skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't fall for this trick! Just because you have no idea how to do those things, don't fall into the trap of assuming that a V.C. does know how to do them / is willing to roll up his sleeves and do the hard work. Most VCs, despite constant blogging of how many hours they work, are actually quite lazy and allergic to work.

Actually, though they'll never tell you, and often say the opposite on their websites, VCs view big time involvement in your day to day business as a sign of trouble - ideally they want to sit on their rear ends, visit you once a month and tell you to "optimize the radical paradigm shift" then go home and write a blog about their value added and entrepreneurs should be grateful they have VCs telling them how to do such things.

When they actually do have to get involved, they'll do so as the article suggests and "punish you" by shoving "their team" in your startup with a "see what you made me do? See what happens when you make me break a sweat?" attitude.

IN CONCLUSION: Just because you don't know it, doesn't mean you should assume that some smug, confident-looking guy sitting across the table from you (the VC) DOES know how to do it. For all you know he might be as clueless as you.

There was an awesome article on this subject from about 10 years ago called something like, "The pussification of silicon valley"
I would hardly call Valleywag a lower-end publication. I mean they have at least 3 stories about bay area escort services on the front page today. ;)
Self-funded. We're not averse to taking outside capital, but I want to make sure we don't take money until the right time in our company's lifecycle. Given how many times our assumptions have been proven wrong, I don't think we've reached that point - I like having the freedom to change directions and try a different tack without having to justify it to investors & staff. I've been an early employee in a couple funded companies that were at roughly the same point in development that we are, and was always struck by how stupid management was. This way we can be stupid and correct for it without getting caught in the blame/frustration cycle that overtakes a lot of VC-funded companies. Investors probably also appreciate us not spending their money making mistakes; I doubt we could get funding at this point if we tried.

I've been working full-time for 4 months (+ 9 months with a day job), my cofounder still has his day job but is quitting in a month or two. I'm still in my 20s and saved up a whole lot of money from my last job, so we could go for quite a while like this.

Everyone's completely right about the reduced effectiveness of moonlighting; in my experience, a 10x drop in productivity is not unusual. Also, I've found that there are some projects that you just can't do while employed elsewhere, because you can't load the whole project into your head on just nights and weekends. The two sites we released while I was still employed were basically dead in the cradle, because they don't solve anything that hundreds of other sites haven't already solved. Quitting has given me the time & attention to pursue much more ambitious coding projects.

Also, those cost figures seem high. We spend $80/month or hosting and make about $60 back on advertising, so it basically pays for itself.
If you need a basic intro page, why not just hand code it?

Check out http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp which is a good HTML tutorial. Also if you're going to do more complex stuff, try Django (www.djangobook.com).
My friend Reid and I are bootstrapping Fangamer. The short version is a professional video game fansite. Since we both run Starmen.Net (http://starmen.net) we figured that we can just do the same, except bigger and for all games. (btw, Starmen.Net is the reason why Earthbound is a 'cult hit') Reid is taking care of all the financials himself.

We have three very great reasons why we believe we can self-fund ourselves: 1) Reid invested in a little known company called Apple quite awhile go. We have enough money to live on our own and work 100% on Fangamer only. 2) We already have built a community, Starmen.Net. Since we're adding on, we don't have to go through the hassle of starting to get people to an unknown site. Due to the crazy media stuff that Starmen.Net does (http://starmen.net/ebanthology/), we have a lot of media contacts in the gaming industry. 3) Since Starmen.Net is donation funded, we already have servers and everything paid for. We run our own private server, so we have a great resource to start out on.

I suppose I could add a shameless blog mention ;) http://fangamer.com/
You don't spend to advertise yourself? How do you get users?
I watch House MD (usually I first download the english version of each episodee, see it, and then watch it again in spanish on TV) and Formula 1 races.
I fully agree on this point. Also, I really don't like our culture. I think the two are strongly correlated. I really don't want to be told what to think, what to buy, who to like, where to go, what to do, and why worry when I can just take a pill for that with possible sexual side effects talk to your doctor.

I download specific tv shows to watch but for the most part, I ignore it. I find whenever I'm at someones place and they have a tv on, my brain just fully shuts down and I sort of drool out of the corner of my mouth.
Anybody remember this famous article from circa '99?
I just found it in my hard drive and the link is expired; can't remember the exact name of it but it was something like, "The pussification of silicon valley" or it might have been "the pussification of venture capital".

It was an "old-school" engineering type VC writing about how back in his day ventures were seen as co-creation activities and how now VCs talk a lot of "value added" but usually wind up not working hard enough to make a difference and instead prefer being seen at the right gyms, the right restaurants, the right trade shows, etc.

Basically his point was in his day he was so busy he had no time to "network" and wonders where modern VCs find they time they claim they devote to helping their investments develop.

