skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The claim was that Euros were angry at Bush because of Kyoto. Since they weren't angry at Clinton and Clinton did the same things wrt Kyoto, the "because" is either wrong or shows that the Euros are ignorant.

And then there's the small matter that the Euros have done much the same wrt Kyoto and the fact that Kyoto doesn't do anything towards the stated goals and ....
That may be true for the likes of news.YC readers, but we're a self-selecting sample.

Based on the office experiences I've had the misfortune to endure, people like us might be at 50% productivity instead of 90% at home, but the majority of cubicle dwellers are are 10% instead of 0% at home.

Maybe I'm inappropriately pessimistic, but even if that's not the case, I'd imagine that's the thing that has kept, and will keep, telecommuting and the like from becoming more than the occasional fringe benefit for the occasional employee.
Any sufficiently advanced spam is indistinguishable from real information.
It depends on how the new startups are distributed. If it's a lot more places with just one startup, no new hubs will be created. Doubling from one to two increases the odds that another startup will come along, but the odds don't get especially favorable until you hit a critial mass, and that mass probably depends on local conditions.

Lots of folks have tried to create startup hubs. What will be different this time?
Ask YC: submit an application a second time?
My problem: no demo yet, co-founder shaky... I suppose I will try to get at least something visible up until 10/11, on the other hand, perhaps I should rather wait for the next round? Or would it be OK to submit the same startup idea again for the next round, only with much improved state/presentation?

Maybe it sounds stupid, because ideally, I should get the thing off the ground within 6 months anyway. This particular idea, however, is something I would probably only tackle together with YC. "Alone", I would most likely chose one of my other, smaller projects to focus on.
I think you mean "Linguistics is to (the use of) language as..." -- linguists study spoken language as well was written language.
The Hacker's Diet 
Weightloss explained by founder of auto desk.
That's odd. I see founders, early, and maybe another round of folks before "later".

To me, "later" isn't until the biz is well beyond self-sustaining, when there's very little risk of failure.
> exceptions suck, Hungarian notation rules and so on.

Have you actually read his article on this? I think it's very good.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html

Joel doesn't say that you should prefix integer variables with 'i' or use -1 as an error code (he prefers returning multiple values). He only says that every line of code should indicate as clearly as possible what it's doing so that you can still understand it six months later.

Exceptions eliminate one problem (a function can only return one value) but introduce another: it's impossible to tell by looking at a block of code where it will exit. If a series of statements might get interrupted halfway through, there needs to be an indication of this or else it's very easy to create bugs. I know this from experience.
I'm in a class in college where we have to have a facebook in order to participate.
"Also contributing to the hype is the Facebook platform... whose existence Joe Average is now and ever shall be blissfully ignorant."

Matt may have some good points but I strongly disagree on this one. Joe 6pack is not ignorant of the FB Platform. Joe 6pack just sees it as: "Mary has offered you a 'long island'", "Jack want's to play poker with you", "You are 67% compatible with Ann in movies", and so on...

I could be wrong but what keeps people coming back on Myspace is just messages either on their wall or in their inbox. In FB this is on steroids, allowing users to do that interaction in a potentially infinite amount of ways. As techies we may think that 98% of these apps suck, but hundreds of new ones come out every week. Even if only a few catch Jill Average's attention for just a few days, it's good enough to keep her and her friends coming back regularly; since there's something new and novel everyday.

FB's platform is perfect of our modern "everything is disposable", attention deficit society.
Having access to a computer (a DEC Rainbow). It's strange, but as a kid it's quite difficult _not_ to be drawn to hacking if you've got the environment and tools for experimenting. By the time I was 15 I've already done some Logo, Prolog, Basic and Pascal .. from there it was impossible to stop.
The best thing about this advice is that it is so easy to follow ;-)
While the current vein of research might never satisfy your stringent definition of "artificial life", I think that's somewhat beside the point. The usage here is synonymous with "designer life", which is becoming an increasing possibility.
Any sufficiently advanced critique is indistinguishable from the random mumblings of someone who not only can't figure out how to occupy their time with more interesting, useful pursuits but fails to realize that you can't establish any serious personal credibility by trying to wreck the credibility of others.

