skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Go with the alternative of an editing page with some default help content. Never have a get started page if you can possibly avoid it. Never ever.

If I saw your getting started page that said something like, 'Make your own webpages! Put text anywhere!', I'd leave. The only thing you have going for you is that people can literally click on the page anywhere and type text in.
i like originalsignal.com better - less content, but better ui
yours is better for the same reason that originalsignal is better; you can see more headlines on one page like a newspaper. this is pretty much what I use originalsignal for
"Our developer workstations boast 386 Mhz . . . and industry-leading green text graphics. .."

This is classic! You people are hilarious. I'm still trying to figure out what that was . . . did one of the dudes have a bottle of maple syrup hung around his neck (?) and another one fuzzy dice . . . walking down the sidewalk during the rap music scene? Awesome.
Because their target users (MySpacers) view animated gifs and busy color schemes as a form of self-expression.
Yeah, there were times I didn't feel right about going someplace, or who was going, so I wouldn't. The rest of my crew did get busted on one of these occasions, too - glad I sat that one out.
I've been known to listen to Zep and other classic rock, it's about half of what I listen to, but usually not while programming.
Fast content-aware image resizing in Ocaml that is over 6X faster than the GIMP plugin, written in C
Kexi Project - "Microsoft Access for Linux" - PostgreSQL, MySQL etc support!
OpenID.net: Run your own identity server!
After 15 years of development Linux finally reaches 0.8% market share
The YC Deadline Brings Out Stupid Decisions in Another Applicant Team
Most often I listen to indie music. My favorites are Rilo Kiley, The Decemberists, Metric, The Arcade Fire, Feist and Stars. It doesn't look like I have any peers here.

But, I do enjoy some Pop (like Ben Folds and Dispatch), Baroque, Ska and Big Band as well.

edit: I also love Gunther and Swizz Beatz. I don't know why.

That said, of course, I prefer soothing tapes of Paul Graham's voice.
What if null if null is null null null is null?
Designing for a security breach
True Names - the novel by Vernor Vinge
Lisp-friendly Web Hosting
I don't see why you think it's unethical for them to try to poach your partner. It's not like he's some helpless pawn in this game, especially if he's as smart as you say he is. If I thought I had a chance at getting one of my competitor's best people to come work for me instead, I'd jump on it in an instant.
Fine, it's not unethical, but it's stupid. Did they think they had a shot after one run-in at a bar? Would you join another team after running into them at a bar with no knowledge of their idea?
Omniture sitecatalyst
I think you're being overly emotional here, they didn't think their offer through. Which makes it stupid, not malicious.
Indeed. This was one of the problems that we faced early in our application for this session. From what I've gathered as far as the YC app, they want to know that your company would do, not a complete run down of the process. My advice would be to get to the point as quick as possible and use whatever else space (<= 150 words) for additional, essential details. Good luck!
I'd like to hear the story from your partner's point of view. Could you please send me his name, email address, phone number, coding background and resume?
What are you saying is stupid? Wanting him, or thinking they could get him? If you all went to undergrad together, then it's possible they know more about his talent than either of you realize. I certainly have classmates who didn't know me very well, who, while I wouldn't take them as the other half of a two-man team, I would take them as a third or fourth man give that I already had one committed partner. And while their chances at success may have been slim, it's not like the attempt required much of an investment.
Haha, I'm curious who this is about since I know the OP.

Anyway, I think it's a poorly executed attempt at being unethical. If you had a friendship with the person who tried to poach, that person should have realized that he was going to dagger your relationship by trying to steal your partner without even pitching an idea.

Given that your partner is very tight with you (and apparently barely knows the poacher), obviously the incident was going to get back to you . . . one would have expected that the poacher would have tried to partner with you guys or, at the very least, have made a damn compelling argument for why your partner would ditch you.

