skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I waited for the MacBook Air, but having seen it, I have now replaced my stolen PB 12" with a base white MacBook.

It kicks! My wife has one of the first ones sold by the Woodlands Apple Store, and it had every problem, but hopefully mine has all the bugs ironed out.

The performance with the base 1Gig is great, and the keyboard and trackpad are excellent. My only complaint is reflections on the shiny screen, but you can't have everything.
There's truth in this. I very much enjoy Philip Greenspun's writing. Most of it is of the general form, "I did X, and here's what happened and what I learned from it."

If you never do X, writing about it would be superficial, at best.
Y C can command lower valuations (though I don't think they really take advantage of it) than most other investors due to their incredible value add, which may actually be the highest in the industry. There are probably zero investors who are going to put as little as $100k into a company that come anywhere close. So out of the gate I'd require a higher valuation from other investors.
Often the usual response is something similar to "we are anxious to go through a formal valuation process should we determine this is an appropriate possible investment." It's certainly a bit of a chicken answer, but you can provide numbers such as revenue, product developments, and users to give an idea of what a proper valuation would be. The idea is to not price yourself out of their range during the first conversation.
The Valley turns out for Natali
lol - nice find
How to Name Your Business
My only problem with table nazis is when they do their job poorly.

i.e. they insist on a tableless layout, yet when you look at their design in IE6/7, the right sidebar always seems to end up at the bottom of the page.

So instead of working on real code / markup, you always seem to be fixing a broken sidebar CSS issue, due to insistence on not using tables. (i fix these problems in 5min w/ a table-based layout)
Bookmarked. I'll be back. If this turns out to be as good as it can be, I'll be back often.
Company Naming Guide (free pdf)
Boy, would I love to never have to think of XHTML/CSS.

The reality has always been quite different.

At least churning out valid XHTML+CSS from Photoshop designs has now become a commodity business:
http://onwebapps.com/39-photoshop-psd-to-xhtml-css-services/
Linus Torvalds - Part I : Open Voices: The Linux Foundation Podcast
along with "i heard he produces invalid markup" (cue beavis & butthead laugh)
Who's at the Crunchies?
anyone going to the after party?
As I've mentioned here before, I've done work on avionics software, which probably has some of the strictest development constraints you'll find.

Generally, these constraints include some things that we'd probably all agree are good: consistent naming conventions, for example. But these constraints also encourage very simplistic coding, such as, no recursion.

Code that follows the constraints tends to be extremely procedural, and tries to avoid complexities of the language. This is for the purpose of verifying that the code really will do what we claim it will. If someone, say, messed up at recursion, it could exhaust too much memory and the box could die.

The result is very robust, but it lacks character. It's rarely beautiful and elegant. But we are about as sure as we can be that it works.

[That is not to say that recursive, elegant code does not work, just that, it's harder for a team of hot-swappable software verifiers, potentially just out of college, to match the code up with the requirements, or to ensure that non-obvious code is correct.]
I'd say I'm at stage similar to what an 'average' YC startup would've been at after about 3 to 5 months. Not hugely populr, and not at a deadend either. It's a consumer, social, Web site. We don't have a lot of users yet, and we don't have revenue, but the concept seems to be a good one, and I think that's how the investor heard of us and approached us.
I would go one step further.

If you need 100k, why are you looking for VC funding? They will give a horrible valuation and take a large part of your company. First phase funding in the ~100k range I would look for angel investors or get the people involved to contribute the money. Either raise 500k from a VC and have a much more aggressive growth strategy if that is the route you want to go, or raise 50k from friends/angels/yourselves and minimize costs as much as possible.
He's jwz man, "one of the best programmers" accordingly to Peter Norvig [1]. He can :-)

[1] http://norvig.com/21-days.html
Don't get locked on the pre-money valuation: the other terms tend to have a much bigger impact on how much you actually make.