Anybody remember this article? It was widely circulated circa 99-2000, I must have gotten "read this" emails about it from 20-25 different people.

I tried googling every variation of the term I can think of but can't seem to get what I'm looking for ...
You find something else to do. I've never been able to quit an addiction without replacing it with another addiction. It went TV -> MUDS -> Magic: the Gathering -> Star Wars CCG -> writing my own MUD -> electric guitar -> MUDS again -> Harry Potter fanfiction -> C2 & programming language design -> sailing -> Reddit -> News.YC -> Scrabulous -> my startup -> Arc -> hopefully back to my startup again, though I can't be sure of that...

Luckily, if you get to a certain point in a "constructive" project (like a piece of software), it'll start to pull you along and becomes less of a chore and more of an obsession. Unfortunately, it's pretty easy to interrupt that obsession, which is why I should stop overriding my 10-hour noprocrast timeout on news.YC.
Word-of-mouth and search engines, apparently. We posted one game on Digg back in the summer, had a flurry of hits and then about 6 (yeah, I'm not leaving off a digit) uniques a day for the next 3 months. But traffic has grown steadily since late October, and we haven't been doing anything. No Google ads, no promotional postings, not even telling anyone other than linking it in our social-network profiles and answering family friends who ask "What are you up to these days?" We're at about 1000 uniques (73,000 hits) for the month of February so far.

I'm kinda amazed that we even have users, given the quality of the product that we've got up there and the lack of updates in the past 6 months.
[Disclaimer: I've been teaching computer science at the high school level for nearly eleven years now. My B.S. is in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin, and I set the curve in some of my courses.]

I hesitate to disparage the analysis of an anecdotal person I've never met, but I disagree with the claim that statistically teacher quality doesn't affect student outcome.

The current leading meta-statistical analysis of teachers and teaching methods and their effect on student learning is "Classroom Instruction that Works", by Marzano, et al. They have statistics on good teacher/bad school, good teacher/good school, bad teacher/good school and bad teacher/bad school and the effect on student performance. The average effect size when comparing multiple studies shows that good teachers do make a significant and measurable difference in student achievement.

I think leaving teaching to "people who can't do anything else" is a cop-out. I've taught the basics of programming to over 1000 students in my career thus far. I know of at least a dozen who now do it for a living, including some who say that a career in programming never crossed their mind before taking my class. Do you think I've had a net positive effect on the industry? I can write a lot of code, but teaching others to code eventually produces more. "Teach a man to fish" and all that.

I do agree with Prrometheus below that a lot of public education is "an inflexible, pathological bureaucracy."

I also agree that if you don't enjoy working with young people, don't bother. Further, if you can't set healthy boundaries, you'll eventually get burned out. Also, if you're a hacker at heart, you'll need to keep coding somehow, or you'll go mad.

Of course, I don't know anything about Teach for America either, but I do know that I really enjoy teaching, and I'm glad I went that route rather than industry or starting something of my own.

Just my two cents.
I quit my job last month and took a 60% job (3 days a week). That way I don't have to use up any savings and have quite a lot of time for my project anyway. It seemed a good compromise between moonlighting and having no day job at all.
I occasionally watch The Daily Show because I like being able to visually see the stuff I read about online. I also watch DVDs on my laptop, and occasionally box sets of TV shows.

If I don't get enough work done though for more than a day or two I start to feel physically unwell, and watching TV and playing videogames beyond a minimal amount triggers the same feeling.
Yup. For us hackers that don't live in the Valley or the Alley, it can be hard to find peers.
Budget Cuts in the Empire
What do you think of an app that analyzes text on your screen and plays appropriate music.
That's how they power their back ends
what does your site do?
Thanx!

Okay, so I took a quick look at the tuturial for "forms" and aside from I don't get a sense of how to place them visually and where I need to write the code to put them "here" vs. there on the website, when someone submits info it sends it to "another html page".

Where is that page - do I have to create it, does it create itself, do I have to be running a d-base to collect the info, how do I access that page to see the input, etc.

Any info would be appreciated, thanx.
Both Magnatune (http://magnatune.com) and BookMooch (http://bookmooch.com) are bootstrapped by me.

The hardest things for me are:

1) sometimes you come up with an idea that would make money at a certain scale (in my case, lots of shoutcast radio stations of Magnatune's music) but you can't do it because you don't have the money

2) I have to put a lot more time into making the software I write efficient and scalable, because I can't afford to buy lots of machines when the site grows. So, for instance, I tend to avoid doing a lot of SQL queries, which might be handy, because scaling that requires lots of SQL server machines.

3) In the old days (10 years ago, when I self-funded Lyris, which eventually became a success) a big problem I had was getting licenses to technology (C++ libraries, database servers) but these days open source replaces all that.

