skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Although you make a good point, you missed something: Nobody tries to intentionally break a taco bell drive through simply because they've got nothing better to do.

On the internet, this is common place. The key is not to miss that "hidden cost" while making your trade-offs. Remember reddit's plain text password fiasco? One of those can kill your company, and cost you millions.
Anyone on YC working Solo?
Vale Arthur C. Clarke 1917-2008
It's a "scribd.com" link, but it looks like now it's smart enough to not bother with the wonky Flash plugin for Mac users, and just send us to the PDF. Yay!
Scene from the Big Bang Theory:

PENNY
What's new in physics?

LEONARD
Really nothing, except for string theory. But only then I can say, "My theory has certain mathematical consistencies"
Half of my friends use laptops that are actually company laptops, but they use them around the house and for anything and everything. None of these computers are Apples.

Anyone know what Apple's market share is for all PC sales including corporate?
Alas, I was a year too early and thus doomed to take the CS 133/134 sequence. It was terrible. (The day our professor suggested Java had operator overloading I stopped going to class.) By all accounts the CS 135/6/45 sequence is excellent; kudos to Prabhakar Ragde for pioneering it. Waterloo's first-year CS sequence has been in a constant state of flux for quite a while now so with any luck this change will provide some stability.
I'm not sure if very many YC companies focus on user support. My impression is that they focus on improving their technology, adding features, and finding additional funding the most. If one can get a reply within three months from a YC company, they're lucky.

The sad thing is I don't know if anyone can blame them. There's more value in building up one's application than acting like an established company and having three founders doing great tech support. In my experience at least a third of the people who e-mail a startup with questions (especially paying customers) offer their own phone number. They either straight-out say or imply that you can call them and spend fifteen minutes walking them through. Believe me, this is sometimes worth it the first few times you do it, but can be a time sink later on. (Granted, this app targets a subset of adults.)

Also, I don't believe YC funders are picked for being great customer service representatives. I also think that makes sense. Not only is such experience not necessary for early stage startups, but computer geeks are running the show, not salespeople.
Bio: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke
I have a confession. I actually don't listen to anything when I code. I find it all distracting. I'll sometimes put headphones on so people don't bother me, but I never have anything playing.
There's another flaw in the drive thru system... http://www.videosift.com/video/Free-McDonalds-via-Questionab...
A reward from Sir Donald Knuth
That's interesting. I'm a postdoc in physics, and a few months ago I was feeling bored and poor, and seriously considering switching to finance.

Three months later though, and staying in academia is looking pretty attractive. I might not be making the huge money, but at least I know my job isn't going anywhere.
What is the value of advertising space on my site?
I am getting to the point with my web site where I want to switch from filling ad space with Adsense to some direct deals with advertisers. My question is, how much do I charge and what metric do I use (page views, clicks, etc)? I know the easy answers are "it depends" and "whatever market value is" but I need something more concrete to move forward with so I 1) don't lose value and 2) don't sound like a complete idiot. Thoughts?
I tend to listen to music podcasts such as Accident Hash, UC Radio, Indie Radio Chattenooga and Sonic Wallpaper.
I'm really tired of hearing this kind of news. People need to start signing up for cryonics.

The following is a public service announcement:
PLEASE STOP DYING
The simple truth is that great scientist are simply a a rare event. How many scientists with the capacity of Einstein have there been? Newton, maybe Aristotle and Archimedes. That's four in the last two thousand years.

The capacity of scientists (genius, output or however you define it) most probably follows a powerlaw with a lot of mediocre scientists, a few outstanding (Louis Pasteur, Henry Cavendish, Louis Maxwell) and only one true genius for every two centuries. Since we had a genius that broke through in 1905 we will statistically have to wait for quite a while for the next one.
I remember reading a discussion on Hacker News where danielha discussed creating such a service a few months before he created it as part of YC. Am I right?
I don't think so; I got a PDF as well in Opera and Firefox on Ubuntu.
Yeah, it takes a real genius to figure this one out. Just buy anything it asks you about. Period. After about 40 trades, you'll have several million.
I haven't heard of Paul Tyma -- what's his credibility in writing this article?
When I was at GT all freshmen had to take CS1321, which was taught in Scheme. (ahem, well, the lectures were in English . . .)
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - Arthur C. Clarke

Thanks for the magic in your writing that transported me as a teenager to worlds beyond imagination and high school...
+1 for Rails
Well, when you compare the free, male, non-laboring population of Ancient Athens with the entire educated population of the world today, you have to wonder where all the Socrateses, Platos, Aristotles, Aristophaneses, etc, etc, etc, are hiding. Using the roughest possible statistics, every mid-sized town should have a few.
From their Anti-Spam Policy:

Acceptable Use

Explicitly opted in with you online.

