skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Look, I can bring this back around to start-ups!

At 21, in the heady late 90s, I was looking for a new web programming job. I interviewed at two places, Monster and this weird little start-up company in a dilapidated house in Allston (neighborhood in Boston that attracts students and wanna-be rockers). Monster was a commute, cubicles, and a growing name. It seemed like a good prospect.

When I walked into the interview at the other company, I saw the team of 6 or so people at makeshift desks lining the living room, and next to every workstation was an ashtray and a bong. I'm totally serious. It smelled like a Grateful Dead show in the middle of an industrial smokestack.

And you know what? I took the second job. Because it seemed really fucking cool, and I was 21, and Monster was already looking a bit Office Space-y.

But yeah, smoking (not just the mj) seemed cool, and weird, and offbeat, and it made the group seem even more rebellious than it would have otherwise. And it turned out ok. Some people got rich, some of us made a little money with options.

I have a great story about how we trashed a bus management rented to take us to Six Flags. I think it took the president approximately 5 minutes to light a spleef, and we were all completely drunk by the time we made it to the park... at 10am.
The first question that comes to mind is: "Are there any security issues with using this?"
Ask YC: graduate courses
Which are the Computer science graduate courses mostly applied for by students.What does AI consist of?I wanted to know which ones i find interesting?
are there any related to the specially the internet?
Yahoo sued for spurning Microsoft
Compulsory Voting with Careful Consideration of Choices
I'm sorry that you think I was subscribing to some sort of conspiracy theory in listing those organizations. The point I was trying to make is that what has been termed "fluff" is now "destructive trends", and worse it was somehow suggested that by exposing others behaviors (or rather, revealing stats as illustrated in the above description) would somehow lead to a (final?) solution.

The degree to which the original "problem" is becoming viewed as cancerous is alarming because I feel that News.YC is a place for diverse thinking and sharing interesting content. Digg/Reddit have devolved because they are more homogenous than they are diverse (hence the mob-like mentality).

The very diversity that makes an online community interesting should be embraced instead of eradicated, but that's just my opinion. I know that eventually as News.YC becomes more popular this community will homogenize and follow the same fate as Digg/Reddit.

It is inevitable...
The people whose opinion it represents.
If this is for real, let's see them film an electron during a double-slit experiment.
I think this says something about the issue (it's the top link on Reddit right now): http://www.paralleldesign.com/mckinney/kevin-01.htm
Something cool? You mean a hacker?
You can take a simple decision: don't do anything you don't want to.

Just be sure to be aware of the full extent of the consequences. You may be surprised at how many times saying 'no' leads to very nice situations.
Personally I think the legal system in the US is broken, and this is a good example. In a sane country you would oust the board of directors if you didn't agree with them. In the US you sue.

In cases of fraud, deception, etc. suing is of course the right thing to do. But in this case the board of Yahoo has chosen to reject the offer from Microsoft based on their belief that the bid was too low. Where exactly is the wrongdoing in that? You can of course disagree, in which case you should take it up on the next shareholders meeting, and vote for removal of the board.

But I have a hard time seeing the justification in suing a board for having an opinion on the valuation of the company. I thought that was what they were paid to do...
Well, as opposed to a website blocker, I thought it would be a step above. You're not restricting their actions explicitly, they just have a peer pressure style of accountability. Of course it could backfire and turn into a "Who can spend the most time on myspace this week" contest.

Oh, it looks like Dave (name picked at random) is the winner with 12 entire hours! Way to go, Dave!

Still, I thought it was an interesting alternative to actual site-blocking.
Mac vs Windows Wiki: surprisingly detailed, allows outside contributors (formerly XvsXP.com)
Perhaps somebody bought too much YHOO after the news...
Yeah I meant internally public. You can't have outsiders (competitors) knowing what your employee's surfing habits are. They could have certain projects compromised.

Of course if your employees are visiting these sites out of sheer boredom, then there's another issue taking place. If the management (don't know how large this company is) is good enough, they could watch the trends in their employee's surfing and turn it into a time to learn why they're spending so much time on non-work related sites, and hopefully provide them with more meaningful and efficient work.
Microsoft is finally growing up
We have a pretty good crowd here now. I think that most of our friends would also be a good crowd, and most of the annoying 14-year-olds wouldn't be our friends.

And this didn't cripple the growth of Livejournal at all. You only get one invite a year, but you get it immediately on joining. I invite you, you turn around immediately and invite someone else, who invites someone else, etc. The 1/year rule is meant to make me careful about who I spend my one invite on.
Just How Much Traffic Can You Get From Social Media Websites?
Nice.

I'm going to file a patent for putting my arms in the air and waving them like I just don't care.
Wow. Medical devices are a really tough go. I had a friend out on the East Coast burn through a quick 700k trying to develop a home test to check for blood in a person's stool. They had the device, and had a prototype made. Getting it approved by the FDA was the difficult part.

