skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, the hope is that Google will get things right that Sun didn't. Developing for J2ME isn't much fun, and, like a lot of Java ick, is full of things like "JSR 69", which of course makes you go look up wtf that JSR is if you haven't memorized it.
Invest it to grow to sixty billion and use it to build a space elevator, duh.
"... Grr. Idiots. Keep linux on the server side ... and you're going to have 10,000+ MSFT programmers dumped on the labor market. ..."

It doesn't really matter what we think, "Free Software" [0] is going to prevail. There is also no reason MS can't co-exist. The difference is this time the user choice will be on things other than marketing or dodgy tactics.

Most important of all there is the freedoms that comes along with this choice. [1]

[0] Free software, not to be confused with Open Source software ~ http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point.h...

[1] The Free Software Definition, http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
this is why i like google video. it doesn't have a limit on what you can upload and it's a good place to find lectures
IBM, Cognos, and the End of Best-of-Breed
The Internet as a model of modern cities (Translated Gr - En)
Seems like a reasonable goal to me. I already know that a number of people use POPFile to do things like sort "interesting" from "uninteresting" messages (e.g. one journalist uses POPFile to automatically filter out press releases that don't interest him).

However, one issue with comments is that they can be short leaving not a lot of text to work with.

John.
I came to Javascript from Ruby/Scheme/Haskell, so when I had to call the Yahoo Search API with a callback, sometimes with two or more searches concurrently, I thought, oh, I'll store the continuation, because they only allow /[A-Za-z0-9.]+/ as characters in the callback.

var fns = [];

function gensym() { return $R(0,20).toArray().map(function(){return String.fromCharCode(Math.random()*26+65)}).join('') }

function storefunc(f) { var g = gensym(); fns[g] = f; return 'fns.'+g }

function jsonk(url,hash,k) {
var s = document.createElement('script');

s.src = url+'?'+$H(hash).merge({'callback': storefunc(k)}).toQueryString();

document.body.appendChild(s);

return s.src

}

I learned gensym and web-read-k in Scheme at Brown (thanks, Shriram!), and jsonk turned out to be pretty useful, because the same comtinuation-passing style that's available when you do XHRs now becomes available when you do json requests from a different domain, if they have a callback parameter. (I brought this code to Songkick, and we shortened callback to k.)
At least for a while: Not have anything to do with computers. No looking at a monitor.

What I would do? Snowboard & learn to surf. Paint.
You write it in Java and then it's compiled to their own proprietary virtual machine - Davlik. Rather than Jython, I'd hope for a tool that would turn python straight onto Davlik bytecode.

Hopefully there should be either documentation/source for the VM at some point or an enterprising person is reverse engineering it as we speak.
I don't remember exactly how many hours I worked on http://l8tr.org/, but it wasn't more than a day. Now l8tr gets constant use, but I'd hardly call it a start-up. Tagmindr sounds similar, a useful little thing that happens to be on the web.

John.
Girls are only a waste of time if they don't like you.
This has been discussed many times before - try searching for it.

You definitely need a business bank account.

Since you have a partner, perhaps seeing a lawyer would be a good idea - you could consider things like vesting, too.
Debugging With Firebug
Agreed. Authorize.net is problematic. Not really because of Authorize.net, but because you have to tie it to merchant services--and every one I've used with Authorize.net has been uniformly awful. Everything is targeted to businesses with card reading equipment, rather than online processing--all of the folks at the merchant services companies are baffled by questions about online stuff (and Authorize.net refer you to the merchant services people for a wide array of queries). It's just a poorly matched set of tools.

API support for Authorize.net is excellent, though...that's the only reason I use it. Some weekend I'm going to convert to Google Checkout or something else.
Its not really true that people will not pay for what they can get for free.
If it is a lot more convenient to pay a small amount of money than to find something for free, I think most people will choose to pay.
KAZE : Ghost Warrior (HONOR IS LIFE)

One Person,
Two Computers,
Six Months

+

He show you all details in his book.

http://www.kazeghostwarrior.com/flash/index.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1556222270
That's true. I used allofmp3 for my music before Oink came around. $1-2 was perfectly reasonable to pay for an album in my preferred non-DRM format. However, in the post Oink era, it is much easier and more convienient to not pay for music. I don't think the RIAA will ever come up with a solution more convenient than Oink and its successors.
The Courtney Love speech referenced was plagiarized from this essay by In Utero producer Steve Albini. http://www.negativland.com/albini.html
I have been waiting for this since I saw Killerbean 2.

I will pay to view this film.
Ask YC: are you a UK-based hacker, or working on a startup in the UK?
I'm suprised how few UK startups and hackers I've seen here. Where are you, and what are you working on? Or have you all moved to the valley?
Grades do not matter. Accomplishments matter. If you have no other accomplishments, grades will be the default accomplishment that you will be judged against for comparison. So really, you are in complete control of whether or not grades will matter. Of course this means applying yourself.

