the pair (total real, total real + total fake), with display based on banned status.

The idea is that there is little to stop someone from making a new account account if they note they are banned.

A similar scheme could be used on an individual basis for trolls. If you mark a troll, you can't see their comments, and they can't see yours. It would fork the audience, but the hope it would eventually be bipartite: trolls on one side, people that matter on the other.
My friends and I do this all the time. I never leave voicemail, why bother? The fact that I'm on the missed call list makes is good enough. And my incoming minutes are free!
On vacation in Lebanon three years ago, I learned that this same thing is routine over there too. People work out systems about what one missed call means as compared to two, and so on.

Funnily enough, a missed call probably conveys just about as much meaning as the average text message.
poor practice wherever it may be found

Sure you want to commit to that blanket statement? Do you expect every woman in every room you walk into to stop and think about why you didn't draw her attention, and then come and tell you?
If I do get into YC, I still have three months of expenses until the winter. I don't have to funds to coast, and I don't want to put my project on hold, either.
Driving from New York to LA in 32 Hours or Less
Oops, sure enough. I think I saw it on popurls. I've seen this happen before, where an old story makes the rounds of the news aggregators, probably getting more traffic than it did when it was first published. Dominews.
We have been sending radio and TV signals for a very long time, maybe they have seen some Pizza Hut commercials ;)
> bringing geeky back

They should make another mock music video, but use a certain Justin Timberlake song instead of Mims
http://valleywag.com/tech/cubicle-culture/yahoos-recruitin-r...

Timbaland should produce, naturally.
"we can work without perks, just yahoo and me / Geek it out till we get it right"
http://youtube.com/watch?v=iWg3IMN_rhU
BTW, if you have $1M to donate (or some fraction greater than 10%) I can put you in contact with the right people.

Seriously, depending on how much you give, your name might go on one of the most important telescopes in the world.... maybe you could even name the first true earth analog :)

Pretty good deal.
Hehe. Pardon me, I had to laugh at that.
Thats some gear list:

Randolph highway patrol sunglasses, 20-gallon reserve fuel tank, Tasco 8 x 40 binoculars fitted with a Kenyon KS-2 gyro stabilizer, military spec Steiner 7 x 50 binoculars, Hummer H1-style bumper-mounted L-3 Raytheon NightDriver thermal camera and LCD dashboard screens, front-and-rear-mounted sensors for a Valentine One radar/laser detector, flush bumper-mount Blinder M40 laser jammers, redundant Garmin StreetPilot 2650 GPS units, preprogrammed Uniden police radio scanners, ceiling-mount Uniden CB radio with high-gain whip antenna. Check. Check. Check.
Do what you love. That's all that really matters.

Ask employees about their schedules, not HR folks. Catch them outside of the formal interview if you can. You'll know if things are really flexible.

I wouldn't count on not working full time unless you're a contractor declared to be part time.

If you can't get funding to go full time on your own project, nights and weekends with a day job provide a pretty good amount of time.

Don't get a job that requires skills in MS tools. Period.
How about: "There was no glaring flaw in your application, but nothing in it jumped out at us. Next time, do something that will impress us more."
Five Reasons Why a Pay Per Click Recession Looms
Multiple-User Simultaneous Testing (MUST)
This is a fun article; I love living vicariously through articles about reckless disregard for the law.
Oh... I didn't look at this date and figured this was a "new" might-be-habitable planet. I thought it was a good sign we were finding more than one... but having found just one is still pretty good.
Well,

To be fair, there's a huge PR machine behind these kinds of discoveries. In other words, there's fuzz associated with a planet being an "earth analog." There will be more and more "earth like" planets discovered in the future.

I mean, we've only discovered 212 extra-solar planets so there's plenty more to find :)
Not trying to pile on, but I'm curious to what sort of feedback "nothing in there really caught our eye" would engender. A request for YC to look more closely? I mean, at some point these are qualitative measurements. Even if you had absolute knowledge, it wouldn't make things any better. Did the reviewer have a bad burrito for lunch? Is your name Bob and the reviewer unconsciously hates all people named Bob? Was there a great application just before yours, and even though yours might be acceptable, by comparison it didn't look so good? Were you the first ones evaluated (reviewers are notorious for rejecting early applicants)

I exaggerate, of course, but whatever reason you get I can guarantee won't be satisfying. I mean, you can go to the store tomorrow and pick up a huge stack of books on selling, which all boil down to "Sometimes you strike out for no reason at all. Keep trying" In a vain attempt to pump readers for money, some books give you a huge list of reasons for why you can strike out. I'm a firm believer in controlling all those factors you can -- wear the power tie, turn the temperature down in the office, sit in the proper locations in an important meeting, use body language and NLP, show instead of tell, etc. But I've never had a client say "You know Daniel, we really like your work, but gosh, those shoes are just not doing it for us". That kind of thinking is just grasping at straws. It never works that way.