I was involved in doing studies for FDA drug approval. One phase of testing after a product had already been approved required about $10 million. That was just to test to see if the process worked on additional viruses, not just the one the product was approved for. Getting anything approved by the FDA is a nightmare of red tape and studies.

That's just to be able to sell your product. Getting the Medical community to adopt a new product is very difficult. Doctors are by nature conservative, and trying new things tends to make them nervous. That's one of the big reasons that pharmaceutical companies market so heavily.

But, where there's muck, there's brass, I imagine. I take my hat off to anyone that can make it in the medical startup/device field. Those people deserve all the kudos they can get.
SuperCompilers
Mitra on Indian entrepreneur Vembu, Zoho and the vibe
If a board takes a decision on other grounds and neglects its fiduciary duty to the shareholders, they can sue. This is probably what the people suing feel has happened. Of course proving it in court is a different matter.

You typically sue to obtain redress for an injury. Firing the board won't make up for their perceived loss.
I disagree.

This statement assumes that "two Detroit pension funds" have enough votes to oust the board of directors or that the stock is structured in a way that they could ever get these votes, even with voting trusts or voting agreements with other shares. I can easily guess that Yahoo stock structured as such and if I am wrong, please correct me.

So, if I was managing a pension fund with languid Yahoo shares and not enough votes to do anything, my smartest and perhaps only move would be to sue. 62% ABOVE the actual market price of the stock? At that potential premium, if I did not sue, the pension fund might be coming after me as shirking my fiduciary duties. This does not mean I will win but its better than flailing around while the Yahoo board figures out a way -avoid- a merger and possibly prevent my fund from realizing 62% ABOVE market price on my sagging Yahoo shares.

So, from my perspective, it makes complete sense.
Where I'm from you fire the board of directors if you think that they haven't lived up to expectations, or made as much money as you would like them to. You don't sue them for injury.

I think this is the best approach for several reasons:

1) The board can actually run the company as they see fit, and not worry about being bankrupted by a hedge fund that sues them because they have a different idea of how to run it.

2) A board constantly keeping to the middle of the road and only taking the choices that are absolutely safe with shareholders stiffle innovation.

3) Control of a company slips from the board to the legal system - which is definitely not good.

It is a pretty sad state of affairs - I would never want to be on the board of an American company.
I'm probably going to regret responding to this, but here goes...

Many of us are also very invested in this site, and are interested in keeping it close to its roots. That's why there's been a lot of alarm regarding the content on the site. I'm sure that some of it will blow over. Some of it will cause changes.

I don't really think that people are trying to get PG to automagically fix the problem for us. I think that we're trying to have an open discussion about solving the Eternal September problem with social sites. This is a recurring problem that occurs on pretty much any site that has a user-contributed component and gets popular.

And, regarding earning karma points: If you take a look at the people frequently involved in the discussion on fluff, trolls and quality slides, I think that you'll find that many of the people that are concerned about this are actually quite active on the leader board. I think it's because we're on the leader board, that we're so invested in keeping Hacker News on the straight and narrow. We've invested a lot of time and effort into the site, and are willing to continue that investment.
Here's an idea for a startup:  Put a robot on the moon and win $30 million
could not have said it better myself
MicroHoo Un-nerves Sergei Brinn
All I'm saying is that you can't take away the right to sue for perceived harm. Its all very well to declare that the US legal system is broken, but its not right to say that the shareholders should not be allowed to sue the board in such cases. Whether the case has merit is precisely the judgement that the courts are there to make.
I might not have been completely clear, but what I'm attacking is not the fact that they sue under these circumstances but the fact that the board is sued on the basis of their judgement.

The board of Yahoo has, for some reason, decided that it is in the companys best interest not to take the offer. This is their judgement. What I'm attacking is that they are being sued because of their judgement. And the reason you pick a board of directors in the first place is to exercise judgement.

And if the board is constantly being sued whenever they make a move that is not entirely predictable and not in any way offending to anyone they don't make judgements based on the companys best interest, but based on their fears of repercussion through legal action.

I see your point that if you are a minority investor there is not much you can do if you don't believe in the boards decisions - but then you should sell your stock.

Just my opionion :-)

Oh - and welcome to YC news, hope you like it.
Video of Matz Speaking at Google about Ruby 1.9 - February 20, 2008
"Whether the case has merit is precisely the judgement that the courts are there to make."

