skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The vast majority of jobs outside of academia are non-research. Moreover, the few corporate research jobs tend to be just as competitively sought as faculty positions, because the positions are so few relative to the supply of PhD-trained applicants.

Maybe it's because I'm too recently out of the system, but I think it was a nearly complete waste of time. Whatever skills I gained while doing my PhD, I would have gained working in industry for the same period of time -- and today I would be extremely well-connected (and far less poor). I'm proud of finishing, and there were certainly intangible benefits (mostly related to being surrounded by coeds for so many years). From a practical perspective, however, it was a terrible decision.
This is a great read.

Any VCs around who want to defend themselves? I think this just convinced me to self-fund or engineer-fund every venture I plan. (Surely doesn't hurt VCs, because someone else will be in line.)
I think it implies that the services which run on the open ports are full of security holes, so the firewall is pretty much useless.
The hell they don't!
http://docs.python.org/lib/module-doctest.html
I've had painless success building Clisp from source. Not quite "four seconds and two clicks", but it works...

LispWorks is another good option. Very easy to get going with, but the free-of-charge version has limitations.
Your Kitchen:

> Tortillas, yogurt

You can make:

> Dog Food

You will also need:

> Dog Food

...? Excellent.
Geo Stalking Your Childhood
Dude, if you've been rejected from YC five times, you absolutely just need to bootstrap and get going. Take one of those projects and just keep coding in your spare time, etc.

Try maybe Prosper? Or ask your friend engineers? The money at YC's levels can be found just about anywhere. The YC 'bump' with expertise, connections, etc, is likely of very high value, but zillions of people get by without it.

It sounds like your ideas may not align with YC-- maybe it's them and not you?

If you've proposed 5 times, you've got more gumption than a lot of entrepreneurs-- just keep moving.
I am doing a lot of file creation and file look up stuff on my projects to avoid db hits when servering up static data. I am only using the database for crud stuff and then handing off to create the static pages. I have been impressed with the speed and also how easy it is to flip the storage to Amazon s3 if needed.
I like the product and as long as they have funding and users I can see them going on to be a player in the market. I don't believe there is not room for a lot of players in the market. They make money from domain name sells as far as I can see.
It's part of the vernacular: "Did you get the evite?" - "Send me the Evite!"
"Did you get the upcoming link for the event?" "Did you get the 'going'... " are both awkward. Renkoo is another. With all respect, if I'm having a party, what am I going to do, Renkoo you? Granted, they just got another $6m - let's hope they figure that out ;)
Xobni are one of the chosen startups on the Microsoft accelerator program. Pretty simple. That & a great, usable product which is making the lives of their users much much easier.
If you divide mass by enery, how do you get energy out?
I can't begin to express how true this article is. I was once a naive, yet optimistic 24 year old who spilled his guts to a reasonably prominent EIR at what was then a top-flight VC firm in the area. I started suspecting something was wrong when I would get invited to their super-fancy digs (receptionist had 3 20-inch IBM flatscreen back when a 20-inch flatscreen actually almost cost $20k, the board room had 30 Aeron chairs, etc.), yet curiously enough never while anybody else was there, and would always be grilled for my 2 years of research findings, but after they "sucked out all my ideas" I couldn't seem to get any call-backs.

Tried another startup a year later and got sued by the EIR who claimed at first that our ideas were very similar ... then so similar that in fact he thought I "stole" what he saw as "his" idea.

I couldn't believe the nerve, and yet there they were, grown men twice my age who made million screwing me over without a second thought about all the crap they pay lip service to on their websites (ie, "Our reputations mean everything to us" and "Our honesty is the basis of our credibility") and all sorts of other mumbo jumo.

IN CONCLUSION: By all means keep at it, but be very, very careful - if they screw up they're still VC partners or EIRs, but you're done for at least that idea.
now i know why MS didn't manage to compete with Google. They still have their focus on desktop.

Thats ok. It's better for web startups.

