skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can see a certain appeal to a VC over an angel. There are a lot of pieces that a company that is growing quickly needs to take care of, and most engineers don't have the expertise to do so. If a business explodes and suddenly finds itself in need of legal, accounting, marketing, and HR departments, how is one of the guys still hacking on the project going to put all that together? I suppose if he's motivated a smart guy could make it happen, but I think most engineers would want somebody to handle all that so they could keep hacking.

At the same time, I don't want to deal with anything described in that essay. If I can find it, I'll take the angel funding until I absolutely cannot continue without professional help and my angel can't provide it.
I agree, which is why I suggested in an earlier thread that Jerry Yang could conceivably replace Ray Ozzie in a Microsoft/Yahoo merger. Ray Ozzie may be an awesome programmer (but I've never used one of his programs), but he isn't doing a very good job with Windows Live.
http://www.thedailyshow.com

http://www.videosift.com

http://www.theonion.com/video
TV contains lots of information about our culture.
Why do people think that MS needs "saving"? They have been predicting MS's death for, what 10 years now? And MS is still making money hand over fist, without any signs of slowing down.

OK, maybe web apps are "where the future is" -- but so were the network computer and the Linux desktop. And, if anybody can make a ton of $$$ out of "yesterday's business plan", that's MS.

If anything, the anti-MS camp needs less hyperbole and more follow-through. "When you have to shoot, shoot, don't talk".

(BTW, I'm an old Unix hand, not a Windows fan at all.)
While Bush senior might have won without Perot, I don't think it takes down the "charisma wins" argument, since I don't think it applies in elections where there's an incumbent running. The incumbent has a clear advantage, and is presumably already somewhat charismatic since he got elected the first time. While Clinton was certainly more charismatic than Bush, Bush's incumbent status should have been enough to overcome this and win.
I wonder if the "commercial license only" features of VirtualBox will become free. There are a couple of those that I've been wanting, but not enough to negotiate a license.

VirtualBox on OS X is crippled at the moment because it doesn't do Leopard.
How to quit Facebook without calling your lawyer
No. Have a HDTV air antena for my tv, but the reception is not that great. I use the TV only to watch the ocassionall rented movie.

Usually I am in front of my computer most of the time.
Mixed Martial Arts

The Wire

Other Sports
he's like dailywtf, people often just send him stories
I agree that Obama is more charismatic, but Hillary keeps getting the womens' vote (At least the white and hispanic ones).

This primary is particularly interesting because you're not choosing between two rich white men. Suddenly there's a question of not just "Who has the most charisma?" but also "Who can I best identify with?" According to the states that have had primaries so far, blacks and white women overwhelmingly support the candidate that looks like them. Perhaps that's even more important that charisma?

At the same time, I agree with PG that charisma doesn't play as big a part in primaries. Bill and Hillary are the leaders of the democratic party, so it makes sense that democrats would vote for Hillary rather than the more charismatic Obama.
No. I realized TV was what I would now call a "time sink" (didn't have a word for it then) when I was about 15, and stopped watching it. I've never owned a TV. I do sometimes watch old TV episodes on DVD though. I especially recommend Fawlty Towers, Jeeves and Wooster, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and The Saint.
I used to be like you, but now I am appreciating quiet solitude.

I am most effective between 10pm and 2am. It is weird, but knowing everybody else is going to bed, and you are coding, makes you more efficient,

I am also very efficient between 6a.m and 8-9am.

It also might be related that the background sound level drops by few decibels during the night.

I just can't do much work during the day, unless there some other kind of pressure (i.e. I have to finish something by that day).
Ask YC: Are you self-funding/bootstrapping?
Just wondering how many people here have been self-funding/bootstrapping their projects and how has that been working for you?

Personally, we've been self-funding Openomy (http://www.openomy.com) since it began in mid-2005. Overall, I wouldn't change a thing. We now have 50K+ users, a scalable infrastructure, and full control over what happens with the site.

