skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
some of them go on to blow millions on "trying harder" on what is fundamentally impossible

:(

One of my big hopes for this is that fingers, I think, only have tendons going into them for movement - so tracking those tendons in the palm/back of hand covers the entire range of possible finger movements. If it's possible to type on a virtual keyboard without feeling the keys, it should be possible to pick up what you're "typing" from the tendon movement.

Most of the 'first class' ideas you think are being overlooked are actually the second case. 3D interfaces

3D interfaces are a daft idea; this is different. I can say that I completely believe that, and at the same time see it's exactly the sentiment that drives people to the behaviour you describe. I guess the proof of whether it really is different is whether it ever appears and works or not.

I've used a couple of exotic input devices or methods that work perfectly fine but stand no chance of general acceptance because people have no interest in learning how to use them.

Me too; I agree and slightly dislike that it is so.
It would be better to link to the actual blog post: http://www.pehub.com/37595/andreesen-horowitz-want-250-milli...

Not a blog-post-about-the-blog-post.
No, it wasn't. When someone starts off with what appears to be a limited understanding of the difference between replicated and distrbuted, lumps systems that are clearly _not_ key-value stores in with the list (apparently so that he can throw in an vague dismissal and move on), and then ends the whole lame wrap-up by declaring that he just decided to write his own version of a system that was already on his list (but was dismissed because he thought parts of it were too complex for him to understand) then warning bells should be going off in your head.
If you got stuck while moving at around 1000 MPH you have bigger problems.

And if you survived the crash - how would you get out? The capsule is unpowered, and they don't make cables long and strong enough to pull you out.

But assuming rescue was possible, I suppose they could drop small emergency coolant refill bags down to you.
Hmm I've been tracking this suit for a while, and didn't catch that. Whoops.

It's a fucking retarded name for a robotics company.
The article states that beautiful = useful.

I think that's one of the main points.
Are you calling josefresco a chimp?
That makes a lot of sense. When we lived in the wild discerning different shades of green would have been crucial. It is also known that women can see more shades of red, probably in order to be able to more effectively gather edible berries. Now blue, who needs it? ;-)
For a car you are 100% right - it's nearly all friction. But to accelerate to over 1000 MPH you need a lot of energy just to get started, and you have little chance of recovering it.

But an overland bullet train in a vacuum would be so much easier to build that the acceleration energy would be worth it.
This is a good issue to teach students about civil disobedience. If you are an A student and you refuse to turn your papers in to turnitin, are your teachers really going to fail you? No, they won't.

Especially since No Child Left Behind, A-level students are a prized asset to every school. Schools will really pay attention if a bunch of A-level students work together against a school policy, risking their own GPA. Send out a press release to the local press about your protest and your entire city will be working with you. Nobody likes these kinds of "guilty until proven innocent" policies.

Even a single student protesting alone really risks very little by refusing to submit his paper to turnitin. Teachers want their students to succeed, and it is difficult for them to explain to a parent "I gave your student a lower grade on a technicality even though his work was excellent."

Some teachers might try to play hard ball but if you are persistent you will win.
Darn. Its not available in safaribooks.com yet either. It looks interesting, but I'd like to get a look at it before buying.
I don't think it's programmers per se. Companies just don't think of design as part of the solution package. I've worked at many companies where you have new web projects and applications and we spend so much time architecting the solution and implementing it. When it comes to the design, - oh just slap on a nice stylesheet or have a visual/graphic designer polish it up.

Good design is more than just pretty graphics, but companies don't see it that way. And more often than not, programmers, who have no visual or usability training are put in a position where they must come up with a good interface and interaction design themselves.

For many companies that is the reality.
I added "hnsearch" link to each listing that executes a SearchYC query on the startup name.
For Top Secret Black projects, the buildings don't have windows and there are no phones and internet connections.
Good idea. It would be nice to have a JS widget ala Get Satisfaction that could be used to provide feedback without leaving a site.
If I described Google to you before they launched, could you have built it? Would you have? How about Digg? The iPhone? WordPress? Facebook? Amazon? Name 10 amazing startups and try to imagine how it could have hurt them if their biz plans were public.