If you're gonna be shady, you've gotta be strategic about it at least. LOL
Lots of Hip-hop and classic rock; Some metal (lots of 3 Inches of Blood recently); some indie (i guess) stuff (Fall of Troy, etc); some Funk and some Jazz; the occasional orchestral track never hurts.
I've got to second Boards of Canada.
Also, Four Tet, Alan Sparhawk's solo guitar (his band, Low, is some of my favorite music for when I'm not hacking), Sigur Ros, Collections of Colonies of Bees, Mouse on Mars, Do Make Say Think, Squarepusher, Dirty Three, Six Organs of Admittance, and Labradford
I'm not sure about the truth of that anecdote, but I liked it and I've never heard it, so upvote!
My New Startup: House Chat Monkeys
I'm trying to sell homes by taking lead generation, a dirty game, and turning it on its head.
It was stupid that they thought they could get him. Of course, he's good. They should have wanted him, but he also barely knew my partner during undergrad. And we were actually pretty good friends before this incident.
I doubt they thought they could get him, but they probably figured it couldn't hurt to ask, which turned out to be false.
yeah, sorry about that. we use to pronounce it with a long o, but most people would pronounce it 'zahbnee' so we changed the pronunciation. However, we didn't want to change our little mascot dude or the logo. Even in a 1 1/2 year old startup we have legacy. weird.
Since when is trying to recruit talented people stupid?
articulating your idea concisely (under the 120 word limit or whatever) and getting to the point quickly will be useful for yc and beyond (other investors or whomever else you need to sell.)

make it easy to parse what you're doing and why it's valuable. part of that is being focused, and brief.
It was ill considered in that they didn't consider the enormous impact the loss of a partner would have on the original poster.
If you're starting a company, and you can't explain it in that amount of space, you either need to try harder or you really need to consider refining your ideas.

The reason the elevator pitch is such a highly stressed aspect of start-up marketing is because investors have notoriously low attention spans from listening to pitches all day, every day.

A solid pitch that is concise at least lets them decide if they have any interest at all before going into the deeper details.

The Human Genome project can be explained in less than 120 words. I have a gut-feeling that that you aren't talking about decoding DNA.
Don't count 120 characters and stop typing. Look at it from the perspective of YC - they read a lot of applications. Get to the point and realize they won't hang onto every word (or sentence, even) you write.
seeing the words "unethical", "poaching", and "boneheaded" in ahsonwardak's post; it's interesting to note that ahsonwardak is currently living in Washington DC...
I like it. And this is a very lucrative market to get into.
Scott Adams: The Future of Newspapers (dead in two cell phone upgrade cycles)
Maurice el Medioni's album Descarga Oriental.
I'll concede that my question over simplifies the issue: Burning bridges is bad, you can definitely be stupid about how you try to recruit talent ...

But whenever someone comes to work with/for you they're likely precluded for working for/with someone else. Sure there could be reasons not to try and poach someone, but in general I don't think you are responsible for the person/company left behind.
Joost out of private beta (Internet TV from the Skype folks)
I didn't mean to suggest they didn't take risks -- of course a startup involves some degree of risk. My point was just that selling out to Google involved significantly less risk than trying to continue as an independent startup.
I don't think this is an accurate picture...

From the site:

"About Our Market Share Statistics

We use a unique methodology for collecting this data. We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on demand network of small to medium enterprise live stats customers. The sample size for these sites is more than 40,000 urls. The information published is an aggregate of the data from this network of hosted website statistics. The site unique visitor and referral information is summarized on a monthly basis. "
this idea looks like it'd save a lot of time - anyone used it?
An interesting point raised in the comments there is that it's hard to peg the actual value of a product that's coming at a problem in a totally new way. Skype is by far the leader in its approach, and if in the future the entire world moves away from landline phone they'll be well positioned to maybe even kill Ma Bell II with their really robust VOIP technology. Plus, with $90m in annual revenue, they're making a ton more than the nearest company with a web 2.0 logo (unless you count guaranteed payoffs from the likes of Microsoft and Google).
http://anywhere.fm/luxiou/top_trance

A mix of old school and some new school melodic trance :o
Welcome to Geek Culture
Marc is telling it like it is, even if it is a little difficult to hear.

