skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Going to Silicon Valley without YC, is it a good idea?
This idea all started off from reading the article below:

http://blog.fairsoftware.net/2009/04/07/you-didnt-make-it-to-y-combinator-or-techstars-now-what/

In my opinion it is true that the best part of YC is the contacts you make and it got me thinking can you really get these yourself?

I didn't get accepted into this years YC like many other people here but still really want to develop my idea, it's a site for storing contact information, just like a web based address book but one you can access from various different platforms.

I live in the UK and am six weeks from the end of my computing degree, my bank balance reflets that. It's got me thinking if I really could just book a flight over to SF and see what happens, do you really think anyone could find contacts and develop their project with as much ease as the article states? Here is the UK it is very much a closed door policy and talking about your ideas is a no no.

Richard

lwcarab@gmail.com
Yeah, I know a lot of people like that, too, which is what gave me the idea. In spite of some Google advertising, though, it never really took off (a few hundred posts total over 2 years or so).
Effective Small Business IT Computer Support Services
It has been minutes and I've already found several new songs I absolutely adore.

For me, this is groundbreaking. It's like last.fm done right. I feel the same elation as when I first used Napster.
Can't get it to work. Using gvim on winxp. Directories are okay, nocompatibile is enabled, using expandtab + softtabstop=4 - but the only thing I get after pressing <tab> after one of the snippet keywords is a single space.
When Francis Fukuyama said "the end of history" he meant that liberal democracy is the evolutionary end point of nation states. Meaning:

1. any nation state that is now a liberal democracy will remain so because there is nothing more advanced for it to evolve into

2. any nation state that is not a liberal democracy is merely not yet a liberal democracy and will eventually evolve into one

The singularity is the point at which rate of technological evolution becomes so rapid that it is essentially incomprehensible. That doesn't sound like an end of history notion to me.
How do you define troll? A blanket statement labelling an entire technology with a pejorative without any justification or explanation seems fairly trollish to me.

However both of us are certainly off-topic and should be downvoted heavily :-)
So, how long will this last? :)
May I ask when you run flash blocker what benefits it provides you? Are you able to enjoy Youtube, Hulu and other flash video sites without configuring the plug-in?
Very nice site, thanks.

In case anyone from Grooveshark is reading this, here are two minor UI suggestions:

- It's rather easy to miss the volume control since it's so far removed from the other play controls. Perhaps it would be an idea to move it over there.

- A button to queue up all the songs in a search result. If it exists already I'm not seeing it.
Thanks for noticing this. The request time limit does suck.
Hi there,

I can't offer you an internship but would be interested in talking about yours projects, I am based in France and in the UK. Email: lwcarab at gmail dot com

Richard
Inspiring.

Reminds me of old ways in doing cloud computing:

EC2 : http://www.nd.edu/~parasite/

S3 : http://isec.pl/papers/juggling_with_packets.txt

; )
I've been in contact with a YC startup since Jan 18th trying to sort out an internship for this summer, however their incompetence has forced me to just give up with them. Hopefully you'll have better luck than me. I'm still looking for a UK internship but have decided local companies are easier to deal with than most startups.
VON wants VoIP on mobile broadband
Use fizy.com as a lightweight/mobile alternative.
> In my opinion it is true that the best part of YC is the contacts you make and it got me thinking can you really get these yourself?

If it were that easy, YC would be less valuable. I think it's still probably doable, but harder.

> live in the UK

Staying for more than the 3 months you get as a tourist might be a problem, if you are not originally from the US (you just said 'live', not where you're from). OTOH, 3 months might be the right amount of time to see if you can swing something more permanent and if you want to stay.
I like the design and ease of use and it is definitely a site I would use.

The only problem for me, and the thing that it lacks that YouTube doesn't, is music that isn't mainstream and hasn't been released by a label. Songs that make it on mixtapes and other singles that artists use to promote themselves and their future albums don't seem to be available from the searches that I've run. But they are available on YouTube.
It's not fair, but that's the way the world is. [...] perhaps we can solve this problem before our kids become adults.

Alternatively, we can opt not to have kids so they don't have to deal with this problem or making a living in general at all. If the world isn't fair, why create more people that will then have to live through it?
Similar situation - I'd be happy to talk to you about some of the projects I'm working on, and see if you'd like to go 50/50 on any of them. http://www.dedasys.com has a few of them, but there are others. I'm located in Italy, but am from the US.
Swing versus Death by Paper Cut
The Great Rails Refactor
Yeah but then most online places are going to require the extended information number, or a street address and other info which isn't on the card's magnetic stripe.

I suppose these guys could be setting up their own merchant accounts and finding providers who don't require this info. Or even creating fake cards and then using those. Both of those options seem a bit riskier to me...
You may register an account then, and upload what you see missing.

Just like with YouTube. But with an Java app that would upload folders in batches.