That said, I think we hurt ourselves by not looking to take _any_ capital: we spent a lot of time rearchitecting our infrastructure to scale, and we still work on the project only on the side. If we could have hired a couple engineers and worked full-time, I think we could be much further along in completing our vision. We may have even been able to do more marketing (more == any)! ;)

Still, to note just how cheap it is to do a project like this these days, we spend <$1000/month on our servers (colocation/bandwidth + S3), and $0/month on anything else.

I'd love to hear from others and to see how bootstrapping/self-funding has treated you, what you enjoy the most, what the hardest part is, etc.
i take those lcd cleaning wipes from the office
Probably because if you believe that web apps are where the future is, then Microsoft's business model is severely screwed because they have no products that compete in that space, they don't control it (despite IE market share), and they have continuously demonstrated that they don't understand it. Maybe buying Yahoo is part of their attempt to kill the web app future. Maybe buying Yahoo is a brilliant move, not an act of desperation.
of course you are :P
He's doing okay.

I'm using Windows Live Messenger (yeah, I know it's just MSN), Windows Live Mail (I prefer to use this than Outlook. Thunderbird or GMail), Windows Live Space (lots of my friends are using it too), Windows SkyDrive (hey, at least I know MS isn't trying to sell the division like DivShare tried to do).
Add some graceful javascript degradation. I use NoScript and your site is essentially useless.

http://www.stevetucker.co.uk/javascript-complete-degradation...
Microsoft: You can now disconnect from the Internet
I'd be happy to read what you have to say, here or by email.
This is how I watch TV. I now find waiting a week to see a new episode of some show annoying, more so than being a season or two behind a series.
If TechCrunch used honest headlines, that would be 'brainstorm a killer web app idea in 45 minutes' -- there's no building involved, especially with only one actual coder (Mullenweg) confirmed on the panel.

In a good brainstorming session, you might get dozens of good ideas in 45 minutes -- and only trying them out further will determine if they're 'killer'.

TechCrunch: lying for inlinks since 2005.
Not really. I cancelled cable about 6 months ago, and I haven't looked back. The writer's strike helped a bunch, though.

I'll tune in to broadcast TV to occasionally watch Jeopardy while eating dinner, or to catch a new episode of House (pretty much the only show I watch regularly).
I use hulu a lot too. A pretty good resource, all in all.
No. Don't own one, don't ever intend to.
Due to the inflexibility in cost of necessary commodities

Really? So are all the people driving around in lowered SUVs with giant chromed rims rich? Or are you saying that lowered SUVs with giant chromed rims are a necessary commodity?
I added up the elements of that graph that seemed essential, I even left out ones that might be skewed (transportation, clothing, etc) because it's possible to spend money there in excessive ways - for the bottom 20% it was $11,033, which is still higher than the income base. That was only including food, housing, healthcare, and taxes.

I don't think the bottom fifth of Americans is buying foie gras and living in huge houses. Try McDonalds and subsidized housing. That doesn't even include things we would consider essentials to being a productive member of society - transportation, a phone, electricity, etc.

I think the savings rate of the bottom 5th probably hasn't changed much in 50 years. It's the savings rate of the 2nd and 3rd 5ths that has become completely skewed by loose credit and profligate spending (again, I wish I had the data to back up this thesis)
"Three ordinary differential equations are proposed to model the dynamics of love..." [pdf]
Only show that I watch on actual TV is The Daily Show. Sometimes when I'm bored I watch lectures/talks/documentaries on the web.

www.ted.com has good short talks (10-20 mins) that can be good to watch when taking a break, or eating, etc.
I believe the best part is you can't be fired and when people tell you that you can't do it, you do it anyway.
Consumer credit has been around a long time; it's part of what drove the boom in the 1920s. And loan sharks are even older -- the difference with credit cards is that their interest rates are lower, and that you can efficiently borrow in smaller increments.
thats how it works. Then to see matched companies, an email is all that is required for registration to be able to create a profile (past and current employers) and then have Genotrope create a graph of related companies which show up on the find page.
The 6% of Web users who generate 50% of ad clicks
WTF is wrong with StumbleUpon?
In that case, I don't see why this is so bad. They value efficiency, so they borrow money and pay back the debt by working harder and more efficiently. I can see how investing in a refrigerator, stove, computer, and internet access would be worth it even if you put them all on a credit card at 20%; I wouldn't have a job without a computer and internet access, and I wouldn't have time to work without refrigerated food.

