skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Asking me if I watch TV is like asking me if I go to the theater to watch new movies. The answer is NO to both (90% of the time), but that doesn't mean I don't consume some of the content through other methods (I download it).

Meaning I won't just drop everything I'm doing on Thursday night to watch Lost, but I'll perhaps catch it on a Saturday afternoon when I have the time or feel like taking a break from my work.
And he does until he divides it, regardless of how much work you put in.

It's a barter - each party gives so that each party receives. I see a lot of receiving, but not much giving on their part.
The entire browser's set of controls is written in C or C++ and is provided by underlying OS the browser runs on. On Windows it's RichEdit control. On Linux it's something else. There is no API in existence that lets you do anything outside of browser limitations.

JavaScript is only used to manipulate API of those controls, but not to implement controls themselves. This means that "Office" part of Google Docs is implemented by FireFox/IE/Safari, where google only provides storage for their output.

I blogged about this "web apps nonsense" a few days ago:
http://kontsevoy.blogspot.com/2008/02/web-vs-desktop-nonsens...
That is sad but this story just makes twitter even more awesome. There is something about it, i cant really seem to understand why its so popular but its amazing.

I am pretty sure that because of twitter he will find a job in no time.
Actually, yes.

If you think fictitious millions are hard to divide, wait until they try to handle real ones.
His contribution entitles him to whatever he negotiates. That's why he needs to have it very clear up front.

The fact that you and I disagree on his worth right now proves this.
Yes I agree: Lotus notes sucks ass. :-)
get tipjoy.com
Some initial data: 1085 tips totaling $749.73. Who knows how much will be paid. 90%? 10%?

We're had around 15500 page views, not counting the buttons on third party sites like techcrunch for the first 2 days. I'll need to look at the logs for that.

Techcrunch earned around $70 per their post on tipjoy (so far), and that is raw conversion rate there. If more people had tipjoy accounts, the rate should be higher. Then again, people tipped to experiment and help our launch. Lots of factors here.

$70 per blog post isn't too bad at all, though they are a huge site.
Firefox 3 beta 3 polishes rough edges
The foundation of Arc: Documentation
Run Paul Run!
I think it is still a serious red flag if you're offered a job at a startup but the equity terms haven't been settled yet. Sure, even if the terms are fixed, it is possible to get screwed down the road. And of course, employees are typically the last people to cash out if a liquidation event occurs. So what? A written agreement in a nascent company might not be worth a whole lot, but it's worth considerably more than a verbal one. If you aren't promised a specific equity stake in writing (in addition to information about the total # of outstanding shares etc.), then I'd assume you're not getting any equity -- you're probably not going to be too far off.

Furthermore, the fact that the equity hasn't been arranged is a sign that these entrepreneurs seem pretty clueless. I doubt that any reputable investor would sign on to invest in a company like that, for example. Not settling the equity up front doesn't "save time", as you've suggested elsewhere: sorting out the equity after the fact is likely to be more time-consuming and contentious than doing it earlier, when the company is smaller and consensus is easier to reach.
I'm blown away by your comment. I felt like the entire thing made the writer seem vacuous (or perhaps it's the medium and not the author that's the problem).
Study: 6% of People Online Contribute 50% of Display Ad Clicks
Yes! We have the production server on EC2 and the development one runs on a virtual server from Spry. From our load tests EC2 can handle about 6 times more site usage.
Yes, google adsense depends on a lot of things. Its not always the best way to monetize a site at all. The payouts are just really low unless you can bring good traffic to good key words channels.

There's alot of companies out there now just building a site together in rails, and expecting to monetize fully on adsense...

Adsense isn't what it used to be. There are still people out there doing well on it. Just be methodical with your traffic. Continually improve it and learn to understand it.
> CUSTOM ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE IS THE ONLY WAY TO GO.

