skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Two somewhat related quotes:

Short version:

"Bad shit is coming. It always is in a startup."
-Paul Graham

Long version:

"First, and most importantly, realize that a startup puts you on an emotional rollercoaster unlike anything you have ever experienced.

You will flip rapidly from a day in which you are euphorically convinced you are going to own the world, to a day in which doom seems only weeks away and you feel completely ruined, and back again.

Over and over and over.

And I'm talking about what happens to stable entrepreneurs."
-Marc Andreessen
Ask YC: Do you believe in Twitter philosophy? 
Recently it's been questioned on RWW that Twitter is still for Geeky people and not for rest of the world. It's hard for someone new to convince why he would share what he is doing with the rest of the world.

What about you? Do you believe in Twitter philosophy? Is it only for geeks? Or can it be taken to mainstream people?

If yes, what ideas do you think that can be build around that philosophy to provide value proposition rather than just "status updating"?

Do you think we need to derive signal from Twitter?
Question your work [37signals]
Ask YC:  Anyone know of a good free speech synthesizer to create a demo video?
I don't want to use my voice.

I found this:

http://freetts.sourceforge.net/docs/index.php

Is there anything better that's free?
i think this is a pretty good explanation:
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/top-5/2008/03/14/The-B...
I heard that the problem with the pygmies hunting for 10 hours a week was that this figure was noted by anthropologists that were driving the pygmies around in trucks!
Yes, wait until it figures out that the best way to stay upright is to subdue the human before the kick can happen!
That's nothing compared to dogs that can be trained to sick specific parts of the human male body!
Do we really need the sensationalist article titles? To tell the truth, the Dow is up a bit from its opening price, and the dollar gained a little bit from its low.
Maybe festival? I once heard a sample that sounded really good, though the default settings are probably the same as any other solution.
How Time Machines keeps copies of data (Quarter Life Crisis)
Bear Sterns did not have enough liquid capital to distribute to investors seeking to withdraw their money, a bank run

Bear couldn't cover their margin calls (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margin_call#Margin_call).

And now the Fed has helped or guaranteed those investments so that JP Morgan can buy them for $2 a share.

JPM wasn't going to touch Bear's liabilities without some guarantees from the Fed.

Details of the plan haven't been released, but here's a pertinent quote from the Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120569598608739825.html?mod=...):

To help facilitate the deal, the Federal Reserve is taking the extraordinary step of providing as much as $30 billion in financing for Bear Stearns's less-liquid assets, such as mortgage securities that the firm has been unable to sell, in what is believed to be the largest Fed advance on record to a single company. Fed officials wouldn't describe the exact financing terms or assets involved. But if those assets decline in value, the Fed would bear any loss, not J.P. Morgan.

Note that last sentence means the U.S. government (i.e., ultimately every taxpayer) is on the hook for that $30 billion.
I've launched my alpha (using Heroku); thoughts?
I have just recently launched the alpha version of my app:

http://ezlearnz.com

There are still major pieces of functionality missing, e.g. anything that has to do with user profiles, comments, voting, and other things. I'll be implementing them in the coming weeks/months. But before I do so, I will eat my dogfood and create some lessons/courses.

Please be gentle in your (constructive) criticism; I was an absolute newbie when I got this idea ~9 months ago, so I had to learn html, css, a bit of javascript, and ruby on rails in order to make the app. Incidentally, I'm looking for a co-founder.

Thanks for your feedback!
Aren't hedge funds a major source of institutional venture capital?
Bear is an investment bank, and does not have direct access to borrow money from the Fed.

Ah, but under "emergency measures" announced today by the Fed, securities dealers (for at least the next six months, anyway) may borrow from the Fed on much the same terms as banks.
Whistleblower exposes insider trading program at JP Morgan
If the big barrier to acceptance is intranets -- where the company controls the web server itself -- then an additional solution is available: Rather than requiring all new web pages to contain a new "OK for IE 8" flag, simply tag the old pages with a new "Not OK for IE 8" flag, to trigger legacy rendering. I imagine you wouldn't even need to edit the webpages -- just add some module to the web server that automatically rewrites the header.