Since this chart is careful not to adjust for age, we don't know if this is a story about 20somethings borrowing to start a family, 50somethings earning a lot of money at their peak careers, and 70somethings living off of the interest in their retirement accounts. In other words, this kind of chart could portray a totally egalitarian society in which everyone earns the same amount over a lifetime, but they earn it at different times.

Thanks for adjusting the chart so there's no way to know that, NYT! I'm glad your writers don't have an agenda I should worry about!
Reminds me of this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R3QR3AC2WXWHIT/
I'm self funded but so early into the project that there's nothing to report. It is nice to know that I can take my time (day job supporting me and all), but maybe that's an inhibiting factor...
Selectors that people actually use
Hardwired for love: Are robots the sex partners of the future?
Um, because you can do stuff like this (http://blog.openomy.com/2008/01/case-study-using-haskell-and...) without being told to get real :) Sound familiar?
Huh. When I was in the bottom 20%, I moved to a really terrible neighborhood and ate mostly rice and oatmeal. In my terrible neighborhood, I saw lots of people who wore much nicer clothes than me, but who, uh, didn't seem to have jobs. Lots of them had iPods -- some of them also had sound systems which they used well after midnight, perhaps in order to broadcast some sort of distress signal audible at the New York Times headquarters. I have a better job now; the average income, poverty rate, unemployment rate, incarceration rate, etc., of the neighborhood I left does not appear to have improved. I did not find it very hard to live on $700 a month when that's what I had to live on. And that was in one of the more expensive cities in the world. I think they can do better, and I do think it's their fault that they don't.
Real men use spit and old socks.
Leopard support (plus a few more mac improvements) was released a couple of days ago.

Works fine so far in my experience.
One-Click DVD Ripping
Do you have a source for this? Every analysis of exit polls I have seen (for example: http://www.fairvote.org/plurality/perot.htm) shows that Perot split the votes fairly evenly.
We try to undo most of the misleading tricks lower-end journalists use to tart up headlines. In fact, "Exclusive" and "Breaking" get trimmed off automatically.
Two Genes Predict Voter Turnout [pdf]
FreeImage on Leopard. Problems Installing 3.10.0
I had a hard time trying to install Freeimage 3.10 through MacPorts until I finally decided to rollback to 3.9.3 just to find out that it was not an easy thing to do. Check it out if you're in the same situation.
In fact, heavy clickers skew towards Internet users between the ages of 25-44 and households with an income under $40,000. Heavy clickers behave very differently online than the typical Internet user, and while they spend four times more time online than non-clickers, their spending does not proportionately reflect this very heavy Internet usage. Heavy clickers are also relatively more likely to visit auctions, gambling, and career services sites – a markedly different surfing pattern than non-clickers.

So basically, the heavy clickers are losers who live in their parents' basements?
Hahaha, it's true-- that's one of the great things. Thanks to Openomy, we've given ourselves the chance to try out soo many things (Ruby (on Rails), Haskell (+ HAppS), C# (mono), Java, Scala, etc). And those are just the programming languages. :)
Well, we are self-funded, two years afloat, located in the middle of nowhere (West Siberia/Russia) and we have customers in US/Canada and Europe :-). We develop mobile voip+chat software (see, http://www.talkonaut.com/). Most of our revenue comes from licensing our software to other/bigger companies.
hulu.com and adultswim.com and joox.net
Only when it's not US TV :)
Seriously, TV in the US is absolutely nothing like TV in the UK. It's sometimes nice to have on in the background watching some classic comedy or music tv.
Find it with Google; buy it with Google Checkout
buy low cost google ads to link to high cost yahoo ads.

