skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hi Joey,

As I said, I haven’t really investigated Ikiwiki, but it does seem like a very comprehensive utility. Still, I was looking for something different, and I’m sure Ikiwiki is a better solution for certain use-cases. To answer your questions:

* No, Markdoc doesn’t require its own HTTP server, but being able to run 'markdoc serve' is helpful.

* No, pages can’t be edited via the web. That would require an authentication system, and would introduce some difficulties w/r/t version control (or require some VCS coupling).

* The way incremental builds work (at the moment) is that the whole wiki is re-rendered into a temporary directory, and then rsync'd into the HTML root. I’d like to write a 'markdoc refresh' command in future, but at the moment rendering is so fast there’s little need to.
OP is right, and people would see that if they weren't reading it as if he were specifically talking about YC startups.

He says: Of companies designed around the sales plan, they rarely fail because of a bad CTO. That's true. It might not seem true looking at student-run startups, but that's because most of them are starting with a product they think people want and then looking for ways to sell it, rather than starting with a sales strategy and then finding a product to match it.

The former strategy is very risky, so it only makes sense to start a business this way if you're sure of a huge exit; after all, sales-centric companies still have the option of a huge exit, but they also have the option to become billion dollar businesses without an exit. What's more, being sales-centric isn't mutually exclusive with having a great product. It's true that some great products don't lend themselves to being sales centric, but the point is that if you have the option to choose either a great product that's sales centric or a great product that's not, choose the one that is.

Now the technical co-founder is absolutely essential to starting a business where the product isn't sales-centric; the point is you shouldn't start these businesses in the first place, because given a universe with infinite number of projects you should choose the one that's both a great product and also allows for immediate sales. IMHO this is the #1 thing that's currently missing from YCs advice to startups, albeit the present advice generally works because YC specializes in a very specific type of startup operating in a very specific environment and time period. It's kind of analogous to how in the 60s they designed the product around the TV commercial, in that you could imagine people giving similar advice at the time that was too narrow but often worked anyway.

edit: And I hope I'm not offending anyone by saying this, IIRC pg actually hinted that they may have to rethink their customer acquisition advice in a recent essay.

edit2: What I am trying to say is that the YC advice is incomplete because it doesn't account for the hidden disjunction, which is the same reason most people get the Wason Selection Task wrong: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wason_selection_task

So the best business is one that 1) starts with a great sales strategy 2) is something people want 3) does not need time or money to invent 4) still has a good barrier to entry. Once you fully map out the disjunction, it's easy to see why selecting startups based mostly on their ability to make something people want may have worked great five years ago, and may still work decently today, but is ultimately flawed and will probably continue to perform less and less well over time. Now it's still perfectly fine to select startups good at MSPWing if that's who YC likes working with, but making that the most important factor for predicting success is probably a mistake; ability to MSPW as a predictor of success is a shortcut, and there's nothing wrong with using a shortcut in some cases, but what that shortcut should be changes over time.
Ask HN: Y Combinator vs. other incubators
I'm thinking of applying to YC summer 2010, but have also been looking at some of the other incubator programs. For example, Founder Institute has several sessions that will be running from December until April.

Is there any downside to attending another incubator program, then applying to YC for the summer? I know that many of these programs differ in philosophy (incubators of founders instead of companies, etc.), but is it a good idea to attend more than one of these programs, or would it be frowned upon?
Why Does The Universe Look The Way It Does?
I updated the article based on your feedback. In the past when I've used PHP it was really frustrating trying to track down bugs. Looking again I see there some good possibilities out there. I'll checkout Netbeans and experiment with other IDEs again.

I'm surprised you think that the tone of my article meant I wasn't trying to be honest or accurate. I'm here engaging the discussion and accepting criticism. When I saw the feedback I felt terrible for not having that information before I posted and immediately made the update.
I really like Linus Torvald's quote:

>> Some people seem to think that C is a real programming language, but they are sadly mistaken. It really is about writing almost-portable assembly language

And that's why comparing C to other, more modern languages is kind of useless - it all comes down to what kind of programming you're doing. Even though more expressive languages have been created and more efficient ways to create programs are around, C is a very nice balance between high-level syntax and low-level actions.
Speech-to-speech iphone translation
This is just a matter of terminology. If "HTTP 2.0" is radically different on the wire from 1.1 then it is both a later version of HTTP and an entirely new protocol.
6 out of 10 2009 TechStars teams funded and led by VC
peteysd is sort of right - a target audience has to be established before the app is developed. Otherwise you're creating an app "for everyone", and the truth is that selling apps "for everyone" is much much harder than for specific target. Targeting is king.

In your case I suggest to target people who like brain-teasers and also tetris communities - there must be some of those. You need to find them and talk to them. Another angle is teachers and people working with children - you can try to pass it as "helping develop brain, reaction, quick-thinking" or whatnot. A long shot, but it doesn't look like you have too many options.