4) doing without employees. That's both a benefit in the near-term, as I have to learn how to do everything lean and well, but a disadvantage if there are rote tasks to do now as we scale. With BookMooch, I've managed to get volunteers to do those rote tasks, but with Magnatune, I got 3 not-very-well-paid part timers.

- John Buckman
Skynet?

um, okay.
Does that mean you are getting $1.5 CPM, or do you mean 1000 uniques per day with $1.5 over a longer period?
Twittershare Brings File Sharing to Twitter
I saw this same screen and thought it was for mobile people on laptops who had limited Internet connection times. It has nothing to do with MSFT corporate culture in my view.

When your installed base is measured in the hundreds of millions things work a little differently from when you're a startup with 200 users.
Have you tried "relaxing" / marketing on "adult" (not "porn") games like Second Life, or maybe World of Warcraft, or who knows what the cool thing is these days? Lots of people in their 30s and even 40s, just create a character called "Try Pikluk.com Free!" and walk around.

That way you get to "play" while actually marketing, which is work.
Is it time to consider PDF a threat?
iPods for one and all. Apple launches Corporate Gifting program
We have been self-funded and I'm still surprised how long we managed to get along, as we really started with basically no money at all. Unfortunately our product (a game) didn't sell, so it didn't work out for us. But I don't think that more money would have made a difference, we failed for other reasons and additional funding might actually have made it even worse.

Not being able to afford an tax accountant was one of the troubles bothering me the most, because doing that myself did cost more time & energy than I had expected. And looking back I think I should have been a little less of a cheapskate for everything needed for business, like hardware and software (like refusing to buy a new HD for myself - that was just stupid). Everything helping you to work faster is probably worth spending money on it, even if you don't have any. I also should have cut personal expenses even harder right from the start, but I only learned how much more I could reduce this after a while.

The good part is that we are not more broke now than our bank-limit did allow us to be ;-)
Announcing the Grand Prize Winners for the Google Highly Open Participation Contest
Dealing with the Office Psycho
While most people here are trying to escape the office, this article is interesting, in particular for the reference: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

This other article is longer and talks about how CEOs of companies should be screened for psychopaths.

"And this summer, together with New York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience."

This paragraph struck me as interesting, since I was just reading about http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113655 -- VCs from an engineer's point of view.
We recently launched a service that might enhance those earnings a bit. It's tipjoy.com, a micropayment tipping system. Users tip stuff they love online.

Smaller sites will benefit disproportionately, because their fan base is probably more dedicated. So the "tip through rates" should be better. We'll see soon.

Alternatively, getting more targeted ads should help. If you know what your users like to see, it can be great. As Ads increase in relevance they approach content.
Completely depends on the placement, site, what the user is likely to be wanting... Care to share more info?
1000 visitors isn't really all that many, especially not enough to draw big conclusions.

It can vary a lot from day to day, month to month.

For comparison though, a site I run gets around 2,000 visitors a day and the adsense on the site makes about $40 a day.
CK-12: Remix and Share Your Own Text Books as FlexBooks
What start-ups can learn from terrorists
Brad Fitzpatrick addressed that when he released the initial memcached - LiveJournal had spent about 2-3 years fiddling with MySQL caches to get decent performance. They even took out one of those MySQL support contracts and had a MySQL engineer in to troubleshoot their performance problems.

The bottom line was that yes, DBs should cache things - but they don't. The main issue was as someone else mentioned, the query cache is flushed whenever the table's written to, which makes it essentially useless on a multi-user website.

Also, memcached distributes the cache itself across multiple machines, which makes a huge difference to cache hit rates. When you have a local query or app cache in a multi-server setup, you end up with each cache storing the same data, so the size of the cache is limited by the amount of RAM you have in the machine. If you distribute the whole cache, you're limited by the amount of RAM in all machines, which means almost every request can hit the cache. Hence you have architectures like FaceBook's 3 TB memcached setup.
While most people here are trying to escape the office, this article is interesting, in particular for the reference: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html

This other article is longer and talks about how CEOs of companies should be screened for psychopaths.

"And this summer, together with New York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience."

This paragraph struck me as interesting, since I was just reading about http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=113655 -- VCs from an engineer's point of view.
RIM BlackBerry Panic Actually Good News for Mobile
I found this at Joel's Reddit: http://angryaussie.wordpress.com/2008/01/31/dealing-with-the...

It lead me to this FastCompany Article: http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html?page=0...

There's a particular part mentioned on the second page of that article: "And this summer, together with New York industrial psychologist Paul Babiak, Hare begins marketing the B-Scan, a personality test that companies can use to spot job candidates who may have an MBA but lack a conscience."

