skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
hivgene.com was available and directly related to the first iteration of our startup.

More recently, we were looking for names for something of an expanded version of the startup and my cofounder and we sat plugging away at instantdomainsearch.com and IMing each other available names as we found them. This got us xygene.com. I couldn't have asked for anything better.

I think we're just really, really lucky with domain names.
What Do Venture Capitalists Know?
Just flipping through, here's a sentence I never noticed before:

There is some thing very _American_ about Feynman breaking into safes during the Manhatten project

American? Geez, I hope the internationale wasn't playing in the background when he wrote that. Stalin (and the soviet scientists) knew everything about the atom bomb the whole time because of people breaking into safes. Frankly, Feynman should have been hanged, if that comment is true--romanticism over the word 'hacker' notwithstanding.

EDIT: I'm going to head off a cliche'd argument in favor of such break-ins, that they detect defects in the system. First point: The authorities have no way of distinquishing happy-go-lucky hackers from spies, and second, the real protection against break-ins is, and always was, the noose, not a combination lock. The lock just makes it clear what is and isn't hands-off.
The Genius Bar can help you only so much
Remind me to never, ever, in a million years become your co-worker.

"You stole my stapler! The sentence is DEATH!"

Meanwhile, you are presumably aware that (a) the key atomic spy at Los Alamos (Klaus Fuchs) was a co-inventor of the bomb and didn't need to break into anything in order to learn any secrets; that (b) as a co-inventor of the bomb himself, Feynman presumably had sufficient clearance to read the documents inside the safes that he opened; and that (c) nobody ever accused Feynman of being a spy. Well, until you, anyway.

Feynman did confess, in his autobiography, that he borrowed Klaus Fuchs' car once, on the occasion of his wife's death. Presumably you would only have sentenced him to ten years of hard labor for that.
In the scheme of Americans who should be hanged for treason, Feynman wouldn't be at the top of the list.
The name of you compnay and the name of the domain do NOT have to be the same. It does help, however.

Pick a name that fits your company and then a suitable domain, if your compnay works then buy the exact domain,

ie. XYZ domain XYZLLC.com or XYandZ.com and so on.
One thing to be careful of here. If you intend to implement the idea (rather than just patent it) doing the search puts you at risk to some degree. If you do the search yourself (possibly not finding the relevant patent) and then do the implementation anyway, you are at risk for "willful infringement". This is all really murky and you probably want to talk with an attorney if you are serious.

Link with some relevant info:
http://wistechnology.com/article.php?id=1303
"Meanwhile, you are presumably aware that..."

Meanwhile you are presumably aware that breaking into a top secret military safe during a war (or at any time) is a federal crime, and that exceptions cannot be made based upon our personal preferences in celebrity scientists, and that the atomic bomb was, in fact, not a stapler, but a device capable of killing millions of people. You are probably also aware that there were co-inventors of the atomic bomb who did, in fact, pass secrets onto the soviets, and you are aware that a person breaking into a safe would be suspect #1 for that in addition to the more specific crime of breaking into a safe.

You are probably also aware that security clearances are compartmentalized on a need-to-know basis and that having such a security clearance does not entitle you to all secrets at that level. No doubt you are also aware that the "hacker" ethics that evolved in-between games of hunt-the-wumpus at MIT are not universally applicable. You are probably also are aware that you are wrong in this line of arguing, and so I finish there.
bustaname.com
To get a bit more specific, I found an answer to a problem dealing with the implementation of encryption in a particular environment that, as far as I know, hasn't been done yet. I suppose that would fit in to the software algorithm category.

I've been reading up on encryption in general today in order to figure out if the solution is novel or not, and so far, it seems as though it is. Looks like I have a lot more reading to go, though.