I don't want to be repetitive, but this is the same conclusion the OFBiz guys arrived at, which is why they have a very flexible, open system that is licensed under a liberal license. I'm not wild about all the Java and XML involved, but they've got a really good community going, which counts for a lot.
The ratio of bad guy to good guy deaths: (0 0.015 0.39 0.92). So looks like Rambo reflects the sense of fear that the bad guys are winning/catching up. Not sure how to explain the big jump between 1985 and 1988 (Chernobyl, Challenger, Lockerbie, Iran-Contra?)
I haven't had a TV set now for two plus years. But you need to really have some effective alternatives, otherwise you end up wasting time on something else.
Yahoo And News Corp. Continue Marathon Discussions; Possible Bid To Counter Microsoft
> I don't remember that many good guys dying in the fourth one.

Assume that "good guys" includes all non-"bad guys". (Villagers, missionaries, extras, etc.)
Mandatory voting seems a bit extreme. Maybe the first step would be to join the rest of the world and have two or three voting days and have at least one or two of those days on a weekend. Some countries give a day off work, which isn't a bad idea either.
Thanks for the info.

I must admit, it sounds like a horrible idea to me... I strongly believe that business processes should be able to evolve, which would presumably not be the case with very expensive software (every change is complicated and expensive). The evolution should also be bottom up - the people involved in a process should be given the ability to change it, if they see that it has flaws.

It sounds to me as if ERP is just a LOT of TPS reports waiting to be written...
Lately I've been busy and have accidentally not watched TV in a while. Lots of DVDs, though, and a couple trips to the movie theater.

Right now, I'm watching the BBC's "Little Britain" on DVD, though I don't count anything on DVD as television.
He will be a lot better off if he stops drinking so much coffee...
There are two things that might swing us into having everything entirely hosted at Amazon.

1) If we need to store large amounts of data at S3 and our app constantly needs to manipulate it, sitting between the user and the data rather than simply linking to it.

2) If we launch an app that has a high dependency on Amazon Simple DB.

In either of these cases we would get a significant performance increase from having always on EC2 instances for the app servers. In the meantime SliceHost continues to serve us well for a fraction of the cost.
Everything in the browser eventually comes down to C/C++. But as far as I can tell controls like the Yahoo UI Rich Text Editor are implemented in pure Javascript. And by this I mean it modifies the DOM in Javascript (and the browser handles rendering the updated DOM) as opposed to using browser magic (like an ActiveX control in IE). If I'm wrong, could someone please point me to documentation explaining exactly how these RTE's are implemented?
A more appropriate title would be "50 Google Maps mashups you didn't know about". At fist I thought it was about 50 features in Google Maps that weren't commonly known.

Very interesting list though including things like airport parking, finding red light cameras or estimating cab fare (for those of you that read the comments before clicking the link). I need to start adding some sites to my Bookmarks.
I can't decide if the first comment

Sad that yahoo is firing such productive employees.

is serious or sarcastic.
Amazon's river of bits
VirtualBox is fun. My kids use it to play their favorite old windows games on their OSX laptops. It seems to be about as functional as VMware was a few years go. The biggest difficulty I encountered setting it up was getting the drivers you need installed in the guest os.
I agree. Hiring a sales team takes money so it's harder than doing something yourself. But once you have a solid sales team (and a solid support team) being agile can help. Large customers always demand new features and being able to rapidly provide what they're looking for is bound to make them happy (and make or break a deal). Once you build a happy customer base the referrals can bring you tons of business.

But I guess you can't take on this kind of work without some serious VC funding which makes it less attractive (you loose control and potential exits).
Maligned aircraft finds redemption in Iraq
Running Numbers
Two products on the market do this. Pubmatic and the Rubicon project.

The last third of ad performance can be squeezed out by simple algorithmic optimization.
Alright, you've cleared up some of the misconceptions I had about your post. Great point regarding the security by obscurity in resumes.

