skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hatchery Startup Pitch Event in NYC
The Hatchery opens its doors Wednesday, January 13 at 6pm for a great round of fast paced New York style startup pitch presentations.

Hatchery style honesty, in ways others may be too polite to share. It's what you need to hear about your startup, covering marketing, finance, technology, business, and presentation.

Please RSVP in order to attend: http://www.meetup.com/hatchery/calendar/11922251/. Space is limited. We will not be taking walk-ins.

If you are interested in presenting at this or future events, please submit request and your powerpoint to pitch@hatchery.vc. If you have any questions, please first read the Meetup page (http://www.meetup.com/hatchery/).
it will be interesting to see how many users jump on this. Seems that if they can nab 3 million users like dropbox, it will make sense to add a windows/osx client and go head to head. hopefully not
> Not at all saying the subsidiary would be held responsible here (they are not operating the website in question anyway),

Good, because the answer to that is clearly 'no', but

> it can be argued that once YC has established a sufficient nexus within a particular country it can be held to its laws (in this case, DE data protection and privacy laws which are far stricter than those of NL, afaik).

Suggested clearly otherwise, so it looks like you have changed your stance on that.

> Whether this is practically enforceable (like the UK libel judgement against Arrington personally) is a different matter.

Arrington was personally liable, which is a completely different thing than the one you are talking about right now.

> For me personally, pg acting on account and data deletion requests would simply be an act of courtesy that we can expect from him.

I disagree with you.

A free, online forum is exactly what it seems, a place where your opinion can be expressed and will distribute your opinion to strangers.

Expectations like this is what drives the weird terms-of-service that many websites have, the overhead on the kind of activity deployed and the income generated from that preclude manual intervention on behalf of every Tom, Dick and Harry that decide they want to rewrite history after the fact. Besides it being simply a lot of work.

If you do not want your words to be stored in an online service, do not put them there in the first place.

Fora are especially important in that they serve as means of communication, in effect you are asking to be able/allowed to retract your statements after any arbitrary period of time.

If that were to be actually enforceable the only thing that would change would be the terms of service, getting you to agree explicitly with the giving up of that particular right since it completely renders the whole forum concept moot.

Every thread topic ever started by a user that requests to delete their content, every answer to every comment they ever wrote would suddenly stop making sense.

news.yc gives you an hour after you post to retract your words, if you do not wish to make use of that right then it lapses, which I think is a really nice medium between the two worlds.
Why Lying Is Stupid In Startups (And Life)
I believe PayPal is the Fairchild Semiconductors of its time and likewise will be recognized for the quality and subsequent success of its key founding employees. I agree that the ability to recruit and build a strong founding team is the most important life-and-death contribution that a Founder/CEO can made to a startup. My own experience is that in startups, it is all about trust and trust is in fact a far more important currency than even money. But trust in a startup has a different meaning than trust in everyday life. By trust, I am talking about trusting a person’s judgment and their abilities. So after you recruit them, you need to build them into a cohesive team by developing a trust among them so that when someone agrees to a schedule or proposes a budget, they are in fact doing so knowing what they are capable of delivering and understanding the consequence if they don’t. They clearly have done that at PayPal and done it well. Excellent article, a good read.
I love the simple bullet point summary.
The Data Center Transformers
Not on online forums where you need to agree with a halfway decent User Agreement before you can open an account. You grant the forum copyright on your posts. There is, for instance, no way to get your posts removed from Anandtech's forum, if they don't want to. You get them anonimized at best.
How to bring a product to market, Part 2 — after product/market fit
I will be moving from A-drive to google docs now. $.25 per GB a year is cheap.
Wouldn't they get the right pronunciation from their parents? Home schooling != being locked in a basement for 18 years with a few textbooks, after all.
"favor boring and faded technologies where possible" == our site is held up by tons of shell and perl scripts
I'm reminded of folks who use IDEs that "help" them remember APIs via autocomplete dropdowns. It speeds them up initially but eventually leaves them completely dependent on their tool and incapable of writing code on their own. External knowledge is good, but internalizing that knowledge that you use regularly is even more important and will make you a better person.
"As a side note, someone should build a site for theses 'watching the watchers' videos. I'd be a fan."