And of course your pithy, Phil Greenspun-esque comment only adds fuel to my ever-growing flame. :P
Breaking news: Proof of P!=NP discovered, ramifications for the fight against bioterrorist warming discussed.
Thanks for the reply; I guess I took it for granted in this day and age that of course equity would be considered. But I imagine that all startups offer equity so I really wanted to get to the jist of what would get "geeks" or "coders" as you say past the tipping point. In other words, what are the top 3 things that would make a good "coder" say, "You know what? I'm going to start some specs ... as soon ... as I ... get home ... TODAY!"

The idea? The person? The impact on the world? Free Sour Skittles?
High-value transactions? Major transactions? Significant transactions? Important transactions?
I agree, the Europeans to some extent are piling on America, and Americans are piling on Bush, as a convenient way of blaming someone else without doing anything themselves.

That said, the Europeans were irritated with Clinton/Gore about this, and I thought it was somewhat unfair back then as well. When the Kyoto treaty failed the first time, it almost seemed that the Europeans had deliberately constructed a flawed treaty so they could blame us for failing to ratify it.

All the same, I think that Gore would have worked to overcome the negatives of this treaty and get a good agreement through. Whereas I think Bush used it to snuff out any action on Global warming.

California's actions can actually be used to refute some of this international criticism: California was willing to go against its own national government to get global warming legislation through - surely Australia, France, and Germancy can find a way to act without US leadership (or in spite of US opposition).

But my very first post was really about branding - that California may have a better international brand than the US does, partly because of this type of legislation. I really didn't want to spin off a long debate about global warming.
This is the second time I've read something recently that Facebook will never be MySpace because MySpace has more users. I disagree. One of the articles I read made it's point by showing a graph that showed Facebook is clearly catching up. It's a few months old, but Andreesen had a really good post on why the platform will always win: http://blog.pmarca.com/2007/06/analyzing_the_f.html
webmail.us is extremely well run, despite their enterprisey web page. I would recommend them very highly.
Ask YC: Why does 800-GOOG-411 have a listing for "prostitutes" in SF?
If you call 800-GOOG411 in San Francisco at least, and ask it for a "prostitute", it has an entry and responds, offering up a choice of hotels. What tech powers GOOG-411 that allows for something like this (it certainly doesn't respond to other nonsensical queries) - or did I just discover an easter egg?
Getting Started with OAuth
Why were you phoning up Google and asking for a prostitute?
I submitted an idea for Winter 06 that PG didn't like. I applied again for Summer 07 and was accepted. So I don't think you should be worried about applying twice, it shouldn't hurt your chances.
I understand, and am not arguing with you. Whatever you want to call them, that "second round of folks before later" is harder to hire than the founders. They're employees, not principals, and you can't bullshit them.
Why, what do you use 411 for?
He doesn't get it! Does. not. get. it.

It's an online rolodex! A REPLACEMENT for a real rolodex! Isn't that fucking outrageously brilliant?

It's clear how a rolodex web application with messaging and a full-featured API is worth nearly as much as GFS + PageRank + MapReduce + BigTable + 450,000 commodity servers + thousands of motivated engineers.
You know, it is possible to do important things, even important things with computers, and not be cut out for a life in business.

Once upon a time, for hackers, it was considered a step down to work in industry. However, it's since been shown there's a lot of money to be made, and lately PG's been spreading the gospel about how entrepreneurship is the true calling of a geek. But it's just not always the case.

Anyway, even if your premise about Aaron is true, the man's already done more with his short life than almost anybody on this site. Even on the business side.