ppc arbitrage will float the company back to glory.
The image quality is awful and gives the site a cheap feel. I'd use PNG.
Yep, it's a fascinating graphic that hides as much as it reveals. And you could pry my home computer, my internet, my washer/dryer, and my microwave from my cold dead fingers. Actually, out of the 16 items listed in the bottom chart, I could probably do without telephone, radio, vcr, color tv, cell phone, and dishwasher. Auto, stove, and AC grudgingly (depending on where I lived). But my wife would never agree to that!
Looking for Sure Political Bets at Online Prediction Market
I often watch television whilst eating dinner, at least a few times a week, and generally watch a couple movies each week (either broadcast on television or on DVD).

Otherwise, my viewing is sporadic, and when it occurs, usually consists of some older programs on DVD, or C-SPAN, or (this year) campaign news updates.
Hey, if it's too easy everybody will be doing it. Nobody will be an employee again...
I read a similar study result a few months ago, posted here also, except I seem to remember that one implicating females rather than males, as this one does.
daft punk
CouchDB now being incubated by Apache Software Foundation
"and $0/month on anything else"

Just how long are you willing to keep this up without taking salaries? Is it a business or a hobby?
heh they code with their eyes closed
We started about a year ago and launched about 3 months ago.
The biggest two problems are:

Time. Neither of us can afford to quit our "jobs at a big company". We're not 20 and have mortgages, school payments, etc. Working part-time is probably 10 times less effective. Ohh... I cannot stress it enough! Part-time can be as bad as 50 times less effective; sometimes weeks can pass with no work being done, depends on how busy we get at our day jobs.

Marketing&Advertising. We cannot afford a solid PR campaign and expensive ads. We got some independent evaluations with ad quotes as high as $500K/year. Google brings a steady (albeit very small) stream of daily new users, but unless we come up with something, it will take forever to reach good numbers. Common advise like "blogging" BS and "sign all your emails with your URL" do not apply and really make no sense - you can't get into 6-figure user numbers this way.

http://pikluk.com
Pretty old news. http://damienkatz.net/2008/01/new_gig.html, January 1st.
Remember that we're working on this on the side. We have salaries, just not from this. That number definitely rises if/when that situation changes.
We're self-funded and have both been working roughly 50% time on the project for slightly more than a year. The hit in income for the past year was painful, but we are about to launch and we're very excited about the product.
Yes, too much though in my opinion. I really only watch 2 types of shows: sports and cartoons/anime.

I should be able to cut down on sports. It's easier if you're engaged in coding to forget to turn a game on.

The cartoons I watch all are shown on Cartoon Network. Since I've seen most of the Family Guy episodes, that's easy to skip. The anime is harder. I find the stories much better than other programs on television.

I recently found a place in NYC that sells some popular anime on DVD imported from Japan. That allows me to get huge chunks of the series in one shot, as opposed to 1 or 2 episodes/week on TV. For example, I bought the entire Death Note series 2 weeks ago. It came in 3 containers with 3 DVDs each.

Since I don't live in NYC, I don't have to worry about frequenting there too often.
Don't forget "The Prisoner" ... and of course GetSmart.
Sounds interesting, which stations?
Deveated Septum
On another front, don't mean to come off as rude here, but surely somebody among you folks has some experience with Wufoo and can spare a moment to jot a quick reply on the post a few topics below this one? Please? Or is everybody busy watching t.v. ....
Whats funny is...I have a TV which I use to output my computer too and watch tv shows on.
Yahoo’s oneConnect: One Mobile App to Rule Them All
No.

The only thing I ever watched was football at the local Pittsburgh Steelers bar. Until I did the math for the Monday Night game against the Dolphins on November 26. 206 minutes elapsed time. 60 minutes football clock time. 8 minutes actual football being played. 3 points scored (with 17 seconds left). 7000 commercials.

