skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we need to look at the landscape of the startup community. If you didn't have to grow to survive, then it would be fair to say that the goal is to create opportunities for people to 'live as they should'. However, the fact is that it is hard to stay afloat if you don't grow. Growth, as defined by how big your company gets and how much market share it has, is also an indication of how long the company will last. Ideally, the bigger your company is, the more it can do, and the more market share your company has, the less your competitors have. This means that you need to grow in order to survive - otherwise your competitors will take the market share from you and leave you without a business.

If you manage your successful company like a startup all of its life, then you'll hit failure sooner because startups just have a higher chance of failure because of their risk taking nature. Corporate structure just carries along a lower inherent risk.
That might not be a great idea, not because of the violence involved, but because that twists the training. If the kid lucks out, he'd find a training group willing to work out whatever it is that is attracting bullies to him. If he doesn't luck out, he ends up being the guy getting beaten up in the dojo.

I actually know of a guy who didn't luck out. His father forced the guy to go learn karate as a kid. Because he was getting picked on. His father yelled at him when he sucked. I imagine his teachers then yelled at him too. The worst part of it was that after he grew up, he is still taking some form of martial arts. He is still getting picked on by his training group, even though he switched to a different art, twice. He is so desperate for friends, he whines about the verbal abuse of his current teacher yet refuses to quit because the training group and the teacher are the only friends he has. These are not the reasons to go learn a martial art.

That's not to say Karate won't work. The main thing is to get him around people who act like sane, socially-healthy adults -- people who takes initiative in a civilized society yet have not lost touch with their survival instincts. That may or may not be karate.
Windows users read my stuff, but almost never download anything. Are they afraid of software?

Perhaps Mac users are more trusting of random software on the internet due to the lack of malware on OS X?
Study: Non-profits Missing Major Online Fundraising Opportunities
I for one believe this conversation has reached an absurd level.
Would it be that hard to just take a fulltext index of each page that hits the hot page? From there, just show anything with some >N% similarity (probably 98 or so, as text ads can affect the site a little bit.)
Are the images coming from flickr? Because I am getting pictures of a baseball and the word is "playing". Since the images are crowdsourced then maybe there should be an array of them to convey the idea.

In my opinion there are too many words off the bat to remember if you are new to the language. How about doing a delay of one where you define a Spanish word and its image(s) and then the question after next is the image to assign the Spanish or English word to it, then a few questions later its the Spanish word to assign the English word to it? That way you get a 1-2 punch to help memorize it.
This assumes that there are no two people in a community with opposite viewpoints. If someone has the opposite viewpoint of you and you start writing stuff to please them, then they'll just hate you for pandering. Plus, the people that agreed with you will call you a traitor and a sellout. Fun times!
OK, ruthless criticism ahead!

It lists 6 languages, plus "other languages", but won't let me even see what the others are without registering. ("Hi, Joe's Repair Shop." "Hi, can you replace the clutch on a '96 Volvo?" "Let me get your name and number before I answer that." "...")

The flowers that overwrite the words on the top-right of the page are kind of annoying.

The "help", "about", "staff", etc., links are all 404, which doesn't exactly look promising.

It claims "3000 words in 3 months", which is over 30 words a day. This seems pretty incredible. I've studied several languages, and I don't think I've ever learned 30 new words in a day (much less consistently for months!). According to <http://www.balancedreading.com/vocabulary.html>, "The average student learns about 3,000 words per year in the early school years -- that's 8 words per day". So I'm skeptical a webpage will help me learn something 4x faster than when it was basically my full-time job.

It says "Read more in our “About the system” page", but I see no such page or link. Do I have to register for that? (What's the point, then? If I have to register anyway, I'll just try it.) Do you have any people who have learned 3000 words in 3 months with your method?

It's not clear if this is written, or verbal. Will I be hearing native speakers? Or is the goal of this simply to read a newspaper?
Companies exist in large part to avoid transaction costs of using several autonomous market agents (the thesis of _The Nature of the Firm_ http://www.cerna.ensmp.fr/Enseignement/CoursEcoIndus/Support... by Ronald Coase, 1937)

Vertically integrated companies can avoid more transactions costs, making them more valuable.

The author doesn't seem to appreciate why large, vertically integrated companies are fundamentally valuable.
NYT: Google Offers New Plan for the Airwaves
Agreed.

Furthermore, don't require an email address as part of the signup. Make it optional (see reddit).
"... remembering the name of everyone interesting works less and less well as the site gets bigger. ..."

I've noticed this as well. I keep a running tally of the frontpage with hacker, points, karma where I can sort the front page to read the top pages by person/karma. A quick scan of the front page shows me almost all are new names, most have karma of <700. Another check is the /news page compared to the leader board.
"Donna Bogatin's purported distaste for YCombinator is belied, however, by her self-interested appropriation of Paul Graham's essay to pitch a competitive offering."
I can't help but think, over and over again, that the "we need a down-arrow" and "take it to reddit" comments are more polluting than the occasional non-programming/startup related stories. The comments don't appear on the front page, however, they do have a much lower information content.

