skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's cute that you skirted my main point.

A car isn't a necessary commodity. Food is. Housing is. Cars aren't. For the poorest Americans, the necessary acts of eating and securing shelter consume the vast majority of their income.

Secondly, what makes you think that someone who's driving a 'lowered SUV with giant chromed rims' can't afford it? Implicit racial bias? Why did you pick this example? Why not something closer to home: Did every douche in Silicon Valley with a BMW pay for it outright?
You get what you negotiate going in. Period. Ive seen people negotiate majority shares, get it, then request 300k salaries and leave in a huff. They still get their millions of real stock.
The fact that the rounded rectangle boxes are not evenly spaced shows lack of attention to detail. (yes I'm being a jerk here, but I've found that negative feedback from others has helped me make my project better)

The graphics are grainy. They should be stark and clean. There is too much use of two colors. It feels too monochromatic.

You need a better descriptions to communicate what benefit you have for people to join. Why should I join? There needs to be a more obvious "in your face" explanation highlighting something. The message should be along the lines of "If I join, then _______ is a possibility for me" - what I mean here is that this is the feeling that needs to be evoked within your visitors perception when they read one of the rounded boxes.

The graph could be a 3D graph, it will look unique and at the same time convey a hidden message to explore the site. It's a subtle message that if somebody sees an object of depth then they have an inclination to explore the site

On the about page, you need to have a margin on the sides. Feel free to make the font size bigger.

I click on the "about" section and have no clear way to get back to the main page - BIG MISTAKE! I see that there is an orange "return" button, but this is not intuitive. Clicking on the logo to take us back to the main page would be more intuitive for users and it will let people believe that this is easily navigable.
BIND DLZ (Dynamically Loadable Zones) Fixes many BIND headaches
As a frequent user of Office, I'm still far from sold on the idea of Google Docs being the future. Maybe the very distant future, but certainly nobody will be using it (or competitors) in 5 years, and unlikely any significant amount will be in 10.

It's simply overextension of the modern mania for moving stuff to the web.
Useless.

There's no answer without describing what you're hosting.

[edit]If the question is should you consider it, absolutely.[/edit]
How do you measure your productivity?
Sometimes, I think I haven't really been productive in the last days, but then I later realize I found and corrected this and that bug, found some flaws in my architecture and corrected some, etc. and well, I was somewhat productive after all.

Other times, I'm pretty happy with my productivity after a day of work but when I really think hard about it, I see that I didn't accomplish so much.

And also, sometimes I don't know whether I'm going slow because I don't have much experience with the particular kind of problem I'm working on, or am I taking a wrong approach, or do I lack some critical knowledge that would make the job much easier?...

How do you measure your productivity?
No - haven't owned one for many years. Occasionally I download or get DVDs of very good TV shows - I watched the Sopranos, for example, and made myself a re-run of Twin Peaks.
There are still trophy mistresses.
Get something written down on paper before you do any significant amount of work for them. I went through this and spent several months working full time for a startup only for them to try and screw me over. I had to quit and take the issue to court.

The equity share was written down (although not in the form of a contract), but the founder of the startup tried to add on a lot of ridiculous restrictions which would essentially give him the right to strip me of all equity for whatever reason he wanted. If I had had an actual contract he couldn't have done that.
PdfMeNot: Awesome New Tool From Makers of BugMeNot
So, does anyone have any thoughts on how to compensate business advisors? Apart from giving them $5,000 + $5,000 * X worth of stock (ah, that we would all be so fortunate).
Thanks. They are incorporated, but one founder legally owns 100%.
Thanks. It's not so much my own share that I'm worried about, as much as potential disputes between the rest of the team members.
I gave up TV a few years ago, and now I physically can't stand to watch it. It's the ad segments that interrupt the programming – I cringe at the thought of how many hours and hours of worthless ads I've had pumped into my brain.

That said I do like some shows now (The Office, Stella, and Peep Show), but I absolutely will not watch them in that life-wasting show/ads/show/ads/show format.
Huge red flag.
If he was hacking at people with big knives, this would be related to Hacker News, but the chart doesn't have that. So, no up vote.
yeah but is that productive? is it worth it searching for a "great fit" language (I ask as I don't know, I just know my grass is greener tendency to get the better of me all the time).
This was written in year 2000, it seems. Haven't some things changed since then? This

The VC's CEO gets 10 percent of the company. VC-placed board members get 1 percent each. Your entire technical team gets as much as 15 percent. Venture firms get the rest.

is no longer true, is it?
Just to throw some more info out there, I get 900-1800 unique visitors for 4000-8000 pageviews. I get less than $1.50 a day but all of these ads are run on a forum. I believe that forums have notoriously poor CTR as mine is under half of a percent.