A few practical advices:

You can't improve what you don't measure. First step - stop sending out iTunes links and start sending out shorted and click-counted linkshare iTunes links - not only you will know how many people clicked, you will also know how many of them buy.

Your demo video is doing a god job but is too long. Make it 30-60 seconds to improve chances of people even starting to watch it.

Everything I heard about AdMob is that it's making money for them and losing money for developers - there are clicks but there are no purchases. You could try, but I wouldn't expect much from it.
Very god job on video quality by the way, how did you encode it?
Hence the qualifier about indie and small devs, I imagine.
it's emotional, not statistical

You just said a mouthful :-)

When I started making my own wine a friend sent me a review of a Barolo -- the variety I was making -- and I mentioned that the wine review seemed awfully similar to high end audio equipment reviews (e.g., $15k CD transports + another $10k for the DAC and preamp!) and sent him a few links.

He was absolutely astounded (and amused): both kinds of reviews used language so similar that in some cases they were almost interchangeable.

What's my point? Both products can be very expensive with little objective differentiation leaving the buyer with a great deal of incentive to defend his purchase vigorously to anyone who asks the question, "why the hell did you spend so much money on that"
Sales engineering or sales both pay really well and have a less technical component.

I've REALLY enjoyed woodworking and home remodeling. Impressive output that wows people, creative problem solving, etc.

Medical stuff isn't going anywhere, though you better like working with old folks. Nursing is fairly approachable.

There are probably some areas of law that aren't repulsive.
We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all.

Google has a really optimistic definition of the "average citizen". :)

In all seriousness, this seems like a pretty cool development for legal folks, but if I'm looking for info on a particular case or general legal topic, why wouldn't I just use Wikipedia?
I'm in sort of the same boat. Developing things and creating software is a means to an end for me. Do I enjoy working for myself? Sure. More so than working for the man. But in the end, it's also so that I can be free from the ties of money.

One thing that I (and some of my other fellow CS graduates) have contemplated is going into teaching. It can be rewarding to teach Math or CS at the local high school, assuming your kids aren't too rowdy.

If you have an interest in photography, that could be a good break. I know several wedding photographers who charge what I would consider a very generous amount - they do a good job, and get tons of business. Personally, I've been interested in photography for a long time, but I'm afraid that I'd start hating it or getting bored of it if it becomes my job. Unfortunately, they spend lots of time in front of the computer editing photos.

Have you thought about anything in the financial field? Data modeling, trends, stuff like that?
Great article, thanks.

Another way to do this (and one that Rails makes extensive use of internally) is to override method_missing in your object, which gets called as a "last resort" whenever ruby can't find a method of a particular name. Inside this method you can check to see if the method being called matches one of the keys of your hash, and if so do what you need. This is a little bit more "meta" (if there is such a thing) than your example because the getters/setters for each of the options are never actually defined on the class, not even at runtime.
I've added the email in your profile to the project
All have their strengths, read up and make sure they match what would be best for your company. If your company / founders need to be in the valley, no better than YC. If it doesn't match your style, there are several other quality programs.
YouTube to Help Sites Gather News Clips
I am a lawyer and programmer. I put together a site - www.tracelaw.com - which I launched last week. Almost every innovation that I came up with, Google has put into Google Scholar. There is one key technical aspect where what I have done is better, but aside from that, I would say Google Scholar largely does everything extremely well.

I was not saying in my above comment that Google will replace Lexis/Westlaw. What I am suggesting is that they will change how lawyers perform legal research. What this does is separate case search from case hosting. And case search is the really expensive part. Basically, as I see it, lawyers will start their searches on Google, and eventually migrate to Lexis/Westlaw when they've narrowed their focus, or run into a dead end. And if that happens, all those searches that migrated to Google, are searches that are no longer run on Lexis or Westlaw (and for which they can no longer charge a fee).
Simple CouchDB multi-master clustering via Nginx
I appreciate the retraction. Your article, whether you intended it to or not, sounds as if you're just a little too over-to-top in love with Microsoft's technologies. That, combined with the misinformation you've now made an effort to correct, led me to the assume you were yet another Microsoft shill. If this is incorrect, I apologize.
Unfriend named word of 2009
I'm talking about groups of birds here, they are very real. E.g, the pilot of a big plane saved the lives of the passengers when a big group(thousands) of flamingos take off from Doñana national park in Spain, he did what the book says not to do, put the plane in full-power and fly over them.