Look at it this way: a couple of years ago I sent a business plan into a local VC group for their paid-evaluation service (pretty good deal for them, huh?). This time, for my $200, I got back a bunch of comments. What did they tell me? That the reviewers were idiots, that's what. And how exactly could I use this information? Except to be bitter, not at all. So not knowing when it's qualitative is a pretty good thing. As for me, I'd rather save my money and get rejected for free.
Interview with Joel Spolsky: Hiring Great Programmers [podcast]
Unexpected Marketing (or The Power of Enjoy your Workplace)
Look ma, no cubicles!
Could MySpace buy RockYou to mess with Facebook?
I've implemented bibliographies and uploads, plus a basic template. Let me know if you think of anything else, and thanks a bunch for the feedback.
The common refrain from VCs, book publishers -- anyone who gets large volumes of submissions and can only select a tiny minority is:

* even attempting to respond (however briefly) to the deluge of requests would overwhelm us to the point that we could no longer focus on running the core business
Dot-com fever stirs sense of deja vu
I forgot about the 3 months, at least do something that hones your skills. Anything that makes you better will be worth the time plus you will make some extra money.
How much data is the library of congress? I bet we could store all the text in a portable device right now.
This is not particulary related to YC or startup, but a general advice.

I've been, and still occasionally am, in both sides---sometimes in a position of selecting people, and more likely, in a position being selected. And I can assert the observation PG stated somewhere in one of his essays---in almost all circumstances there are a few stand-outs, a few obvious inferiors, and large number of the rest in the middle ground. Unless you're in either extremes, whether you pass or fail largely depends on small bits of random factors. And it doesn't help whether you know which of those small factors you missed. Because in highly competitive fields, you have to get into the few stand-outs eventually. Don't take the real life tests as if they are school exams where you can earn several points here and there to cover up some minus points elsewhere. You can tell excellent work from not-so-great work, can't you? Just aim at excellent work. If you think your work is less than excellent, then that's the reason you're rejected. If you think you did an excellent work and still rejected, then they are wrong.
Whether you believe you can or whether you believe you can't, you are right. --attributed to Henry Ford.

Entrepreneurs make it because they choose to, not because someone gives them the opportunity. The opportunity is always there, the question is whether or not you choose to make it happen. I've been reading "founders at work" and it surprises me that their opportunities were where they least expected it.

So, cheer up and keep dreaming!
I remember doing this when all my friends were on prepaid phones. We called it 'pranking', though: "Just prank me when you want me to pick you up."
Portal is an excellent game, I just wish there was more of it.
so, are you suggesting canidates demo in spandex?
These guys are seriously crazy.
Radiohead's Warm Glow (or how economists don't understand tipping)
I still can't imagine needing that much temporary space and yet being small enough that using EC2 is still economical.
Any suggestions anyone on how to kill the wait? ... I'm running out of options..
Yah, who would have thought that a guy in the 1920's would write a master thesis suggesting the idea that you could transfer information electronically in 1's and 0's (claude E. Shannon).

What I find more interesting is that it wasn't the idea that took time to develop, but the technology. Without people dreaming and working on ideas, we wouldn't be where we are. The beauty of the night sky lies in the constellations, not the indivdiual stars. If there was only one star, we'd get bored, but individuals stars are fun to look at because they increase the total beauty of the constellation.

So, if you want to change the world, shine like a star and belong to a constellation.

The allure of a small business is that it is not entrenched in keeping the status quo, but excitedly endeavoring to ask the next big question, "why the hell not?"
Obviously people won't use it as temp space; they'll use it to store databases and replicate them on multiple instances for reliability.
Arrington's argument is no. I tend to agree with him. The best part of the article is when starts comparing it to a mall, and it oddly works...

"Hong is better off sticking HotorNot in the mall than trying to get people to come to his standalone site... the social network landlord could one day create its own... like a mall owner opening his own clothing store to compete with the Gap, greeting people at the door with flyers as they enter the mall, and charging his store below-market rent... Then, of course, there's the fact that malls tend to lose their foot traffic as soon as a newer one opens up down the road."