Almost anyone who could possibly be a threat to you if they had your idea ALREADY HAS THEIR OWN IDEAS. Even if they don't, presumably you have dozens of competitors-- 1 or 2 more isn't going to change your shot at success. If you don't think you have ANY competitors, you are either stupid about your market or you truly have an invention on your hands and you should keep quiet.

Talking about your idea a LOT will make you smarter about your market and increase you shot at success. Do it, and do it a lot.
Given that list, if I was as successful as they require for this, I wouldn't want to sell!
I guess some people may be completely unable to grow their own business, but f you have a business that already has happy paying customers, then why sell out. It feels to me like you've already done the hard part.

http://www.jacksonfish.com/blog/2009/04/21/sell-or-sell-out/
It might just be me but I didn't realise that clicking on the like link was a vote for that startup. An up arrow or a plus sign might be more clear.
they're also 10 times more likely to say "shiver me timbers" when prompted.

actually I have downloaded music a lot in the past, from allofmp3.com and mp3sparks.com, and if I like it enough I do buy the actual CD because I want the complete package. Some music I purchased online through the Apple iTunes music store was so bad I wished I could return it. But no returns. Every CD store I know of will at least give you store credit.
Two Ways to Make the Most of Your Screen Size
In more detail: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chroma_subsampling
I suggest you to read the "Founders at work" book and look for common patterns among the successful founders.

Personally, I found exactly one thing in common - determination to get something done. That's it.
The women who believe that are the women who grew up in households where it was true, or who believe that they are worthless for some reason and don't deserve any better. A small minority of women, in fact.

If you see that mentality in most of the women you meet, then you're missing something about them or about the men they like. Or you're hanging out in strip clubs.
I think there is some promise in the circos technique, but the author would be well served to eliminate some of his rhetoric.

In particular, he should recall Tufte's advice that every visualization should serve to answer a question. Tables are very good for looking up information, in much the same way that a telephone book is good at providing the published phone number of a specific person or business. Despite reading through two examples, I am still unsure what relationships the visualization is particularly adept at highlighting.

I don't know what "agnostic to the data domain" means, but I assume that it suggests that the visualization has application regardless of the questions being asked of the data. That attitude implies that the author fails to understand what makes visualization interesting and useful in the first place.
If you want to slurp in some more data about the companies already in there, you can use the CrunchBase API: http://groups.google.com/group/crunchbase-api.
don't forget the CSRF/XSRF protection... http://hnstartups.com/startup/64/like
I thought about tags. I think it might be just better/easier/less cluttered to mention some keywords in the descriptions (which are searchable.)

If HNStartups blows up enough, I'll add them.

Thanks for the link to that wiki!
Most publications: Breaking News

Techcrunch: Broken News
It will largely depend on how well MS can control the vendors. In other words how they can prevent the vendors from installing crap on a computer. For the longest time computers would ship with 1GB of RAM with tons of applications in the startup. You really felt like you bought a car for $20K that can only go 20 miles per hour. Don't underestimate the importance of performance.
Google releases web browser plugin allowing the creation of interactive 3D applications
Rasmussen Survey: Nobody Listens to Scientists
Nicely done!

Ideas in no particular order: Have a master index page, with just startup names, for seeing overall size of wiki and one-click navigation to any one page. Offer browsing to the ordered list starting at letters other than 'A'. Make URLs guessable (and thus also SEO-friendly). Improve disclaimer that it's any HN user startup, not officially YC-related -- there's a small risk of confusion, better to be ahead of it.
While I'm all for supporting and using open source software, I don't quite get how doing that has anything to do with this story. Or are you talking about the Apple-controlled nature of the AppStore?
Sorry, I meant in social terms, rather than the technical or business model. The way I see people using Twitter reminds me of the social dynamics on IRC, just on a much larger scale.
Open source fonts won't be crappy for long once they're easily usable by everyone's browser.
on Vista the password prompt looks different depending on why you are needing to elevate privileges. This struck me as a pretty huge bug, as anyone who managed to spawn a popup window might seem equally credible to the one generated by the OS.

