skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First thing I noticed was the graph of companies. I figured the site was a database of corporate relationships (company A funded company B, which acquired company C, etc..). Then I saw the 'job hacks' tab, and the 'Opportunities at Emerging and Start-up Technology Companies' tab on the top. Ah, this is a job site.

The message needs to be clearer: This is a job site (which happens to have a nice company analyzer) or this is a Company database (which happens to have job listings). There is probably too much info on the front page.

I would probably lean toward the Company database that has jobs version over the other.
Sometimes I step back and am really, really amazed that those three guys were assassinated. No wonder people thought the world was about to fall apart to shit in 1968.
Ticket Scalpers Seatwave Take $25 Million Series C
can't get to the site
What Is A Canonical URL?
I hope it is easily turned off. I don't need or want advertisers burning off the millijoules of my battery with distracting ads. I've enjoyed the 1990s version of the web with static pictures for ads.

I agree though, with the SDK Apple will have to add Flash or someone else will do it poorly and waste even more power.

I think they've managed to establish a baseline expectation for how long iPhone should last on batteries, when people see the impact Flash has they may understand that the message isn't: "The iPhone doesn't last long on batteries.", but rather "Flash eats your battery."

(And yes, I suppose you could write flash that didn't eat batteries... but people don't.)
I had the same thing in a couple of hotels in Sydney and Melbourne that I stayed at 2 years ago. Never seen this anyplace else though.
Comments, like anything to do with writing maintainable code, take a while to learn. You only really figure out which comments are useful when you come back to something you wrote a couple of years ago, and try to make sense of it.

So, new programmers are likely to write bad comments, more than they are likely to write bad code (because bad code is more obvious the day you write it, so the feedback comes faster).

How the comments are bad, though, is going to vary between programmers. Some will write too many, some too few, some will just write plain useless comments.

My disease was like Steve's - over-commenting. I put it down to my liberal-arts background, which meant I found it much easier to think in prose than in code. Accordingly, I would get my head round tricky problems by writing a comment about them first. I wonder if programmers from a straight CS background would tend to write fewer comments.
I thought the same. And I think there are a lot of possibilities in the ERP and financial markets for a product that can display data like that.
In a consumer culture, where entertainment, experience, and stuff is what life is about, why would anyone save? What are you saving for?

I would imagine with multiple huge revolutions in recent memory, people in China might have a reason for a different outlook. It is actually totally backwards, because a poorer nation can expect to grow at a much faster rate than a developed nation -- you just need to take off the brakes in the system for it to happen. If you ignore the shaky history, you'd have to be pretty dumb to save money when the economy is growing at 10% annually for a decade (unless that savings is in the form of investments, but it usually isn't)
Nvidia Enters CPU Market
Incorporate the age of the most recent comment next to the comments link:

52 points by pg 355 days ago | 432 comments (2 hours ago)

or something like that. It's nice to know if a comment thread is still active. On the flip side, I am less likely to comment if all of the other comments are several hours old.
Vista SP1 still vulnerable to activation hacks
Feature Request: Display the age of the last comment
Caffeine - A User's Guide to Getting Optimally Wired
That's a completely normal offer in the world of regular business, in fact, it's pretty good considering some of the particulars.

When non-outlandish deals and realistic valuations stop making sense to you, it's a clear sign that it's time to explore life outside the valley a bit!
100+ Useful Web Resources for Small Business and Non Profits | BlogWell
Best way to clean LCDs?
Lots of dust on my street, so I'm looking for a better way to clean my screens, preferably without destroying the glazing.
It's not small, it's realistic.

All the other valuations are retarded, that's all.
Agreed. A couple years ago I was a married student with a kid and a $17K stipend, taking out $XX,000 in loans. Now I'm not borrowing any more money (well, except the house), paying back tons every month, and earning many times what I was then. In two years, I moved from the 20-40% to the 60-80% quintile just by graduating and working. So I'd agree that those bottom two quintiles are distorted by students (not sure how much though)
I have a silk sunglasses bag that seems to work ok.
You could make it so that if you are not coding fast enough it stops the music.
301 no? It's a bad url after all...
"I think it's far better to have a leader that everyone hates."