If I get a chance I might write a script to search the web for publicly accessible resumes and track changes in keywords over time. Might be able to pick up some interesting trends.
Here is a post I wrote a while ago about the reasons why I picked Slicehost over Linode http://blog.offbytwo.com/2008/01/05/moving-to-slicehost/
I did my part reading about high morale and good working conditions in a trade journal. Now you do the manager part.
Agreed - of course you can get screwed, but by running things that way, the owner is showing how he operates, and it's a warning sign.
Turing Machine Simulator in Arc
We are bootstrapping and I find it really helps. You get a higher thought-to-work ratio, which means you can more often work out whether an idea is good or bad before pouring away development time into it.

The downside is the frustration of not being able to work on your true passion all the time. But I would say this is a common problem for salaried employees.

However, once we start cranking out code, I think going full time will make us much more productive than continuing to bootstrap.
I gave up TV and computer games about two years ago. The first was easy, the second was harder. The way to do it is just to have a lot of creative projects on the go. In my case it was a start-up and a band, but it could be anything. As soon as you start creating, you get way more sucked in than you ever do with TV.

The only tricky part is finding something to keep your mind occupied when you're eating. Reading leaps to mind.
We've been going back and forth on whether or not to use S3 and EC2.

At the moment we're only planning on using EC2 for computationally expensive tasks like generating thumbnails, PDFs, and that sort of thing.

We might use S3 for storage of large files, but probably not small frequently accessed ones because of the per-request charges and latency.

We're going to try to build an architecture that's not tied to one particular hosting method... we could start out on EC2 and if it doesn't work out then move to dedicated boxes. And even then if there's a particularly heavy load we could fire up additional EC2 instances.

The nice thing about EC2 is it's pretty easy to experiment. There's no big up-front costs with setting it up, so there's not too much to lose by testing.
Modulus (http://www.mogulus.com/) runs completely off EC2 IIRC. I know at least if you ping their www server it brings pack an EC2 IP.

http://scobleizer.com/2007/11/16/the-serverless-internet-com...
the chart is relevant, to us

it's the first movie intelligence solution application to be seen in the wild

movie intelligence in the next big thing, the new rave, en vogue and in demand

i hope to see the same done on another very interesting movie called "revenge of the nerds" if they ever make a sequel for that, which they should. the intelligence chart will include, the numbers of computers, servers, hand-helds, girls in bikinis and refference to Perl specially the line "it's scary the number of things you can do with Perl"

yes i once saw a perl script and it was indeed scary, all horror movies from now on should be written in Perl

Programming languages and movie intelligence will changes the cinema industry as we know it

next thing you know, you will go to the cinema and in the middle of the movie, you will be presented with a BSOD and the movie will restart
Im surprised that people who spend more time online would be more likely to click adverts.
If they don't make you a good written offer then they haven't really done anything to stop you from finding something better to do once the novelty of working with them wears off (which will probably happen really fast the moment you think you've been screwed, true or not).

It doesn't sound like they are complete fools, so
the only rational explaination is they aren't concerned with you staying or leaving, and neither is their client.
It depends on your growth prospects. If you're not going to have 10,000 active users from day one, I'd stick with something cheap and simple like slicehost. It should last you a surprisingly long time and save you a lot of annoying configuration.

I just went through scaling my app for EC2 and it took a good week to get it all worked out. By comparison, setting up one instance on slicehost takes just a couple hours.
Musings of a Neural Network
AlchemyGrid - Create an API for any Website
For big companies the continued survival is stability in their operating process. ERP plays heavily into the role of managing large amount of resources.
Affiliate Ranker :: Affiliate program directory and search engine
When I gaze into my crystal ball, I see Amazon offering the best components of their ERP system as API-based services. Web developers will move up the value chain and provide custom interfaces for companies who want that.
It just shows that Microsoft has been around for quite a long time. I don't see what is so funny about that. I am not a Microsoft fan, but I think they were successful in a time when not everything was as easy as it is today. So laughing about them - I don't know how many people really have the achievements under their belt to be in a position to do so.
viewing PDFs in safari is nice
highest karma-per-word comment ever :)
close, but I think this one wins the per-word and per-letter contest.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110034
And Ray Ozzie that created it is now the guy that everyone is counting on to get Microsoft leadership on the web.

