skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"How to win friends and influence people" by Dale Carnegie.

This book should especially be read by those that aren't good with people.
Yeah, this is just one of the worst pieces of writing in the history of P.R. -- if it had been phrased properly nobody would have even noticed. If Steve Jobs had composed the memo people would be grateful to have gotten it.

Given that the public version of the app store doesn't even exist yet, why should we be surprised that Apple is not yet willing to take your $99 for the right to sell something there? Hell, if Apple was taking the $99 now, in exchange for nothing but promises, people would be complaining about that.
I wanted to paste this one as well. By far, one of the best recent quotes I've come across. It summarizes my drive perfectly as well.
None of the above. The whole thing is a big logo train wreck.

Because the contrast of the stripey letters is so much lower, the whole thing ends up half-legible. At first glance I see "p ay st", or "myp ay st". I have to squint, or use my brain, in order to tell what the hell I'm looking at -- and both of those tasks are too much to ask of visitors!
I assumed it just requested the '/' with an HTTP request...
It looks like nobody else has recommend one book I particularly like: Startups That Work: Surprising Research on What Makes or Breaks a New Company by Joel Kurtzman and Glenn Rifkin.

It combines a large quantitative study on startups with highlights from case interviews. The book's claims are generally backed by empirical evidence, which is something missing in many other entrepreneurship books.

David Sickmiller
Fluc - Mobile Social Network
Wow! congrats amichail. That was a surprise indeed.
Might work as an iPhone or mobile app. Not as an app for standard browsers -- the data are too time-sensitive, and I don't have the coordination to juggle a laptop while driving a car.

What I'd really kill for is a version of this app that could alert me to on-street spaces, or other cheap alternatives. I don't usually have much trouble parking in downtown garages -- they cost so much that they often have spaces, and if they don't have spaces they generally have signs at the entrance to tell you. I once had the bright idea of planting a sort of super-RFID in the pavement under each on-street parking space -- or maybe in the parking meters? -- and monitoring those with an online service. Make that work and I'll be your friend for life.
Ask YC: How do you perform website A/B Testing?
Ask YC: How do you perform website A/B Testing?
I think having the level meter in JUST the "i" would be far better. As others have noted, readability is very low on this as it is. Adjusting just one letter can work, but not three, especially two in a row.

As far as colors go, none of these are very vivid. Perhaps all white with just the "i" as a green level meter, with a white dot.
Green. Red infers a problem.
Parking companies are unlikely to share information if it disuades customers from speculatively finding a space. However, if you allow advance booking via mobile telephone then the parking company obtains revenue even if you don't use the service.
Which version? 384 654 112 DVDs (with porn) or 3 DVDs (without porn)?
In the olden days, A/B testing of newspaper adverts took advantage of a printing system in which two otherwise identical copies of a newspaper was printed on wide rolls of paper. This fixed the testing ratio at 1:1. For new website features, this doesn't have to be the case.

Pick a small sample of random users, perhaps where account creation time modulo 1000 equals 120. Make new code paths available to these users only. Measure load. Get feedback. Then repeat where the userbase is larger. Repeat until the feature is available to everyone.
I have to agree with everyone here so far. None of these logos are nice to look at.
To the TracksRuns guy
To all others reading this, I don't have the right contact info to send this request through the proper channels. Sorry to take up valuable electrons.

Could you add a comments field to the site? It would be a really nice addition, and it would make your site much more valuable to runners (or to me, at least).