Explicitly opted in with you offline.

Gave you their business card at an event.

Explicitly opted in for the subject you are contacting them about.
Have you had this conversation with your partners?

This is actually the one sticking point with my partner. He has "mega bucks" on his mind, but if an offer comes through in 6 months for mid 6 figures+, I would be inclined to take it unless we have some serious traction. Not enough to make you rich, but enough to bootstrap you better for the next challenge :)
Bummer. I was expecting that he would indeed get to teenage centenarian.

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.01/ffclark.html
Ah, but I believe MIT's intro CS course stopped using Scheme a few years ago.
Disqus is one of those startups that shouldn't even think about monetizing. They're not a bootstrap and slowly build over time company, they're in a full on land grab.

That said, it's a tough question as to how they could/should monetize. Freemium seems ok, but perhaps not great. I'm not sure what, but I feel like there must be something better.
well what is the true "economic cost"? :D rather, is it going to set you for a while? how do you define the "true" value (apart form a gut feeling or using made up projection numbers)?
Obviously, it needs to be included in the risk vs. cost calculation. The point of the post: Don't assume the risk automatically outweighs any cost.
Arthur C. Clarke, Premier Science Fiction Writer, Dies at 90
Student won't be expelled over Facebook study group
When you compare the educational prerequisites needed to discover something new nowadays and the educational prerequisites needed in Ancient Athens, you have your answer.

Most reasonably bright high-school kids can understand Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, etc. A few can even rederive their findings; there were a couple times when I was growing up when I had this great insight, only to find out that it had been discovered by a dead Greek guy 2000 years ago. But unfortunately, discovering the same stuff that the ancient Greeks discovered doesn't count as noteworthy anymore. The bar's been raised a little higher.

Same goes for most fields. Lots of college CS students can implement a Lisp interpreter now; it was a big deal when McCarthy did it in 1960. When Tchaikovsky wrote his violin concerto, he gave it to the best concert violinist of his day, who took one look at it and replied "This is unplayable." Now it's standard repertoire for dedicated high-schoolers.
Ask YC: What's the most inspiring sci-fi book you've read?
Since Mary Shelley published 'Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus' in the early part of the nineteenth century, there's been an awful lot of sci-fi written. Which books do you recommend and why?
India: future now
Lady of Mazes, by Karl Schroeder.

Simply the most idea-packed book I've ever read that was actually entertaining. It also has some interesting discussions about meaningful post-singularity life (which are at least partially applicable to our lives today).

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0765350785/
What happens if blog tools include Disqus in their next release?
to add to that, wouldnt the increase in supply of startups, also drive up the quantity of startups bought out, but not necessarily the willingness to purchase them, thanks to the equilibrium price coming down.. But this is assuming a perfectly competitive market. With only short-number of buyers, this may not necessarily be the case!
the Northwestern University CS department has been teaching Scheme in its intro course since the beginning of time. its kind of a weed-out class. theres been a lot of talk about teaching a more 'useful' language like python, but its probably never going to happen.

as for me, im glad i learned it and saw the light!
Brave New World, by Huxley

I read this book in the eighth grade. I was fascinated by the classes the society was divided into. In the book you were born into a certain class, and I saw many similarities to today's world. It was not the most inspiring, but definitely it was the most interesting.
A little bit too vitriolic for my taste, sorry.

This appears to be the case with Mark Pilgrim's latest posts for
some reason. See also: Pilgrim flipping the Bozo bit on Linus
Torvalds:

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2008/03/07/iphone-gpl#comme...
"Is it true, Dr. Chandra, that you chose the name HAL to be one step ahead of IBM?"

"Utter nonsense! Half of us come from IBM and we've been trying to stamp out that story for years. I thought that by now every intelligent person knew that H-A-L is derived from Heuristic ALgorithmic."

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/faq/index.html#slot7
At Bowling Green, the introductory class for the CS major is based around C++.
Same here at IU, but what do you expect when Dan Friedman and Kent Dybvig are faculty. Unfortunately my undergraduate school was yet another java school.
12 things that cost more than Bear Stearns
'Squirrel Facebook' shows three degrees of separation
What language did you make it in?
Intel's Long-Distance Wi-Fi
I consider this to be the greatest sci-fi short story of all time.

http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

I'm a big fan of the book 1984, along with the full length works of Asimov.
For some reason I misread "the most insipid". Oh well...

Personally the one that inspired me the most was the Foundation trilogy, with its nerd-propelled universe.
How much is your pride worth?

All transactions are made on the principle that what you are giving is worth (to you) less than what you are receiving in return. All of them. No exceptions.

If you think that the you are rejecting an offer just because of pride, than it your adding the value of it to the transaction price.