Bill Gates used YouTube too before Google buy it, but MS went with creating their own video site..
MSFT buys Danger
Trevor has one. After about 2 minutes of using it, I realized it was going to be one of those things I'd see again in 10 years and say "Wow, is that a Kindle? I remember those."
I think you are blatantly ignoring the entire history of Microsoft.
what kind of caching? why would you want a web server cache that would eat up memory? what you need is an independent distributed dumb cache in memcached terms.
I like how they confused Y Combinator and news.ycombinator.com.
Hot or Not acquired for 20 million
your comment was "almost" funny
Modified: 31 August 2001 - his recommendations at the end seem in tune with some of the ideas behind YC. I wonder if he ever read pg's essays.

Nick is a great "rabble rouser". I remember when he got all the pro-RISC professors at UC Berkeley mad at him by arguing RISC vs CISC was unimportant because modern CISC chips translated CISC to RISC internally.
I, for one, welcome our new algal overlords.
Oops, clicked by accident. Then typed.
So if being a Venture Capitalist means being rich, and the goal of a startup is to get rich, how does one skip the hard startup part and become a Venture Capitalist?
...

By putting your finger on the active stuff?

It's designed for a mouse, where there are normally actions taken after moving the pointer. If there's no continuous UI presence on the playing field it's kind of... erm... pointless.
Danger's been one of my favorite companies, ever since I saw the Hiptop and heard that some independent startup had made it.

This could be a really good thing. Microsoft definitely has resources to let them do more awesome stuff, and Robbie Bach's group is decent about keeping their aquisitions alive (or making them better, e.g. Bungie).
The problem is that the nerds have no interest in doing the work involved in running a VC. Your Sergei’s, Larry’s, and Bill’s all seem to prefer philanthropy to investing.

PG is an obvious exception, though by all accounts it seems as if his YC commitments still allow him to do nerdy stuff.
Itching Powder 2.0
Ask YC:  Anyone know of a search engine for finding the WORST of the web?
People probably have a fascination for embarrassingly bad web sites. I think something like this can be quite popular.
Mod_rubinius coming.  What do you want it to look like?
More Erlang Fun: Distributed, Fault Tolerant MapReduce
My bad. I meant kilograms to joules or megatons to joules
Pretty Good Privacy Causes Legal Problems for a Vermont Cour
Barack Obama at Google
Obama gives a great speech about his campaign. He also tackles some good question asked by Googlers.
Yea, systems that can be pretty isolated have a lot to gain from keeping caches on disk instead of going to the database on every request.
Microsoft Responds to Yahoo Rejection:  Resistance is Futile
Mac OS X (Leopard) 10.5.2 Update Released
My oldest kid was part of the SharpOS project for a while.

It's cool stuff. The article doesn't do the subject justice, though.
Have you talked names on The Funded?
Actually most VCs are nowhere near what you would think of as "rich" ... they just have use of fancy offices paid for by the fund, lease a fancy car paid for by their 2-300k saleries, etc. - it's designed to give anybody talking to them the impression that "they don't need you" and you're lucky to be breathing the same air they are.

On the other hand I've formed some friendships with a few high placed people in a large company here and there, and they assure me that pretensions aside, VCs usually spend most of their time calling contacts in the corporate world begging for deal flow.

Most VC is just bluff.
I thank Yahoo for this. The open source community should be thankful as well. Remember, Yahoo put a lot of effort into open source projects.
This was way, way before the Funded came out. And while it would be nice to add my two cents in, (a) the VCs themselves never actually did anything unethical, they just used the EIR as a proxy, so they can always shrug it off like, "It wasn't OUR fault - we had a "rogue" EIR who did things his own way ... and (b) I've had enough years of ruminating and one day decided to put the past behind me lest I become a bitter old man in my late 20s/Early 30s.

This article just struck a nerve and I wanted to add my 2 cents ...