Funny how much more valuable your time is when you're doing a start-up. Spending 4 hours to see 8 minutes of content is no longer an option.

On the bright side, I have 7 months before next season to find a 12 step program.
I wish I had that type of willpower.

My Dad always had a TV on. Looking back on it, that really wasn't good for any of us.

How are you able to break such bad habits?
Well, I live in NYC area and I think I know what store you speak of - in the Village, correct?

Perhaps I shouldn't tell you about "certain" well-developed import sites where you can get a copy of just about anything that comes out of Japan in any version you can dream of ...

And I'm sure you know of Anime Network, all anime, all the time.

Now, be strong! Don't google these things! You have work to do and can't be distracted!
Trying to learn something worthwhile with TV is like trying to get rich with the lottery.

Sometimes you do indeed learn a little something/get a little cash, but at least 99% of the time you're wasting your fucking time/money.

And if you still manage to be lucky enough to learn something/win cash, it's still not very edifying (I'd rather make a million by myself than 30 millions with the lottery).
Is that 50% on architecture and 50% on your startup?
Well said! These are two of the biggest strains for us, too. Even if you were to work 6pm-midnight every night, your productivity is sooo much lower!

The best way I've found to be productive is to put long hours in on the weekend, at a coffee shop. Fewer distractions, and once you're in the zone, you can stay in it longer.
Google Adsense: +1000 visitors = $1.50 usd, WTF?
Is anyone feel lets say, uncomfortable with the earning on Adsense?
Microsoft should declare anti-bankruptcy
T.V. has a huge narcotic effect and gives you a "hit" of dopamine rush, very hard to get over. Try googling things that help you regulate your dopamine levels so they're more in balance and you'll find anything from t.v. to smoking easier to quit; for starters: exercise, especially stuff that stimulates glands and lymbic systems, like Yoga and Qi Gong - not so much Tai chi. Running helps a lot but eventually you mess up your joints so biking is good too. Just take it easy and don't look for any quick, extreme radical changes - just setting self up to fail. Instead try this: "I want to reduce my t.v. viewing to 150 minutes of quality t.v. programming of my choice per day and not give in to random crap programming designed to just grab my attention." Step by step.
No. Haven't watched TV in over 4 years. It's a giant waste of time.
20 Famous Software Disasters
This is the same company whose CEO wrote a book in 1994 named "The Road Ahead" that does not include the word "internet.

</lol>
This looks fishy. These guys obviously have a conflict of interest with regard to the study, as they're trying to sell you their marketing analysis services.

This reminds me of the studies conducted on google adwords, where research companies said that 30% of clicks were clickfraud. They arrived at this number by getting a group of ad purchasers together and asking them what the number was. They guessed, and their guesses were averaged. I think another study said the number was closer to 80%, but again their methodology was poor.

I don't buy this. That this study covers two million people doesn't mean it is representative, because these were people that filled in an online survey and talked about their attitudes and intentions. They missed a huge part of the internet users who, by and large, have better things to do, and don't fill out surveys.
Obama is off the charts, but let's be honest, McCain can hold his own in any charisma contest. Do you ever wonder why you never hear about John McCain's ex? This is from a 2000 profile:

Mr. McCain abandoned his wife, who had reared their three children while he was in Vietnamese prisons, and he then began his political career with the resources of his new wife's family.

Yet although Mr. McCain's children and some friends were angry and disappointed with him at the time, they rally around him today. No candidate could be luckier in his choice of an ex-wife than Senator McCain, and he must be the only politician around who could cheat on his wife and divorce her and still get her support and her campaign contributions today. Even her friends rave about him.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B02EFDF1439F...
Willpower's got nothing to do with it.

That's like saying, "What? You never strike your children? You must have a lot of willpower."

Here's what to do. Put you TV in front of your house with a sign on it, "Do Not Take".

7 minutes later, problem solved.