This article and xkcd are both more informative than "time to add a down arrow," no matter how much I may agree.
How your tech blog posts are ripped while you sleep
Essential MediaTech Keynote: Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn [video]
How is that new, newsworthy or even relevant?
On the Chinese section (using IE), the pictures won't display. Also, the characters don't display. Being able to read pin-yin is useless in a Chinese speaking country. Maybe pin-yin and characters should show.
I've got a few invites for the app if anyone wants to try it out. Reply to this comment with an email address if you'd like one
90% of AJAX apps are just like 90% of Windows apps which are just like 90% of mainframe apps: they suck. A greater percentage of AJAX apps suck because the technology is newer, that's all.

I've seen plenty of great AJAX apps, especially for the enterprise. The problem is NOT with the technology, it's with the programming.

Forrester obviously doesn't understand that. They don't find any good AJAX apps (one wonders where they're looking), so something MUST be wrong with AJAX. Their recommendation: explore other technologies, including Microsoft's.

Run, don't walk, the other way from "research" like this. Look on the bright side - you're not the poor sucker who had to pay for it.
With your comment, I saw for the first time how the semantic web might be useful.
Guns, Germs, and Steel [video, long]
While I agree about the perils of generalization, the problem in this case is not that - it's that we're using the term "star professor" ambiguously. My fault for not being clearer in the first place.
Here's another issue with these kinds of studies:

The researchers are either incompetent or on someone else's payroll. Either way, they're useless.
It probably isn't, but I hadn't heard of it before and it gives me another option to download some of those big ISOs if the other places suck :)

(Note: I'm not the poster.)
My premise is more that there is a truth of the matter. Even if people start with opposite view points, that won't last when sufficiently good/true things are said (plus enough help seeing why this new view is better, and how to change, and how that will improve their life, etc).
Socialbomb, a real-world reputation game
A list of Open-Source Alternatives to Business Applications
What do you think could possibly prevent this from working

The people you're trying to please have contradictory opinions and desires. What you say to please Group A will strike Group B as an outrage! And if you try to remove everything potentially offensive to anybody, well, that will turn you into such a pandering namby-pamb that the whole world will find you annoying and want to poke you with a stick.

Edit: Just to be clear, I'm not saying one should go around offending people. I'm saying that trying to get everyone to like you is hopeless and that effort put into doing so will both warp and weaken you.

Other edit: just noticed that pchristensen already made the same point.
Read your employment agreement. Some states are more flexible than others.

Don't use ANY company resource (email, bandwidth, office supplies, their computers) to make your product.
The non-compete clause is for when you leave. IP rights are explicitly signed away in employee agreements.

The easiest way to reconcile is to quit and do the startup full time.

People shouldn't do things half-assed anyway. It's all about the focus.
Sometimes it pays to be a contrarian. Sometimes it doesn't. For programming and employment, it pays to be a contrarian and that is the focus of this forum.
Actually, staying a while in business is a good way to learn those managerial skills!
Performance Problems Continue for Visual Studio 2008
Giant 20-sided die on MIT campus
You're assuming that people want to hear the truth. That is not at all what most people want. And if you insist on offering it to them against their desires they will eat you like (dare I say) a caged lion. :)
Distributing Bonus to Agile Teams is Like Playing with Dynamite
37Signals and Smugmug don't prove much yet because they aren't that old. I'd be willing to bet both either die, go public, or get bought within the next 10 years.

It's easy to stay medium-sized if you're a consulting firm, but hard if you're a product company. As a product company you tend to either extreme: you either keep growing, or die. And if you keep growing, you'll eventually either go public or get an acquisition offer so big it's hard to turn down.

I might turn out to be wrong. This world changes fast. But there aren't a lot of 20 year old 37Signalses around.

Bezos seems to agree with me. He invested in 37Signals. He would not have done that if he didn't expect some form of exit. And in fact 37Signals probably had to say explicitly that they expected some form of exit in order to get his money.
I like the idea, but if it were applied, I bet Scientologists would win the debate against the over emotional "in your face" techniques used by their opponents.

For example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hxqR5NPhtLI
There are a couple of interesting articles on NYT on this author's books.

- http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html?_r=1&#...