For some reason Aaron feels compelled to talk out almost every personal failing he has in public. I don't know, if the famously mercurial Steve Jobs or Larry Ellison actually recounted all of their meltdowns candidly, they might sound something like Aaron's blog.
No.

The basic work on relational databases was done by computer science researchers. And actually people in labs built the Internet, come to think of it. And they pioneered the ideas behind dynamic languages like Ruby. Before there was Matz or Larry there was Alan Kay and Guy Steele.

What would we do without computer science researchers?
I always thought reddit was well established before AS joined. The content was much better even with 3000 visitors. I think the 'reddit this' links must have been the biggest factor in reddit's decline. Interesting to see he joined the RDF group, also with some objection.
for those that don't know what OAuth is:

http://oauth.net/

(I sure as hell didn't from just reading the blog post)
Just say it- you are looking for a cofounder to apply with for this round. Get rid of your shaky co-founders. If you can't convince them this is the one idea they should work on maybe you need to change your idea.
Top 10 US Advertisers
I remember that sometime ago someone asked what are potential consequences of housing's downturn. Here's the answer.
Response #1:

By which you mean, one makes the other possible?

In the middle ages, can you imagine the trouble it was to make your own ink, collect and maintain quills of the appropriate type, train oneself to wield the quill skillfully and not cause inkblots, and finally deal with the fatigue of manipulating such a large object?

Nowadays pens are so cheap and easy to use you never even have to think about it. So you move onto other questions, like what to write.

Response #2:

This statement is idiotic. Computer science is essential to the collection of technologies people call "Web 2.0".

The most advanced Web 2.0 sites allow for quick search across enormous databases, and efficient, many-to-many messaging. These problems are hard. Using the appropriate algorithm is essential to scalability. Look at Facebook; they deploy Stanford whiz kids to invent their own infrastructure (hmmm, that sounds familiar) and they're growing faster than anybody else in this space.
Is Google Broken?
The Fucked Google Blog
Far from taking over the world, too.
It's true that scalability is hard once you get users. But by then you will have VC funding to hire experts who could do that stuff for you. So it's not essential knowledge for entrepreneurs.
Ask YC: Should you go to graduate school?
I am currently a college CS senior. One of the biggest bind I am going through right now, is deciding whether I should go to graduate school for computer science. Like most people here, I am very much interested in applying CS to exciting and important problems in the everyday world. It would seem like then, I should just start heading out to either Cambridge/Seattle/The Valley.

The thing is after having worked at various tech companies, both small and Fortune 500, I realized that companies don't really push you to do research or learn on your own; it's all about "bringing yesterday's technology one step closer to today" and dumbed-down powerpoint presentations to the pointy-haired boss.

As for joining or founding a Web start-up, I have tried to launch a few sites with my college friends and honestly, I have come to a conclusion that copying-and-pasting php, playing with photoshop and dreamweaver isn't cutting-edge CS either; Web startups, IMHO, has become more about designs, social networking and hype.

Don't get me wrong. I don't want to sit in a closet office in the ivory tower, writing proofs about lambda calculus. But there's just this one paradox:
I happen to see all of the new exciting area's in CS: Bioinformatics, data-mining of online community intelligence, computational finance all have graduate school as a barrier of entry; and yet it is the college/grad school dropouts (see every successful software/web company founder) that made it out of the ivory tower to make an actual difference.

So is there a third way out of this lesser of three evils, career IT corporate ladder, trendy style-over-substance web start-up's, academia ivory tower? Any ideas would be appreciated.

P.S I tend to use unnecessary adjectives for dramatic effect, I actually think anyone who is involved in IT/Web/CS is a great person and I actually don't mean to offend anyone's professional or academic background.
Ask YC: How would you determine how much funding to request from a VC or Angel for a Facebook app?
why can't you just say major purchase?
I got this advice from someone when I was considering applying to AppFactory.