Excellent point. I can only hope for the outcome :-)
http://paulgraham.com/equity.html

What PG writes here is a pretty good explanation of how equity should work and he even gives an example of a situation where a hypothetical startup wants to hire a good hacker and trade equity for him.
Ideas at Google do not burst forth from the Heads of Geniuses
You just described the underlying problem with a suit such as this. There is a concept called the "business judgment rule:" if a shareholder sues the board for a breach of fiduciary duty of care, a court is unlikely to second-guess a business decision if it was made in good faith and was informed. So, the system does give deference to the judgments of the directors. Its existence is just buried deep in the folds. :-)
Should be no problem, I'll hack one together over the weekend and have it on the moon by tuesday.

:-)
2) It must be novel

I think this is where Apple is going to have a hard time. There have been several other devices that had a sort of "multi-touch" capability, which might render Apple's multi touch non-novel, and prevent it from receiving a patent.
Ok, thanks for the info. I wasn't aware of that.

Maybe the system isn't as bad as it seems form the outside.
I haven't seen the "pinch" idea anywhere before, so I think they might have a pretty good chance there.

Of course I haven't done any research on the matter either...
Good idea. There is a 'conflict of interests' when you give the length of the comment a value. It will give people incentive to write longer comments for unnecessary reasons, which is the definition of fluff.
Forensic tracking codes in Xerox printers
Like these: http://binaryfreedom.info/node/312 (scroll down)
The Indian Clerk
I used his whiteboard project to turn my laptop into a touch-capable laptop. The only thing is that my IR source doesn't work very well. I replaced a keychain LED with an IR LED but the switch is a simple squeeze and it is incredibly hard to turn it on and get a good signal, so when I'm trying to calibrate it, I usually accidentally click twice and have to redo it. Does anyone have a good idea for an IR pen?
This book has been out for awhile, but I just started reading it and am having a hard time putting it down. If you're interested in G.H. Hardy or Ramanujan, you should definitely read it. Of course, it's a novel, but the portrait of Hardy is fascinating.
Do we have an explanation yet for why

null == 0 -> false?

It can't be because operands are converted to numbers or booleans, since 0 == 0 and false == false are both true.
Wealth vs. Religiosity
LOL, this reminds me of Jiffy Express:
http://snltranscripts.jt.org/92/92djiffy.phtml
I have taken an undergraduate course called "Introduction to AI", and it so far deals with topics such as search, knowledge representation, game playing and so on...kind of a overview of most of the topics the prof said.
At my university(San Jose State Uni), about 40 students have taken the xml and web intelligence course, which seems to be towards data mining and ontology.
Also keep an eye out for vague topics, and go and speak to the prof and find out what he intends to cover during that semester.
Intel sees big dollars in tiny package
It's not inevitable.

I'm not sure how long you've been lurking; there is a shared desire to perpetuate the level of discourse in a way that benefits the community. We've also got the "don't say something stupid, the natives are very smart / clever / motivated and deserve your respect" factor, the "ask yc news/ask pg and almost always get intelligent actionable feedback from experienced hackers/entrepreneurs" factor, and the "if I have an idea and demonstrate talent I might get noticed / funded, so I better not say something really stupid" factor.

Releasing data is a '?' - if it can be suggested that it may be a means to arrive at some sort of method for automatically/technically ensuring the community doesn't move toward the same kind of mob mentality, that's fantastic, let the heavyweight theory guys find something cool to do with it. If that fails, there's still moderation, and a strong desire to perpetuate the high signal to noise ratio here.
Microsoft E-mails Employees About Yahoo! Takeover
JPL's Ulysses mission is ending
Online/offline ad network startup
Don't Become a Scientist.
Phun: 2D Physics Sandbox
See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0H5g9VS0ENM for a video demo.
It's strange what will set people off. I got to spend a day in the metropolitan museum of art. The four thousand year old woven cloth pretty much brought me to tears.

Astronomy never held a deep fascination for me, but i can relate to seeing a technology that both has deep personal meaning and changes the way culture interacts with science.

Good for him.
The illustrious Allston trading???
An Intuitive Explanation of Fourier Theory
Well the US isn't as bad as the Europeans think :-)
By the way, if this lawsuit upset you, then I really shouldn't tell you that Yahoo was already being sued for refusing to do a deal with Microsoft last year!
Jeff Han's presentation at TED in February of 2006 was the first I had seen of multi touch like this.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/65

You'll notice in the photo application that he pinches to zoom in and out.

I pray that the difference between using the exact same technology on a 4 inch screen that you had seen on a 40 inch screen isn't novel, but with our patent office these days it won't surprise me.
It's funny how every response in this thread confirms the three reasons mentioned in the article - in particular reason one: cognitive dissonance.
Microwulf: A Personal, Portable Beowulf Cluster
"a new and useful process, machine or a composition of matter,"

The exact anti-definition of 'pinch'
So, religiosity = c / wealth for some constant c, with the U.S. (and Kuwait) as an outlier. Why am I not surprised, yet somehow disappointed?
Cosma's Notebooks
Collaborate more to achieve hustle (Agile software development)
Ask YC: How To Prioritize
For me, one of the hardest parts of doing a start-up is deciding what to do first. I know what has to be done, I know how to do it, but I find it much harder to determine what my site biggest issue is.