- http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30EASTERB.htm...
You can't raise the networking opportunities nearly as easily. The social motivators to work like hell and launch as soon as possible are also worth more than the actual cash.
Remember hackers: You can still have you cake and eat it. Rails + Flex makes a sexy combo. (There is a book by the name too, "Flex on Rails". Great stuff.)
"Situational metaphor" is widely used. In this case, because I'm emphasizing an explicit, limited comparison, I used "simile."
They might not want the truth now, but they could be shown why it's good to want it, and shown how much nicer that lifestyle is, and helped to change. Hard but certainly possible.
This is interesting, but how is this actionable? I'm still going to be working on my startups.
I meant we encourage startups to stay small in employees, not revenue.
Come on guys. You can get this news at Reddit. This isn't hacker news.
My mistake - I read the first two lines and that set the tone for the rest of the article. Those first two lines, though, have no relevance to the rest of the article. You can in no way argue that the lack of wealth (the definition of poverty stated in the article) is caused by a 'rest state of doing nothing' (also a definition of poverty in the article), which is what the first two lines imply.
I read this story, too, wondering why it was here. But I kept reading anyway because I had already noticed 18 comments and I was curious to see what my fellow hackers had to say about this. (I'm a hacker news addict; I value your comments as much as the original content.)

I expected my fellow hackers to condemn this bullying behavior and support the bullyee. But instead I was very surprised (more like stunned) to read some of these responses.

I empathized with the boy in the story because it could have been my story. And probably the story of many people here. Just because you're not a jock or a ladies man, then something must be wrong with you.

The attacks on this boy were unacceptable and inexcusable. I don't know the answer to this problem, but blaming the victim is NOT.
Every company should be its own Startup Camp
I don't see a misunderstanding. The page points out that evolved DNA code and human-designed computer code use several of the same techniques.
Perhaps I should clarify that I'm not convinced that it's real on news.yc. Not yet, anyway.

Yeah, reddit and Digg are disaster areas. I don't know why, and your guess is as good as mine. My impression is that, in Digg's case, they tended to play up the gaming aspect early on -- e.g. they put up huge banners trumpeting the number of diggs for each article -- and built their audience out of people who think that competing to push articles up the leaderboard is a fun sport. Now they've reaped the whirlwind. Reddit, I'm not so sure I could even guess. I didn't stick around to analyze the phenomenon; I just left.

I do agree, however, that the only proven solution involves manually editing the system to some degree.
Pleasing two groups that start with contradictory opinions requires persuading at least one group to change it's mind. That's definitely possible because if they contradict then at least one of them is mistaken and would benefit from changing its mind.
Are you saying the idea that maybe humans shouldn't be monogamous is absurd? This seems more like one of those things you can't say than an inherently absurd idea. How many other primate species are monogamous?
There have been a number of good app-specific recommendations below, but I think there are some more general things to keep in mind, too:

#1: Keep your system up-to-date. Your most likely entry vector is a perfectly legitimate service like Apache or OpenSSH (or even worse, some PHP application) being cracked 'cause you never installed a critical security patch.

#2: Run different services as different users. There's no reason for your Mongrel listeners, cron jobs, reverse proxy, and god knows what else to run as the same user. Basic uid/gid partitioning is at the core of good POSIX security.

#3: Never, ever trust a public web application or server with total access to your data. Use your database server's access controls to limit admin-level access, and consider running your load balancer, public applications, and admin tools on separate hosts.

#4: Find ways to prevent password storage, entry, and checking on your application servers. Read up on and understand Kerberos, even if you aren't going to use it: it's the industry standard for an authentication system that doesn't require clients to expose their password to servers.
In the industry, the term "VC" is used exclusively for people who manage venture capital firms. I'm not considered a VC. Closer to an angel. But that usually implies an individual person. There's no name yet for the kind of thing YC is.
knockd was created by Judd Vinet, same hacker that created the popular distro, Arch Linux.

It's a creative project, but it is definitely not the recipe for sloppy security in other places.
I don't know what "The Secret" is, and that one certainly doesn't come from it because it's my own. In any case I came up with this unsubstantiated claim on my own (is it unsubstantiated if it stems from 12 years of first-hand experience?)
The analogy that this parody depends on is a very weak one, because PG's point is that the modern job in the modern company did not exist when we were hunter-gatherers, i.e. any time prior to the invention of modern agriculture.

Marriage, on the other hand, is the result of an intrinsic human tendency to form long-term relationships and raise children within those relationships. This tendency has probably existed for longer than the "modern" human species (the major evidence for this, as I remember, is the similarity between male and female size, and the fact that human monogamy is determined by the combination of helplessness and large size of the new-born infant, so that the mother requires major help from the father in order to raise her child successfully).

Modern civilisation has not done anything to prevent men and women getting together the way they always have, and it has had limited success in providing "artificial" alternatives.
Fuzed - Rails on Yaws (erlang)
I'm not saying he'd end up in hospital if you threw him in any neighborhood. What I mean is, if you change the neighborhood in which he lives but he himself doesn't change at all, he'll be just in as bad a position relatively to the other kids.