Unless that leader has given even the uninformed a reason to hate him ...
The entire site is a confusing mess. That chart is fuzzy and scares me. I don't even want to look at it. Text is horribly contrasted throughout the site. Constantly opening links in a new window when I don't want that. Clicking on the "Limited Access" link to let me do a search loads a page that nearly crashes my browser. Java is slow to load and other portions had to wait.

Don't see why you had to use JAVA to show a graph that has no real value. Cool, we can move the arrows around the central point! But it has no value .. just make it a nice static, clear image
This would kill sharing one's wifi.
And Sony Reader. Once someone releases one of these without a CRIPPLING copy protection scheme, then we'll talk.
It's a neat sounding part, but I don't think they're actually doing much r&d on the CPU core - it's an ARM11-based SoC.
"I for one didn't see the article a year ago."

Neither did I.

That's the way information are spread. Duplicating them is a side effect and there's nothing wrong with that. If they are still interesting, people will upvote them again, and again...
How to compensate business advisors
Bullseye. And most people would rather like a folksy, funny guy that talks like they do instead of a rich, over-educated, boring guy.
Interesting that this thread has about as many political comments as the rest of YCNews combined, but no one has complained. It's a good example of civil, intelligent political discussion.
Ask PG: What are those little blue question marks ["?"]against each comment?
What are those little blue question marks ["?"]against each comment?
strangest name I've encountered in a while and thats saying something on today's internet.
They're already in 36 million and only since 2006? Where does all of this money go?
Probably a browser artifact.
did aomeone finally get fired for choosing IBM?
No user cares about HTML 4.0 and table layouts. I hate this complaint. Also, don't use mod_rewrite because it adds unnecessary overhead to your webserver.
I'd like to hear more about what you're doing. I shot you an email.
Too slow to load. I gave up. But from the looks of the other comments here, it's just as well.

Looks like you're getting good (and ruthless) feedback. I'd expect nothing less from this group.

Good luck to you. Let us know when 1.1 is ready.
I use compressed air.
You may also try reading it like this: only the fifth richest have money to save. Due to the inflexibility in cost of necessary commodities (food, housing) one may mistakenly read that as 'the poor trying to live like the rich,' but that is far from the case.

Let's assume that you spend $200 a month (a fairly meagre amount) on food; that would be $2400 a year. And you also spend $600/month on rent (a fairly low/middling amount). That's $7200 a year. Combine the two and you get $9600.

That's already >90% of the TOTAL income of the lowest bracket. The lack of savings among the poorer members of our society has less to do with trying to 'live like the rich' than with 'not being able to do so.'
The frontpage doesn't explain what the benefit is for the user, or what he should do to try it out. There's also at least 2x too much on the frontpage, though better graphic design would make it look less distracting.
Is this supposed to be like LinkedIn for startups?

Or is it just a research site, like a Hoover's for startups?
Do you mean a gift card to a grocery store? Does this work for you?
http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/ref=gw_br_gro?%5Fencodi...

Just kidding!

I think the real solution is clearly to put in the legwork to become a licensed money transfer service. We fully intend to, but simply can't afford it till we close a Series A. So not to sound like a broken record, but use the service so we can impress VCs :-D
P/E ignores a lot of things, too. Old-line manufacturing businesses usually have a ton of assets (machinery, land, etc) that boost their valuations.

I doubt HotOrNot has much more than the brand name and domain, as far as assets are concerned.
It's been going for over seven years so far, without much in the way of marketing. I don't see why it couldn't last four more years with a little more attention.
PHP fast, large (megabyte), data transfer between sessions
We changed the domain display to include subdomains. Just a different regex.

I need to change the check to see if a URL is already in the system. I cut off the protocol part, but forgot to cut off the www, i.e. http://google.com matches google.com, but not www.google.com or http://www.google.com.

This will be fixed very soon.
Teaching is a tough gig -- I tried it, and it was too tough for me.

The downside of tfa is that they are somewhat cultish and will want you to drink cool aid. The upside is that you get some training, and will meet cool people. (Many don't drink the cool aid, and even those that do are well intentioned positive thinkers.)