There is Copwatch. Here is the West Denver group:
http://westdenvercopwatch.wordpress.com/

They also have videos on YouTube.
Isn't it common in C code contests to disallow all system calls except read, write, brk (or equivalent) and exit?
If there is a simple google api, some third party / open source developer, not having to worry about the backend infrastructure required, might create a client app to do this, which would compete with dropbox to some degree.
I emphatically disagree with his standpoint, but I voted it up because it's a reasoned write-up of his belief.
The blog post states that if you need more space, you can buy additional storage [<- link to page Aaron linked to] for $0.25 per GB per year.

I'm guessing they simply haven't updated the page to reflect that the storage is shared across Docs as well.

Edit- confirmed in the comments:

The storage page will be updated later today to reflect the addition of Google Docs.

http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2010/01/upload-and-store-your...
great advice, thanks.

you're right: a 3y head start means they've made a lot of mistakes that we can learn from.

slicing the self-employed market in many different ways is exactly how i'm thinking about it, for the same reasons you mention: being broad and ranking highly for specific keyword combos.

thanks again!
Someone create FUSE plugin, please :)
http://fuse.sourceforge.net/
I never understood the purpose of gift cards, other than to prevent your child from using the money for drugs or something. Why force someone to a particular place? Is there some kind of etiquette no-no to give cash as presents?
LiveView for iPhone (Mobile Application Design & Prototyping Tool)
I'm currently #26 on the rep list and I am employed (which means there is a workplace I have to go to every day and be there during the business hours).

I cannot tell much about my current job's details (I'm bound by an NDA), but mostly it involves not coding as such but rather answering the other people's programming-related questions, in other words exactly what I'm doing on Stack Overflow.

I also have a blog where people ask me the questions and I answer them.

SO and the blog just help me to be in form for the job: almost any problem the people contact me with at work I have been asked about (and answered) a dozen times on SO and the blog.
thanks. our plan is to always listen to our customers while keeping an eye on competitors. figure the company that wins is the one that's closer with their customers.
Do you take equity?
Indeed. As a long-time Pasadena resident (and hence usually 110-bound from Downtown), I've learned always to be two lanes over from the 5 North exit lane in order to avoid the "viscosity" effects from the slow-down. I also learned the hard way not to be three lanes over; then you end up on the 101 North instead.*

Bay Area residents end up on "101 North", which is even worse. :-)
Apple, It's Time to Delete Safari From the iPhone
"care" is the most logical pronunciation (as that's how you pronounce the first syllable of "character"), but I've never heard anyone say that. "char" (as in burning to a crisp) is the second-most logical, and is what I say.

I think I actually avoid the word in practice; "cstring" instead of "char star", etc.
thanks. not planning to go head to head with them, but your perspective on pulling even on product/market adn then differentiating is a novel one to me. appreciate the comment.
The first major growth in the middle of October last year was seen after I published wasitup for review at Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=886875

The steep growth at the end of November last year can be attributed to a blog article I wrote where I referenced wasitup: http://journal.uggedal.com/vps-performance-comparison.

The last jump of regisrations on Jan 4th 2010 was due to a featuring on HTML 5 Gallery: http://html5gallery.com/2010/01/was-it-up/
I got linked here from Google Web History information page
The comments are priceless.

I am concerned about the risk of Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease being transmitted between
teleported goats. At the speed they are being teleported, one can hardly expect the
biofilters to be able to keep up with filtering out prions. What precautions have been
taken to avoid cross-contamination of goat matter streams?
Just thought that was hilarious.
yep, after sleeping on it i think i was more startled than scared... startled i hadn't even found these guys after looking for so long. which, i guess, it a good thing.
Caltrans did know:

"Ankrom eventually leaked the story to the Downtown News, stunning millions of duped commuters, and effectively coming clean to Caltrans. But Caltrans knew Ankrom was right. For eight years, the sign remained."
Consider this. You serve YC with papers in Europe. They don't show up to the trial. Now what?