Let's say Billy has a GetsInTrouble factor and the neighborhood has a Violence factor. If Billy still has a GetsInTrouble factor of 8/10 but gets into a neighborhood with 1/10, of course he'll be far better off. But he could take matters in his own hands and try to lower his GetsInTrouble factor; taking an assuming posture towards the situation would already be a great first step.

Changing himself would be far more effective than trying to change his environment or worse, letting his mother or other intervenants try.

edit: By the way, I'm not saying that changing his violent environment is not a worthwhile goal. Just that he shouldn't count on it much. If he doesn't count on it, his situation will be better whether the environment change happens or not. But if he counts on it, he's just denying responsibility again and that won't protect him if he ever relocates or if the environment changes again.
What? Is Google is now offering "stripper services" to their employees? Now that's a perc I'd sign up for.
Especially for the enterprise? No wonder. Enterprise software represents the absolute lowest form of life among all softwares: the requirements are relaxed, bandwith is fat and users are paid money to use such software, not the other way around. Makes me smile every time I hear "enterprise class" attached to something.

Just a little funny fact: in nearly all enterprise software UIs I've seen, even tab order wan't assigned on dialog panels.

That is not a test for technology, even junk like Oracle survives there.
"But that usually implies an individual person"

Not really... http://www.bandangels.com/
What's the difference between YC and these guys? Maybe in the amounts invested.
Zed Shaw's page is really cool, so cool in fact that some might consider it The Best Page In The Universe...
I would argue the opposite: that lifelong monogamous marriage is unnatural. Witness divorce rates in Western society. (Many other cultures that are overtly polygynous.) Humans, by nature, are slightly biased toward polygyny.

Let's assume PG's argument is that employees are unhappy because they are going against the grain of human group-dynamic nature. By analogy, nearly a majority of married couples are unhappy because they are going against the grain of human polygynous nature.
Nicely said. Sorry for accidental downmod, stupid CT syndrome... :)
200 channels and nothing but Katz.
The Lifestreaming Backlash
Heroku has a revision system as of the last update. You can also edit on local machines via a gem that synchs up to Heroku, though I haven't tried this. You can also snapshot your app at any point and export for additional backup. I've been satisfied with what I have now.

For a brand new hacker, Heroku lets you spend more time learning rails and building your idea and no time with system admin. Depending on what you want to learn first, that might be a good thing. You can always pull it out later with an export and part ways.
Flex is not a technology. It's a marketng BS. In the end your "platform" is a lousy browser plug-in which is already having a hard time catching up to the variety of web-platforms (no iPhone yet, Linux implementation is buggy as hell, etc) while a new wave of Internet enabled portable hardware is just around the corner.
These angel groups usually have a different structure. You go and present to them and the angels individually decide whether they want to invest. Whereas YC itself is the investor in the startups we fund, as with a VC firm.
Obviously intended as a parody, but I think he's inadvertently on to something.
Ask YC: Whats your Twitter handle?
As recently as two weeks ago, i didn't really get what twitter was all about nor did i care. I reluctantly gave it a shot and i must say, I'm hooked. If you're a twitter user and would like to be added by other YCers, post your Twitter name below.

http://twitter.com/cbomb
"I have a couple friends that grew up in the Talladega, AL area. Each of them independently told me that people around there are clinically antisocial and borderline-psychopathic. Hell, some are not even "borderline". They each told me that it wasn't just that people are inheriting genetic factors that predispose them to these kind of behavior, there are also environmental factors reinforcing them."

From the article: "She wonders why Billy is the only one getting beaten up"

Apparently not in his case.
I wrote a whole essay about that one. Short version: at the seed end of the startup funding continuum, money is not the active ingredient.

http://www.paulgraham.com/ycombinator.html
World's First Full Face Transplant Hailed
Ok and I guess this is a lot different too... (the mgmt team bit)

Q: What does the Band look for in their initial review?

As with most venture funds, the Band seeks to invest in companies with a strong management team, unique technology and a large potential market.
>Why is everyone who invests small amounts of seed funding a "YC clone"?

Because the first one to launch was a YC clone... Techstars even copied the application verbatim. I think a better term for the YC clones is micro-incubators -- most of them offer office space.
They do link to that article, both at the beginning and at the end of their story.
Alternate title: How one stupid interviewer can cost a corporation millions in settlements.
The major difference this time around is that the incubators are going for much smaller dollar amounts: they're doing YC magnitude investments. I'm not sure if it'll end up being a profitable experiment or not, but I understand why people are trying.
The questions feel like tricks to get the entrepreneur to reveal negative information about himself or his company that he wouldn't otherwise reveal. If I were an entrepreneur sitting through a round of questions like these, I would be a bit offended. I suppose for a fledgling entrepreneur who actually may not have thought everything through, these may be appropriate. For everybody else, I'd skip them.