I did so back in september. At the time there was even some scheme in which uploader would get money for uploading popular stuff, but I don't remember any details.
where are you based? what are your skills?
Where in the UK are you? What are your skills?
Nokia 1661 – The most affordable color phone
The phone has a large color screen to facilitate superb display. The Nokia 1661 is unique in its’ style, design and function because it is more of a practical phone.
Do not let someone making an "incentive" bonus manage a nuclear plant – or your financial risks.

The problem is that you're uh.. incentivizing the wrong thing. This is basic capitalism.
More on Peace Symbols
Curious, what advantage?
Here are a couple of companies which are currently on the front page. Since you're looking in Germany or the UK I'm not sure how helpful this will be, but it may be helpful to others who find their way into this thread.

Justin.tv: http://www.justin.tv/jobs
JamLegend: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=551247
I just wonder, what on this site is done in flash that couldn't be done with plain AJAX/Html, appart from the obvious streaming part ?

Just wondering, they may have some reasons
Hi guys. We were actually about to do an "Ask HN: Review our startup" post, but I guess someone beat us to it.

So, please review our startup. :)

We are launching the beta today to a handful of users and will be letting in more and more users over time.

One other note: We don't just offer crawling. Our model is actually to allow you to analyze the web content that you discover. Using your own custom code that you push into 80legs, you can do sophisticated text processing, image processing, look inside PDFs, etc.
I know of those, but I'm absent-minded enough that I often forget there's many better things I could be doing. Seeing my long-range goals and my short-range deadlines in an easy-to-grok format has done wonders for me in the past; I just need a systematic way of delivering that when it's needed. Ideally, the software solution could also pop up when I start viewing a comic book archive, watching a video file, or preparing a snack just because I can't think of anything more pressing to do.
I'm based in Sheffield UK, I mostly use Python where possible but write Java/Haskell where it makes sense. I have some code up on http://www.davbo.org/trac if you're interested.
Really fantastic work. The best touch was the camera lens actually was set inside the 'Houd uw PIN privé' sticker.

P.S. NL Hacker meetup? I'm noticing a few people from/in Holland recently.
I eat my morning cereal with Muscle Milk instead of milk. The stuff actually tastes good, unlike the ~10 other protein powders I've tried; and the nutritional information list looks like a multivitamin.
It's hard to find the angels by yourself. The deferred legal services are easy to find though (just go to meetups and ask), and the legal services alone make Silicon Valley worth it compared to any other place to start a startup.
Dealing with impossible crises - Relentless resourcefulness at work
I was going to write the same thing.

Quick check. Lots of metal and folk. Some local stuff (Scandinavian). Seems to be little jazz and world (balkan folk, arabic, etc. Had e.g. Natacha Atlas and Susheela Raman.) Problems with Unicode.

Really really good start. Now just needs to add lots more esoteric stuff I can find! (Unicode would be nice.)
Plura affiliates actually accept responsibility for getting the permission of their users. Plura encourages disclosure and has found that it is actually very well received by the users once it is explained. It always works our better for Plura affiliates when they disclose. To that end, Plura has actually changed it's TOS with affiliates so that they directly take responsibility for getting user acceptance.

Most Plura apps/websites give users optin/optout capabilities. Rather than anything ill-intentioned, the actual model is really that Plura gives application developers a means of offering their application at a discount (or free) to users that don't mind trading their excess computer resources for the app. For those that don't want Plura+free, the application developer can give them other options (pay, ads, whatever).

Once the users really understand it, they are almost always happy that the developer has a new means of monetization so that the developer will continue to improve the software they are using.

BTW, this all runs in a secure java sandbox where nothing can actually see the users data, disk, what programs are running, or anything else about the computer. Plura has gone to great lengths to try to sanitize the entire process and be good guys.
Think Iceland circa 2006.
OKCupid has done reasonably well for me--just spend enough time answering questions to get a good level of math & science stuff, and rate those as very important or mandatory. The Harvard math majors who run the site don't know how to classify looks into "Me likey" or "me meh-y" yet; but they do have the personality profile done pretty well, in my experience.
http://www.spotify.com/en/

Since using that, iTunes: "Last opened: Thursday, 26 February 2009 11:27"

It just feels like I'm browsing for music on iTunes, and listening to the previews....except the previews are the full songs! It rocks! :)
* I wish I had the citation at hand for a finding that 50 percent or more of all medical research findings published in top peer-reviewed journals end up not being replicated. *

Was that finding replicated?
The depressing truth about web stardom
Wow, so no one knows about http://deezer.com ? It's been around for years. It's lack of popularity probably stems from the fact that it's French, same as http://jamendo.com (Creative Commons music)
Takeaway: Air France sucks, and I couldn't agree more. Those #######'s managed to lose most of my important personal belongings in Paris, in 2002, and gave me a very measly amount of compensation after hassling with them for a long time.
Polar Rose releases photo sharing site
I sure hope that's not your only takeaway from this article :-P
Is that the diet about not eating bread or pasta or rice because the hunter gathers did not eat those foods?