I would die of happiness if I could pull in $40 a day.
Firefox 3 Beta 3 is out
Very true. To me it seems that the two most charismatic candidates in this race are Obama and Huckabee.
I said it would be an attempt, not that it would or could.
Got beta invites?
Here goes:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114568
I think the trend is very interesting and the post is perfectly appropriate for Hacker News.
I guess it has some relevance to hackers considering creating something suitable for the movie industry. Perhaps a program that gave you the appropriate deaths/minute for action sequels. :P
YES: We're using EC2/S3 24/7 for our startup and extremely happy with it. Our cost right now is $70 per month, but this will go up as we get more users, which is fine as we are running a subscription model. The storage costs are so low, we are going to offer a huge amount of data storage for our users. There is no cost to move data between EC2 and S3. We now don't worry at all about our hardware, and focus totally on our product and business. We were originally hosting at our office, but the bandwidth alone would have cost more per month.
The State of Mozilla and Open Source in Asia
Didn't have one for several years and got out of the habit for awhile. There is some great drama and comedy and if you keep it to 2-4 hours a week I think it's as valid as any other entertainment. The only reality show that's not crap is Project Runway, all the contestants are real entrepreneurs, and just enough non-stupid-ass-silly stuff slips past the producers.
Defending PHP - Jimbojw.com
No. I do watch dvds and Joost occasionaly though. Joost is especially good for on demand video - just make sure you don't have any memory hogs running when you use it.
I doubt it because they left out porn and WoW.
Correction: The whole thing is a sex scene.
I'm actually trying to make lists of the best programming music now. First, I'm collecting databases of all the music I can find. The electronic genres are the most elusive... I have a database listing about 16MM tracks and mixes now. Once I get all that I'll finish making those lists.

I have found some decent web stations, but for the most part I just rip hundreds of tracks from dozens of stations at a time and pluck out the couple good songs and then repeat.

I'll get back to you on that.
Don't even think about it. And tell them exactly why. The team will not survive the stresses of early startup life with this decision put off. It's going to be a hard discussion even now, just imagine how bad this will be with revenue coming in the door, pressure to grow, some members of the team really stepping up and others not working out.
Rambo made his own knives from rebar in the jungles of Burma. I'm up voting.
I just browsed through Pikluk and am impressed with the idea and execution. Have you guys tried getting media attention? You could email newspaper journalists, parent-type magazine editors to take a look at and review your site. That's free publicity and journalists are always looking for new things to write about!
The Democrats and the Republicans.
10 Mistakes in Icon Design
Blodget: MicroHoo ‘is gonna be a disaster’
No, I haven't watched TV in years.

I do watch South Park, The Wire, and Entourage via torrents.
Web browsers under siege from organised crime
Yes, not sure how it relates to Hacker News. If you're trying to choose between TFA and running a startup, you've got your head twisted around somehow. Very different paths. If you have notions of doing both at the same time, give those up. First year of teaching is very demanding.

But if you're still interested anyway, sure, look into it. I did TFA for a couple years (95 Rio Grande) and it was a good experience. I wouldn't teach in a public school again unless I was starving, but it was the right thing for me at the time. Feel free to email me, mspambox@yahoo.com, if you've got particular questions.
For any given timeframe:

ItemsActuallyCompleted - ItemsPlannedToComplete = Productivity
I've been following the new Terminator TV series, and still tune in to the local public broadcasting channel for a while when there's a good documentary or news show scheduled, but network TV in general makes me twitchy and angry more than it relaxes me.

If I had cable, I'd probably watch it, but that seems like as good a reason as any not to get it.
Flat-fee hosting plans are much more reasonable considering the bandwidth costs. For example, the virtualized hosting plan at Media Temple serves 1Tb of data for $50 per month.

If you can justify the cost of the logs/data upload, EC2 is be a good way to run stats or other sorts of heavy-duty batch processing. So use EC2 only if you keep hitting ceilings on processing / memory consumption on your hosting plan.
You don't need an invite. Sign up and you should receive an email from hulu within 2 weeks or so.
I had an idea a while back to automate this process. Basically a user chooses maybe 8 different places they would be willing to place ads on their site. Then there is software that tries out the different placements, colors, etc, and records how well they do.

Then use maybe genetic algorithms to optimize those variables for ad revenue.

Maybe I'll still do it one day.
I would recommend developing your application so that it can easily scale horizontally. Run the main application on a box at a regular hosting provider and have an account on Amazon EC2 which you can use to rapidly create hosts when your load increases (and then shut them off when the load is back down). This way you can keep your server up 24x7 without paying the price of EC2 but still have the option to scale easily.
this is very pertinent to my interests
While I am sure they intend to be fair, intentions aren't good enough. It's a red flag, tell them why, if they can't fix it asap, walk away.