Go figure...
Our family collectively watches about 20 hours of television a year. We only use it when we're all together and some relatively rare event is going on. My wife is a big Tom Petty fan so we had the Superbowl on this year for about 3 hours.
i use an old cat
No, not at all. My post was a suggestion of some tactics he could try, not a negotiation script to be followed to the word.
If you get the execution right you are headed for greatness :-)
Speaking from experience I can only second that.
Google Toolbar Beta Hijacks "404 Errors."
A first look at iminta - the social aggregator
Your analysis, as far as it goes, is spot-on. Here's a link to somebody else who appears to share your vision: http://www.thingamy.com

Go tiger, go!
I could imagine using a neural net to make a first guess at classifying documents, but actually using one for parsing structured data is crazy.
Neural nets are notoriously hard to debug since after you've trained them all you have to work with is a set of coefficients. I can't imagine the silly things they probably had to do to get it to reliably handle corner cases.

Using a net to generate gibberish is also pretty silly, especially when there's a much better tool designed for just that purpose: http://dev.null.org/dadaengine

An online version is here: http://herbert.the-little-red-haired-girl.org/en/dada/index....
Scheme Tattoo
get it in writing up front. if the company takes off and the founders get greedy you will be kicking yourself that you didn't.

At the end of the day they may be paying you but you are taking the risk that you might end up not getting paid if it goes wrong.
if it works for you then yes, just have a plan b for the future just incase it goes south.
Do not fear failure
I quite agree - we're bootstrapping too. I'm contracting during the day at the moment to pay for mortgage, food etc.. But when I'm stuck on something coding late at night, I've got the whole next day to chew over the best way forward then attack it again in the evening.
I work in my own time, but I think about problems on the client's time.
Don Knuth's VCR's clock blinks 13:37 instead of 00:00 when unset.
To start, it's not a bad option but once a company gets some momentum, then they probably need to look for a "real" host.
Ask YC: Robust, lightweight load-balancing web server that does SCGI?
I am developing an application in a high-level language and want to interface it with an existing web server. I have implemented the SCGI protocol in 15 minutes as it is really simple and I don't really need the extra complexity of FastCGI.

The web server will do load-balancing, compression, serving static stuff and and maybe some SSL.

I know of Apache, Cherokee and lighttpd. Cherokee doesn't appear to load-balance SCGI and doesn't do SCGI over Unix domain sockets. Lighttpd does all that and is fast but it unexpectedly fails ("no FastCGI handler found") when stress-tested. Also the 1.5 version is still very beta. Cherokee doesn't do concurrent SCGI connections or load-balancing and seems to be stalled for a year (for instance, it's forums page points nowhere). Apache, well, it's apache, doesn't do SCGI over Unix domain sockets, has low performance (about 50% less than lighttpd) and apparently you need to combine various unrelated modules in a funky way to get something similar to load-balancing.

Do you know of any other alternatives? I've heard of nginx but it doesn't do scgi it seems.
UK news.YC meetup at BarCampBrighton
Any UK news.YC people who want to meetup come to BarCampBrighton2 on March 15th-16th. Signup is at http://barcampbrighton.eventwax.com/barcampbrighton2
What creative things do you do?
I'm not going to judge what is creative or not, if you believe it's creative then say it. For example: I'm a writer, which is clasical 'creative'; my brother is a coder, he developed my website in rails and talent required to do a good job (and the numerous other things he's made, like Skype extensions) I consider him talented - sadly our webserver is screwing up Rails, so we're looking for somewhere to transfer too (any suggestions?).