Ubuntu's is exactly the same each time and looks very clearly like part of the OS. And it's not annoying in the least.
Pretty good LiquidWeb special Dual Opteron, 32GB Ram, Dual 1TB HD - $399/mo
Opening up Government through Google Summer of Code
I use liquidweb and they are great, usually a little pricey, but the support is worth it...I once had to call them at 4 in the morning and someone picked up after 3 rings.

If anyone wants to give me referral credit, you can use this link instead: https://www.liquidweb.com/cart/content/dedicated/Enterprise/...

If not, simply follow the main link
I second the idea of being able to find the boxes you created. I immediately lost the link to the admin page. It needs to be idiot proof...

Would it be bad PR to make people create a premium account if they want to find their admin page back?
Open Source World Map
Why some people you may work with are so f-ing stupid
Does anyone know what the power source for this is?

"Its rechargeable 100 Volt ACDC power source will run for five hours for normal activity."

To me that reads as an AC-DC converter which makes little sense for a battery. The cyberdyne website describes the power source as,

"Battery Drive
Charged battery( AC100V)"

I'm missing the significance of the AC

The cyberdyne website also states,

"Continuous operating time

Approximately 2 hours 40 minutes"

I wonder where they got 5 hours?
Great ideas, Gordon.

Master index page is an interesting idea. Not sure about how useful it might be, since there's already search, but I'll do that soon. Edit: done.

The alphabetical list is ordered with pagination — do you mean have links A B C, etc. to jump?

Guessable/pretty URLs are on my list. Just didn't get around to it :) and I tried to have a decent nonobstructing disclaimer on the side, but maybe it needs a bit of a boost :)

Cheers and thanks! Mark
i can't submit a comment on the HNers page. i don't use disqus. i keep getting an alert about "username must contain 3 characters" even though i've typed my full diN0bot username.
I hadn't heard of the Open Font Library[1] before. It looks extremely interesting, especially using dynamic font linking with @font-face[2].

[1]http://openfontlibrary.fontly.org/

[2]http://openfontlibrary.org/wiki/Web_font_linking_with_@font-...
By the way the first place to look for money to pay the manufacturer is the manufacturer itself. They need you as much as you need them and will often provide cash for equity if order from them.
the cursive font on diveintomark is virtually unreadable to me without magnifying it a whole bunch. :(

edit: not cursive. narrow letter spacing. bold, too? gah my eyes.
> And if not, I hope someone listens to Yudkowsky.

I think the chances of that are really slim. EY's best hope is to be the creator of AI, but waiting until he has a full theory of FAI first (if I understand what he's doing correctly) seems to make it much more likely he'll be beat, even if he otherwise wouldn't be (which I have no opinion on).
Ad Money Will Play "Follow the Leader" to the King of Links
Competition for Unity3D : http://unity3d.com/
I don't think you should participate in a business plan contest if you are really serious about that start up.

The whole process is a distraction and doesn't bring any value. The downside is that you'll waste a lot of time filling templates and doing stuff that doesn't matter at this stage. You may also get demoralized if jury/public doesn't get it and thinks its trash. For all you know, they might not be the segment you plan to target..