Feel free to hit me back at bcater (at) mit (dot) edu.
ACM Queue - A Conversation with Phil Smoot: Scaling Hotmail
Don't forget about colour blindness. Although it isn't critical in this case (the red/green distinction doesn't add much information about the structure of the logo), in general mixing red and green is bad news.
Does anyone else find it funny that this is an HN link about a TC link about a HN link?
"myplaylist" in san serif is good. Lowercase is alright. Black background may create printing problems and limit future styling. "my" in green is good. Red dot on "i" is good. Volume style stripes on "li" significantly reduces legibility. Just omit this from the design and you'll be alright.
Red implies a problem. I infer that red denotes a problem.
Update: OK, now I wrote the program, and in hindsight it was overkill. Just check the candidates for x+y starting from below, and the right solution appears pretty quickly (there are 24 candidates for x+y, but it is not necessary to check them all).
Their host is in France (gandi.net), and it's a project by Alex (http://al3x.net) who works on Twitter.
Google reader
JPMorgan buys Bear Stearns for $2/sh, ~$236mm total
I actually do use it because it's more secure, and free (as in speech). I don't exactly think it's fun, nor do I particularly enjoy using the command line.
http://www.spotscout.net/
its a good idea - u can either make mobile app or on gps navigator or even with GM OnStar service ... one can also make an app to send automatic sms text message on your cell phone.
Link it in to sat-nav systems and it could be very interesting. Also, to counter xirium's (perfectly reasonable) point about companies being reluctant to share information: if you sell it to one parking company, then customers will know which of that company's car parks to go to, which is an efficiency benefit for them. If they're doing it, other companies might feel they have to as well.
Just to give you an idea of how ridiculous this is:

- BSC traded at $30 a share Friday, and well north of $100 a year ago

- Their building is supposedly worth $1.2bn alone.

- They have a solid asset management business, and a world-leading prime brokerage business, and STILL sold for pennies.

- They were the 5th biggest investment bank in the US

My take: KKR and Flowers (two private equity firms) were apparently interested in the bidding. Why didn't they pay up, and at least get the building for cheap and fire all the employees? Probably because Treasury/the Fed wouldn't let the transaction go through unless the buyer agreed to guarantee all of BSC's trades. Who is big enough to guarantee BSC's trades? Out of the pure investment banks, Goldman is the only one with any sort of financial strength, but they probably don't have the balance sheet to assume all of the trading and litigation risk that comes with taking down Bear. Citi and UBS are crippled, BofA is certainly big enough but is scaling down its investment banking and just bought Countrywide anyway. On Thursday and Friday people were talking about Wachovia being a potential purchaser and a good strategic fit, but who knows if they ever had any real interest. That leaves JPM as the only bidder, and since it was the only bidder, it paid basically nothing.

This crisis is so much bigger than Long Term Capital in 1998. LTCM almost destroyed Lehman. This crisis has destroyed Bear, and Lehman has one foot in the grave again too. Many more losses are yet to come.
Ask YC: How do you start and run a VC firm?
Is there any book or course you can suggest to know the following ...

1.whether it is simple to create a VC firm - like couple of millionaire getting-to-gather and start a VC firm?

2. What are the roles and responsibilities of partners, management team, limited partners etc.?

3. Whether they have to be unanimous in selecting a start-up company to fund?

4. How do they distribute profit amongst all these partners, management teams, limited partners, resident CEOs etc?

5. Why do they require outside investors or limited partners if they dont have money to invest from their own pocket to begin with?
Apropos of this being a dupe, I wonder if it would be reasonable to judge drift in the quality of a social news site readerbase via the response to the same content submitted at different time periods.
http://allyoucanupload.webshots.com/v/2001228246529956665
sorry had to correct this.

I was replying to this

I'm struggling to give some examples. I don't know if either of lastminute.com's founders were coders.

so google and MS are perfectly valid answers.

Anyway laters folks.
Best thing I read in a while! (I'm not done yet but I'll read it all)
when i do it to my server i get two "HEAD /" http requests from their ip.
New Internet Project
If you like what you saw please pass it on to your friends. And everyone is welcomed to participate.
Perl mailing lists added to Markmail archive
It looks like this can be brute forced because its in javascript...
Shelly Farnham on What Makes Facebook Apps Work
This could be why it shows youtube as down:

curl -I -A "" www.youtube.com

curl -I -A "" www.google.com

I suggest to whoever made that site to put a user agent string in the request.
Oh, so, fanboyism.
New Google source code browsing tool
"Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of any statement the other person makes..."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=teMlv3ripSM
I posted your question at http://www.ask500people.com/questions/which-logo-do-you-pref...