Likewise, your future degree has an expiration date. I would estimate about a year from walking. Your degree will start to smell if you have no accomplishments to back it up. Each year past graduation, the education section of your resume should be bumped farther down the page. Eventually, it should become a matter of whether or not you have room to include your education at all. Your education should become a trivia fact. A small talk subject before discussing what you have done.

PS: I am of the opinion that anyone completing a four-year degree with a 4.0 grade point average did not get their money's worth out of college.
I'm in London, working on a web app for helping people share and organise stuff.
I am just starting out and trying to get a couple of start-ups off the ground. I am based in Leeds (http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&q=leeds&oe=UTF-8...) and my current concern is about finding talent in the north. Everything I have read so far - including most of the stuff on YC News - suggests that I will have to go down south to London or Cambridge, or up-sticks and move to 'the valley'. However, recent networking events have introduced me to local talent and so things are looking more optimistic.
And that coming from a guy whose name is 'merkin' :-)
Electrical engineering is interesting from an applied physics/mathematical standpoint. From the point of view of day-to-day work, a large segment of it has been reduced to providing a life support system for the microprocessor, which, you guessed it, runs software. Almost every EE I know is a programmer. Analog electronics, one of my early interests, has been pretty much reduced to power supply design and maybe some mixed-signal modem design. On the low end, there are advances in materials that enable Moore's law, but this is more applied physics than EE. Control theory jobs are almost nonexistent outside academia.

A lot of the higher level mathematics is cool: I personally liked dsp and stochastic systems but it got repetitive. Most CS programs offer similar math anyway. I wanted to go deeper into how the math was developed.

In short, the traditional electrical engineering field is being heavily encroached by software and the high end math isn't interesting enough. Which is why, if I had to do it all over, I would have done math, CS, physics, a lot of chem, and maybe an EE course or two. Boucher is right, it is a very difficult major, but boot camp is difficult too. I just wish it were more relevant to what is going on.
I agree with you on the difficulty, believe me. If you make it through that curriculum almost anywhere, you are the real deal. Read my reply to falsestprophet for the rest of the response.
I'm in london, working on a citizen journalism site (www.scribblesheet.co.uk)
Lisp NYC Tonight (Nov. 13): Rich Hickey on Clojure, A Dynamic Language for the Java Virtual Machine
I'm in London, working on a journey planner.
Keen to meet hackers in the UK. Drop me a line
at enginedriver at telltrains dot com

BTW, my site is www.telltrains.com
Talk to a lawyer and an accountant. It'll be well worth the couple hundred dollars.
I'm in London, finishing a PhD actually, but after that...
In Guildford, have a few ideas for startups, but not gone as far as actually doing anything about it. Yet.
I'm london - hedge fund.
...I'd rather not take advice from a pirate. Or Disney.
In Cambridge incubating an idea. Cambridge is a great place for entrepreneurship.
London.

echion - I'm doing some research in the healthcare area for a startup and am interested in speaking to anyone involved in a hedge fund and healthcare that works with firms like Gerson Lehman Group. Do you have any suggestions for appropriate individuals or organisation in London to contact?
World's First 28 qubit Quantum Computer Demonstrated
Ultra-portable Apple notebook to splash down at Macworld Expo
Hey - if you are looking for FX trading API or STP people at any point, please get in touch :) (My contract is likely to be up at end of the year)

I'm working on an online music startup in my spare time, based in Islington.
I'm in Southampton, Hampshire. Currently hacking away at a web app which has something to do with online storage. In the progress of registering the company.

Will be hopefully moving to Cambridge at some point (that is if I don't run out of money entirely).
Bristol based here. There plenty of UK startups but they're mostly busy working isntead of posting on here :p
In London. Working on collaboration software.

If anyone has the leadership ability to organize a meetup - I would be very interested.

http://www.jettask.com/
I would think short comments are a stupid-positive flag all by themselves, though. It's very rare for few words to carry great meaning online; in this case, a manual "this is wise" button may be appropriate.
Hi, ian here from Songkick (YC summer '07 batch). We're based in East London. If you're UK based get in touch - can introduce you to other hackers in the UK doing/interested in start-ups. We'll organise some drinks soon. You can reach us at founders at songkick dot com.
There are several UK startups funded by YC, so we exist! Auctomatic, Sitepass, Songkick and a few in the new batch.

Visas are difficult but otherwise I'd recommend moving to the Valley, or at least visiting.

How about getting together at this?

http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/events/Silicon+Valley+Comes+to+Oxfor...

Myself and Harjeet will be there.
Get traffic with sites like digg, here's a list to help you
We'll do it. Hit us with your emails: founders at songkick dot com.
This doesn't surprise me. I'm in a different part of Europe that's getting the iPhone in a few days, and I won't be rushing out to buy it. Sure, it looks like a nice piece of kit, but if I'm going to upgrade from my RAZR...