... This is going off-tangent, but what do you think? Higher percentage of VCs who would be rated as moderately psychopathic or antisocial? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114422
Actually no, you're gonna have to read a little more closely than that if you want to get snarky with me, Aston. :P

CouchDB was just approved a few days ago for Incubator. The post you referenced talks about Damien's intention to submit it. Here's the Apache e-mail if you need it:

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/2...
Yes. Once a week we sit down and watch the latest two episodes of 24 on Canal+.
This is devastating stuff, if true. How large were the student and teacher sample sizes?
real coders don't have screens to clean: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800
Bike races (classics, Giro, and Tour). After years of being deprived of cycling coverage in the US, I am a slave to the black box during racing season. Well, not really, but I do enjoy it, and I'll haul the computer in front of the tv to keep track of the action while I work.

I've also been watching Doctor Who on BBC world, even though it's from several seasons ago:-/
Envisioning the Zero-Pollution Car
Preview: Backpack Multiuser
Consumer credit was very popular in the 20s and then fell out of favor for a long time, from the 30s all the way up through the 1970s. Possibly because people discovered what a terrible idea it was in 1929. ;-)

I've been talking with my parents about this lately - up until the late 1960s, people almost never bought stuff on credit. If you didn't have money for a car, you walked or took public transportation until you could save up for it. You waited to buy the latest consumer gadgets, you didn't pay them off later. If you couldn't afford the down-payment on a house (which was nearly always 20%, non-negotiable), you rented until you could.

I was born in the early 1980s, and my first money lessons were always "Save up for what you want - you can't buy stuff you can't afford, regardless of whether anyone says you can." I suspect that my generation and the tail of Gen-X was roughly when that changed; nowadays, it seems like kids are being taught "Okay, you can have it, just charge it to plastic."
Wow, worst poll ever: the options are sorted by popularity. Yep, self-confirmed prophecy.
Voters in primary elections may also be more interested in politics and less influenced by charisma.
This is really nice sw and very easy to use. I'm setting up Ubuntu on my XP dell laptop right now - sweet!
Strangely, I can't find much either way. I thought there was a clear case for Bush over Clinton absent Perot, but I may well be wrong.

I also worded the original comment too strongly. Clearly, charisma is a big factor in modern elections, and one data point isn't enough to disprove anything in any case. Concluding that "it's charisma, stupid" does seem to rely on very small-number statistics, though.
We had an air compressor at my old job and wow did that thing do a fantastic job of cleaning out the innards of computers.
I don't hate scalpers. To me, they're just part of the invisible hand.
"... Openomy is completely free for now. In the future there will be an additional premium membership, in exchange for some nice extras. ..."

Is there any reason why you are not charging something? Sure you need free accounts to let people try the service. What about a Pro-Version like flickr. [0]

A question I'd like to ask is:

Q What nice extras do you offer?

For me nice extras would be:

- ability to create a profile

- ability to see images embedded in a page

- tools specifically to post to twitter (simple twit poster) , archive the post, process meta data (who replied, when)

- tool(s) specifically to post images to flickr (simple flickr uploader), archive image, text, tags & who replied.

- rss feed back of flickr + twitter archive that I can customise (select twit + flickr images mixed, only twitter, only flickr, only flickr, only flickr images by tag etc)

- allow my friends to subscribe to my feed

This is an abstraction above your current service. But is readily consumable. The real problem is being able to find what people want, then charge for it. Flickr built this kind of back-end then built the photo site on top of it. Is this what you need? A purpose built public site on top of you data service?

"... Over the past couple of years, as we predicted, the world is moving to an almost entirely web-based software model. We post our photos to Flickr, write our documents on Zoho, etc. Unfortunately, it's much too difficult for us to use our photos posted on Flickr within our documents on Zoho. ..."

My view is you are doing a great job of creating the basic building blocks to achieve this. What I'd want to see is a pay for use service that allows you to demonstrate these aims. [2]

Your service utilises commodity bandwidth and storage. If you look at how flickr utilised these same commodities by harnessing the explosive use of cameras I'm sure you can see a way to make money from it. How flickr balanced the back-end development (infrastructure) with the front-end (consumer facing) is a case study in itself. This means more development, but that's what it's about right?

[0] The free version of flickr allows limited usage. It does not stop you upload images, but the cost for use is worth it if you intend to use it over a longer period.

[1] Caterina Fake, ITConversations, "The History of Flickr", http://www.itconversations.com/shows/detail1755.html

[2] One area I don't see is how you can share your data with friends, like friendfeed [1] does so well.
Amen. Our startup has 5 people and (by coincidence?) none of them own TV's.
yeah thats what I meant. Not quite the same as the article, but to similar effect.

I do appreciate the "lisp" approach though, for sure.
After "It's the charisma, stupid!", here comes "It's the stupid charisma!"
I fail to comprehend how their buying Yahoo could "kill the web app future".