...There must be a good reason why this would never work, because I don't recall hearing it proposed before.
The Telia-Cogent Spat Could Ruin the Web For Many (Web partitioned)
"...jobs people kill for..."

For an european, this gets out of balance. You americans use kill, nuke, bomb etc. far too much. Think about your life!
A few of these articles were maybe ok (and maybe not), but let's not open the floodgates.
>Think blackwater is bad now? How about when they're not even human beings?

Then they run at a lower threat level.

A humans's decision process: "Is that guy a suicide bomber? OMFG SHOOT!" A few minutes later: "Fuck sarge, I got scared. I screwed up big time."

A robot's decision process:

if uncertain_of_hostility(target):
speaker.warning() #This robot only costs us $50,000. Hearts and minds, right?
else:
fire_warning_shot(target, bystanders)

## if fu_bar(target): #Don't delete or uncomment this line, or else bad things will happen.
Britain makes camera that "sees" under clothes
"Decentralization" would better convey the positive connotation he wants to emphasize than "fragmentation".
design wise it is always a good product - but feature wise ipods just cant copy - if u look around there are many mp3 that have good design and tons of features .... u dont need to be blind folded by marketing.
It's a useful hypothesis to use as an ideal, and just because reality is different from the preconditions of the hypothesis doesn't mean it's silly. Sort of like Newtonian physics.

Also, deviations from situations predicted by EMHhelp identify weaknesses or abnormalities in the real market.
I'm part of the crowd that still doesn't understand the efficiency of twitter in any environment other than average use. If you want to equate twitter's parallel with geek society because it's hard for geeks to get their non geek friends to use it, by all means make that the bottom line of your argument.

For me, I don't think it's an issue of who's a geek and who's not, it's more "who's going to leave their AIM or ICQ protocols to use something on the web that does the exact same thing?".
While this was similar in explanation to the Ars 10.5 review [1], I thought that it was a useful discussion of how Time machine works, including some valid, and some not-so-valid critisms of the implementation.

I'd love to see future versions take advantage of redundancy in files.. If I make a 1K change to a 1GB file, I'd love to only keep the change.

As I understand, this would be prohibitivly slow under HFS, but should be possible under ZFS, which natively stores files as original + diff anyway.

[1] http://arstechnica.com/reviews/os/mac-os-x-10-5.ars/7
In the above talk, he mentions that Black Swan is better than Fooled by Randomness.
A couple things I would do for now is get rid of the ad's and add more initial content. I think more content would convey what you are trying to do better. I know this is supposed to be user generated content, but to bootstrap some of the content up maybe have some friends write some stuff. How do you like heroku ?
You Don't Have to Ditch the Day Job
New technologies and ideas like Twitter have a habit of appearing completely useless at first, and then suddenly catching on. I remember the first time I saw the ICQ "pager" on the internet in the mid 90's. My thought was "WTF is this stupid thing good for?", now (like most people) I have multiple IM accounts and do a good bit of my daily communications via IM.

I was having a conversation this weekend with my wife about Twitter. She is way more technical than the "average" wife, but doesn't really "socialize" online much (her IM client has only me as a contact). Anyway, I was trying to explain Twitter to her, and some of my summary points were:

1) Twitter is the evolution beyond IM, which was the evolution beyond email.
2) Twitter is (likely) best suited for 1-way status updates (I'm at X, doing Y) to close groups of friends vs. "micro-blogging" which seems (to me) like "micro-attention-whoring" most of the time.
3) Twitter is useful when you don't need or want a response, just a way to keep friends/family in the loop about things where the value decays over time (ie: you wouldn't post your vacation summary via Twitter, but you might mention that you landed safely at the airport)
4) Twitter took a new approach, trying to embrace some of the Web2.0 methods, where it's NOT a closed client-server system as IM is. Instead it seems more like a framework that is waiting for the true killer app to be built around it (or, some might say a solution looking for a problem).
Repeat 3 times: "The stock market is not the economy."