Do you have any more tips for researching software patents?
Thanks. That's kind of along the lines of what I was thinking I would have to do. I figure if I can do a bunch of research and find out that what I'm thinking of is not patentable, it would save me a boatload of money. On the other hand, if I don't come up with anything, it would give me more of a reason to think that it is patentable and to go ahead and meet with a lawyer.
Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma in Lisp
Well, you can't patent ideas in the first place. And doing a google search isn't going to get you sued for willful infringement.
Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine
Bruce Schneier: Anonymity and the Netflix Dataset
Google may have finally figured out what to do with Google Apps
There are two steps, looking for similar patents, and reading them to decide if you'd be infringing.

I can't offer any tips for the former, but for the latter you may want to skip ahead to the 'claims' section: this is the part with the legal meat in it.
Next for Apple: Lossless iTunes Store
yes I can't even believe you would worry about SSL in CL at all. Definitely something to offload for a whole lot of reasons.
Yes I think the "unable to find people" thing is bogus - unless you are looking to pay bottom dollar and don't care at all (you just want "typists" as some people call them).

But otherwise, people will probably beg to have a go, if you are prepared to teach someone smart I am sure they could be productive in a few days, surely ?
The DOE has a similar project on a larger scale. Typically in these designs the fuel comes with the reactor, along with everything else: it is a sealed device. Once the fuel is spent, the reactor is shipped back to a plant, the waste disposed, and the case recycled and refueled.
New mobile phone accessory will allow people to "speak" through their ear
Apparently Toshiba is planning to pilot this (or something of the kind) in Galena, Alaska:

http://www.adn.com/front/story/4214182p-4226215c.html

http://www.kiyu.com/news1007_2.htm
Ask YC:  Who's doing new desktop apps?
Web applications seem to be all the rage right now, and rightfully so. Just curious to discuss the state of the art and state of utility of desktop applications.
speaking as someone who tried this route, don't bother. if you have a product named xyz, people expect it to be at xyz.com.

otherwise, you will lose the traffic that assumes xyz.com is your domain.

and not just from random visitors but important contacts like investors, who assumed we were at dropbox.com. even people who knew well that we were at getdropbox.com would routinely fire off emails to dropbox.com by accident.

the process sucks, but we're changing our name after wasting a lot of time hoping we could secure dropbox.com and going back and forth with the owner.
I used Global Prior Art, a boston based IP consulting firm for some quick and dirty patentability searches. They were cheap and very good. Saved us months of work by avoiding some patented approaches.
we:

1. picked a list of 50-60 words/prefixes/suffixes we liked

2. wrote a python script to generate permutations, and then

3. ran dig -f on the text file to see which weren't taken

4. scraped buydomains search results to see which ones were easily for sale.

absolutely everything else was a waste of time, although we're also working with a naming agency and that might be promising (but expensive).

amusingly, domains that were occupied by squatters or companies like buydomains were easier to deal with -- at least they're rational and the conversation, though annoying, is straightforward (arrive at a #.)

domains that are occupied but unused (and don't have a 'for sale' sign hanging up) are generally hopeless. if you get a response, you'll generally get some whacko who either won't sell it, or who will only sell for millions of dollars or something. you'll probably not believe me, and will learn this the hard way (just as pg told us months ago :))

ok enough bad news -- some links that might help:

http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/02/the_name_game.html

http://onstartups.com/home/tabid/3339/bid/223/The-Startup-Na...

http://foundread.com/2007/08/20/3-rules-for-naming-your-star...

and last and best (a 100+ page guide)

http://www.igorinternational.com/process/igor-naming-guide.p...

hope this helps -- it's a struggle :)
Doesn't that worry you a bit? I remember amazon having trouble re starting machines that had been up for several years. I think they ran into several problems. Boot sector demagnetization was one. I think they had problems with drives that could spin, but failed in such a way they couldn't start spinning.