See, if evolution is about the survival of the fittest, then would have not those hunter-gathers who got unhealthy because of eating pasta not pass on their genes?

What I mean is: have we stopped evolving since hunter- gathering times?
Oh, I just skimmed the motivational blah blah blah part;-)

(Just to be perfectly clear, I'm just teasing swombat a bit, it was a good article, and had good advice).
Hybrid architecture: in praise of 3D printing
So yeah, we're all going to die.
So what?
I'm not going to accuse this piece of consisting entirely of rabid Mac fanboyism, as he clearly has the ability to recognize that other laptop manufacturers are able to provide much of the same and in quite a few cases, even better.

Doesn't really help though. It still comes off as "I'm going to use 3 pages to justify why I just spent $1000 on branding and I'm OK with that" and not much more.

So apart from (once again) confirming that Apple sells equal hardware at a higher price, this wasn't really all that interesting.
Frankly, having performance problems is about the best problem I could have, on launching a new website.

Since most of us won't have enough customers to bring these problems to light, time spent worrying overmuch about performance at this stage in the game is time that could have been spent getting more customers. And honestly, time wasted.
I'm curious, how would anyone know until what age could people have lived about 20k years ago?!
BumpTop gives Windows desktop a much-needed makeover
Just a little thing: if I click on a twitter name, it takes me to a page which says "this domain is still available".

Also, I agree with the idea of splitting up the domain and twitter names - it was far from obvious to me at first look to see which was which. Either that or move the legend to above/below the filters as it appears off the bottom of the page at the moment.
Yes. With the current system an aging population can't be supported for long. There isn't yet a solution for that.
"A more puzzling question is why the producers persist in the face of declining audience figures. "

i.e., why don't "one-shot wonders" recognize themselves as such and... give up?

It's a basic principle of the psychology of learned behavior: intermittent reinforcement: Having occasionally been rewarded, s/he persists in trying to be rewarded (cf: win the big one in the lottery).
The "rebel king" is also a phenominal lecturer and a favorite among all cornell CS students.
Sorry for hijacking your plan to post here first, but i found the idea incredibly cool and useful, and didn't know you guys are around here on HN. 80 legs can potentially save a lot of effort for people/companies who need to crawl web for data and analyze it.

Hope this really works out well for all of you.

p.s. Just in case you are curious, i got a reference note about your application from someone who was following Web 2.0 Expo.
To me it sounded like he said that if you have enough good food (fish, liver, veg, eggs, milk, etc) you can have some bad food (i.e bread).
The Arcane Method Of Valuing Early-Stage Companies
$5M doesn't seem a crazy amount for 2.5 years -- I think there is some pretty hardcore technology powering this site.
Hi,

We'd love your help. Debatewise.com is a non-profit debating site built in Ruby on Rails. Our goal is to create a Wikipedia of debate, a resource full of user-generated pro and con debates on a wide variety of different issues that people can turn to when they want to make up their mind.

I can be contacted via the site if you're interested and want to know more. We're based in London.

Dave
That aspect of human behavior is also mentioned here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=485797
In the UK we get sun only during May or April. So accordingly we should hardly have vitamin D!
That is indeed pretty stupid, but on the other hand you can set up a task that runs often and then split the time consuming task into several smaller tasks and then only execute on task at a time.
No I'm not
I think that those sites are in a white list.
Battle of the multi-column Twitter clients
Their face detection/recognition technology isn't even that great from my informal tests, I think any graduate student + openCV can come close. the pittpatt one is much better.
Coo, I wonder if WebObjects can be levered into this, then.
> To make matters worse, almost half of Russia’s treated tubercular cases over the past decade have been the variant known as extreme drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB).
This can not be right. XDR (Extreme Drug Resistant TB) is fairly rare (definitely not 75,000 a year). Multiple Drug Resistant TB (MDR TB) is a lot more common.
Most people with XDR TB die in a month.

>Russia’s patterns of death from injury and violence (by whatever provenance) are so extreme and brutal that they invite comparison only with the most tormented spots on the face of the planet today. The five places estimated to be roughly in the same league as Russia as of 2002 were Angola, Burundi, Congo, Liberia, and Sierra Leone.

Congo? Which one?

Russia's murder rate (while appalling) is below Colombia, South Africa, Jamaica and Venezuela:.
You linked to a tag, rather than the article itself - which means your link may not point to the same content in a year's time.