That's why I get miffed whenever I hear talk of "ideas are nothing, it's all in the execution" because I couldn't help but think that those two EIRs weren't executing jack-sh@# before I told them the idea and HOW to execute better than anybody else could, what to do when you had duplicators, etc.

Never mind me, I'm just a rampbling, bitter old man in a young man's body ...
What Y means to me
Sloppy thinking. Sloppy measurements.

If you have almost 1000 reqs/sec initially, that's 1ms per request. By bringing this down by the amazing 400% (!!) percent you've shaved off 3/4th of a milisecond per request. Congratulations - you have no idea what you've been measuring. Just the way in which the request is logged can make a 5ms difference. Insignificant and completely uninteresting.

Back when 3d game programming was cool, people would get a rotating cube and show off their 1200 fps frame rate. Of course they would get upset that by adding a texture to the cube the framerate dropped by 400 frames to 800 fps. "Textures are slow!", they'd say. Yeah, right...
Something tells me you'd probably have a very different opinion if one of the cofounders from a venture YCombinator started disappeared only to resurface later with VC-backing and a "I don't owe anybody anything, I didn't sign any contracts, it was just as much my idea as it was theirs" type of attitude -- especially if that guy went on to use his capital to start what would go on to become a very successful company while the one you founded floundered into eventual obscurity.

I mean this in all honesty when I say I hope it never happens to you guys like that, but something tells me if it did you'd be writing an article proclaiming something to the effect of, "That's Bulls@#$!!! People should respect other people's hard work!"

In conclusion all I'm really saying is "proceed, but with caution" since in the end there are a lot of VCs who'll more than readily copy your idea and give it to a friend or two they'll fund to "execute" your startup on their terms and not care twice about the bad reputations they develop as long as they make enough $$$.

And apparently by one of the most recent postings on this board, ie, "An Engineers View of VCs" or something to that effect, I'm not alone in this impression:

http://www.flownet.com/gat/eng-vc.html
No one in the article claims it is all downside (the shrimp farmer in Georgia now makes his income from Jellyfish) or a claim on the evolutionary advantage of the system. In a direct way, we can trace our own lineage as mammals to being benefited by the extinction of the dominant vertebrate for 160m years in the Cretaceous extinction.

However, in our current position, humans have a different role and relationship with nature: what we do has a direct impact on our environment. Even if you discount the loss of biodiversity as a minor thing to be waved away -- and even if you do take the fairly nihilistic view that all ecosystems are of equal worth -- there are direct impact to humans from our changing of the environment.

In the case of the oceans, they provide a massive economic benefit directly from extraction industries, which have been in decline due to overuse, and mechanisms like the great ocean conveyor belt (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation) transmit tremendous quantities of energy into northern climates providing moderate climates at northern latitudes (particularly, Northern Europe). In the case of corrals, diving, recreational fishing and tourism are key components of many of the economies of nations containing them. Without these natural resources, local economies suffer, as has already happened in a number of Caribbean nations.
Yeah, I was going to say, Allegro and Lispworks seem to have their share of lawyers. Is there a good open-source way about things?
About 1000 according to this article: http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewA...
"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." - Anton Ego
4x valuation or do i remember less from accounting than i thought?

Their annual revenue is estimated to be around $5 million, with $2 million in profit.

Doesn't make sense to me.
From the article: "During the 18th century, as theorists became aware of Isaac Newton’s scientific experiments with light and prisms, red, yellow, and blue became the canonical primary colors—supposedly the fundamental sensory qualities that are blended in the perception of all physical colors and equally in the physical mixture of pigments or dyes. This theory became dogma, despite abundant evidence that red, yellow, and blue primaries cannot mix all other colors, and has survived in color theory to the present day.[16]

Using red, yellow, and blue as primaries yields a relatively small gamut, in which, among other problems, colorful greens, cyans, and magentas are impossible to mix, because red, yellow, and blue are not well-spaced around a perceptually uniform color wheel."
I've seen one of these websites in the media. It must be a PR hit because there is nothing new about storing recipes on a computer. It was a common vision of the future since the 1970s to have a computer in the kitchen which would retreive recipes. The Commodore VIC20 manual, circa 1982, had an example recipe program.