A bailout is _good_ for the stock market, especially the financial sector, since it means the government will back any bad decision the top 20 Wall Street firms make.

A bailout is bad for the economy because it will devalue the currency, fire inflation, keep firms alive that should have been killed, and make unavailable capital that would otherwise be available to new firms. Can you say "Stagflation"?
Seth's response to "Boom you're out" is that you probably don't want to work there anyway.

From my experience, I'd say that he's correct.
I admire your optimism. It is indeed exciting technology, but I think this will have military applications long before it is available for public use.

For now, Roomba will have to do.
Joel points out the main reason for Microsoft's behavior in the article: standards benefit the little guys. Microsoft isn't interested in benefiting the little guys.
I was talking big trends here.

I can find companies that only hire programmers that know cobol, but that doesn't mean that all companies do, and that you should emphasize your cobol experience in your resume.
survival of the fittest?
hunter/gatherers were replaced by settlers largely because of lack of resistance for deceases spread from animals to settlers.
pretty painful way of becoming fitter and quite odd way of defining the word.
Unfortunately for Bear these emergency mearures were only enacted today, and Bear needed the money on friday.

Lousy timing...
Pretty impressive! However, regarding the practical prospects of humanoid / antropomorphic robots I remain pretty sceptical. Why? Because wheels (or sometimes threads) are so much simpler and cheaper! It seems to me like a classic case of "Worse is better".

The usual arguments for legged robots aren't very convincing, IMO:

- "legged robots are better for difficult/uneven terrain": look at some videos showing the iRobot PackBot (which runs on threads): Although it's very small, it can climb stairs.

- "humanoid robots have an advantage because people can interact more naturally with them": maybe, but people also interact with Roombas, dogs, cars etc. - none of which are humanoid. Regarding the Roomba, I have read an article that many people name their Roomba and even pity them if it gets stuck. So the question will be: is the advantage of "better interaction" worth the considerably higher price for a humanoid robot body?

- Isaac Asimov said that humanoid robots will have an advantage because the whole world is already build for humans. Again, maybe - but when the car was introduced, we rebuilt the whole infrastructure (i.e. streets) to meet our new machines' needs.

Perhaps I'm just not getting the point of humanoid robots - apart from beeing technically impressive and cool to watch.
I guess sending large volumes of mail must be difficult...somehow. There are several services like this (and sure it's cool that it's free and all), but I've never been able to understand what's so hard about sending a few thousands emails. I've built bulk mail senders on a whim on several occasions...when we re-launched our website, and the passwords had to change because of different encryption, I sent out 5000 messages by writing a 25-ish line perl script to pull addresses from the database and queue up the messages. Put a 1 second sleep after each message, and things never get out of hand, as far as server load or bandwidth usage--in fact, it was completely unnoticeable and the system was in service the whole time as both our web server and email server. I've done the same with as many as 20000 recipients and multiple sending SMTP servers. It's just such a simple task that it wasn't even worth looking on the web for an off-the-shelf solution.

What is it about sending out a large volume of mail in one burst that frightens people so much? I'm sincerely curious...I see it brought up quite frequently among startup founders as a serious problem worth spending money on. If your list isn't a spam list--e.g. 90% bounces and errors--sending out mail is trivial, right? I guess if we're talking about a million recipients...but, I can only think of a few companies that could possibly send to a million recipients without it being unsolicited (and those folks are dropping it into mailboxes on their own systems in a large percentage of cases...Google to gmail, Yahoo to @yahoo.com, MS to hotmail.com, etc.). Heck, many of our non-technical users use off-the-shelf stuff, like PHPList, to send out newsletters to a few hundred or thousand users, without giving it a second thought.

What am I missing?
No; Gladwell just doesn't think about what he writes....
"Oddly, it seems pretty rare."

Why?

Frankly, I don't understand the need to be "public". Why would I possibly want my personal info on a website for anyone to see?

If I want anyone to know anything about me, I tell them. No one else needs to know.
Great idea. How about a SMS gateway where you could text your ZIP code and it would return a list of garages and number of open spaces. this would be a lot easier than typing in a web address, and would be quick enough for you to do it at a stop light.