"I would say multiply the number of team members by the time period you're asking to be funded over, by a very high valuation of your team members' time ($75/hour, say), and add some server costs."
Well, the first time you use any given technology its a novelty, but that usually quickly fades. When I found Google I instantly thought "this is the greatest thing ever". Within a month of owning a cell phone I knew I could never go back.

Facebook has been around a long time and still has nothing more compelling than turning people into vampires, and they have a ton of geniuses trying to figure it out. Its not only a perpetual novelty, but one which is apparently wearing off if you look at average visits per day per user.
The middle part of that sentence which you ...ed out was kinda important. I meant that platforms in general have not and will not reach the popular consciousness. People in the tech world today think they're far more important than they are.

Facebook apps have definitely made themselves known to Facebook users, but far from indispensable.
Regarding Hungarian notation, it's really a kind of type system with explicit typing, except the type checking is done by the programmer reading the code rather than the compiler. Kind of the worst of the static and dynamic worlds combined.

He could solve the tainting problem by just wrapping the unsafe string in an object. This would be safer even in a dynamically typed language. His example is only relevant to very early versions of VBScript that didn't support classes.

Regarding exceptions, they are NOT supposed to be used for returning multiple values. They supposed to be used for exceptional results that cannot be handled locally. They don't have to be "invisible", e.g. in Java you have to either explicitly handle an exception or explicitly declare that you may propagate it. Using return values OTOH you may forget to handle a return value, and the compiler will not complain. His complaint is more valid wrt. C# where exceptions are indeed not checked by the compiler. But since he don't even seem to be aware of this difference, I'm pretty sure he knows about neither.
Thanks - seems like good advice. So did you end up applying to AppFactory and if so how did it turn out?
Yeah, it's abysmal.
That would be Plaxo.
Knowing how algorithms work can easily be the difference between a program finishing in ten minutes as opposed to never.
I wouldn't mind to find a cofounder here (please contact me - I am located in the south of Germany). The problem with my friends is that they are not living in a startup culture. Where I live, everybody has a well-paying job, and startupping isn't the norm. Basically, my friends somehow haven't read enough of Paul Graham's essays yet :-(

My best friend would probably come along as a co-founder, and he is a very good coder, whom I worked with on several projects before. But he works as a freelancer and just got an interesting offer for a new project. It might be a close chase...

Now about the idea: it is true that most of my friends didn't get overexcited when I told them about it. I think that is because it deals with a relatively new thing: build on demand hardware. It is only just starting off (Ponoko, eMachineShop, Apple and Dell online shops...), and people are simply not used to the idea. They think it is exotic and weird, but I think there is a fair chance that in relatively short time it will be really, really big.

Edit: I'll probably be at BarCamp Munchen tomorrow, in case any prospective co-founders want to talk...
If you can't convince them this is the one idea they should work on maybe you need to change your idea.

Not necessarily. You can have a great idea and still have shaky cofounders. It doesn't automatically mean your idea sucks, cofounders can have any number of outside concerns that may prevent them from throwing their full weight behind your project. Job, wife, SO, children, mortgage, bills, school, etc.

And even then, your partners may not realize what a big idea you're sitting on. I think Robert Morris had little faith in Viaweb from the beginning. I guess that's how he ended up getting his ear pierced.
I would agree with ingenium here. To add, almost everything Venter has done seems to be along the self-promotional line rather than the advancement of science. Seems he is more eager for attention than anything.
You have to have at least a skill in something. If you're good in marketing, then do what Kevin Rose did. He got the first version of Digg built by a contractor on elance for $1200. Then he worked really hard on marketing it. Once it started to pick up, it was easy to get funding and hire programmers.
Well to me the most important part of:

"Also contributing to the hype is the Facebook platform. Platform is the Bubble 2.0 buzz word, which everyone talks about but of whose existence Joe Average is now and ever shall be blissfully ignorant."

was that you thought Joe 6pack doesn't know anything about it. All tech enthusiasts talking about it is a well known fact (everyone on yc knows about it). Was there something that I missed in that fragment?