If you do however think that what you have really is worth more than the value offered, you'd refuse.
Ask YC: What's the most insipid sci-fi book you've read?
Since Mary Shelley published 'Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus' in the early part of the nineteenth century, there's been an awful lot of sci-fi written. Which books do you recommend I should steer well clear of and why?
their only competitive advantage is the network effect. and even then, when you're pitching to M&As, what would you even say? oh hi, i have tons of users playing on somebody else's backyard?

their positioning is as precarious as facebook app developers.
yes and then off to the races with the next more meaningful endeavor

Unless, of course, you're already working on your life's mission :)
screen + vi here, more or less the same results
It's a scribd.com link that redirects you to a PDF on everythingimportant.org.
I love 1984. I wouldn't say it was inspiring (its dystopian) but rather an eye-opening experience. It made me change the way I look at security and privacy.
I did it from late 2003 to the fall of 2007; I had a product with which I got the point to where I didn't have any questions from people who bought the app anymore, so I didn't have anywhere near as many questions as I did when I started. It became pretty boring, because it was fun getting questions when stuff broke all the time or people wanted to request a feature. I made it free to get a lot of users, but my dad was laid off, so I got a job at a Fortune 100 to save up money and experience what it is like. I haven't had much time to focus on the software since, as I'm focusing on saving up money and working on the web-based side of the things.
Thats encouraging to hear. Some would say too many smart people go "fuck it" and move into finance/IBanking for the money (not that I could say I would do any differently if riches were assured). But it seems a worry when minds could be put to other productive uses.
It depends on your financial situation. How much money do you think will make you happy? If you hold out for more, even if you make it, will your life significantly improve? What are the chances of ending up with nothing?

I'm a swing for the fences type of guy, but I'd have a hard time passing up any offer that hit my minimum number. That's why I think investors should let founders of companies take money off the table at a certain point. It gives them more desire to go for the big score, knowing that even if they fail, they're still set.
I gotta disagree with you. If anything, Pilgrim was too easy on him. Frankly, I think someone could make a wicked "Fake Joel Spolsky" blog. The tag line could be: "HEY! I wrote Excel! What have you done douche bag?"
my homegrown PHP framework
The Energy Industry
A volume control and/or some type of compression/limiting would be useful.
http://www.hypem.com
They're in a far less precarious position than a Facebook app. An app developer is dependent entirely on the whims of one company for their success. Take, for example, Scrabulous. If MB sends a cease and desist to Facebook, they might be done for.

Disqus, on the other hand, resides on thousands of independent blogs. Each one individually may decide to uninstall it or switch over to a competitor, but then Disqus loses only a tiny fraction of their userbase.

It's much better for Disqus to have that power spread thinly over a lot of individuals than to have it all in one place the way an FB app dev does, especially given the capriciousness Facebook has exhibited since day 1. Disqus has tons of users playing in thousands of back yards, much like MyBlogLog or Feedburner.
There are way more people around now than there were then—the number of people alive today is comparable to the number of people who have died in the last millennium.
Yeah, I'm not sure either. Wasn't my most informative comment ever, as I didn't go into much detail, but wouldn't have guessed it would be downmodded.

I never can predict what people will like here.
Ever heard the expression - 'Stubborn as a mule'
It does depend, on (among others):

- your visitors' age, gender, location. A highly targeted audience is usually worth a lot more.

- visitors' intent (are they researching a purchase related to your site and the advertisers' product, or are they looking at pictures of LOLcats?)

- the product being advertised (mortgages or facebook apps?)

- how much the advertiser's willing to pay (some companies will pay a lot more than it's actually worth, but they probably won't pay you more than they pay Google)
This is a sad day for all, indeed.
Monday Starts on Saturday (by the Strugatskii brothers)

A programmer on a road trip through Siberia picks up two hitchhikers, who recruit him for the ideal job: to take over the computation center at the research institute of enchantment and applied magic. Fantasy sets the mood, but the book is really about people who love what they do because it's challenging and meaningful and fun.

One of my unfinished projects is translating it to English.
http://weblog.rubyonrails.org/2008/3/18/comparing-rails-2-0-...

"Hongli Lai has compared a dummy scaffold application from Rails 1.2 to Rails 2.0 and found the latter to be 30-50% faster. That’s great to see.

But what I think is even more interesting is the progress we’ve been making on performance optimizations for more substantial applications. Rails 2.0 made a lot of progress for applications with lots of assets and for ones with big routes.rb files. The forthcoming Rails 2.1 will move things forward even further."
The Lathe of Heaven
(also: The Forever War;
The Einstein Intersection).

Hmmm. My favs seem to all start with "The."
This goes to an area where economics hasn't caught up to reality yet. If you watch Deal or No Deal, many economists would say contestants are making a mistake (being irrational, unlike the ideal homo economicus) when they accept a deal that is significantly lower than the average value of the cases remaining.

