skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Good points webwright. I have had a few discussions with entrepreneurs in Colorado and they are collectively trying to make Colorado more of a hub for startup activity. Holding investor events and such. Im in Columbus, Ohio so I know the feeling of being on the outside looking in to places like Boston, New York and the Valley.
We're still in the development stage so we haven't even thought about this yet.
That article is almost 2 years old.
The "Wouldn't get hired" comment is pretty common -- in fact, an interview with Daniel Loeb about his multi-billion dollar fund ended with him saying something like "I couldn't get hired here. Bad grades in college, no MBA. If you want to get a job here, you have to start preparing when you're thirteen." (So once again, these guys are all using the same model).

Some funds have a program explicitly designed to hire people who 'wouldn't get hired' under normal circumstances: http://deshaw.com/articles/Alpha_2.pdf .
go read about subprimes here: http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2008/01/straigh...

Obviously fees are factored in.
2008 Color Trends
I got back from my first band practice in six years, did XHTML/CSS till I was falling asleep at my desk, and hit the sack at 10pm - which is earlier than normal. Ended-up waking around 5 a.m., so made a venti size latte and caught up with the ever-faithful RSS overload.
Ted Talks Video Aubrey de Grey: Why we age and how we can avoid it.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/39
Boulder looks like a nice place to live, too. Perhaps the sort of place you might even be able to live in over 30 even if you don't become fabulously wealthy. I'm actually becoming sort of curious about Colorado... living here in Innsbruck, I realized that it's not the cold and the snow that bother me, it's the gray and the rain so prevalent in the western half of my home state of Oregon. I can't stand that weather.

I guess all this is pretty tangential to startups, but quality of life is extremely important for me.
Top 10 Reasons Startups Fail
List of CSS Tools
Washington Mutual for Bank, Quickbooks for Accounting
I use GnuCash, which isn't great, but seems to be enough to keep track of the few transactions I have.
Resume: 30 seconds to impress
If Slide is Worth $500M, These Are Worth?
For the least hassle, PayPal's got a few options for payment. PayPal IPN can handle monthly subscriptions, and the service charges are not bad. You need to be diligent about moving the money out of the account, and about handling customer service problems.

Quickbooks is the default, but you can just keep a shoebox for your records and give it to your accountant every so often. You need a finance pro anyway, and if you don't have a founder who is an expert, outsource. You can't afford to screw that up.
There is a law in France making discounts of more than 5% illegal (on books)? WHY?
Xobni.
personalized search can be good (for both Google and you), but , involves some pretty serious privacy concerns. I would rather use something like this: http://history.sansj.com where all data stays in my server.
Indeed. But ultra portable approaches the mobile space. I suppose with the meteoric rise of celltop and ultra portables, it should be a more prominent issue. It's interesting to think that the average pixel count might actually decrease.

My celltop has zoom but the best sites just have another version for it.

2007 was the first year that more laptops than desktops were sold. If you consider browser enabled cellphones, I wonder how those numbers change.
Because they hate freedom.
It is amazing that Yahoo has yet to copy Adsense, I mean they know is giving billons to Google, and you wait years and have not even complete a decent copy of it???
Hacker News RSS 'comment' link is messed up
It seems the <comment> node in the RSS feed is missing a slash after the '.com' part. For example, it's showing up as 'http://news.ycombinator.comitem?id=101355'.

Does everyone else have the same problem? I'm using NetNewsWire.
ActiveDocument: More than just a document store
No. The only startups that exist are JavaScript hacks that take up 90 MB of RAM.
About Ajax...
Hacker news should always be about trying to understand why things work the way they do, even if we view them as misguided.

A lot of European countries look askance at "cutthroat" competition:

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displaystory.cfm?story...

Perhaps the idea is that in some cases, with too much undercutting, a single monopolistic vendor might be able to emerge, having killed off the competition. Which to me seems like a terrible reason to keep laws like this around - worry about the monopoly when it actually happens, and otherwise let the market get on with things.
Just get a no-fee business checking account at a convenient bank with a debit card, once you are making or spending a lot of money you can shop around for something that suits you better.

I use Fifth Third.
video games, hedge funds
I agree that understanding why is important, but I don't think having some silly comments prevents that.

Though in this case, what interests me more than why France is primitive, is why we are better. Which part of our traditions prevents us from having this law?

While I have general answers to that question, I don't have any answers specific to this particular law.

Edit: BTW my comment did allude to a serious answer. They have a different meaning of freedom in France, and are somewhat hostile to our meaning of it.
For my consulting business I had Bank of America Small Business account and used Quickbooks a little bit, but mostly did ad hoc accounting.
"They took VC money when they have paying customers and a working business model and it was time to grow the company."

Paypal had no idea what their business model was going to be when they took VC (they tried to fight off ebay sellers to begin with), their idea changed every week. They actually raised money so they could buy users (literally, they gave users money if they signed up).