There is a rule in engineering, never underestimate a 900km/hr projectile. And I have seen myself engines birds test that are mandatory on every turbine.
Click Here To Watch Slovenia v Russia Live Playoffs World Cup Football On PC On Nov 18 19:45 UK
I vote for stage 2: get the thought prototyped quickly, because that may crystallize your ideas.
Yep, that jumped out at me as well, it was like the article was written by two completely different people. Plus it barely qualifies as an article, more of a quick blog post.
You have a typo on your first link to dotnetstories. (The i is missing leading to dotnetstores.com)
I used to give free hosting to Indian bloggers and startups. (More bloggers took me up on the offer than startups though.) Tips from my experience:

* I kept it as a first-come-first-serve thing. I didn't want to become the judge out there.

* But I kept a rule from the beginning: people had to move once they became ramen profitable.

* There was no other rule except the obvious: don't abuse the resource. It worked well.

* The only problem I faced is: quite a lot of people who took me up on the free hosting offer didn't do anything with it for months. Didn't put up a single web page online. And only used email. It was free. So they procrastinated. And weren't as aggressive as they would be if they had to pay for hosting.

* So if I were to repeat my offer, I would add Rule # 2: their website or beta has to be up within 2 weeks.

(Also to weed out people who wouldn't use the free hosting after getting it - I started relying on how good they were with follow up. I usually asked a question on their first request. Once they answered that, I asked another question. And only then did I gave the hosting. Its amazing how many non-serious people drop out by that stage. These questions were basic ones: who is going to be your target audience? How many people in your team? Anything to just see their response reaction.)
I guess I didn't think of the "per search" charges.

That said, Using West's Digest and their case histories is a neccessary step in legal research for me. I can see this for general searches on a topic, but for the real nitty gritty you need to get into West/Lexis. To summarize, I think West will do just fine. It might mean one less leather portfolio for law librarians every year.
My biggest concern with those frameworks is scale and speed. Anytime I see a framework that is trying to make my life easier I think it means more overhead. It's the same reason I don't use many of the asp.net components like the Update Panel and instead use my own hyper specific javascript or jQuery.

To be fair I haven't put them to the test and I know major websites use them. It's mostly the perception I have of dealing with scale that keeps me away.

There's also the fact that asp.net works so well for me and I'm comfortable coding in it. I haven't seen a compelling enough reason to switch yet. I still used other languages but the core is .net.
If anyone hasn't checked out doubleTwist (www.doubletwist.com) this is the solution I am using right now, and plan to use for all my devices once I am comfortable with it.
Trefis: Understand How Products Impact Stock Prices
Picking a Django powered CMS
Richard Feynman's 1974 Caltech Commencement speech: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm
Become a mechanic; That's what I would do anyway...
These kinds of interfaces are more for desktop/end users and you pay a surcharge, I think you would be better off using S3 or something similar directly. It's cheaper, there are better tools to interact with it programmatically, and it is "pay per actual use" instead of a flat fee.

You can also usually "flip on" the CDN feature for very popular and/or large files (Rackspace's CDN feature is performing better than Amazon's CloudFront for people currently).

Beware the bandwidth charges though. For some situations you would be FAR better off renting a VPS or even a dedicated box, it all depends on the particular deal and your needs.
lol. Your are correct. The less actual substance and more emotion there is, the more tenaciously people will defend their positions. Again it's a feature, not a bug: one of the reasons I decided to look into wine collecting was observing a couple nerd friends of mine argue (discuss) for 30 minutes what kind of wine to order at a fancy restaurant.

Both products can be very expensive with little objective differentiation leaving the buyer with a great deal of incentive to defend his purchase vigorously to anyone who asks the question, "why the hell did you spend so much money on that"

To which the appropriate reply is: "I didn't spend my money on that, I spent my money on me (or you, or our dinner, or your graduation, etc)

It's like weighing the steak at a fancy restaurant and comparing it to the price-per-pound down at Costco

It reminds me of my step-father's view on haircuts: for a certain amount of money, you deserve to get at least so much hair removed. :)

Having said that, I've got a bottle of 98 Donnoff Riesling that has my name on it for Christmas Eve. And I've been saving a 1996 Opus One for gosh, I don't know, perhaps the end of the world or my first million :) And I'm thinking that I've sat on those 4 bottles of 97 Dow's Port long enough.

To my mind, I'll take these wines and statistically match them up anywhere. But who cares if I'm wrong and it's just me? I've enjoyed collecting them, and I'll enjoy the special feeling of consuming them when I think the time is right.

But damn it, I'm right. (grin)
>If you call a cab, you also accept "be there in 10 minutes", even though it's not confirmed, not "Right, tell you what, I'm gonna push this button on my radio, which closes an electrical curcuit connected to a big radio, and announce your request to our fleet of cars. Now, provided that there's no interference, and that the nearest car isn't in a garage or a tunnel or something, and if the driver isn't fighting with his wife on his cellphone, or in a place getting a coffee, he'll hear the message, and radio back confirmation. He'll then drive to your address, where, bar mechanical failure of perhaps the brakes or the pressurized oil system, he will arrive in 10 minutes. Have a good day."