Also, I know some people that work at a company that makes the software for said garages.. I could talk to him / connect you two.

Mail me: valor _at _schnooze _dot _com
Of course not. It's called newsletters, like to one you can subscribe to here: http://www.37signals.com/
Seth has created a pretty sweet reality for himself which I'm sure he enjoys quite a bit. Being a bestselling author, successful serial entrepreneur, and industry icon sounds like a reality most people would enjoy.
The Getty makes art accessible with online database
because there are a lot more average, well-paid positions that require resumes than there are "Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for" that don't.
He's not talking about average jobs OR average people:

Some say, "well, that's fine, but I don't have those."

Yeah, that's my point. If you don't have those, why do you think you are remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don't have those, you've been brainwashed into acting like you're sort of ordinary.
A "traditional" resume is simply a track record in a concise format. If you're exceptional enough to not need one the company will probably be approaching you. If you're too pretentious to bother making one because you think you're exceptional I would expect it to be rejected.
Why bother wearing pants? By wearing pants you just communicate to the rest of the world that you're a B-player who needs to wear pants to be taken seriously. Look at Einstein. He always wore pants, but if he didn't, do you think they would have fired him? Hell no, he was Einstein.

Great people shouldn't wear pants. If you go around wearing pants, it sounds to me like you've been brainwashed into thinking you're kind of ordinary.
echo mk here. I'm not too sure what it is you're trying to do. Is it just a place to store lesson plans?

Also, Like ____ for _____ is evil. You should try to explain it without referencing another product.

Good luck to you!
macbook does have bells and whistles and stability worth buying ... but not the ipods but it is so funny that macbooks doesn't have 80% market and ipod does ....
Well, the sale to JPM was probably already a done deal at that point.

It seems these measures are because there are probably other Bears out there, but not enough JPMs to save them all.
Aaah I see. I have to learn about those newsletter things sometime. Maybe that's why I get so much mail everyday.
I see general business news as on topic here. The discussion of Bear Stearns here blew me away.
Jimmy Cayne would be more deserving. But they can have Schwartz as well - he was COO while these bets were being taken.
My point is that the title of the actual article would do just fine, without adding "the sky is falling! the sky is falling!" to it.
Good point Mr. Christensen...

Had to upmod you for that one, even though it may well be contradictory to my own point.

Oooh the humiliation...
I disagree with what you said. If it was sarcasm, it was far too dry for me to pick up on it.

And, quite frankly, I usually downmod reddit and slashdot style jokes and puns because I want to help maintain the quality of comments here. I believe that if we "punish" people for behaving like that, they'll either leave or start submitting relevant and useful comments; either of which I fully support.
Startup Camp U.K.: Are Domestic VCs Missing Out On Better Opportunities?
You're on a site that is dedicated to discussing computers, programming, business, and random niche "geek" news.

Clearly this isn't the site for you -- try reddit or anything mainstream like Fox News or CNN.
Ask YC: Where are you physically located?
I myself oscillate between Baltimore suburbs and New York, US.

Post your location. It would be interesting to arrange a few get-togethers and geek out!
So... how can I free Tibet, end the Federal Reserve System, and save Darfur?
Google: DoubleClick Employees Must Re-Apply For Their Own Jobs
Sell yourself, not your soul.
That is crazy. It is almost like a real dog - which are free.

The real future is with genetically engineered dogs, horses... to run faster, cary heavy loads etc. We have already done it through selective breeding and soon we will be able to program DNA (see Craig Venter, Dawkins...).

These robots are so mechanically complex that they will ultimately fail. Nature (evolution) is the greatest designer. What complex robots have hit the mass market? None, because they are just too many moving parts.

Animals can even reproduce!
You really have to make a better summary of what your product does. I'm not really sure what it does or it's purpose. The top "500 pixels" is really important to tell people what your product does.