"entrepreneurs should concentrate on building their company with their own money FIRST"

it's precisely because this isn't an option for young founders out of college that something like YC exists. we have no money of our own in the first place so taking external investment is our only option.
I learned Lisp aged 12, after messing around a bit with Basic. I consider myself very lucky for having had that experience. Writing an ELIZA clone at that age was a lot of fun - I remember in particular thinking it was hilarious to give my version a very rude personality ;-)
There are a lot of cool computationally intensive problems in drug design/discovery and trading/investing. There is also the possibility of a substantial upside in both fields.
How big is a Million Lines of Code?
An Introduction to String Theory
http://searchmarketing.yahoo.com/

http://publisher.yahoo.com/index.php
I'm sending mik the article by Natasha Chen, on how terrible classes organized around syntax killed joy for her, and Scheme revived the magic.

http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html

(here's the comment I left on the blog)

Hi there,

I applaud your efforts, and hope everything is well with you and your daughter.

I do want to raise a note of alarm. I recall struggling through Java and C++ syntax as a kids, and though I did get through without too many scars, I remembered much pain upon reading of Natasha Chen's encounter with programming classes. In this article:

http://www.trollope.org/scheme.html

She details how boring classes organized around syntax displaced creative teaching and work. But she then explained how learning Scheme revived the magic for her: that the extremely simple syntax allowed her to focus on the ideas directly, learning, all the way.

I love Scheme, and it would be a great choice. Squeak, too would be terrific - it seems to have been developed with kid's exploration in mind: (see for example, http://www.squeakland.org/kids/kidsmain.html). Even Java might not be so bad.

But I would take caution. Making GUI apps in Java wasn't very fun. I recall my frustration with Swing and exception hierarchies and paths and packages and altogether it's just not an experience I would revisit. Maybe it's better to learn something designed to be easy. Something designed to grow with you.
10 Best Intranets of 2008
Bank account is with the localish large bank, PNC.
If his goal is to make a game that can be played in a browser, his realistic options are Java and Flash. Java is free, which might be a consideration.
25/5 = 14
We're starting a startup in computer vision. We're deploying across the web, but that's just because it's the cheapest distribution mechanism.

You describe interests that might imply you'd enjoy game development. Have you thought about giving that a go?
I read somewhere that the blockbuster title 'Gears of War' had only about half a million lines of C++ code: ~250,000 specific to the game, and ~250,000 for the entire Unreal 3 engine.

I was surprised. Steve Yegge seems to be pretty well known as a programmer, or at least, as a programming blogger, but his 'modest' web game was more than a million lines of Java.

Apparently, if you're disciplined enough (they coded in layers, much of which was in a strictly functional style) you can do a lot with a little.
Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship
I'm not crazy about using federal research stats and applying them to 'start ups'. I think those stats are skewed by restaurants and franchises, which fail left and right.
I think the political forces that led European countries to democracy are much more tied up in class struggle than those that led to the American revolution. As a result, Europeans tend to make laws that keep large businesses from pressing their advantages as much as they can in the US.
I use freshbooks for all of my invoicing etc. I couldn't be more happier with it. They will even post your invoices, estimates etc. You can also take payment for your invoices online with them.

I use spreadsheets for working out cash flow etc
Yahoo: More Details on Potential Mass Firings
a million lines of code? about one 50th of vista.
Ah.. Gears of War is also a single player game. Steve's game is closer to an MMO. Once functionality needs to happen across 60 different computers in a synchronized fashion, code can get pretty complicated. And sometimes a multiplayer setting can actually force you to write functionality that only makes sense in a multiplayer setting.

For example, Steve's game levels are tile-based, but I doubt he restarts the server whenever he makes a small change to a level. That means the level needs to be editable at runtime, which means changes need to be streamed dynamically to all clients that might be watching. The changes also need to be serialized to the database periodically, so that they aren't lost when the server does reset.. And you need code to make sure two players' views of that level don't get out of sync if they are both editing it at the same time. That tileset loader code you wrote now needs to be able to support additional tiles at runtime, which means you need a collision tree that can be rebalanced quickly without hogging valuable server resources. And what happens if a player was standing in a valid tile, but you just removed that tile? You get the idea.

My employment's game is easily over a million lines of code at this point, and the client alone is about 700,000. Not only that, but the client is completely recompiled for every change - so it takes about 10 minutes from the time you've made a change until you've tested it. People avoid compiling the engine like a genetically-engineered flesh-eating virus, so you're coding for maybe hours before you test all your changes. And since debugging requires changing code, each mistake costs you another 10 minutes. The whole process is like putting together a 10,000-piece puzzle upside-down.

Some bits of advice for large C++ projects:

* You need to have split your functionality into about 20 different DLLs before you get to the point of being an oh-god-why-is-it-so-massive project.