I would add that the whole real estate analogy has been used quite a lot in technology. The only difference is that no matter if you create a super-regional shopping malls (Mills), the great power of the internet is that people can leave your place lightning fast.
excellent article. nice hope for the future
thx
It's guilt. People tip cab drivers and pay for music because of guilt. It's funny though, I feel guilty stiffing a waitress but not for downloading the album of my favorite band for free.
improve your webapp (or start developing it if not yet ;)
No, it is not.

Some LOGO books are, but the language is not.
I tried reading 'Turtle Geometry' when I was young.
Some parts are like University Maths. In fact, all of it is very strict in the mathematical sense. And all is based on LOGO. For someone in high school who had no idea of trigonometry, it was mind blowing.
WOW! I hope this is true...
That still sounds unwise. One glitch slightly worse than the one from last week and you're badly screwed.
Hack: Set the "Ready Message" on HP printers to INSERT COIN
The buying binge is over (will it impact ad market and startups?)
How about doing some consulting for a startup, maybe even one from a previous YC round? You should be able to negotiate a pretty flexible schedule if you have expertise they need.
At my previous office, we had to wait 1+ month to get badges so we used to do this all the time to get people to come down to open the door. No need to pick up... if it rings twice, come to the front door and open it.
Gmail will get a facelift in Nov... along with a ton of other social features.
Growing a Language, by Guy Steele (vid)
I wish I could concentrate ...
I think it's more about being fair.

I think one of Co-opetition's (http://mayet.som.yale.edu/coopetition/index.html) main ideas has it nailed. While this doesn't involve business competitors, it's still about players of a game giving up maximizing their own individual gains, to share it with one another

in this case we can think of the consumer as a player of a game where they have three general choices:

a) maximum gain - pay nothing (assuming they don't buy anything else from RadioHead; Radiohead loses big) and enjoy the music

b) minimal gain - pay what they think is full price (buy extra stuff, ...) and enjoy the music

c) mixed gain - pay what they think is a discounted price (less than a cd) and enjoy the music; neither Radiohead nor the consumer maximize their gains in the short term but both of them benefit moderately. Radiohead has an incentive to keep publishing hits and the customer can keep enjoying them (without being robbed by the record industry).
We dealt with this same question and one of the guys we called to talk about this said:

"When you're young, hitting a double is better than striking out, because you can then get drafted into the majors."

Nevertheless, you need to really just focus on product because if it's all just hype, you're likely going to not provide any value to the buyer later on anyway and that hurts your reputation too.
Version Control and "the 80%"
The difference is perhaps that the band's marginal cost of serving you was basically zero, whereas for a waiter or a cab driver it was significant.
Mobile music going off-deck
You should, otherwise you're in trouble (if just waiting few days for YC's decision distracts you so much)
while digitized songs scale better than food or driving services, i'm not so sure that the cost of delivering it is basically zero
Yeah, articles like this are almost enough by themselves to justify the concept of a statute of limitations.
Tipping is just a corner case of supply and demand, where the good being demanded is supply.
Thanks wise man... now go back to your webapp
In South-Africa, it was called Scotch-ing, as in the Tape. What would often happen is people would say. Scotch me when you get to so and so's place, or Scoth me when you are going for dinner...

One of the cellphone providers would also give you a code *147 or something and someone's number and it would send a "please call me" text message with your number included. People would say. Send me a "please call me" when you are there...

Everyone does it.
the question is more like: do you sell your business as a startup? or do you sell a mature business? If you want quick cash then sell the startup; Or, build a buisness and sell for a lot of money.
Some applicants get feedback priior to the announcement date?
Some shortcomings that still irk me.

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=329797&th...
Well, just going by S3 rates, a 5MB song costs $0.0009 to deliver.
well it took years to build their fanbase with previous albums and touring; and I could be wrong but I think both recording an album and touring around the world have significant costs in both time and money which don't always result in fruition (big risk). Luckily it worked out for radiohead
When I got an interview I got an email from pg and a call from jl asking why we were doing this now as undergraduates rather than waiting until we graduated.
Sounds similar to using collect calls requests to convey a message.. "Press one to accept a collect call from <meetmeatthebusstop> click"

I remember a TV commercial that involved this a few years ago. Oddly enough, I think it was for a phone company.
As well as create a successful startup. That's not the point.

It's a product not a service, so they work the same if their album is downloaded a hundred or a million times.
That's why I was careful to specify marginal cost. What you're discussing is fixed cost.
"I'm not sure that finding life on another planet would change the science much. " -- Maybe not, but it would shut up the religios nutjobs, and the creationisms freaks...

If there is life in another planet (even a non-intelligent one) means life is a normal part of the universe, and it is another blow to their idiotic books that claim god created everything.