1. 3G please. Since the iPhone is expensive I expect it to be able to act as a decent modem for my MacBook Pro when I'm on the road. EDGE has a theoretical top speed of 200Kbps, but is more like 90Kbps in practice. Whereas I can go out and get a 3G+ (up to 36Mbps) modem for my computer for 9 EUR plus a contract.

2. Poor camera at price point. The Nokia N95 is similarly priced but has a much better camera (5 megapixel with a Zeiss lens and a flash).

3. While we're on the topic of the similarly priced N95 it also has GPS and is 3G+ and EDGE so satisfies point #1. And it has WiFi. The N95 probably loses on the screen and the "Apple experience" of very well integrated applications. Also, it's kind of ugly.

4. Non-interchangeable battery. This is a big deal for anyone like me who travels a lot.

So the iPhone looks expensive, nicely packaged, but not compelling. I'll wait for v2.

John.
I read about that event somewhere, but isn't it for Oxford students only?
In Sheffield, South Yorkshire.

Two of us working on a web service that should make blogging more 'two-way' and social, as opposed to the rather one-way broadcast activity than it is at present. Hopefully it will help web-surfing be a far richer reading experience and encourage higher quality Internet conversations.
Paul Erdos reportedly worked 18 hours a day on mathematics for most of his life, writing 1500 papers in the process.
Cambridge does seem to have a lot going for it with the science park etc (I'm based not too far away in Ipswich).

Would be interested how other peoples experiences have been regarding getting funding though (I haven't got that far yet).
In East London, bootstrapping a social mobile music thing :-)
Hmmmm, just as I thought, everyone is down south! Could people please expand on the merits of being down south: is it easier to find funding, hackers, etc?
Ah, so you're ready to change the argument to counting applications. Nobody's arguing that the count of Lisp applications is high. I'd only argue that the success stories are out there.
A syntax-higlighting JavaScript editor in JavaScript
The link is there for the additional reason that you are still promoting Snipshot. This is good news for me, because integrating Snipshot with ourdoings.com is in my plans, and I wouldn't want them to disappear. That they recently added a Pro version seems a good sign.
An Economist Solves The Mysteries of Dating
its a great bit of kit but too expensive, especially as they'll be better versions in 6 months

I'll keep my Sony Ericsson
Day to day? Much the same thing, actually.
DHS' SkunkWorks Needs to meet Y Combinator
Paypal, to give you one data point. I use Scheme. I don't know whether to recommend it or not since I haven't tried multiple gateways.
I got 4.2 on a 5-point scale at MIT. I graduated in 1990.

Know what's interesting? You're the first person to ask me that, as far as I can recall.
When you're thinking hypothetically about incorporating in the future, YC is a great place to get feedback. When you have multiple founders, and you're about to launch, and provide paid services, you should be asking different questions. Where do I find a good lawyer? How much should I expect to pay?
Any theories about why it did so much better in the US? Do US buyers have lower standards? Are they richer? Do they like the Apple brand more? Or is there something broken about the iPhone they launched in the UK?
3 guys in London, and myself in Bristol working on our project concept at the moment
YC can get away with providing such small amounts of seed funding because of the nature of the companies and founders they fund -- companies with almost zero capital costs and no marginal cost of product, and founders who are willing to work for equity.

The DHS Skunkworks funds projects which require significant capital costs and are expensive to scale up -- and because the government doesn't want to end up paying market rates for the product of R&D they funded, they have to pay their "founders" with cash instead of equity.

The YC model works fine when applied to the right fields, but notion that YC's success can be replicated in completely different fields is downright silly.
Such speculation is counterproductive.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=74030
Is FreeRice.com making $150K a day?
OK -- normally I frown on reposts of stuff on the front page of other major news sites, but I figured this one fits right in here.
Pretty much summed up on the second page of the link, the market is much more competitive here: people are used to 3G, cheap contracts and discounted handsets, and there are established competing devices. Basically, the US mobile market is quite backwards compared to Europe, so the iphone looks more attractive there. Also, there are probably more, and more fanatical Apple fans in the US.
I'm one of the co-founder's of Zamzar which has been live for about a year now. (http://www.zamzar.com)

I'm based in Southampton and interested in the meetup that the Songkick guys are mooting - you could always post the details on Hacker News ?
College matters more than high school because (for most people) the intellectual standards are so much higher.
Probably a good idea to start a new thread for that sometime. Its about time for a UK meetup so thanks for taking the initiative!
Actually, inflation is caused by the increase in the money supply. While certainly goods derived from high energy usage will become more expensive as the cost of energy increases, that isn't the same as inflation.