It will get a few votes over the next while, but if it gathers enough up-votes (sort of like digg, but for polls) from the community within 24 hours it'll run on the home page and get many more votes from around the web. Hope it's useful for you and good luck with the site.
We will never have a perfect model of risk
It incorrectly reports my site (mirwin dot net) as down, but adding (www.) makes it report as up. Kind of odd.
I think what the parent meant is that such a tree is fundamentally relational (not merely that it can be modeled as such). Since a relation is just a mapping between tuples and a set of logical values (TRUE and FALSE in most cases) then clearly there is a well-defined relation among the notion of 'parent' and 'child'. Thus the problem is the de-facto standard query language. It seems to me that we could use new special query language (or an extension to SQL) that could handle creating trees from pure relations in a performant and lexically elegant way. Or maybe it’s already been tried and I missed it.
(edit: looks like a lot of smart people have already figured it out)
To many end-users, technology is magic and therefore anything beyond pixels on their desktop is non-existent. Therefore, it would be worthwhile to consider the proportion of code which is directly concerned with user interface.
Take a look at the dollar. Looks like it's in freefall.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=USDJPY=X&t=5d
Calling something Web 3.0 does not make it so.
Looks like all those pundits predicting a 'slow-down' or 'mild recession' for the next couple of years were being wildly optimistic.
Warning: Do you protect your web statistics?
Interesting Idea. Amazed that I haven't heard of this before to be honest.
Actually more interesting is their performance in scaling Google Code within the past couple weeks. Huge performance boosts!

I find that their syntax highlighting is quite quirky... sometimes it's incorrect. Colors aren't too great as well...

Functionality-wise it's great. Diffs are awesome to view. Easy UI
I think this is actually a positive for the market. Now that people don't have to worry about trading with Bear and know that the financial strength of JPMorgan is behind their obligations, there should be a return of confidence.
What are your predictions for the credit/financial markets for the next 5-10? Can sovereign wealth and globalization ease this some until the bad debt is flushed out?
I was going to post spotscout.com but it does prove that when you think of it...10 other people are building it!
Capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich. Welcome to America.
Harvard neuroanatomist gives TED talk on experiencing a stroke (video)
Is Citi next?
http://www.bloggingstocks.com/2008/01/15/citis-bad-news-bank...
Physicists slam publishers over Wikipedia ban
But this problem is bigger than Bear, isn't it? So former Bear clients may now be happier trading with JPM, but what about all the other banks that are about to go to the wall?
Best advice so far. To it I'll add (1) lose the outline/dropshadow effect, (2) do it in Photoshop or something that smooths the pixelation, (3) use a white background, (4) use a thinner, sans serif font, maybe something slightly techno.

My favorite font site: http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=303
From what I hear it requires developers to make use of the Internet's inherent design to support multiple planets.

You think I'm joking about that last part?
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/print/1700
Ooh, that's got to hurt.
Honestly, the web is confusing enough as it is. Something like this will scare people like my parents.
Web Browser CSS Support
One of my friends commented today that the US Gov't is now taking measures to shore up the economy - however he remarked that they did very little to control the economy during the boom period. For example, if the stock market falls 500 or whatever points, there are built-in circuit breakers to halt trading. However, in the roaring NASDAQ/Dow days, there were no circuit breakers to prevent crazy, gambling-style appreciation..