Really, you should consider power cycling every 90 days or so, just to make sure you can restart. at least use several different brands of HD in your raid arrays.
uTest Gets $1.7M for Crowd-Sourced Quality Assurance
We are doing one as part of a desktop/web app.
I am, but it's for developers, not end-users.
TorrentSpy loses Calif. copyright lawsuit
http://instantdomainsearch.com/ works best for domain brainstorming!
I found this book to be very useful:

Patent Pending In 24 Hrs

http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Pending-Hours-Richard-Stim/dp/1...

I also bought (but haven't yet read):

http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Yourself-David-Pressman/dp/1413...

http://www.amazon.com/How-Make-Patent-Drawings-Companion/dp/...
Yeah, that is good advice. I'd do it if I cared at all about what was on them. They're just part of the "long tail" of hardware, long migrated off of. Now we just let them run for the novelty of saying, "look its been up for YEARS!" One does a webcam of the server room.

As a side note, every single production server we now use is a vmware instance... how do you count uptime there as it gets passed around various physical machines?
We had this discussion 52 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73112
Digg, like reddit now, suffered from a bout of tyranny of the masses. Hard to come back from there.
Are you crazy? The safes didn't provide security sufficient to keep spies out - some didn't even have the codes set to anything other than the default. Feynman strengthened the whole system. Most of the safe cracking was done in order to provide access for the owners of said safes. His activities were quite well known: would you presume to advise the corrections department at Los Alamos to hang their scientists leading their technical divisions?

Additionally, he kept Oak Ridge from blowing up when he noticed the water moderated uranium was stored closely enough to be near-critical. Were he hanged, there would have been hundreds of direct deaths, and the entire effort would have been held up for months: they kept all their enriching equipment there, not to mention that it housed their enrichment experts.
5 Infrastructure Tips for Startups
How ridiculous. He presents a very simple, easy to read recursive function as the solution, but claims "This is risky: what if someone redefines or deletes the method? Can it be done without defining any methods, to prevent this problem?"

He then provides a much larger, incredibly harder to understand YCombinator method and mixes it into the Object class. How is that not a method with the same downsides as the recursive one?

This is why I still have no idea what the ycombinator is... every explanation is as inane as this one. Does anyone have a simple explanation of it, where either (a) the ycombinator solves a problem more simply or (b) the ycombinator is the only tool to solve a problem ?
Most large tech companies have an explicit prohibition on non-lawyers doing patent searches. At all.

Doing the patent search won't get you sued, but if you are sued and they win, the fact that you did the search means that they can hit you for triple damages.

I've leave the "you can't patent ideas" piece alone here because I think that is semantics.
Ask 37signals: 10 ways to "get ink"
PipesCamp , unconference for Yahoo! Pipes enthusiasts
the first ever pipesCamp uconference, dedicated to showcase,discuss and explore how yahoo! pipes can be used by bloggers, startups, developers and end-users alike - is going to be held in december 23rd, 2007 in chennai,india. also featured is a "best pipes" showcase contest open to all. more info on the wiki...
Are you suggesting that going back to the db each time is more scalable, or that I am better off using some kind of method level cache?

Yes and yes.

This is a really long and deep topic. There are all sorts of reasons why sessions are not a good idea. But let's stick to scalability.

If you're using your session as a sort of cache for objects, that's probably okay (although, consider using something designed for this, like memcached). The point is, you ought to be able to reconstruct all the objects you need from just the request parameters.

This is a pretty good article about it all.

"Session State is Evil" -- http://davidvancouvering.blogspot.com/2007/09/session-state-...
Is your message memorable? [old but relevant article]
Is your app's message memorable?
Goes to show why you shouldn't take 11 million in funding when you're a social news site. How much do you think Kevin's going to take home if they sell for $10-20 million?

Maybe enough for a new pair of cargo pants and a latte.
Find out what domain name you can get first, and go from there.
They may not be exactly helpful, but they're relevant:

http://pogue.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/12/06/the-dr-seuss-jumbl...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11...
I think this is a really good point. The first liquid fueled rockets didn't fly nearly as high as solid fuel ones either.