At the end of the day there is no 'fairness' in equity, just equity. Some people will put in more units of work per equity unit then others. This doesn't really matter if each person knows where they stand and what they stand to gain and loose. This allows the members of the group to asses their risks and rewards.

No one will be able to asses risk/reward so there could be a massive shock when the reward is put in front of them.
Definitely a red flag. There's nothing to be determined later. Later on they will get more funding and be able to hire people without handing out (much) equity and when there's a handful of developers already you won't have much power to negotiate. Work out an acceptable deal now.
Bored With Cup Stacking? Try Speedcabling
I grew up with TVs on a lot as well. Not the constant background noise that some people grow up with, but a fair amount of TV. Cartoons Saturday morning and after school when I was little, and then sitcoms or whatever my parents were watching in middle school.

However, I also grew up with a truckload of books. And one day I finally realized that I wasn't really watching TV; I just happened to be keeping my folks company and reading in the same room the TV was on. I had accidentally (but fortunately!) learned to completely tune TV out. This led to my current state of constant reading. To me, books are TV. Some people have to concentrate to read a book. I have to concentrate quite hard to pay attention to a TV. Weird quirk, but I like it!

This of course means times other than when I put on a DVD or tape or something specifically to watch and turn all the lights out and get lost. But I rarely have that much free time.
Oh god. That's an absolute disaster waiting to happen.
Why do you just have to compete against other hackers? I would rather compete against big established businesses that never seem to get anything done than race neck in neck with other smart hackers.

At least you'll manage to annoy one of the existing players and they (or one of their competitors) can buy you out.
Here's a thought.

You have a good idea, and with proper marketing and pr, you should see decent growth. Have you considered bringing on another partner, someone who could focus primarily on gaining eyeballs and users?

I understand the fact that you may be busy with your day jobs, but sacrificing equity for a good (hopefully full time) partner to manage what you can't in your current situation seems like it would be a good decision.
Try to get past needing to create a profile. Let the user enter as much data as necessary and save it in the session. If they like what they see they can decide to create a profile.
I don't remember that many good guys dying in the fourth one.
If the promise isn't on paper, it doesn't exist. Don't let them guilt-trip you by questioning your trust in them.
The discussion on the Network Neutrality mailing list suggest that encrypted file sharing would become commonplace if ISPs inspected packets for copyrighted content.

This is a case of the music and film industries demanding that something be done and that ISPs have the technological power to intervene. Unfortunately, it will just cause an escalation and waste energy as the current traffic is encrypted and decrypted.
Russia Emerges As Spam Superpower, Sophos Says
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_normalization
Google Docs allowed me to complete the switch to Linux and Mac. I can easily exchange Word and PDF copies of my documents with email contacts, never have to worry about which partition my files happen to be on today, and better yet: access my documents from anywhere.

I love the fact that Google can take documents from GMail and with one click open them in Google Docs. The ability to share and collaborate on documents is awesome as well. Emailing the same file over and over again to an entire mailing list and making sure not to loose revisions is a thing of the past.

Turns out people like to communicate and collaborate and they like the convenience of having their files available everywhere. MS has failed to deliver in this area.
Then my productivity is negative, because I seldom make realistic projections...
Agreed. It's a really sweet piece of work and proves that not very startup's product has to be web-based.;-)
The Point Organizes a $4.8 Million Series A For Itself
Remember seeing the (co)founder post on news.YC. Congratulations!
Don't trust the client. Nowadays, it also applies to Caller ID.
do you know how much time you have before they may decide on the big equity equation? Do you know how much the others are investing (especially money wise)?
well said. some people work better under pressure
Be concerned: you've got to know what you're getting beforehand.
Ugh. The Diebold bot is voting me down.
Open source digg/reddit/propeller clone based on drupal
1. By seeing how many tasks you have achieved out of your to-do list.
2. If task takes more than a day (of planned time) you have not subdivided it finely enough.
3. For every 5 hours it takes a task (add extra 2 hours).
4. For every 6 days it takes a task add an extra day
5. Roundup 3-3.5 weeks of work to a month
You are spot on.
Honda demos robot that can run 4 mph and may one day take care of you
Coleman: The Cyber Arms Race Has Begun
MIT researchers fight gridlock with Linux
30% planning, design data model, etc
25% Back end code (only the major part of it)
15% Client-side design and code (if it matters for the app I may spend more time here)
10% Integration

At this stage if I was fooling myself I'd say I'm done. but this is just a prototype and I have only tackled the major parts of the application. There are lots of details that are laying around even though everything looks as if I'm done. At this stage it may look like your productivity is low but it is actually part of. So you have to do some tests step back and look at the whole thing and find that you have to spend another

10% modify things
30% to deal with little seemingly useless fixes or just making things look nicer or adding content etc.