A Ph.D. is a huge opportunity cost with an extraordinarily high risk/reward ratio. I have often had undergraduates ask me if they should pursue a Ph.D. I first ask them if it is their desire to teach at a research university. This desire is a little like becoming an NBA player especially in certain technical fields like physics. A horde of Ph.D. candidates is good for tenured Professors and research universities, but not necessarily for the students. Post-doc hell is left as an excercise for the reader.

If they don't have a burning desire to be a professor or happen to dislike trees, I don't really see the point of a Ph.D. I tell them to at least take a hard look at the costs of their decision either way: real financial, opportunity, time, etc. An objective tally will rarely be in favor of a Ph.D.
I just heard a truemor that Guy won't write any more blog posts.
why with a piece of string and some sand - how else do you propose to calculate this "circle" you speak of ?
Unfortunately, he's right.

This isn't so much because engineering is great, or the only way to make your mark on the world. The problem is that today's arts faculties just suck. It's possible to graduate knowing things that only matter within the walls of the university, and you may not realize this until the very last minute.

That said, it's possible to graduate from engineering schools and not have a clue about history, current events, different sorts of people, what matters in life, and the fact that one cannot wear socks with sandals. You may not be starving, and you may be in a sense contributing to society more than many artists, but you may never have really stretched your own mind -- merely let your geek tendencies do their thing.

I think the best possible thing to do in university is to take the hard science courses, and then supplement them with intense and challenging arts courses. The ones where you have to do learn some serious art history, or do some sort of performance. This is the best of both worlds.
Can we be done reiterating the Turing completeness of our favorite fringe languages? Amazing fact #1312: Writing a more efficient algorithm leads to faster code, even if you're comparing a slower language to a faster one.
Better Data Mining is no incentive for me to use it - why would I want to be monitored even more?

Commenting - maybe, but it can't be the killer feature. Actually, I'd rather comment less than I do now, not more. That urge to comment is stupid...
80s and classic rock
That's an interesting point. But... I'm someone who came from an arts degree and sort of turned myself into a reasonable facsimile of an engineer. I personally regret not having done things the other way round.

The problem with arts degrees is that very few people end up doing what they originally wanted to do. Most of the journalism grads are going to end up in PR, or something even less related to what they supposedly studied.

So yeah, one might be more content if one had the talent and passion and stuck with the dream. But so many people don't and that's a ticket to a midlife crisis.
After my first visit with a VC last week, and inline with a lot of the advice already given, the point the gentleman stressed was having a concise and tight pitch/overview document.

The verbose application/business plan can wait until the VC is actually interested in your company and requests a more detailed plan. (not to say that you should wait until the last minute to draft your BP though)
luke vibert all day long.
pg has a deeply felt longing for brevity. Our application, which did get us to the interview, was long, as I tend to chatter on quite a bit more than strictly necessary--I feel the engineers compulsion to cover all of the caveats and interesting (to me) details--but I don't think that helped our case. You should fight the urge to chatter on.

Think about the following questions:

What are you going to build?

Why should we believe you are willing and able to build it?

Everything else is fluff...so, for every sentence you write, think, "Does this answer one of those two questions?" If not, cut it. That's pretty much what all of the questions on the application are about--they just want to hear it from multiple angles.
To add to the list, some of personal favs that get me through coding sessions:

Orb

Narko Masutra

Kompakt (5,6) - german techno compilation - Germans know their elektronika ;)

Richie Hawtin // Plastikman

Kraftwerk

Squarepusher
Uh, gregorian/rennaissance/etc. chant? Classical too, though don't really know who's playing usually. I like Chopin alot. The best is music that sounds like thinking.

I also second silence. That's the usual case.
80s porn music.
Amazon EC2 loses user data
8.43% currently and probably this is the final score for the Progress Prize.
+1 for Salsa. It's also a great way to meet women while doing something fun. And it is a learned skill, something you can become good at if you practice, and it makes you seem a bit less nerdy, I think. My wife agrees.
I like ambient electronic music for coding. Check out:

http://www.limbikfreq.com/
I love eclectic bands with a ska/horns bent, like Fishbone, The Cherry Poppin' Daddies (from my hometown, Eugene, Oregon), Los Fabulosos Cadillacs, plus other stuff like the Voodoo Glow Skulls.
I did something similar (RCSS) a year and a half ago, before Sass, and that was great. I wouldn't want to do another large site without it. Doing it with Sass looks even better and now I want to find some time to switch over just to keep things well-organized.
molehill != mountain
I think you just saved yourself from what could have eventually been a huge headache.