If you are serious - Move forward and build the product and show it to real customers that you plan to target. That's probably the only way to know if it'll work or not.
Some people have proposed a theory that the failure of the IBM-Sun deal created the perception that Sun was desperate, and once they were desperate Sun had to accept whatever deal came along. Thus Oracle could pick them up at a discount price.
Hunch: what we're trying to do
David Aronoff's (Flybridge VC) grim take on VC
Of the people we pitched Matasano to, Aronoff was my favorite. But obviously this is just another data point.
Piracy is rampant but a lot of people and especially businesses don't want to be pirates. A lot of software businesses have been successful in making casual piracy difficult and confining piracy to places (usenet, hacker-or porn- themed websites, bittorrent, limewire) that most of their target customer won't feel comfortable going. They can't absolutely stop piracy but they can make it a lot less appetizing than the "all you can eat for free" that it used to be.
Yes, it's definitely not just programmers, but I'm expecting there are more programmers reading here than (say) architects or urban planners, who have their own design dilemmas.

> And more often than not, programmers, who have no visual or usability training...

It's not just that; the elements that affect usability during development, debugging, etc. are often completely unrelated to elements affecting usability for end users, so you get interfaces like this: http://www.ok-cancel.com/comic/4.html That's a great interface for ... figuring out if endian-ness is affecting a music player. Or something. Certainly not for using it to play music.
> No, I'm serious, why should they be any different from us?

Um, because they're a different species. Look, I'm all for bringing back extinct species if it's possible -- mammoths, Neanderthals, dodos, whatever -- but it's silly to expect one species to behave identically to another one, even if they are closely related.
On first blush I agree, but after thinking about it for a few minutes I can see a scenario (actually, recently experience several) where once the interesting engineering problems have been solved and the major challenges overtaken, my interest in incremental growth and feature releases dwindle and I wouldn't mind turning the product over to a company interested in growing the product gracefully (so I can move on to the next challenge).

I would like to be "on retainer" though if in the future some compelling feature was needed or some great bug was to be addressed that proved challenging and/or interesting...
A master name index would let viewers sense the size of the set moreso than a reported number; see patterns in names; discover interesting names they wouldn't know to search for (and might not page 'next, next, next' to find). Such a view could also grow into a 'dynamic screener' -- one click to filter view by 'official YC', geo-location, launched-yet, etc.

Yes -- I meant quick-jumps to letters. But that is really only interesting as a way to randomly browse without blind-jumps into the page numbers.

Again, nice job!
Neanderthals, if resurrected, may indeed be cleverer than us. But the fact that we're here and they're not suggests to me that we are probably cleverer.
Was hoping that OGC would get a mention in there... oh well...
Minimum Viable Product: The least you can do and let the user actually do something. Features can be added later.

Edit: I did this comment in the MVP way. I just put the term, then added the definition later.
the permission table he is talking about sounds like the copy-prevention bit in PDFs. it's up to the reader software to enforce it, and since PDF is mostly an "open" specification, many free readers simply ignore it or allow the user to override it.

but how are fonts any different than stock images? a designer/photographer creates a work, then licenses it to end users that are entitled to use it. if you have a license to a stock image, you can use it on your website. i can copy it and use it on my site, but that would be illegal. how is this different than fonts? if you have a license to use a font, use it. i can copy it and use it on my site, but that would be illegal.

sites using stock images illegally are often sued or fined and there are a number of companies that offer services to find these illegally used images, even ones that have been resized or altered.

with fonts it seems like it would be even easier to automate the process of crawling websites looking for a particular font file and checking the licensing of it, especially since the font files wouldn't be altered.
A completely different approach to the problem is to minimize the number of necessary distance computation in the first place. There are various indexing algorithms which make finding nearest neighbours feasible in large datasets. Incidentally, I implemented two of them. :)

http://well-adjusted.de/mspace.py

For real usage, you would probably want to reimplement them with performance in mind (and in a different language), though. My implementation is dog slow. But on the plus side, it is very readable and heavily documented.
Oracle Buys SUN; MySQL is Forked
On HN today - yesterday's reddit top stories.

reddit become obsessed with 4Chan recently, is HN going that way as well?
I've collected maybe 90% of the time.
Let me tell you an interesting true story.