* You must write most of your objects using the interface pattern (a pure virtual interface in the header file, and your implementation exclusively in the source file). No private function or variable declarations should be written in the header at all. This facilitates extremely fast compile times. Here's an example of what I mean: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/example.cpp

* Sometimes you need to ignore what senior programmers think is best to get your goals accomplished. Remember, they got you into this situation in the first place.
I like my 'Regex Powertoy' better:

http://regex.powertoy.org

Requires Java applet support, for step-control over matching and better-than-Javascript regex syntax/funtionality.
I enjoyed the following at the end of the article (with context added by me):

Think about that last analogy: A million [lines of code costs a million] times the cost of the flash chips [it is stored on]. Yet accounting screams over each added penny in recurring costs, while chanting the dual mantras "software is free," and "hey, it's only a software change."

I've worked at a place like that before. They would pay a full team of developers for several months to roll our own custom solution to something we could have bought off the shelf for $1000. People just don't see software as expensive to develop... and unless it's open source, it is.
I think computer vision is cooler than gaming personally.

Actually, my skills are perfect for game development, but it seems if you want to work as a game developer you have to sacrifice pay or something else just so you can work on games. And the fact that I would work on games wouldn't really compensate for the sacrifices because I'm not a hardcore gamer that went into computer science just to write games.
I was reading "Weaving the Web", by Tim Bernes-Lee.
yes, surprisingly good
In most cases: too big.
Just because you can generate a hypothesis doesn't make something true. Its pretty difficult to compare the difference in required code for a modern 3D engine, with lots of single player functionality like scripting and AI, and a multiplayer game with a lesser graphics engine. It should be noted that there are some simple multiplayer games that are hardly any code at all though. 500k lines all up for Gears of War certainly seems massively less than the industry average for that kind of project.

Just because you like Yegge's post and/or game doesn't mean his code needed to be that big. Judging from his post on code size it's not like he cares particularly.
The working in designated office space requirement is a big negative to me. I see this as they either 1) dont really understand what kind of work environment hackers want/need 2) dont trust the groups that they are funding enough to allow them to work alone without supervision. They really should consider making the office space an option for those who want it.
Some smart robotics startups:

MekaRobotics (by Aaron Edsinger, MIT star behind Domo)
http://mekabot.com/
http://people.csail.mit.edu/edsinger/domo.htm

Willow Garage (former early Google employee founder)
http://www.willowgarage.com/

AnyBots (Trevor of YC's company)
http://anybots.com/

Q Robotics (early stars from iRobot that liked startups so much, they needed to leave and start another once iRobot went public)
http://qrobotics.com/

You don't really need to know anything about robots to work on them. The best groups are made up of specialists that understand a bit of everything, but are essentially software|hardware|electrical|systems engineers at their core.
The original designers of Smalltalk taught a load of primary school kids to program. So squeak may be a good bet.

There was even a video on it. I think I saw this in one of Alan Kay's UI videos that are available here: http://webcast.berkeley.edu/course_details.php?seriesid=1906...
Just because you can generate a hypothesis doesn't make something true.

No, it doesn't. But I've seen what I described happen many times over three years.

Its pretty difficult to compare the difference in required code for a modern 3D engine, with lots of single player functionality like scripting and AI, and a multiplayer game with a lesser graphics engine.

It's not. There are many shared concepts. Scripting and AI, for example.

Just because you like Yegge's post and/or game doesn't mean his code needed to be that big.

That seems like why he wrote the post. Also, my likes and dislikes are irrelevant.
They provide optional office space -- it's there if you want it.
If you're thinking about C code, you're probably looking at drivers or unix programming. I'm sure there's database companies that are looking for decent C or C++ programmers. You'd be programming for concurrency and optimization there. Granted, databases aren't really a sexy field, but... where there's muck there's brass as they say.

From what I understand, a lot of the C++ programming is windows stuff. But a lot of the Windows programming at small companies is going over to C# stuff. But, there are some ISV's around that are probably looking for programmers. Joel Spolsky is always hiring. I don't know how much concurrency work you'll be doing at an ISV, though.

As far as 2D/3D graphics are concerned, there's always work for programmers in the special FX industry. Those tend to be smaller companies, and they tend to do more C++, C, and python stuff working with graphics. You don't have the upside potential that you do with startups, though. If you're interested, by a copy of CineFX at Borders, go through an look up the company names and see if they're hiring programmers. Or, Goiogle companies like Pixar, Dreamworks, ILM, Tippet studios, Blue Sky and see if they're hiring programmers.