(Hint: the US is not going to extradite pg for not deleting your HN account.)
agreed re: network effects. this isn't one of those businesses though.

> I suggest that you stick to your strategy until you hear a customer mention a competitor by name, or otherwise have proof that you are losing customers to your competitor.

i like this - thanks!
Wonder how this will impact DropBox.
When Mayer says her "mind has evolved" to the point that it can only recognize and process information that has been digitized and uploaded

Is it possible that too much Googling has led to parts of Mayer's brain to atrophy?
I understood the point only because I have practical experience working with large amounts of Perl 5 code in every stage of the mentioned enlightenment. The example worked for me; it won't work for people without that experience.
I’ve seen it all before
OT: Is it just me or is that link unzoomable on an iphone?
thanks. complex, hard to use and ugly software is an easy enemy, which we're happy to pick a fight with :)
"And who judges if you've been "aggressively" defending your trademark?"

Presumably, the judge.

"It's a perfect example of the Streisand effect."

A very, very temporary Streisand effect, yes. If North Face is at all confident about winning this suit, then South Butt will have to shut down - you're granting them a brief bit of revenue (which you can later sue them for too!) in exchange for their permanent death.

"Shouldn't that amount to something if they later have to defend their North Face trademark?"

Trademarks don't work that way. "We inadvertently publicized this infringing trademark while we were suing them" is not grounds for losing your own trademark.
way less than 10%. thanks!
thanks, i like both of these, especially the idea of a migration tool.
An irreverent review of the naughts decade for IT - and some of their graphics are hilarious art/culture hacks.
That's wretched. Though it doesn't correct the overall problem, a GPS unit would help you a lot. You can always verify that you're on the right road and see how far your next turn is.
FREELOTTO - Confirm Your Identity
>Just b/c they have nice uniforms and helmets doesn't mean they've scored lots of touchdowns.

haha, i love this line. there's definitely lots of room to play in this market, which i like. thanks.
Interview with Automattic CEO, Toni Schneider
Modified Nokia cell phone runs on Coca Cola
Nokia cell phone gets old battery taken out and new bio-battery added. Just pout Coca-Cola in and start using the phone!
got it already - appreciate it!
That's a dumb error on my part, it should be fixed now.
I Have No Talent
largely better, since they're spending VC dollars to educate the marketplace on why it's a good idea to have the product. i just need to find and compel the self-employed folks to buy from me instead of them.

thanks!
An interesting article. But I find a couple of things about it odd.

First, he says:

> ... Amish practices are ultimately driven by religious belief: the technological, environmental, social, and cultural consequences are secondary. They often don't have logical reasons for their policies.

Of course, there is no rule that says religion cannot be logical. Regardless, he says a little later:

> Behind all of these variations is the Amish motivation to strengthen their communities.

And then he spends several paragraphs giving a logical, well reasoned account of how various technologies (cars, electricity) were rejected because of their impact on the community.

Second, while carefully explaining one group, the old-order Amish, he very much mischaracterizes another: the Luddites. These were not people who simply rejected all new technology; they were protestors against the social changes produced by the industrial revolution. And their protests sometimes took the form of violent destruction of textile factories. It seems they didn't want to be mere cogs in some huge corporate machine, a sentiment I think most of us can empathize with (regardless of whether we approve of their methods).
I read that as "Caltrans recognized the correctness of the modified sign and decided not to roll back Ankrom's change."
Presumably they have a weakness. As you say, it's hard to quantify what they're doing, but that just means we don't have an easy way to figure it out. It still has statistics, limits and numbers, even if only their accountants have a good handle on what those are.
True. Until Google decides to code and release their client app, at which point Google will be in direct competition with Dropbox, and any third-party client to Google doc storage would be at a great disadvantage. I would guess that based on the adoption rate, a Google client app is not far into the future.
Obviously the situations are different -- vastly so. First of all, safari doesn't sound like the name of a scary anti social networking site, it sounds like an adventure instead! Second, since apple can do no wrong (in its own mind), porn in safari must be a hack, and probably violates TOS and warranty.