Last weekend I was at a friends place, and there were a few people there. One of them asked me what I did, and I told him about an idea I had for a new way of doing business online. It's pretty revolutionary, I've thought long and hard about it for a long time, and it can probably be easily copied by someone else. I told him about it anyway. Pretty detailed too.

It just happened that he was finishing up a PHD thesis on a subject very close to what I was thinking about, and we started talking. This conversation gave me some great insights I didn't have before, access to his large network, a serious ambassador and maybe a friend.

Will he steal the idea? I don't think so. Empirically it is very very rare. Did I gain something from it? Absolutely.

Answer enough?
Thanks for your input. Actually, reading http://www.userscape.com/blog/index.php/site/comments/starti... made me decide to start blogging again, and to blog mainly about my project, even before I startup.
VRML is back!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VRML
Quick jumps might take a bit of time. For now, though:

http://hnstartups.com/list
Perpetual revenue is never worth as much as one thinks.

First, even if your product generates $10,000/mo forever, it clearly doesn't generate infinite profits. In fact, money that comes 5 years from now is worth less than money today. Why is that? As a simple example, let's say you have the option between $380,000 today and $10,000 per month for 40 months. Which is worth more? The $380,000 is worth more because if you put it in a CD for that time period, it would become more than $400,000 by the end of that term. So, money in the future isn't worth its full value.

Second, there is risk in a product that generates monthly revenue. A competitor could come by and undercut you and you have to reduce your pricing (and therefore profits). Heck, things could get so bad that your product becomes worthless. A cash buyout doesn't carry that risk.

Third, there is money that you have to put into a product over time. So, you might have something generating $10,000 worth of revenue each month, but you have to work full-time maintaining it and improving it. As such, you are forgoing other ways of earning money. Let's say that other way would get you $4,000 per month (low for a computer programmer with such skill - remember, that $10,000 is pretax as well). So, would you rather $4,000 per month plus $400,000 or $10,000 per month? At 10% interest (the rate of growth of the S&P 500, you'd have an additional $3,333 from the interest off that $400k bringing you to $7,333). So, it might not be as much, but you still don't have the risk of your business being undercut, made obsolete, etc. And if you're earning $80,000 per year (a reasonable salary for a programmer making such valuable programs), you'd be getting $6,666+$3,333 = $10,000 in a much more stable way where you don't have to worry about where the market might go. Plus, those types of jobs usually come with at least $10,000 in benefits (health care being a big part of that). And you have no expenses since your employer is paying for the servers and such.

So, it's not such a terrible price. There's a lot of risk they're taking as the buyer and they're taking over all of the maintenance. Maybe you believe in your product more or maybe you enjoy working on it which gives other value to the project for you. But it isn't that it will only last 40 months.

Again, this might be different if this is a project that requires a few hours a month of work in which case it doesn't change your potential for other salary. It might be different if you see a great way to expand the project to get more revenue. It might be different if there are competitors nipping at your heels. Maybe I'm too risk-averse, but it's important to see how it all fits together - from the present value of future money to the risk of competition and obsolescence to the amount of time you need to put into the project and how you could alternatively earn money with that time.
I released an Android app today with similar results. Lots of people giving 5 star, glowing reviews when it works and lots of people giving 1 star, nonsense complaints. And as with the iPhone, there's no way for the developer to respond or clear up misinformation.
Are Fat People Destroying Earth?
-1 for making me lose the game.
Breaking the [Advertising] Contract
Open source, BSD licensed (http://code.google.com/p/o3d/), available for all 3 platforms.

I guess Chrome and the OEMs allows Google to push adoption of the plugin, but I think it'll have an uphill struggle. It'll take a killer app for users to bother with 3D on the web, let alone choose this over rival technologies like Silverlight or even 3D Canvas looming over the horizon.
Aviary Releases API: Add Image Editing to Your Website