The best analogy I've read likens the economy to California Wildfires. One of the reasons the California wildfires were so intense was the policy of fire prevention. Forests in the natural cycle of burn and regeneration seem to require a healthy burn once in a while. Obviating the natural wildfires leads us to bigger conflagrations. One can liken the economic impacts of lowering interest rates to fuel the housing bubble to putting out natural wildfires, building up fuel for a bigger economic problem (recession, millions of upside-down mortgages)
Asking people to use Google Maps on their mobile device while driving is a terrible idea. You're going to get sued by everybody who runs over a pedestrian or a mailbox while using your service, which will be just about everybody.
I was trying to use Google Map's "Directions" feature on the iPhone in NYC (yes, I was driving and was on the wrong side of Manhattan, lost) and it never worked - "Service unavailable". Google Maps - search for location worked however. Almost had to resort to last-ditch call my brother-in-law "Onstar" style service but I managed to get where I was going.
On a trivia note, as we're on Y News: Zed Shaw (from Rails Is a Getho rant fame - http://zedshaw.com) works at Bear Stearns and they have lots of RoR projects over there.
Wall Street fears for next Great Depression
make sure you anti-alias your edges too yo. jaggies are gross
Vanguard 1 turns 50
I secure mine but I don't think most people do. Here are some more stats

http://www.google.com/search?q=inurl%3Awebalizer+%2Binurl%3A...

Of course it's not that big of a hole and some sites actually like showing it off.
Agreed it's a ridiculous deal when I first heard it. But as outsiders, we don't have info on how much debt BSC has. JPM could very well inherited billions dollar worth of debt from the buy-out.
A newspaper article here in Spain covered it in January I believe. It's got a bit of press over here.
The large "Enhanced communication" pie chart slice has got to be a gussied-up term that covers SuperWall/FunWall type applications
No safari...
How is it socialism for the rich when one of America's leading financial institutions is completely wiped out?
I don't think so -- Citi is unlikely to have a major liquidity problem since they've attracted major investments from overseas and have billions of dollars in assets from their retail and commercial banks.

Lehman might be next... their stock was off 13% or so on Friday, and their credit default swaps are trading around 500 basis points... people aren't very upbeat.
Happyness is a positive cash flow
- A sign on an CFO desk at Digital Equipment Corporation.

From:
http://www.cryan.com/quotes/
The service isn't live yet.

An interesting feature is the ability of private people to sell the use of their parking spaces while they're not using them. Very interesting.
I'm not sure it was that bad:

Bear Stearns was simultaneously preparing a bankruptcy filing in the event the deal had fallen through

Better 2/share than zero. What's strange...really strange...was just how wildly wrong the market was on Friday. 30/share on a company putting bankruptcy paperwork together. That's scary.
This has been posted here before but.. http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/mil/206782771.html
Hey, good to read your posts again, informative as before; thanks!!
This is the first time I've seen this - Google search
At bottom of my Google search: In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s) at ChillingEffects.org.
At bottom of my Google search: In response to a complaint we received under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we have removed 1 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read the DMCA complaint that caused the removal(s)
I agree with pretty much everything everyone else has said.
- Lose the beveled edge.
- The meter-effect thing is a decent concept, I guess, but it's way too overdone. One letter is more than enough.
- It already has enough color, don't color any of the letters or the dot over the i.

You should always consider whether or not your logo will look good if you have only one color to work with. Think about things like screening your logo in black-and-white (e.g., a t-shirt or trade-show duffel bag). Incidentally, this is one reason to avoid gradients in general (another being that they just look like crap). This is also why the bevel has to go. So will the sound-meter analogy carry through with just black? I think it might lose something if you don't have green and red to work with, but that's just my opinion.

You should also make sure that you can shrink your logo down to a teeny-tiny size and have it still be recognizable. Think about things like favicons.

The font in the logo is actually pretty good... it's clean, readable, and a bit edgy.