That's not really a fair comparison to "We'll confirm that the restaurant got your order and email you".
Agreed. When you are bit-banging and other low-level stuff, you want a language like C.

It's such a silly argument. Good programmers pick the language that matches the problem they are trying to solve. Anyone that considers themselves a hacker isn't a square peg in round hole kind of person. They have several tools in their bag and will pick out the most appropriate one for the job.

That's all the comes to mind these days when I see these arguments: people need to open up their field of view and see what other great language exist for their craft. Did Leonardo only use paintbrushes to write in his notebooks?
UK university startups get their own version of Hacker News
To be fair, you shouldn't have promised instant delivery. And saying "a couple minutes" (or even "a few") is a lot fuzzier. The kind of person who calls in after 180 seconds because a few minutes have passed in the kind of person who is going to call you anyway because s/he's just neurotic.

Edit: And single data points are not convincing. How many users have emailed you in 27 seconds (or something similar)? If it was just the one, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't break your business whatever your margins.
I guess it's true that there is some MS-bashing going on in the OSS community. But you have to admit, there is some irony in praising MS for open-sourcing a technology by saying it's the best thing for distributing closed-source binaries ;)

OK, Java and .NET are going to stick around in the enterprise space. But you increasingly hear Java code being classified as "legacy". The next thing in enterprise is web apps, for better or worse. At least for the next few years. Then a major cloud hoster will have a serious data leak, and everyone will run screaming back to native apps. There's a reason computer technology development goes in circles :)

> No, but the code + license is everything.

Symbian is doing great...
this is a primary source, wikipedia is not.
Shameful Innumeracy in the New York Times
The misleading part was the 'End of an era' phrase. You are right that it was accurate in saying the tracker is gone (not the site), but by throwing on a needlessly epic phrase about the 'end of an era' makes it sound like the whole TPB is dead, especially to those that don't realize the difference, which I'd wager is most.

It's needless linkbaiting... creating a headline out of an event that really isn't one.
They are, but they also want to have the option to sell my eyeballs to someone else in the future. (I won't be buying any more Archos products until I get root on my device. That is probably costing them more than they will ever make from ads... but every business has a right to self-destruct if they want to. I am hoping they see the light, because their hardware is very nice. But Sony used to make good hardware too, and then they tried the "DRM everything" approach, and now nobody even knows about Sony anymore.)
Online Subscription Billing Is A Pain. Recurly Wants To Alleviate It.
should this automatically mean these are quality companies because they've gotten VC funding? i'm sure all of us can tell a story or two about their favorite VC funded burnout. why does this continue to be the barometer by which start-ups are judged?
I am in love with some Microsoft technologies and I hate some others. Their coding products helped me build so many websites and have been pretty reliable. I've tried using some other languages/databases and they haven't worked out as well for me.

For me the enterprise stuff is great, it's their consumer products that leave much to be desired...
It's not true. Yes, we mine less Uranium than we use, because we have been burning Russian bomb uranium for the past ten years. When it runs out, we will need to mine more. Why would mining companies expand mining if it's just going to pile up and cause the price to collapse because Russia is undercutting them on price? There is plenty of Uranium to be mined. It has even been shown that with a small increase in the price of electricity, we could extract the trace amounts of Uranium in seawater, which provides a nearly unlimited supply.
I fixed the title and found a plugin that will help me fix the URL. I'll poke around with it later today.
Seesmic for Windows and the myth of platform-independent applications.
As someone said, no knowledge is often better than some knowledge. If you weren't so savvy, you'd simply check the "About Us" page and then follow the link to their site.
As a founder of one of the other 4, I am impressed but unsurprised, it was an incredibly strong group this year.
I missed the one about his dog. Thanks for sharing. Awesome read.
I think my last sentence agreed with your point.

For anyone interested, only one person, who was originally from Sonoma Valley, claimed to be a connoisseur of any kind. He didn't do much better than average--I scored higher and make no claim to any expertise.
State of the art C compiler optimization tricks
What in the Standard (free) version of Google Apps doesn't work for you?
Manufactured ice piles could provide summer drinking water and air-conditioning
The A Position .com Launched - Are real journalists going to move to the web?
just an interesting trend to look at, VC's are getting into TS and more seed deals as accelerators mature (YC is seeing similar things from what I have read).
I'm astounded that AT&T filed a lawsuit over these ads. What would have been somewhat forgettable as a "snarky Verizon ad poking fun at AT&T" is now front-and-center in several media outlets, all with a positive Verizon spin. (Witness the comments here.) Even if they win (which is looking unlikely), all they've accomplished is getting the ads off the air - after drawing a huge amount of attention to them that they would not have otherwise received.