What they miss is that dollars offer diminishing returns at scale, so the decision is rational. Going from 0 to 100,000 dollars is very different life-style wise than 3 million to 3,100,000. Because those first dollars are "worth" so much more, and because the upside of the best outcome is not worth as much proportionally, the decision is rational (although people are often being irrational in other ways in this game).

In your case, I suggest you consider your BATNA (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) and estimate their interest, then consider countering. You can only negotiate your "best deal" when you're willing to walk away.
If you're not willing to walk, you play it safe and "make a deal."

Edit: Keep in mind, if you counter, the worst they can say is no, and you can often still acquiesce to their original offer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_alternative_to_a_negotiate...
I would label this with the "Not NSWF" marker.
At the moment there's lots of Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts I-IV spinning on iTunes for me. :)
Which should amount to an Einstein every millenium or so.
No hacker site would be complete without mention of Cryptonomicon.

That being said, I always liked the epics in the style of Poul Anderson, Robert Heinlein, and the like.
Hey, wouldn't all that MS has to do is use a different Agent string for IE8 so that the agent sniffing fails. You know, go incognito, like user-agent JF-8.
I'd say about 1.5 to 4 times the CPM for each ad unit of whatever you are getting from google ads would be an average starting point. Higher end for smaller and/or targetted ad runs and lower end for large run-of-site ads. If there are a reasonable number of relevant advertisers on google then it servers as a decent market sample.

Page views are the way to go because some of the ads you get from customer won't be good. I wouldn't look at committing to a significant campaign based on clicks unless you actually had the creative of the ads and had tested to see the click through rate. You are liable to get customers providing you with 'branding' ads that will achieve a very low clickthrough rates and return low CPM.

You have to consider a number of issues

- Commission and/or wages paid to the salesperson.

- Cost of chasing the ads, fixing their mistakes, and putting the ads up.

- Cost of billing + financial transactions

- Reporting costs

- Cost of collection the money. Some customers just don't pay.
Unless I was dead sure that my company was worth 5x as much, I would take a 'make you rich' offer in a second. Then just rinse and repeat.
i can't narrow this down to one. some of these are already named:
Cryptonomicon,
Snow Crash,
"The Last Question",
Ender's Game/Shadow,
Dune,
Slaughterhouse 5,
Ringworld
Great story. I was trying to track down the name after reading the Clarke thread (though Asimov wrote it, not Clarke).
Hard to find a use for this, but congrats to the Disqus team.
their positioning is precarious in that they're at the mercy of the platform providers. sixapart or automattic (they did buy a similar company) can come up with official comment systems with better support. livejournal doesn't even let them add on third party software.

the flipside of course being that they're platform agnostic and third party they're capable of bridging the community at large and there's certainly value in being able to be a telephone instead of the telephone service provider but how do you monetize this whole thin? the only provider that has the power to monetize would be the blog software providers and even they have trouble doing that.
Are there other people involved whose interests might be worth considering?

I'm thinking of someone with a much smaller share. As someone has pointed out, the 100% increase from 50k to 100k is different than the 100% increase from $1M to $2M.
Actually, to my great surprise, "give my field more money" was only one of his suggestions. It was, in fact, the last suggestion of his, and (at least to my reading) least important.

The rest of his answer is quite reasonable, and doesn't even need new money:

1. Seek out people with different points of view and invite them to join the discussion.
2. Give money/influence to individuals, not to large fiefdoms/research programs.

I think he is quite right on this. In at least one area the author mentioned (foundations of QM), even a single person with different views can be beneficial to a department. At Rutgers (where I got my Ph.D.) the math physics group has a single advocate of a deviant view. The department would be weakened if we replaced him with a normal scientist of equal quality.

Diversity of ideas is important, and we definitely don't do enough to promote it.
Two reasons. 1) The achievements of modern day scientists appear less amazing than they really are. 2) The achievements of scientists of the pass seem more amazing than they really were.

There are quite a few candidates for a modern day "Einstein." Stephen Hawking or Michio Kaku, for example.
If you mean YC, as in this site, then always. Never done it any other way.

If you mean YC, as in actually in the YC program, then sorry ;-)
The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle
The Big Bang Theory has surprised me in that it actually has truly intellectual jokes. I thought it would just be another stereotype-promoting, nerd-meets-hottie sitcom, but this one actually has some intelligent humor.
Using Python for Word Frequency
New Einstein dropped out, built and sold his "Hot Physicist or Not?" startup, and now just likes to kick back and listen to some choons.
The Night's Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton
Neuromancer by William Gibson, though it might not be inspiring, is a must-read; it's practically internet heritage!