The article in question is here: http://olabini.com/blog/2009/04/dynamic-languages-on-google-...
That's a pretty editorialised headline! Why not just "Polar Rose releases photo sharing site"?
Second that. So many crappy serials get renewed, why in the hell this got canceled?
I wonder what happens if you pay and give retirement benefits to national and state legislators as percentage of per capita GDP.
Actually it uses the flex framework (as you can see by looking at the scrollbars and the tooltips) that then produces an edible binary .swf for the flash player :).

Back to the topic, as a music site developer myself, I can assure you that everything (except streaming[1]) you see on grooveshark can be implemented using XHTML, a JS framework (I love jQuery über alles) and an HTTP backend. Wheter or not do it depends mainly from the target of your audience and the browsers they use, because to achieve 100% browser compatibility, especially when dealing with older IE versions, imposes a bit of headbanging over their quirks and issues. Another point is performance: on older machines, animating big elements on the page (like grooveshark does) causes flicker and a clumsy experience for the user. The last point is maintainability and integration: after all, flash software is another piece of the stack you have to coordinate, implement, integrate and deploy.

So, it's a bit controversial which path to choose; on our project we're following a mix of the two, by reducing the flash implementation to the bare minimum to accomplish streaming, upload (ajax upload via iframe is a bit of a mess) and a set of JS interfaces to implement the rest of the interface via XHTML. Similar to http://playlist.com 's approach.

The last consideration that comes to my mind is purely ethical/political: I prefer to use open standards and contribute back to open projects via source code, and not be forced to use closed technologies and tools and contribute back via cash, having to read clumsy documentation, little opportunity to improve anything, and the list could go on and on.. :).

[1] Luckily this is gonna change with HTML5!
From the article: Principle #1 for doing the impossible - Calm down, smile and stay polite
Jamendo is quite a different beast, because it's a CC label, not a music sharing/streaming medium.
There was a company called Riya that had some similar, advanced face detection technology. It launched in 2006 as a photo sharing site with face detection. However, relatively soon it shifted direction. It may not bode well for PolarRose that Riya relaunched as Like.com after deciding that licensing its face-detection algorithms would not be as good a business path as allowing people to search (and shop) visually.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/07/06/technology/riyastartup.biz2

Riya received funding of $4M (Series A) and $15M (Series B) and their Bangalore and SV-based teams (mostly computer vision Ph.D's) developed the technology over a period of 2 years. $5.2M for PolarRose is impressive, if they have developed equivalent technology.

It is possible that Riya's technology is behind iPhoto's face recognition. Or maybe Apple developed its own technology. Either way, face recognition now seems to be on it's way to a commodity technology and feature.

"Worked with the US team of 14 Stanford Computer Vision PhDs, and 6 Engineering and Management members from Cornell and Stanford - led and grew the team at Bangalore from a one-man-army to 30 engineers and 4 researchers."

http://www.linkedin.com/in/sandeepgain
I'm waiting for some rich geek to produce it themselves.
It looks pretty cool and even something I might be interested in using.

However my initial feedback relates to clarity.. on the About page you say 'crawl 2bn pages' then 'pay $2 per million pages crawled' and don't actually say that - as I understand it - customers set up custom searches matching a regexp and only pay for the hits (crawls) that match.

My immediate reaction on seeing '2bn'/'$2 per million' was to firstly think 'wtf, $4k per day then?' and secondly 'I hope that's an American not a British billion'. (Though we seem to have adopted yours, now.)

It's really just a wording/clarity thing though, and I might be alone in this.
Anyone implementing sphinxsearch care to share their experience with us?
"Your invoice has a reference to the vendor."

Relational model.

Case closed.
* Desktop Notifications - This is solved, I wrote one myself[1]

Try using existing Java/Browser technology.

I would suggest this:

Each compatible web page has a signed applet which can also run resident on the remote machine via Webstart. If the server is not listening yet, start it.

If it is listening, send it a message. The Webstart remote applet then displays the message in the GUI.

My server just bound to a range of well known sockets, and the clients tried each one in turn. Try to keep it simple. I just wrote a string with a carriage return to the socket. No XML, no heaviweight protocol.

* Native Widgets - tough to get right

As soon as you start having native widgets, you cross over into having the users preferences honoured. Great for user, hard for site-consistency and support. Joel Spolksy recommends a complex setup[2] , just to get it right.

This may be a little challenging for the average webapp. Admirable but tough.

* Payments

Good suggestions from the article.
A bigger problem I see is the large payment processing fees levied by each different payment provider

For instance £0.20 per transaction when payment is via Debit Cards in UK. If you're selling small items, that can be 35% of the price!!

---

[1] These days I use it to tell me when my ant builds have finished

[2] http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000306.html
Their datacenter costs might be lower. Hopefully, they can pass that on to their customers.
I wonder if the ants can talk and have sophisticated societies with large building underground, by they standards anyway and perhaps have universities and stuff, I mean perhaps they like us just different.
Embarcadero Java tool takes over for the now-retired Borland Optimizeit