What's your plan for paying the investor back? Will you need a follow on round? How much, when, and why. What risks about your startup will you have reduced before you need to raise another round. Can you be acquired based on what you will achieve with this first round.

Have you talked to other teams this investor has worked with? You have to assign a value to the expertise, advice, and connections that this investor will bring. Most angel investors supply more than money. That's one of the reasons teams want to take money from Ycombinator, they have a well defined methodology and a constellation of other folks they can connect you with who can help you succeed.

You are negotiating the start of a relationship that will normally only end when your firm goes bankrupt or is sold: this is not a transaction this is a long term partnership.
I'm not looking for VC funding. He's an angel investor.
Crunchies Live - on right now
An Incremental Approach to Compiler Construction [pdf]
It may be common but the more important question the investor will have is how soon and for how much you can sell the company (in other words how will you use the funds to create more value / reduce risk in the startup). There will be other terms associated with a funding that will have a significant impact on how much you make when you sell (for a reasonable range of exits). A couple of good sites for background on funding:

http://venturehacks.com/

http://www.feld.com/blog/archives/cat_term_sheet.html

http://www.startupcompanylawyer.com/?s=term+sheet

http://www.paulgraham.com/guidetoinvestors.html

http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2007/12/01/three-points-about-s...
He's just trying to impress the lady in black.

(Or some other lady nearby.)
It's amazing that Cringely can be so consistently off the mark about everything to such a wild degree and still have a column that people link to.
I'm always shocked when something non-retarded is written on valleywag.
They brought it on themselves. A well-conceived and well-run company which fell prey to greed and was destroyed by it.

The VCs would never have destroyed anything if the original vision had remained in place and expansion proceeded apace with what the market would bear (obviating VC funding).
Hehehe, I do use and administer a Subversion server, but to me the webdav choice was ugly.

Standalone svn:// server for the win.
Real Time Angst
As I recall, the university was run out of the non-profit ArsDigita Foundation, but the foundation got it's money from the for-profit ArsDigita company. All the VCs had to do was cut off funding, and the university dies.

I still listen to the recordings from their university every so often; they did a good thing.
Well then. Good move.

(friday night, beer and a looming all nighter...and other excuses, read the YC as VC...)
Ask 37signals: How is Campfire different than a meeting? - (37signals)
Google Transit
Amazon EC2 Ubuntu 7.10 gutsy AMI built using code customized by Eric Hammond <ehammond@thinksome.com>
For more information: http://ec2gutsy.notlong.com
Halting problem proved in a poem
Intel Releases LatencyTop 0.1
I think you mean:

value = $15000/20% = $75000 at the low end

or

value = $15000/5% = $300,000 at the high end
Trolltech's Qt to be licensed under the GPL v3
Compilation of your applications to binary for one. Also, it enables you to do the bit twiddling necessary to write device drivers and other lovely systems programming things. Maybe we'll see a better scripting language VM in D one of these days?
Slackware.
I still find it interesting to read, when taken with a large grain of salt.
with the value added to us readers, i think we can overlook this issue and get back to coding. would you yell at your girlfriend for cooking you a nice dinner and putting the fork on the wrong side of the plate?
What you can do is what matters most. Something works or it doesn't. How you do it is purely subjective.
Slide is on MySpace too, and they probably make more money there than on Facebook. It's easy for us YC news hackers to forget about MySpace because we probably all use Facebook but MySpace is where most users are.

Let's also not forget that all other social networks are going to open up, creating a massive opportunity for Slide that probably far exceeds what Slide makes on Facebook. $500 mil may not be such a high valuation when you think about it.
$100K is not enough to sustain two employees for an year. $50K is less than the annual average living expenses for a person. (Just do the Math, housing, insurance, etc.). I would strongggggggggly recommend to try raising something between 0.75M an 1M. I have noticed a lot of fellow hackers seriously undervaluing the time they spend building a product. Two strong hackers, working for 6 months is eaily $140K expenses(and I am including just the salary an employer would pay). Please, please do not undervalue your time and expertise.