The VFX world does a lot of C++, Python and works a lot with distribued computing, render farms, graphics, optimization, image manipulation, etc... It might be your cup of tea.
Boost Your Cell Service For Cheap
They need to come up with a new metric. LOC is so wrong for so many reasons. Running tested features seems like a good way to measure project progress but I don't know how it would relate to overall project complexity. http://www.xprogramming.com/Blog/Page.aspx?display=RunningTe...
k, we all hate the RIAA, but how is this notable?
You need to have split your functionality into about 20 different DLLs before you get to the point of being an oh-god-why-is-it-so-massive project.

How does separating out code into DLLs help? Linking is fast.

You must write most of your objects using the interface pattern (a pure virtual interface in the header file, and your implementation exclusively in the source file).

This is something which you should always do -- not just for large C++ projects. Separating interfaces from implementations is ALWAYS good design.
I'm not doubting adding networking adds complexity. I don't think the comparison of complexity between the graphics and AI of gears of war vs the networking of Yegge's game is easily made. The interesting thing about Gears of War is that most titles of that caliber take a lot more than 500k lines. Yegge's game as a comparison point seems pretty fair to me, and I just don't buy the fact that the extra networking necessarily makes the code so much more complicated than Gears of War - thereby invalidating the comparison.
I'm in the same situation - but its more of a psychological hurdle to apply to places that want X years of experience, when all I have under my belt as a soon-to-be new college grad is summer internship experience. Just be vigilant on craigslist and sites like SimplyHired and Indeed. There are tons of opportunities available and your net may simply have to be cast wider.

Oh, also - check out http://www.ventureloop.com for culling startups. I've found that these small companies have a ridiculously fast callback rate.
The issue is not DTrace. The issue is corporate agenda and control. So far Apple hasn't become "evil" yet, the way Microsoft has been, but I am not willing to bet it's going to stay this way for long, especially after their market share increases substantially.
I am not sure what "spirit of open source", that the blog post refers to means, but what Apple did isn't looking nice from any angle.
It's not the networking. It's the fact that changes need to happen at runtime, and sync to any number of clients that may be watching.

Also, your hypothesis that the prettier game the more complicated one is false. 2D physics and AI can be horrendously complicated, or elegantly simple. There's no way to tell just by looking at the game, except on a very rough level. Take the game Gish for example. I don't know how complicated that little blob's physics is, but it could be extremely tricky.

Amusingly, the game rules are the least complicated component.
Linking is fast.

Unfortunately, no. The linking step at work is the most time-consuming. Visual Studio takes four minutes (and growing) to link the client, no matter how small the change.

By the way, do you have any samples of C code from your project I could read? I'm writing my game engine in C, so I try to learn as many different C styles as I can.
Plotr: Sexy Graphs in Javascript
I meant syncing the game state to be included under the term networking. Amusingly, Yegge's post about the length of his game was all about how massively bloated it was because of Java. His own estimate of what size he would like the game to be was 150k-200k. Apparently impossible in Java, but presumably what he felt he should be able to achieve that even given the game's distributed state management.
Your right, it's a quick fix. If they don't raise the value of their stock there will be no difference between them and another company as that company will have bought them ;)
I'm more excited about Lenovo's new ultra portable IdeaPad U110
Here's the best writeup I found on my own:

http://www.plaxo.com/api/openid_recipe
I work at Yahoo!, and I really hope this rumor is true. There is a lot of dead wood, and even more VP level employees that really don't contribute to the bottom line. I know this, others know this, and Jerry knows this. Its just a matter of seeing if he has the intestinal fortitude to do the needful.
I actually like Vista. I'm a Mac user (so maybe it's the pretty interface I like...) and I probably wouldn't have paid for it, but I won it in a programming contest so I figured why not install it on my 3 year old mediocre PC with 512MB of RAM... bad idea. It was ridiculous slow, so I picked up another 2GB of RAM and it runs great now. When they say 1GB RAM minimum they mean it.

Of course I wouldn't switch from Mac OS X to Vista, but as far as Windows goes, Vista seems alright.
Certainly. Although most internet startups will include a strong web presence, that is often a small part of the equation. I got pretty heavily flamed for suggesting to not write your own framework, but I think the whole point was different business genres.
For an internet startup, you probably don't want to write your own framework. For a web based startup, where that is the core of your product, you might have a huge competitive advantage writing your own.

Best of luck!
From MySpace to YourSpace
Most of the folks who do this are the big financial firms who have a direct line to the exchange (actually, I've heard of boxes being colocated in the exchange to shave a few milliseconds off the trade time). They aren't paying retail commission rates.

There are still transaction costs though, mostly in the form of the bid-ask spread and the effect of moving the market when you buy or sell a lot of shares. Reducing these transaction costs is big business - one of the main areas that my employer was in was finding "hidden" liquidity where you can trade a lot without materially affecting the stock price.
I am not going to answer your English usage question here on the public forum because there is no sense in posting something many people will read for the benefit of a single person, and there is no contact information in your profile.