Also, this something that search engines could do for 10 years. I worked in a Internet cafe and I explained to a old woman that a search engine allowed you to search by content. She reponded "Does that mean if I search for a list of ingredients, I get a recipe?"

This was an absolutely geniusly insightful response. Indeed, I distinctly remember trying this technique with AltaVista at least 10 years ago. Of course, then, the number of webpages was sparse compared to nowadays. So, AltaVista allowed partial matches. Nowadays, you'd only get an exact match.
Agreed. I would be suspicious of any "partnership" offers from Microsoft. Especially if my product was closely tied to something like Outlook.

Next thing you know MS Office whateverthefuck edition comes out and has the functionality built-in.
I'm actually quite impressed with Weebly's usability. My mom asked me to help her make a website, so I pointer her to Weebly and she was (almost) able to do it all herself.
4x valuation would be small, i.e. not expecting too much growth.
You have to admit, that wasn't exactly unintentional on PG's part.
The site isn't hackernews.com, it's news.yc. That comes with certain connotations.

One of which is that the site gets free publicity and name recognition. Another is that people are on their "best" behavior, since their comments might be counted as part of their YC app.

The downside is that people are going to associate anything that goes on with the core YC project.
I fear the former point is relevant, the latter is not.

Geez I'm getting grouchy in my old age.
This is going back a little ways: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirsky's_Worst_of_the_Web
PHP vs. Rails on Squidoo
Actually, it was unrelated to startup accelerator. Just like anything it took a lot of hard work and a little luck. One of the office evangelists became a Xobni user through our in-app invite system. He liked the product. He reached out to us and then we spent a couple weeks putting together screenshots, and answering questions. Every time I talked to him I asked, "so, is it looking like we'll be in the Bill G keynote? How else can I help."

We don't have a PR firm.
I think it's worth less because the founders aren't vesting in the new company or anything; they're quitting.
I have a 256 meg slice which has been rock solid and with no issues. I use Litespeed (http://www.litespeedtech.com/) for the web server. It is excellent for Ruby on Rails hosting. It dynamically manages Ruby processes - if there is no traffic it shuts down the processes, if there is traffic it ramps up the number as necessary up to the max that you specify.

On my slice I have a few PHP sites, a few static sites and 4 RoR sites (most of which get very little traffic.) Overall about 30k page views a day.

Litespeed isn't open source, but it is free and it works great for my hosting.
3x revenue is pretty standard for businesses that aren't really growing anymore. Seems like a pretty solid deal to me.
Everyone needs good music for coding (a little side project of ours)
Yea i don't see the point of selling for 20 mill when you are generating that much revenue. It shouldn't take that much of their time to run that thing, I would just let it ride.
Ask YC:  Anyone try combining a Yahoo Answers like site with wikis?
People would use a wiki to collaboratively construct an answer for each question. You might even have a sophisticated method for assigning credit.
Microsoft Responds to Yahoo Announcement
Funny thing is it looks like someone using a Newton on the subway.
I refuse to believe in memcached. Apache, along with other web servers, has a built-in in-memory cache for static content. Decent SQL-servers have several caches on different levels, in fact those caches in theory should be far more effective than a simple remote hashtable that memcached is. And all that - on top of OS level disk I/O caching.

I suspect that memcached was born as a result of sloppy SQL querying multiplied by inefficient SQL schema and lack of RDBMS tuning skills. Moreover, anyone can have memcached with zero programming by either hosting DB on a RAM disk with replication, or using in-memory tables.
Like it should. User browses coffee on their iPhone, places order, waits for their name to be called, pays for coffee, drinks.
"If you are a qualified investor, participate in start-ups as an "angel" investor."