With the oncoming recession and all, you do want to have enough in the bank for at least 1 to 2 years, if you are serious about your startup.
we use fedora
2007 Crunchies: The Winners
Has any startup successfully deployed zfs on solaris?
Please give your experience thanks
linus is a mad genius
You might want to consider punting on the question altogether by taking angel money as convertible debt instead of equity.
Lessig's Final Free Culture Talk
I would like to hear more about why you use it. I used to use FreeBSD for everything, but it's my understanding that the once significant differences in performance and stability between Linux and BSD no longer amount to anything. I switched to Gentoo (can not give up source builds!) two years ago.
I agree. Convertible debt financing delays the valuation question until it becomes reasonable and is a common way to do seed rounds.
Solaris whenever I can, CentOS5 otherwise. Solaris has excellent threading and some apps I run for customers therefore run better on Solaris.
It's not easy, but it's doable. Asking for the numbers you're suggesting forces us to seek VC funding (which we might do later), but we're not ready for it yet.
Considering the optical path, this can not be used as a display.
getting-things-right-vs-getting-things-done
http://evalinux.wordpress.com/2008/01/02/getting-things-righ...
TED Talks | Larry Lessig: How creativity is being strangled by the law
Are you addicted to Information? N.A.D.D.
Yes, Joyent, up until now: http://www.google.com/search?q=joyent+zfs+solaris&ie=utf...
$100k is more than enough to sustain two founders for a year. Especially if the founders happen to be young and unmarried. If they were living together they could probably make it on expenses of $50k for a year while still living relatively comfortably (even at Silicon Valley prices).

Also, I'm not sure what to make of your comment "Two strong hackers, working for 6 months is eaily $140K expenses" How good the hackers is hardly related to the expenses they require. Perhaps 140k is the opportunity cost?

Having enough in the bank for 1-2 years is probably a good idea, but it sounds like they could do that on $250k-$350k.

Also, I agree with matt, focus on the percentage you are giving away rather than the amount you want to take.
That's your impression? I don't think it was greed that motivated him.

ArsDigita grew at market pace without VC money. Unfortunately, during the dot-bubble, so many companies were going public that individual options holders were barking at Phil, demanding an exit. Greed you might condemn, but daily annoyance at your place of work? They wouldn't have been any easy acquisition, they were basically too large. They were also after all a consulting company. An exit meant going public.

They took VC money because underwriters refused to them public, despite their massive profits! Underwriters didn't want to manually verify the company: they were already operating at capacity. They wanted to scan for some large VC firm and sign of.

Greenspun didn't understand the danger. Once he did, he acted on it, and made a public warning in hopes that people would see it coming.
:) Yeah. I was tired when I wrote the post. Thanks.
What's dumb money?
Ubuntu 6.06 LTS 64-bit. It is beyond me why so many people use non-LTS release of Ubuntu on their production servers.
What should I send investors? The Elevator Pitch.
What should I send investors? The Deck.
No investor ever asks you "how soon and for how much can you sell the company." Ever. And if they do, go elsewhere.
What should I send investors? Business Plans, NDAs, and Traction.
It's kinda odd how blatantly he contradicts himself there. He seems to think Oracle wants to buy/kill mysql, and at the same time mentions that because it's open source, it can just be forked at any moment. Meaning that Oracle couldn't possibly kill it, they could, at best, force it to change names.

If mysql were Nike, it would be worth it for a competitor to pay a billion to force a name change. But anyone who even knows what mysql is would know instantly what happened.
cringely gets a lot of things wrong, but i always enjoy his vision. he's not so good at ferreting out what's going on in the tech world right now, but i think he'd be much better at inventing new parts of it.

my attitude when reading his columns: "this might not be true, but wouldn't it be cool if it was?"
Not sure. Google gives me this: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/08/uberfac...
Ah, okay.