Edit: forgot the :P, but it is a joke
that was a horrible song
thanks sean. had one of my clients walk through it while i watched, sat on my hands, and shut my mouth. it was heartening to see that she was pretty confused about how to solve her problem with their product. happy to see that even though they overlap on our target market, we can still build a better product.
Imaging the spotty surface of Betelgeuse
Survey Monkey for the Phone - A Business on Twilio
All another company needs to do is build a better phone and they'll have all the press again. Without Google's (free, by the way) OS, Motorola would be just about dead by now. And I don't think Sony Ericson or LG had some great mobile OS in the works either. Google may have single-handedly saved a half dozen companies from being eaten alive by Apple later this year when the AT&T exclusivity runs out and all we every hear is how Google is screwing over it's partners by having the gall to have an HTC phone Google branded and sold online.
I say "care", but I also taught myself C from library books when I was a kid. It was a while before I talked with anyone about C data types, of all things.
I wouldn't be surprised if Google is now in talks with Dropbox to acquire to them.
iMuy importante! :)
Minimum Viable Product illustrated - the MVP Curve
Hey HN, (author of that article here) was wondering if you guys had any general feedback. I'm an evolving tech writer and I'm always looking for pointers.
Why? What would Dropbox give Google that it doesn't sound like they've basically already built. (Other then the brand and all of it's users)
Here's a great post on doing the math for this stuff

http://blog.asmartbear.com/easy-statistics-for-adwords-ab-te...

But yes, the bad news is it's going to take too long at your rate right now. I recommend looking at things like http://conceptfeedback.com to get feedback in lieu of being able to test right now. You could also consider running a poll with Mechanical Turk workers. The turkers would answer a poll like which design is better for about a $0.05 a person.

I've done the conceptfeedback.com for testing some new elements in http://tgethr.com before we had the traffic to start experimenting and the feedback was great.
I find it interesting when people trash the government. In the US atleast, you have some control over it. If you are getting screwed by the government, you have various outlets to mobilize change and if you don't act on them it's no ones fault but your, since the government answers to it's shareholders: you.
good points, btw I suspect that a lot of people wouldn't use this type of marketing-speak naturally (as a marketing tactic). I think they see this marketing-speak as the prevailing trend and just follow it (I'm speaking of the generic case and don't know anything about the specific case that maxklein is referring to)
This is just wrong.

The Virtual Memory Size (VSZ as he calls it in the article) is not what is important.

Measuring actual memory preasure and costs on modern Linux is pretty non-trivial, just look at this wiki page about Spam Assassin:
http://wiki.apache.org/spamassassin/TopSharedMemoryBug

He needs to measure the real size of a multi-process daemon like apache by using a script like the ps_mem.py:
http://www.pixelbeat.org/scripts/ps_mem.py

That can measure the real memory use of each daemon, and while I don't think the overall picture will change much, measuring VSZ is just inaccurate.
It seems to me like the Boston Police and The Powers That Be who they work for in Boston do not want any non-police witnesses with video evidence who could appear in court. I would assume they fear that non-police made video evidence might conflict with what the officers actually testify to in cases, and that this would give irrefutable evidence to a judge and jury as to what really happened.

Every corner store seems to have video surveillance to help deter crime I see nothing wrong with the public making videos of police officers. To me it actually seems like a very good idea.
But it's still a selection sort.
Only 2.4% subscribe at newspaper pay sites
On how Google Wave surprisingly changed my life
When Your Competition Gets Bought by Apple: The Melodeo Story
But where do you draw the line?