That said the handful employees I know at google use MS office. That seems odd to me.
Some pages are missing... go to http://paulgraham.com/hp.html for the full essay.
Better flight stats results
The only thing that has prevented nuclear genocide is mutually-assured destruction. If the U.S. could've gotten away with it, who knows how many cultures we'd have nuked in pursuit of the American Dream.

If anything, the spies who stole U.S. secrets inadvertently did the world a favor. Countries with a nuclear arsenal don't get invaded.

If Iraq had had nukes, we might have made major strides to become energy independent by now, instead of thinking it was easier to go in there, beat them up, and steal their oil.
That's also the price of orange juice at Whole Foods.
Tweeterboard: Who Does That Person on Twitter Think They Are?
Cracking the Netflix Prize dataset's anonymity
I'm not convinced Digg has experienced any sort of downfall yet.
Well... if it were a red Swingline stapler...
Top 10 design priorities with high ROI
Amazon Helping To Change The Business Of Music
At 71, Physics Professor Is a Web Star
Let's see anything better.
> we are actually trying to define intelligence through IQ tests, for example

Fail. IQ tests only measure how well you do on IQ tests.

> The problem here is that not every human being is intelligent

Unless they're in a vegetative state, they are more intelligent than any artificial system, so far.

> Is that the way you formulate tasks for software engineers?

The only way to make a specification so precise that it does exactly what you want is to implement it, and then the code itself becomes the specification.
This is so true. The starting developer will feel an immediate response, without (typically) first having to install/configure the webserver, compile code, setup deployment scripts etc.

PHP is definitely not a good language to start programming at first (for that I'd recommend Scheme, ala SICP) but it's definitely a great one for a My First Website project.
I just interviewed at this place: http://www.trulia.com

They have quite a number of interesting graphical displays (one are 'heat maps' showing housing prices, granulated at the level of neighborhoods, and another is a visualization of how a city have evolved over time).

I think I may be working with them to figure out how to grab unusual data and pull out all kinds of interesting correlations useful to the public.
Be sure that you have

ProxyRequests Off

specified, with <Proxy [asterisk]> deny from all (or allowing just as needed). E.g. in Ubuntu, make SURE you link to proxy.conf from mods-enabled, because Apache has a horrendous bug where if it doesn't see that option in a config file it defaults to ON.

Which means people can joy-ride using your server as an open proxy.

I don't know what possessed them to make that an opt-OUT.

<Proxy *> -- news. yc markup bug, can't specify a single asterisk if italic markup follows.
I'm wondering if the problems happened because of some sort of economic downturn, or lack of available credit. I thought most of the time people just re mortgaged after the 2-3 year fixed deal.
Data Mattress FTW
Scheme over Common Lisp
Make sure to pick a name that can be pronounced two different ways. It's better when the prevailing pronunciation is the one you don't use.

Doubles the startup excitement!
A PC productivity suite's main competition was pen and paper. An online productivity suite is similar (by design) to existing PC applications. One must be a PC user before an Internet user.

Yes, there is a market, and it's growing, but it's not going to make the next Microsoft until somebody discovers as big a value add as MS Office was to pen and paper.
There is a real problem in teaching someone lisp, when they had no prior experience with functional languages and too much experience with imperative ones.

You need to rewire your brain and think differently.

Which is probably the exact reason why it is so highly recommended that you go out and learn it, even if you'll never write a single LOC in it professionally.
MS Office is a better application overall unless you need a specific feature of Google Docs like "free," "no install," and "easier to collaborate remotely." None of these apply at a big company.
Sorry, I meant that the authors themselves say that it's designed as one - i.e. there's no 'appears to be' about it.