I'm assuming since you are applying for funding from YC that you are looking to start a company (YC acceptance or not). If that is the case, you should be glad that you weeded out someone weak while it is easy and not later on down the road. This could be a valuable lesson: Choose who you work with and trust very carefully!

If this guy can get up and jet on you this easily, think what would have happened after you actually started and financial and emotional stress enters the equation?

My advice is go find someone who you can really trust as a co-founder. Someone you know you can depend on when the going gets tough.
Yeah I tried baroque but it made my mind wander too. Distractions must die.
Eh, not so bad. Some EC2 instances crashed. I take that for granted. If they'd lost S3 data, I'd think twice about using them going forward.
Ebay admits it overpaid for Skype
tech.coop is great!
I'm exclusively indie rock. You're a bit softer in taste than I, but there's some overlap. The Arcade Fire is one of the best bands playing right now. Their live show is astoundingly good...best I've seen in years.

My faves are: Spoon, Midlake, Fugazi, Death from Above 1979, Voxtrot, Mission of Burma, Cat Power, The Lemonheads.

When I'm working I'm most productive with things that have no lyrics or illegible lyrics, but are familiar. Jesu, The Fucking Champs, and electronica like Booka Shade and Apparat. Embarrassingly, perhaps, I'm totally loving working to old school metal lately--some from before my time, actually, but I like it anyway--Judas Priest, in particular. Also stuff I liked in high school and college: Carcass, Godflesh, Neurosis.

I made a list of my favorite tracks at emusic a while back (need to update it with Arcade Fire and a few other recent faves):

http://www.emusic.com/lists/showlist.html?lid=564452&p=1

You can't beat emusic if you like indie music. It's cheap, non-DRM, and they've got nearly all of the best bands and labels.
Hmmm, the "lessons learned" are far from obvious for me. What were the performance criteria for Skype? Were they realistic, were they meant to be realistic? Without the details it just looks like accounting trickery.
Japanese, Scared by 'Second Life,' Get Own Virtual World
Our website launched today! What think?
We're calling it ESER and it's basically caller-id for Wikipedia. See:

http://www.eser.org

You type in a Wikipedia topic, and it returns the identities of all of the anonymous editors for that topic.

Thoughts, suggestions, comments, criticisms?

Thanks
Data memory aligned or not ?
Apples & Oranges.
Music with VOCALS?

You guys have some weak taste in programming music. Only the hardest electronic for me. Stuff that makes you feel like adrenaline is being injected into your brain with a firehose, yet predictable and non-distracting. Who else listens to that?
Cool, but what I think depends on what you want to do with it. If it's just a handy utility, it works pretty well. If you want people to come back from time to time, you need to add more stuff. Stats might be interesting.
Do you keep delaying things? Eat that frog!
That is quite possibly the most awesome thing I have seen in a long time. I wonder how much he charged; the article doesn't say.
Telefon Tel Aviv! or any kind of good intelligent dance music.... (check lastfm...)
gotta love guitar hero music :).

http://anywhere.fm/derek/guitar_hero
http://anywhere.fm/derek/freezepop!
SEOS : The Card Counters of the Internet
Google is the casino. Google gives us free stuff, and provides the entertaining environment - the web as Las Vegas. YouTube, Picassa, Google News.. they are the pirate ship, the fountain show, the fake Paris streets of Las Vegas.
If your answers are less than 120 words that's fine.
Punk/Hardcore (bands like Bane, Paint it Black, Modern Life is War, Good Clean Fun, Minor Threat, Gorilla Biscuits) mostly, with some Pink Floyd and Violent Femmes thrown in there for good measure.
Thanks, I tried to find the right balance between enough content and over-filling the page.