In a free society there should be no line. A person should be free to say absolutely anything. There is certainly a possibility of causing harm by way of your speech, but this should be handled post hoc, with a court determining damages.

America partially observes this with a watered-down doctrine of prior restraint, but it's got enough exceptions that it's not worth so much.
Security through diversity
Not wanting to place product, but Grado make excellent headphones. iGrado are okay and reliably built, but the SR60's are the best. My ears have not suffered in over 9 years use. The only problem is the SR60's should go through an extension cable, and I even have to re-solder the headphone cable to the cans (the headphone speakers) cable every few months as the connection gets loose with friction.

[Note: These are not in-ear headphones]
Samir: Yes, this is horrible, this song. </office space>
You could count it by the failure rate instead.
> Use obsolescent (pre-void) syntax. (68 bytes)

If memory serves, that means the method now implicitly returns int and has an implicit "return 0;" at the end. Sure the source code is smaller, but the actual machine code is larger. Going for the shortest source code is pretty silly, but then this isn't exactly a serious endeavor :)
Larger companies need such a system due to sheer volume and faceless interactions with the customers. Smaller firms better have a good idea what your client is up to without a survey/poll. The only target audience that makes sense to me is smaller businesses that do not have a long term relationship with the client. For that its perfect, except I have no one to test it on.

You can also branch out as a notification service that tracks acknowledgment, (Doctors appointment reminder service, etc...)
I really can't see how Muslims can think that the Koran is the result of a scientific method. This is a book whose contents were supposedly dictated to Muhammed by the angel Gabriel. This is a supernatural claim, not the natural. If people want to believe that the word of God was transmitted to human ears by an angel, that's fine, but please don't drag science into it.
What's so complicated about this? Apple likes to control every aspect of its products. Apple's customers like this.

If you don't like how Apple sanitizes the "Apple Experience" then buy an Android phone.
Whenever I read that thread title I always hear that stupid Beyonce song ("all the single ladies") in my head. It's awful.
If you are an entrepreneur, there is no separate personal and business life. I think it would be ok, after a friendly introduction, to talk business with him.
I agree, plus Dropbox is built on what is essentially a competitor's product. They'd likely have to do some significant re-engineering to make this work off of Google's Doc Store.
I think "car" makes more sense as that's how character is pronounced. I say it that way in my head, but switch to "char"-as-in-burn when speaking aloud as most people don't know what I mean.
What Google really needs to just do is pin the bow on their enterprise class document management system they clearly are building. Folks like documentum must be quaking in their boots.
I suppose the parent comment was being sarcastic.

Safari can also mean an adventure (using essentially slave labor) to illegally kill lions and elephants. The name forChan doesn't mean the same thing to non-IT-geeks.

This seems to be just another case of the App Store behaving badly (unless there is more to the story, like malware). It is very unfortunate that Apple is profiting so well from the App Store model. I can imagine many companies wanting to replicate the closed-platform, you must use our one store model. Its a shame to see free markets devolve.
Inaccurate History: the problem, its effects, and possible solutions
Oops, my clumsy fingers put you at 0 points. Could someone correct me?
Trademark tarnishment is a kind of dilution (the other being blurring). In this case, I think it will be hard to argue tarnishment and easier to argue blurring.

The real point I was trying to make, though, is that a court might find in his favor, and it wouldn't really be "a sad day for every entrepreneur without Chinese contacts". It would be a reasonable decision. Finding against them might also be a reasonable decision, though I'm prone to want to protect satire as much as possible. :)
Go put it to some dope beat homey!

Homey? Seriously?
I didn't vote this guy into office. But I did vote. And I knew going into it that either candidate would've screwed us over in his own way. Most of us have come to terms with the fact that all candidates are for bigger government, it's just whose pork barrels will be filled for the next 4-8 years.