I'm certainly no graphic designer, this is just stuff that I've read about logo design over the years. :)
Also reminds me of this could-happen and chilling story. Recommended: http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

"Live Your Life means that you are able get the most out of your life, as opposed to the least. Instead of dying in Terrafoam, or dying in some job that you hate, you live your life in the Australia Project in freedom and prosperity. Live Your Life means that you are in control -- again, the emphasis on freedom of choice. You decide what you want to do, and then you are able to do it. You reach your full potential. Live Your Life is the idea of thinking about your life as a whole, as something that you get to design and control. Does that make sense?"
Is this Digg?
I learned that having a powerful cross-platform standard library was more invaluable than I previously thought. :-)
Wow, I don't follow this enough. That's like the exchange rate a decade ago. Amazing.
Fed Takes New Steps to Ease Crisis
Just had random flashback to that doesn't-seem-so-silly-now movie "The Net" staring Speed's Sandra Bullock where they remove her identity...
http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2007/03/031207.html

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/archives/2006/07/071106.html
The entry barrier is higher than the average YC startup (and the like) for this idea. It isn't a pure software solution, content requires cooperation/contracts among parking lot owners, as well as the distribution method (I doubt you would do it for cellphones because satnavs will be a vastly superior tool for thus).
It supports the full C# language and many of the component libraries. Silverlight is essentially a plug-in that can run in any browser, and there are extensions for different operating systems. (Apple and Linux soon.)
From DealBreaker.com's liveblog of tonight's 8PM JPMC conference call (http://tinyurl.com/2jlhjy)

"8:24. Good question about how to reconcile the alleged $80 per share book value and todays $2 per share price. JP Morgan doesn't say it directly, but Bear's liabilities must be severe."

"8:35. Bear Stearns does own it's building, which means JP Morgan is getting a huge piece of midtown real-estate as part of the deal. By our math (which is shaky even when we haven't been drinking all day), that means either the building or the business is worth something like negative $400 million."
Bear Stearns current losses from the sub-prime investments are $3.2bn but GM's losses were reported as 39bn sometime last year. Why is the Bear Stearns saga so significant?

Edit: I didn't understand the whole problem behind Bear Stearns but this Q&A from BBC details the issue really well (would still appreciate some insight or further reading links though): http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7296827.stm
1. programming reddit
2. hacker news
3. gmail

Actually, I just deleted my reddit account, so expect /. to replace it.
I don't know of any "how to be a VC" books, but here's what I understand about VCs:

1. It's easy to be a casual angel investor (typically investing your own money) but not so easy to be a VC (risking others' money). VCs typically create funds in the hundreds of millions from a number of large organizations (pension funds, endowments, etc). A couple millionaires who simply have a lot of money but no VC experience aren't going to have much credibility when raising hundred of million dollar funds.

VCs are fiduciaries to their limited partners, so they're responsible for explaining all their investments. Angels can invest in a company that makes toothpaste out of poo if they want.

2. For the same reason, VCs also usually sit on the board of the companies they invest in. Angels typically don't.

3. Different VC firms have different policies on selecting which companies to fund. Some might require unanimity, some majority, some 2/3s, etc.

4. VCs typically make money two ways: yearly management fees regardless of how well the fund does, and a certain percentage of the profits of the fund.

5. VCs are professional investors who invest other people's money. They may also invest some of their own money, but the majority comes from outside investors. See #4.
Knowing a friend who is a real-estate agent who tried for months (unsuccessfully) to negotiate the purchase of a single building that was owned by one of the mega-huge global-local parking lot conglomerates for a rich client, the barrier to entry is connections to metropolitan parking lot enterprise(s)
Didn't know it was a dupe.

I find response heavily dependent on the time and day of week of submission.
An Assistant Who May Need the Occasional Battery
I just watched The Net last night. It's on Comcast's On-Demand for the next couple weeks for anyone who's interested...
I'd agree it's not even close to Hacker News per se, but this is a big enough deal I'd say it belongs.
"... How do you read YC? ..."

- find some articles, /submit

- read RSS for headlines with my own hack sorting by hacker, points, stories & replies

- read /new, then /news, upclick & new tab for good articles, reply where something grabs my attention

- read threads, then reply

- read /comments, /lists when bored
That's a really neat idea. Even just a Flesch-Kincaid score (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch-Kincaid_Readability_Test) of the dupes responses might be interesting.

On a related note, I bet that the rate of dupage may say something about community quality as well