But not only was I unclear, in hindsight it was a total nitpick to boot. :)
Thanks for the links. I wonder how long it will be until someone puts one in Django.
Learn many languages as soon as you feel interested. See programing from as many points of view as possible.
We just launched SpiderOak: http://www.spideroak.com
One thing you can do is to ask a company to do a patent landscape for you. There a few around (can't remember their name) and they charge a few grand to do it for you. The results usually come in within a week or two.

The instructions for them would be to look at encryption in general with particular focus on the environment you're talking about.

Also, try freepatentsonline.com instead of the USPTO's website. I find it's much easier on the eyes and the search a bit more human-friendly.

Pierre
So, what you mean by saying something is more intelligent than something else? What criteria are you using to evaluate that?

And yes, it's the way programming works - when you know what you are trying to achieve. Software is about input and output and unless they are deterministic, you can't write code.
The only problem is everyone is reading the same information, so by following those rules you just blend in even more. "There is no substitute for originality" --- By Me
WoW, great read. There are people making millions on spam. Mostly because it works. Spam has a higher click-tru rate then adsense
It would be gratuitous to mention what orifice the internet allows people to speak out of.
I recently thought about a project called "anarchypedia", which would simply be a wikipedia without any editors. I wonder what would happen? Perhaps there would also be bot-wars, with spammer-bots mending articles into spam and corrector-bots watching over the articles and fixing them back again.

Like I think for IRC, if you want to stay in control of your channel, you have to run a bot that keeps the admin rights for you? Similarly, to keep in control of an article on anarchypedia, you have to keep a corrector-bot running...

I'd love to try this out, but I don't know how to set up an anonymous server. Can't risk to be liable for the stuff people might be putting on that site.
Some of these are sort of obviated by being a decent admin yourself.
Start-Up sells solar panels that are cheaper than coal power
GPUs are a dying breed
http://getdropbox.com
WiiMote Guitar Hack [Video]
I don't know much about common lisp (compared to scheme) but pretty much every bit I have seen (which is not that much) has nothing to do with functional (in the "strict" sense). I would think it would be easier to pick up then say haskell, in terms of the "head adjustment" factor (which is also a bit of a bogus argument, anyone who would have an interest in working on a startup using CL would surely have spent some time in functional land anyway).
Hero Worship in IT - Good or Bad?
It's always exciting to hear someone eager starting out. The only secret is to keep being interested and not give up on yourself. If you're looking for a fun problem to solve, try writing a brute-force sudoku solver. That could be fun in the context of a webapp. I'd also recommend getting a solid grounding in SQL and designing schemas. You can do a lot of this by brainstorming applications and then working out how you'd design the schema. You don't actually have to write it, and the process can be a good way to get a feel for whether an application will be simple or hard.
Web hosting recommendations?
I'm looking to get a VPS (or other web hosting service--enlighten me if I should be getting something else) for a few personal projects of mine. Any suggestions for good companies to look at?

My requirements:

- root access to the server (I want to be able to install whatever I want)

- good out-of-box performance--I once worked on a 1&1 VPS that segfaulted every few hours; got rid of it before figuring out why

- disk space, bandwidth, hardware, cpu speed aren't so important.
The sad thing is, if they seriously tried, Google could easily solve lost luggage problems. All they need are a few RFID tags...
corenetworks.net have been really good, dedicated servers down to 25 bucks per month.
Adwords is good for testing out headlines and copy, but are you seeing much variation based solely on changing domain names?
He hits many of the reasons why I never gave CL a try. Scheme just seemed to fit in my head easier, made more sense and of course continuations. Though to be fair, don't many CLs have some support for continuations, outside of CPS?
Wow. Great find - if this is true this would be wonderful for the world.

I hope that the costs targets remain stable. These are projections, after all.
you are not considering your position. if you are number one for your keyword your click through ratio will be higher no matter what. assuming all else is equal, bids, keywords, ads. your average position will be higher or lower depending on your quality score which is determined by several opaque factors which are hard to quantify.

i just dont know if adwords is the best way to test brand affinity.
People Looking for Google on Ask.com