Couldn't agree more!

holds out hands expectantly
Reminds me a bit of squidoo http://www.squidoo.com/
What will likely happen is that some species will learn to adapt and thrive on the increased numbers of algae and bacteria. And all the places and industries that depend on oceans will adapt as well. I bet someone will figure out a way to harvest energy from the life forms that are now taking over our oceans.
still no vote-down button...
Wow, this is great for Xobni. Only if I could get the video working on my mac...
Comments like "why post ...?" don't seem to add much to the discussion. Obviously someone thought the article was interesting enough to post and several people thought it was worth reading (and perhaps worth commenting on). I for one didn't see the article a year ago.
"The digital age consumes more paper, not less."
Well, what if we transmit known data in a strong signal from one end to the other and then compare what was received to what was sent... (insert big hand waving) if we replicate those steps x times, we might be able to map the "interference structure" of the Earth and compensate for that somehow...

This is admittedly almost impossibly complicated.
This technique is becoming increasingly common with the decreasing cost of digital film cameras. Expect a large jump in the popularity of this technique after the release of the next Wachowski siblings film, Speed Racer ( http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0811080/ ) in May 2008. This film will use the technique to remove mis-focus and create a live action effect which is more like cel animation.
Farmer gives low-cost laptop a proper field test
Ask YC:your opml files, please.
Developing a personalized news service. Id really like to beta test it with news.yc users in the near future, but need to train the algorithm a bit before its worth spending your time with it.

Could you guys post your opml files as comments here, or a link pointing to them? I would be eternally thankful.
Microsoft to Buy Mobile Software Firm
One benefit of a Lisp-driven website
Michelle Obama
Good music is important for me to get into "deep hack mode". Usually, it's house, trance or something like that. One day last week though, though I had David Wilcox's "Do the Bearcat" on repeat for about 2 hours. It was the most productive 2 hours I've had in a month.

Who would have thought?
Reminds me a lot like wiki answers http://wiki.answers.com/
Reminds me a lot like mahalo
That's really clever. If each disk sector has an inode and offset label then fsck becomes trivial. Why isn't it common? Because sector payload is no longer 2^n bytes. Any arrangement of labelling will increase disk head seek operations.

Labels and checksums are used in InnoDB 16KB pages. However, in this case, database rows are always smaller than one page and waste occurs anyhow.
How Americans Spend their Money (pictocharts)
Yeah, exactly. Although the recent Yahoo temporary insanity might suggest that MS is taking a new approach to competing in the web market.
When I want "coder background music" I just listen to a psytrance onine radio station.
reminds me of http://snacksby.com - which I think is better since it's been around longer and it has more data/recipes
-though someone can prove me wrong
How Obama is walking the racial tightrope
"So you’re going to write an iPhone app…" Tips from a dev using a preview of the SDK
some good music there - although I prefer albums when I'm coding. I think it provides good quantized units of time to work on things
trance is good, but for work? maybe that's why your coding isn't going so well :)
I don't see hot or not still pulling in 5M anually four years from now. Hot or Not seems like it's probably going to have a shelf life. While I think you do have an argument, taking the money is probably the best option.
Since it doesn't seem taboo to plug your own business on this site, I'll shamelessly promote one of my own non-software ventures: http://cdbaby.com/cd/trevisr/
"... Jellyfish populations are growing because they can. The fish that used to compete with them for food have become scarce because of overfishing. The sea turtles that once preyed on them are nearly gone. And the plankton they love to eat are growing explosively. ..."

Interesting comment.

Remarkably similiar to the scenario of "species collapse" outlined in Jarad Diamonds work, Collapse. [0] As species loose their ability to adapt in the environment the whole adjacent species start to be effected. Loose enough and whole groups that are closely inter-related disappear. You have to start questioning what are we doing wrong when the stable marine environments start to change so quickly.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose_...
"beautiful women around you right now"

I don't fail with them :-p
I have one that I often read on the subway, and I get a lot of questions about it. I've never seen anyone else carrying one around.