To give a few examples:
I haven't implemented billing yet. This is obviously essential, but now may be premature, since ...
I've got very few users. So, maybe I should do more marketing, but ...
My site may not be good enough yet, so most visitors won't stay around. So maybe I should listen carefully to my current users and make the site ... prettier? Easier to use? Create more content? Make it more fun? More addictive? More viral?

This is a hard problem no matter what, but does anybody have useful suggestions on dealing with these issues?
Simpler, More Relevant Profiles | Facebook Developers News
Brazil dances with OPEC
Amazing memory man never forgets
The challenge is idiotic. This is coming from someone who loves space tech. There are other nearer term challenges in space that have applications on earth that don't require a lunar landing.

How about a materials prize, or a solar cell efficiency prize, or a earth orbit sky-hook demonstration, or better hardened electronics, or or or ...

The way a challenge works is to get people motivated by money and publicity beyond a threshold where they normally wouldn't take up the effort because of the costs and risks. X-Prize for a near orbit manned mission and the DARPA Grand Challenge are two good examples.

There is simply no way a company not tied to a major aerospace corporation can complete the prize in the near term. It has completely failed as a "challenge".
Anybody waiting to get there hands on this? What are you using in the meantime?

This should be a very attractive market to target for a small startup. Apple will probably sell apps through itunes for 4.99 (or less), so you don't have to worry about sales or distribution (and marketing becomes easier too). And the huge "how do we charge people for this cool thing we made?" issue just completely disappears.
Open source project: Func, the Fedora Unified Network Controller
Go reputation economies!
Ask YC:  Why not have "reddit-sense"? (like adsense but adapted to social news)
If the submission rate is too fast, some submissions may not get much of a chance at making the front page.

So why not show new submissions all over the web a la adsense?

The idea is to show new submissions on your site to have your new submissions shown on other sites.
Focus on your core competency. Whatever makes your site good and unique. There are a zillion other sites, why would someone come to yours?

Obviously listen to your users! Prioritize on things that you think will grow your site - like ALL of the things you listed. Some are easier to address than others, so tackle those first.
There's an excellent marketing scheme hidden in there somewhere...
First of all: great response!!

"...a lot of alarm regarding the content on the site."

The fact that people are finding "fluff" to be "alarming" is what is concerning me more because this is the attitude that leads to mob mentality very quickly. Everybody is free to think and act as they please. So if this means combatting "fluff", then by all means do that.

On the other hand, I will always be speaking out for diversity. I'm sure we can all agree that great ideas don't grow out of homogeneity and that it requires a mix of information from different sources.

Fear mentalities are much more dangerous than "fluff" because they can seep into other aspects of your life...

Btw, can anybody explain to me why I'm being downmodded so much? I really don't care about the karma itself (except for real-life Karma of course!), but I would like for somebody to explain to me what is wrong with my arguments regarding this emerging "War On Fluff" (sorry, I couldn't resist!!). I will also add that I hope when I ask for feedback on my startup/concept in the coming weeks people are just as sincere about giving me some feedback!

;)
It is a hard problem, but by addressing it you are already ahead of the crowd.

What I would do is to set up some goals (get more visitors, increase ROI, etc.) and then look through your list of stuff that needs to be done, with these goals in mind. Do the ones that are most likely to get you towards your goals.

Just writing it down will probably help a lot.
Slavokia, Bolivia Czech Rep? Lots of rich people in those countries (not). This graph should show income based upon the real local value because showing it in just dollar skews the results.

Sorry it is not the poor dumb tards that are religious it is usually the rich. (Except in muslim countries, then you can turn it around and say it is the poor but that is for different reasons all together.)
But any on my list could be a full time job. And yet I must choose. But how? Are there rules of thumb?

How do other start-ups prioritize?
Facebook claims no user drop - someone is lying
"Pinching" is definitely not unique to the iPhone. Microsoft's Surface has similar features to zoom in/out.
Reminds me of the time I sent a read-only PDF to my professor for a formal report. (Can't copy or print.) They used some kind of anti plagiarizer. While I didn't plagiarize, I wanted to see what happened when they tried to grade it.
Its because you imply (intentionally or no) that everyone who believes that some form of content control should be implemented has intentions similar to the DOD, CIA, KGB, etc.

In retrospect, ultimate control of the site belongs to pg and if fluff does start flooding the site, he could just reincarnate the site elsewhere with a different policy backend. However, there's no harm in trying to do it right the first time. :)