I thought you were using all three at the same time, which sounds like a big headache for dubious benefit. :-)
Scrabulous Still Hangs in the Balance
Two AI Pioneers. Two Bizarre Suicides. What Really Happened?
Fave Media raises $1.6M for local search engine
You must also consider the potential for abuse by governments or other individuals against your users. This is particularly relevant to online backups. You aren't facing a big ethical problem at all if you ask me. Privacy is a basis of US laws, and all that.
> created the greatest weapon mankind has seen

Stretching it a bit... I think the guy who made machine guns happen slept worse at night. You must realize though, that both were obvious inventions that were going to happen no matter what.
CentOS 5
YC tends to gives about $6K-10K per founder, which needs to last for at least 3 months or until they get more funding, unless they have other funds... and the funded companies seem to make it work...
I need reliability, with a bias on using source code to produce my running binaries.

Of course, I run NetBSD.
Gentoo, both desktop and server
My guess is that everybody will switch to Postgress or a fork of MySQL itself in no time if Sun will ruin MySQL.

Still it is not impossible that management style people at companies like Oracle and Sun are so stupid to don't realize this, or maybe it's the best they can do to mitigate the MySQL effect in the current situation, that is to continue the development in a way that makes MySQL uncomfortable in some way but still usable enough to slower the switching to other products.
Google Offers OpenID Logins Via Blogger
To this time the max. price people (thinking that domain is for sale) offered for my openid domain was $800. It could be much more interesting now :)
CSS Gradient Text Effect
If anybody is interested in the report, here is the link: http://www.project10x.com/misc/SW2008.pdf
Examining Feeds in Social Networks
Openads announces $15.5M funding and a free hosted ad server
Debian Etch
New Findings Confirm Darwin's Theory: Evolution Not Random
State of US science report shows disturbing trends, challenges
You said: As bayareaguy noted: "You have to read the original article very closely or you'll miss their point: in terms of distributed database research, MapReduce is a step backwards."

This to me is really funny since I don't think you can view MapReduce as distributed database research. I haven't used it, and while I admit that I might have gotten it all wrong, to me its a library/dsl/paradigm/technique for parallelization of certain data-processing tasks. So to me that statement makes as much sense as "lisp, viewed as a monitor , is a step backward compared to lcds".

Others, that I consider smart, have noticed http://bitworking.org/news/288/Stonebraker-on-MapReduce

Also, while it was a while since i viewed the techtalk on bigtable, and I really agree BigTable is a column-based DBMS, I can't seem to remember that they built it to get around deficiencies in MapReduce, I understood it as a compliment. BUT it might have been much more constructive if, as someone said higher up, they wrote the original article about BigTable, because I do believe that their criticism is actually valid (as in apples vs apples) in some cases regarding BigTable.
Yes, and of course you should really generalize that so that the number of squares on a board with nxn single squares is sum(i=1..n) i*i
Or svn+ssh://
Clearly the MBA is not a good development machine, you want as much screen as possible for that. I have a MBP 17" with the HD screen as my primary machine. I am very happy with it (and I've been through a lot of laptops starting way back with DOS based laptops, through all the Windows variants and with a Linux detour). MBP + VMWare is a perfect combination for me. Dual cores are really nice (have recently been doing some stuff on forgery detection in images, which I'll open source soon, and I can tie up an entire core doing image processing and not notice the difference).
At $50K your taxes are going to be pretty low, but just the same try and have the company pay for things instead of buying them with your salary.