So, if you like say... oragami death cannon, please tell!
Ask YC.news: Are superdelegates democratic (in online communities)?
As the election cycle is making clear. people more involved in party politics could potentially have a disproportionately important vote at convention time. Rather than use this as an opportunity to debate the U.S. political process, I'd like to consider the ramifications for online communities, including this one. Should folks get a greater voice if they are more invested? Would they help to stem the influence of community drift that we've seen at places like reddit? Why shouldn't we listen to people we trust more by virtue of their involvement?
The people in the team you mention remind me of a mistake I made a few years ago. It taught me a very valuable lesson though: Don't even think of negotiating with someone unless you are prepared to walk away if no satisfactory outcome is reached. But all the effort put in before splitting up equity makes it virtually impossible to walk away. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.

These people obviously desire to be part of this business so much that they don't care that they have no equity yet. Desire blinds.

Then again, my opinion is more than a little coloured by my personal experience.
Do you have any evidence?

Microsoft buys tons of companies, including those competing with internal products. LookOut is a great example, and one that's relevant given the current discussion of Outlook plugins.
A new form of literature? I hope not. That was boring. Twitter is a vacuous way to waste time reading about boring details of stranger's lives.
Besides coding and the startup? Directing short films.
5 Simple And Useful Collaborative Tools
I don't disagree that there are times when PHP might be the right tool, but these reasons are pretty bad.

PHP's support for "lambda" is a joke, even compared to Python's limited lambdas. I question how often "eval" is used in practice, except maybe to get around limitations of the language.

In fact, there is nothing on that list that Python and Ruby can't do, except for a few things that are probably bad ideas anyway. If the author is impressed by built-in functionality like array sorting, I am guessing they have never seen the standard libraries of Python or Ruby.
I dont know what's worse... the bullshit people come up with to justify 36 upvotes or the post itself.
and your point is?
I agree with the comments below. Your worries are completely justified. In fact, I'd call it wisdom and intuition, not worries.
The problem is they aren't worth training, the best trained PHB is still a lot less enjoyable to work for, than working for yourself with your friends on a startup you love.
Airline To Close Website For Three Days
7 Must-Do Tasks Before You Start Up
Thanks for the feedback. Great questions.

1. You deliver.

2. You deliver superfast.

3. My experience: 95% of the time the problem is with the software. They will willingly teach you their processes if you know how to ask and are patient enough to listen.

4. Very smart. That is one of my biggest challenges right now. My compliments on a great question.

5. Success breeds following. I don't want customers that are worried about the wrong things. There are plenty out there who aren't.

6. Every way you can. They are everywhere. I don't worry about "competing with well oiled sales machines", I relish the challenge. In the first hour, while they're still pontificating over their 4 color brochures, I can have a prototype up and running that addresses their biggest challenge. They should be worrying about me.

Great questions. Spot on. I never signed up for easy.

My experience over and over and over is: when you find out what's needed and deliver "something" very quickly that addresses it, you get their attention. Right now, I'm salivating just thinking about it.
"we'd have a "standard" set of modules, which would either be completely replaced or slightly modified as necessary to fit the client company"

This is what a dozen of my customers have suggested. (You know you're on the right track when your customers are pushing you into a business.) I'm doing something like this but with a few twists.

Thanks for the side note. I have start-up fever and am married to my project. But I'd love to stay in touch.
Self funded & enjoying it. Doing pure research on a field that fascinates me. plus no VC funds anything in this field today.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter
Hi, I'm pretty certain that there is no embedded rich text control used in gmail/google docs. It's pure JavaScript.

Can you post any links as a reference?
Thanks. For years, I've toiled in an area where there's often not much logic. I've always said, "There's gotta be a better way." Now is my chance to put my money where my mouth is.
From the article: "Trying to drown it in free lattes. Which I will miss."

I miss the huge amount of free tea that I drunk in my last job. I'm sure that the caffeine boost paid for itself.