"I meant that platforms in general have not and will not reach the popular consciousness."

I could be wrong, but I feel that my non-technical friends and family that I have FB food fights or Mafia games with would disagree. They may not know what it's called, but they do see it and enjoy it.
Oh, okay. I can understand being upset about that, but I'm sure it will get worked out.
Really? Name a few...
In the UK you graduate in June and have to start repaying your loan the following April as a percentage of your income if you earn more than GBP14,000/year. I've found that you can survive for GBP6,000/year so this shouldnt be an issue. No idea what the situation is like in the US however
Looks like that comment helped to increase your karma four fold!
Chipping software for faster debugging
I think this talk first presupposes that the audience would like a job like that, which is probably a stretch. His accomplishments notwithstanding, his current job seems pretty undesirable to me.
Computer Science is about understanding what computing is; it's about what it means to compute.

Let me guess: you're not a big fan of Knuth either?
Ebay: a place to sell PEZ dispensers that used to crash every second

Internet: a place that used to only be mainly useful for looking at free pr0n

Post it notes: its adhessive was a "failed" project. Its value was only found after an employee started using it on paper to use as temporary bookmarks for gospel music

"From: torvalds@klaava.Helsinki.FI (Linus Benedict Torvalds)
Newsgroups: comp.os.minix
Subject: What would you like to see most in minix?
Summary: small poll for my new operating system
Message-ID: <1991Aug25.205708.9541@klaava.Helsinki.FI>
Date: 25 Aug 91 20:57:08 GMT
Organization: University of Helsinki

Hello everybody out there using minix -
I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones...."
I think there is a logical inconstancies in here.
You say specific startup hubs are important, but specific colleges are not? Bullshit, either both are important or both are not. By your own arguments they will be performing the same service, building communities.

You say one goes to Silicon Valley to be in a community of startups, meet cofounders and talk with smart people.
Then you say that in the future, in college, we will be more concerned with meeting cofounders and communing with smart people than we will be concerned with grades.
Why won't yo want to go to the school with all the smartest like-minded people?
Thats what Harvard is to business people. A community of like minded people that band together to help each other.
The same will be created at the new breed of startup oriented tech schools. The admission standards might be a tiny bit different though.
Another Google data point: Steve Yegge ported Ruby on Rails to JavaScript because Google works in only 4 languages... C++, Java, Python, and JavaScript.

http://www.iunknown.com/2007/06/steve-yegge-por.html
Not to mention, nobody has bought an actual Rolodex in 10 years. You can't build a business by replacing a product that has already been replaced.
Developing a modular, nanoparticle drug delivery system
Winter of '98 - '99?
> there (used to be) an enormous Boeing factory nearby

Still is.
Why do you need funding for a FB app?

Do you really need funding, or do you need financial motivation to do the work?

I would suggest if you really do need some funding for some specific costs, you should take as little as possible :)
"build on demand hardware" - it means build funny electronic devices(in Ponoko way)? Or it would be something serious HW stuff like PCB for custom device?
Finally a business model I can believe in. Despite not having an MBA I'm going to speculate that there may be slightly more demand for this service than for Facebook's digital fish in an aquarium.
Web Startups Are A Commodity
When the physics department got their own computer, a DEC VAX/VMS. I was a post-graduate with more-or-less unlimited access. It was love at first sight.
$30 at SitePoint, plus they offer extra options. We opted not to do anything extra, and instead put all of the money into the prize ($500 in this case, which made it the highest logo prize on the site at the time).
Good to know. We'll keep it in mind for future work. We're not at all dissatisfied with our SitePoint experience, though. At least a quarter of the entries are top of the line professional work, and we're now fighting it out to figure out which one is our favorite--not because there aren't enough good entries, but because there are too many really good ones to choose from.
plaxo began to be free only recently... besides its audience is traditionally more slanted for business professionals. It's trying to change, but it has a long road ahead
maybe it's trying to replace your web mail for personal use...