If you look around you may find a business partner who could give you some money as part of some kind of deal. Traditional software companies can do this by pre-selling licenses at a discount and web companies looking for ways to get more users may pay you if you find a way to help your users get signed up with them. However I'd caution against spending too much time on this sort of thing yourself as it can easily become a distraction.
As it stands they are selling a promise that someday things will be better than they are. Since that's not something you can easily exchange for actual value, I think a more fair arrangement would be for them to sell the initial inferior product at a discount and charge separately for the retrofit when it becomes available.
Another good start, but I'd like to see Google (and Yahoo) allow me to use my non-Google (or non-Yahoo) OpenID to login to their services.

i.e. Google and Yahoo should be "relying parties" in addition to their current plans to be OpenID "providers"
Heh, I'm just yankin yer chain. :)

You must have been that kid that always made it hilarious to do the "what do you see in that cloud?" game in Jr. High.
Apathy wasn't really wrong since even if Greenspun himself wasn't greedy he didn't have what it took to cope with the greed of others.
At least with the MBA I don't have to worry about treating the battery right, like taking it out if I don't use it. I never do that, and feel slightly bad about it.

My only concern would be if the battery were prone to exploding. It's nice to be able to take it out to be safe against that.
Mines a Fujitsu lifebook, AMD dual core and yes 3 gig of ram. I've run it with linux for a while but needed vista for work. Yes, I do think there's something wrong. It takes about 90 seconds to get to hibernate, but always more than 5 minutes to become useable again after wakeup. Any advice? People tell me my macbook would make a much better vista computer with bootcamp. Anyone have any experience with this?
"I say death to President Bush, I say death to the United States. Fuck the United States, fuck the Jews, the Jews are a criminal people, they mutilate their children, they are murderous, criminal, thieving, lying, bastards. They made up the Holocaust, there's not a word of truth to it. They are the worst liars and bastards. And now, what goes around, comes around, they're getting it back, finally. Praise God... Hallelujah, this is a wonderful day. Fuck the United States. Cry, you crybabies! Whine, you bastards! Now your time is coming! The US is getting what is coming to it. This is just the beginning."
-- Speaking on Bombo Radyo, September 11, 2001
The current Economist issue contains a letter on this story by Stephen Corry, Director, Survival International, London. From the letter:

"The Sentinelese are not the only tribe of hunter-gatherers who still resist contact with the outside world ("Noble or savage?", December 22nd). There are over 100 uncontacted tribes worldwide, many of them hunter-gatherers. Nor are the Sentinelese warlike. They defend their tiny island with good reason--intruders have shot and killed Sentinelese, and neighbouring tribes have been wiped out after contact with outsiders."

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_id=1...
As someone with a different opinion on the events he covered in his nerds book, I thought Cringely's own story of his failed attempt to build a working airplane in a month is his best work.

- http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0164814
It probably won't work because it contradicts behavioral economics. Daniel Kahnemann won the nobel prize in economics in 1992 "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty". One of his findings is that people tend to overreact to small probability events, but underreact to medium and large probabilities.

What that means in the case of this particular business model is that customers will be wary of reserving a table at an early stage where they will potentially pay a high price for the seating even though the probability of this happening is very low.

If you haven't heard of Kahnemann's work his nobel lecture is definitely worth watching - it will give you some great insights on pricing, auctions, and why the economy works as it does.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2002/...
I agree. I know I wouldn't go for this sort of scheme unless there were special circumstances.

I think popular restaurants should try and find a way to offer real-time reporting of queue lengths and availability of items on their menu so that I could make a good decision quickly when friends call and want to eat somewhere.
I use FreeBSD (not GNU/Linux), Debian and Ubuntu on my servers.
More articles should use the textbox-in-a-frame scheme like this one did to quote things at length.
Webdav is really one of the really ugly design decisions of the Subversion project. WebDAV was initially promoted by Rational - if you closely study WebDAV, it is easy to notice similarities with Clearcase. Looks like it was a political choice that was made to appeal to the managers in the IT departments - "Oh, Firewalls are not a problem, If your browser works, then the SVN should work ... blah blah". To be fair though some of the top committers will freely confess to a dislike for WebDAV.
I believe that the IRS uses Benfords law for fraud detection. If the numbers on your tax return do not conform to the law they will investigate further, as there is a good chance that you made the numbers up.

Maybe there is a potential start-up idea in generating and selling credible numbers that will fit Benfords law for creating fraudulent tax returns ;-)