Measures of the CPI that remove these derivative effects are better. They demonstrate the true responsibility of the fed, much more than a half measure of the cost of petroleum.
Cool - sign me up!
I am working with online storage as well. I see it as a smaller part of a bigger system. Get in touch - it would be good to swap stories.
1) As early as possible. If your company is a success, the earlier you start it the better(because when you first start and issue shares/units to yourself and your partner, the company is worth very little. Later on, if you raise money, the company will be worth more and if you wait until then to issue shares to yourself you'll have to pay taxes on that). However, doing all this stuff is a pain in the butt and it costs hundreds to many thousands. An LLC usually is the cheapest way to go.

2) VC's can only invest in C corps. S corp is only good if you have profits.

3) Get a good lawyer. Talk to friends who have done startups and get a referral.

4) If you do a Corp as opposed to an LLC, it will most likely be in DE. You have to register as a foreign entity in the states you do business in(another $500 or so).

5) I recommend getting shared space. If that's not an option, get a P.O. Box. Depending on what your company does, using a personal address might be fine.

6) Get a good lawyer and a good accountant. The less time you spend on this stuff(I'm assuming your strengths are in building the product or sales and not paperwork) the better.

7) Have a partnership agreement. If you Incorporate, the lawyers will work this out. But at the very least, make sure you have a written, signed partnership agreement detailing everyone's responsibilities. Even if its your brother, just do it.

8) Get a checking account. Stay away from credit cards.

If you are an internet startup and will be raising capital, traction/the product is important and revenue less so.
Anything else, focus on getting customers.
I wonder if they could sell the reversed results to teenagers as an non-teen filter. Something that would guarantee they only see their "stupid" peers comments. No more articles about boring stuff, no more long winded intelligent debate just pure unadulterated LOLs.
Wow!!! That was amazing. And yes, your story is very inspirational.

Thank you. Looking forward to seeing the film on the big screen...
I'm working for 'social betworking' starup http://www.bragster.com/ in East London. I'm originally from the North West and often keep an eye out for jobs back there but they usually pay ridiculously low amounts so all the hackers congregate in or around London. Also there are loads of opportunities to network around London which are all but non-existent in the North.
I'm scraping something together in Edinburgh.
Ideas to monetize new artifical intelligence
I've developed a new machine learning algorithm that understands the relationship between its inputs better and outperforms existing algorithms on almost every test I've done, and I'm looking for new ideas as to how to monetize it.
Already working on trading commodities with it, which is progressing but still hasn't reached the point where its a money making scheme.
Also working on some CAD (computer assisted diagnosis) applications.

Any ideas?
I'm in Edinburgh. Working on a collaborative web search startup.
not sure i trust a 2-h old account with 1 karma... but it's nice to offer.
Hello YC! Will you help us stress test our new file hosting start up? (No ads, no tricks)
We're a couple of young developers who have been working on a distributed scalable online storage solution. We rolled out our first public release today and need some help just stress testing the system under real world load. Would you help us?

Thanks for your time and consideration.
Irish hacker here. We are currently in stealth mode while we work on our project.
Works nicely for me, I uploaded a 5 page essay I write recently :P I like the layout/design; it focuses on functionality.
The site seems pretty speedy, kudos on that already. It's like an all purpose imageshack. I'll start using it from now on.
>And who likes pain?

Let me guess, you?

I remember seeing a 3D JS/DOM 1st person shooter and a raytracer in JS, wonderful intelectual excercises. Probably not products.
Heh, I'm in Ireland too. We should meet up.
Hi. We're here - based in Newcastle. Existing business, however we've two startups underway that are being run by two independent teams. I'm trying to oversee them and help where needed as at 37 years old I get too tired for all-nighters!! Just as a note though, I often go out to San Jose etc to meet up with people
I'm dropping out of the University of Bath to work on tech startups full-time in London. Also in Winchester quite a lot as from there.
How about _proving_ that the algorithm works first. Prove it on something simple and verifiable like symbolic addition http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=75439. Here I go again with my own agenda, sorry...
Report: China Mobile talking to Apple on iPhone
Oil futures?
Patent and publish it. CAD is not limited by the algorithm so much as a lack new problems. However, if you can generate a little buzz you can become a consultant / start a consultant company.

PS: Many machine learning systems can trade off accuracy for efficiency so you might look into increasing efficiency vs. accuracy for some existing application.
Yeh, do you have aim or any other way to contact you?
You could also email me at bkmrkr at yahoo.com
Look east, young founders!
Departing co-founder of Bebo talks about leaving, Facebook, Friendster and more
Hey, i hope the sponsors of this site don't mind me offering help to anyone interested in building an international software brand. I was the development director at Codemasters and built and sold M$$$$$$$$$ software brands with hackers. I'm a follower of master hacker Paul Graham...see me....www.cibermole.com. Kent/England.
Blue Gene's supercomputer dominance isn't fading at Livermore lab