If I'm spending more time in any of these stages either I am being lazy or I didn't do the previous stage correctly and it is effecting what I'm doing now. so I stop and go back. it's better to cut your losses early or you'll really loose productivity and develop something bad.

here is a tip to be more productive:
When you get tired of thinking switch to graphic design and when you are stuck with a design idea switch to writing code and when you are thinking about your idea write content especially help files (even of an unfinished app). You'd be surprised how this may actually effect your own views about your ideas.
Oops, I accidentally upvoted you, which forces me to be annoying and reply with "-1".

Do not do this. It's spam. It's unethical. And on top of that, it won't even fucking work.

Invest your time in creating a product that people will seek out. If you can create such a product, there would be no need to do what you're talking about. If you can't, then even if you do, nobody will care anyway. You'll only drain your karma trying.
Brickhouse Head Leaves Yahoo
You could market that and make a ton of money. I wonder if it would be possible to do that with a rails plugin + javascript + google analytics?
The 404 not found page is tomcat's default page. A custom page would be better. The favicon is again tomcat's default. As someone mentioned earlier, the image quality needs improvement.
AdaptiveBlue Rolls Up More Services into Simpler Interface
Firefox 3 Beta 3 steps up its security game
The worry there is you have to have a big part of your business be for a sales force to cater to these large companies which take forever to make up their mind - unless I'm missing something?
Getting Fired At Yahoo: A Twitter Log
What is ERP?
Right, observer's bias seems important here. Being a president builds a strong brand for that person. Beyond that, being in power actually makes people more charismatic. With that, judging their charisma as candidates in retrospect hard.

Kind of like judging company names -- Apple Computers now actually seems like a good name.
J&W ftw
I think this is more a measure of your traction--your ability to set and hit targets--and might be better expressed by

Act / Plan

instead of

Act - Plan

assuming some normalization of item size in either case. It's the inverse of the "Schedule Fantasy Factor."
It needs a password. How ironic.
ERP = Enterprise Resource Planning

In this context, you're buying a database and an application to manage inventory. And people. But people are just inventory with different expiration dates. They really are designed to do contain EVERYTHING a business does. If there's a procedure for doing something, it needs to be in the ERP.

You mostly have two options in the status quo, as the poster said: Pay to have it customized ($10,000,000 total budget (hardware+software) for a 4,000 employee organization isn't unusual) or conform to the ERPs methodology.
I work at a fortune 100 company; my only ERP interaction is occasionally entering an equipment purchase order via an Oracle system. It sucks, so you're preaching to the choir.

Nevertheless, I'd still have to ask the following:

1) Your beliefs are easy to agree with, but how do you get your first 10 customers to believe that your solution upholds these beliefs?

2) How do you sell the idea of 'writing your own' to a business person who doesn't want to become the head-contractor for a software team?

3) Keeping in mind my white-hot ignorance about this particular vein of software, I'd want to know if the problem is really with the software? Or is it a problem with understanding the process and the implications of implementing it a certain way (ie, can processes interact? do we know if they will at specification time?)

4) How smart does the tiger team need to be? An ideal system should be reasonably easy to implement by average programmers.

5) How do you sell developers on learning your platform? A customer might be concerned that not enough developers know your ERP well enough to implement future extensions.

6) How do you sell customers? You're competing against the well-oiled sales machines of your larger competitors, and all but the smallest businesses may not mind spending $1M to ensure that their all-important business processes are implemented with a well-known ERP (poorly implemented or otherwise) that they can trust their business to....

I guess one way to counter this may be to make the ERP free (open source), and have a team of core developers/contributors who could then charge $ for implementation.

Don't mistake my concerns for a lack of enthusiasm. This is a field ripe for improvement, and you seem to have the ideal background for it.
Agreed. You're doing volunteer work until you have your stake down on paper.
Just tell them you'll join on the condition that equity is on paper. If they're your friends, explain to them that it just makes sense to do this right away in order to focus on your business and prevent any greed or disagreements.

Imagine this hypothetical scenario: 1 Year from now, you have a decent amount of cash flow, and are steaming along smoothly. As far as personal income is concerned, you've all somehow survived on savings, credit, and a small salary. Now an investor comes up and wishes to invest, or say that you have a buyer or some other liquidation event. How will you split the harvest? Now each of the founders looks back and evaluates how much they feel they've contributed. Disagreements arise. The programmers claim that they built the product, the sales guys claim that they brought the income in, and ultimately, the legal owner with 100% equity gets the money and you never speak with each other again.

The moral of the story: It's easier to divide a hypothetical pie now than a real pie later. Get the equity worked out now.