Look at mint.com or backpackit.com for good examples.
For example, mint.com says: we're a money manager (nice summarizing screenshots), and this is how we're better.

backpack says: We're your simple, easy small business intranet. (notice the feature summarizing keywords in the top 500 & the title. And WHAM, a demo video to see what it is right away.
From the article: Which party is responsible for which legs of the connections?

Do you have each party's telephone number on paper, in a big folder which never leaves your office? Having this information in a fancy database is useless when there's a power outage.
i appreciate your effort to learn everything in 9 months to bring your dream come true - good luck
I enjoy twitter, but don't see the mainstream bothering with it.
I'm pretty sure that the sale wasn't a done deal on friday. The problem didn't get serious until friday morning, and thursday I think that nobody even suspected a firesale.

Unrelated: what does your username mean? Is it a greek last name, something else, or just a random sequence of letters? Just curious...
Silicon Valley
A followup on Concurrency within Python
sooner the better else elephant is going to fall - and when elephant falls it takes forever to get-up !!!
I mostly agree with your second statement, though I'm not sure I'm convinced it's evil. "Like Flickr for video" worked out, in fact, far better than Flickr for photos.
Copenhagen
Sending emails is not rocket science. But it begins to be more complicated when you want to serious about it:

First, you’ll want to automate bounce processing. There is typically a 2.5% churn rate per month on average on a list. You'll start to be blocked at 10% at many ISP.

Second, you’ll want to be authenticated if you don't want to be tagged as a spam. Think of configuring SPF, SenderID, DomainKey and DKIM.

You'll also want to remove recipients that will tag your email as spam, and that will happen, no matter what. For that you'll need to have your feedback loops configured at major ISP, and unsubscribe the plaintiffs as you get the reports.

And we’re still not talking about calculating open-rates, click-rates and reporting them in a way that is efficient and gives you insights about your marketing operations.

It all depends on how your value your time. We think you have better to do than tweak yourself an email marketing solution.
SF, CA
Well, there's always an exception to the rule. :-)
Mac OS X has a great one built in. Leopard's new "Alex" voice is excellent.

By the way, in OS X you can use the built in speech synthesis from the command line.

say "hello world"

Check the man page for more options.
As far as I'm concerned, the biggest problem is making sure that your email gets to people's Hotmail/Yahoo/etc. inbox, rather than their spam folder or rejected entirely.

From my experience so far, this seems to involve messing with SPF/SenderID/Domain Keys/DKIM, filling out various forms, harassing Microsoft and Yahoo support, and sacrificing small animals at midnight. None of this adds any intrinsic value to a start-up, it's just a hassle that may as well be outsourced.

I don't know if that's part of what these services promise, but it's the only thing that would make me consider using them.
Awesome; habe das vorher gelesen, aber habe ich doch den Titel vergessen.
I think it's more or less on topic, but N articles about the same thing... maybe a bit much.
;) Think of this as a business hacking tip for people who want to inside trade.
http://www.hackrtrackr.com/
seed funding from the people like YC may not go down - VC funding may slow down temporarily - but if the startup has something innovative and unique stuff to offer then funding shouldn't be a problem ...
When savings have zero value, not working makes sense.

Enforceable property rights matter... and so does a stable economy....
I hated this parable the last time I read it too. It’s sloppy. It’s based on the false premise that there is no difference between a pauper lounging on the beach and a millionaire lounging on the beach. However, the millionaire’s life has a lot less risk. He has a longer life expectancy, and so do his loved ones, because he can afford quality food and access to medical care. He lives in sturdier dwellings that are more robust against storms. He can afford an education for his children. He can help others who are in need. He can put his money to use to build cool and interesting things.

The fisherman is one unexpected disaster away from death. He, his children, and his wife are powerless in the face of a risky world. I suppose it is noble that he is able to stay content when his children die of preventable diseases, but I am sure he would rather be saved from doing so.

If the fisherman extended the effort suggested by the MBA, he wouldn’t be back at square one as the parable suggests. Rather he would be in a new place, one that I would find preferable.

Rubbish. Again.
Pittsburgh!
How It Works: The Sturdiest Solid-State Storage