Still, it's intended to be more than just a simple feed reader.

The recommendations system (only ahem slightly behind schedule), based on a system of shared inputs, is what will really make it stand out (or not).
Then you should try http://wazee.org/ as streaming radio.
YCNews down?
I was not able to access YC since last 1 hr. Was it a planned downtime?
Is there a reasonably mature web framework for SBCL?
The sky is falling!!!
Are you talking about Vitalic, by any chance?
Database Management Systems: The end of an architectural era (MIT paper)
The paper goes through how databases should be written with modern CPU, memory, and network resources. It's a fun an interesting read. Well worth your time.
Debugging is tedious, non-determinate, and requires a lot of knowledge recall. Not usually "requiring creativity or higher level thought"
Have a banana.
Kraftwerk, DMX Krew, Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, Autechre, IT & My Computer, anonymous minimal house, Daft Punk

Radiohead, Modest Mouse, Jose Gonzales, The Knife,

Timbaland
* metal (heavy metal, progressive metal, death metal, some goth...), rock, jazz, some electronic music...

You can check my tastes: http://last.fm/user/egimenez :P
Even thought I don't listen to rap that much, Method Man works for me. I find rap like that, where it's just a constant flow of lyrics and rhymes, really gets me going.

http://zviband.com/2007/09/30/getting-in-the-zone/
Since the application is submitted on the web, they might be reading it on the web. Ruthlessly cut text. Some tips here:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/intro-text.html
Rails makes it feel like I cheated
Last night I decided to take the dive and try building a website in ROR. I had no prior experience, but I did have the new Agile Programming book. And after four hours I have to say I feel like I cheated. I was able to create a fully administrable website, with almost no coding on my part and very little learning curve. It was almost too easy. Anyone else have a similar experience with ROR or any other framework. I tried Django, but I couldn't even get that setup properly, so I gave up on it for now.
Do Corporate Wikis Suck?
How some different companies have used wikis. The big question Dovetail asks is whether these wikis should be completely public and who should be able to edit them. Wikis are probably better for a startup from my experience
Didn't really enjoyed the video, I guess I'm not part of their targeted segment...
Edison as I Know Him by Henry Ford. Around page 5? Edison was really happy with the "power plant" in the car idea of the internal combustion engine.
Oddly enough - game and movie soundtracks. Mostly game though, because it's music designed to be ignored.

I knew a coder who listened to the Muppets Christmas Sing-Along on repeat for about 10 hours during a marathon coding session. At about hour 9 she started to feel like she had lost her mind.

Edit: I just listened to Zero 7 on pandora, and it's awesome. I think I've found a new favorite.
Stormhoek blue monster wine update (join a Facebook group, send an email, get a half-case of wine)
Registry for ip addresses that send spam?
Maybe it already exists, if not, would it be interesting to have a registry for ip-addresses that send spam? Volunteers could submit the senders ip addresses for spam they receive (automated), everybody else could check their own ip address to see if their computer has become an unwitting spammer. Could be a widget that checks the computers IP address against the registry.

I guess it wouldn't work because the sender's ip address could easily be faked, or could it? Don't know enough about SMTP...

On a related note, how many nodes does the internet have? Would it be possible to remember all possible spamming ip addresses in memory (4GB perhaps) -> I guess it should be, for the time being (unless EVERY device is spamming, I think there are more devices on the internet than humans alive). I just remember the article about mailinator, they manage to run their service on one server by keeping everything in memory.

In fact, mailinator could probably provide that kind of service.
If YC news is down, how did you post that article? ;-)
Yes, thoroughly planned by Kismet.
I have backend access ;-)
OK, thinking on - it's probably all bullshit, but anyway, it wouldn't have to be limited to spam. Victims of DDoS attacks could also register the ip-addresses of their attackers.

There could be a simple website, you call it and see if your ip address was involved in strange activity (with a probability - obviously the bad guys would try to submit false addresses). If another DDoS would make the news, perhaps a lot of people would check the address. Maybe a lot of Trojan horses could be purged as a result.