For those who are born teachers, who love kids, whose calling is to teach... TFA is great. For those who aren't, it could be a catastrophe in a rosy coupon. Most people will fall somewhere in the two extremes.

So, the simple answer is: run away. But, maybe you are a born teacher and this is right for you. No harm in applying, I guess.
The Clintons' Terror Pardons
Note: I applied, and was negged, by TFA, but know many people who did it and told me of their experiences.

I taught briefly in an urban public school, where basically anyone with a college degree could get a job because there was such a teacher deficit. (They were quitting in droves.)

I probably could have used the training I would have gotten in TFA, as going in there completely green was a bad idea :) Oh well, I probably taught a few kids some stuff they might be able to use later in life. Mostly I just tried to keep them in their seats and not setting the building on fire.

One final note: The hardest thing about teaching is the workload. 100 hour weeks is just words until you've experienced it. (To be honests, I am not sure if it was that many, but it seemed like it. And this isn't 100 hours staring at a spreadsheet, but chasing down kids, grading illegible homework, calling parents, dealing with bureaucracy, dealing with classroom observations and job ratings from the assistant principle who doesn't give a shit about your fancy college degree... yikes.)

Teaching would be a lot more doable if you had fewer students, or if all the classes you had to teach could follow the same lesson plan. I was preparing five different plans a day. A tough schedule even for an experienced educator with years of semi-prepared lesson plans that he has already taught a few times and knows what works and what doesn't.
uncle, uncle,,thanks, may I have another. I was expecting brutal good feedback so keep it coming. Ok, we are down now. will get it back up and try again. thanks for the pressure
Server infrastructure and developers would be my guess. Probably a fair bit goes towards "misc. marketing expenses", which == bribes/kickbacks/gifts. :)
This may be true, but think of having all that graphic firepower in the palm of your hand. Their graphic abilities are impressive (I run dual high-res monitors with Nvidia on my laptop)
Yang's Yahoo comeback plan
Very confusing graphics and layout. Also, strange name. If you have to explain what your name means, you've got a problem.
no mod rewrite? ever heard of something silly called seo?

ref tables etc, Im with you - who cares

s
Yeah, you're both right. This was a quick and dirty because people were starting to open emails. We ended up fixing it for real after our quick and dirty solution. The only reason I mentioned it to begin with was to point out that IE7 hijacks 404 pages too.
back up, well see how long it lasts
20 million is no joke - for a startup that has already paid them very very well for a long time and put them in the web limelight for many years - its a great deal.

I was a bit shocked by the price - when startups are getting all these crazy valuations and acquisitions it seems crazy that such a successful, profitable, and valuable company only got 4x. Sometime valley logic is ass backwards - but its all good - these guys built a kick ass business and made out with loads of cash - well done all around.
I guess I don't see the point. People are complaining about fuzzy images or whatever. I thought the interface was okay, but the question of where and how value is being added is not at all clear.

Also, go through your codebase, and anytime you see something like this:

"Please login to access 'Find Companies / Jobs"

...do a total re-write. I'm not logging it to an unfamiliar website, and neither are 95 percent of people.
Obama comes across as awkward and geeky, but have you not seen the 2004 Democratic Convention keynote address? It was one of the best political speeches in the last 20 years.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNCLomrqIN8
you could say that, founders move from company to company and create similar work environments and hire similar quality people
Got your email. Thank you. A couple things you said really got me to thinking. So I'm putting a little extra thought into my response, which I'll have sometime later today.
Real coders work on dirty screens
You're right about HTML4/tables... but the suggestion to use something (mod_rewrite or whatever) to get off a non-standard port (8081) is a good one. Non-standard ports look sketchy to many people -- and sometimes company networks even block access to them.
thanks, the faq issue was an oversite, the rest we can fix. what is the issue with colors, what site colors do you like
I usually use a clean, wet cloth. That gets off dust and stuff. For oils, I'd probably use dilute window cleaner.
http://geeksaresexy.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-to-properly-cle...

http://www.wikihow.com/Clean-a-Laptop-Screen-With-Household-...

http://www.tech-faq.com/clean-lcd-screen.shtml

http://www.ehow.com/how_2036384_clean-laptop-screen.html
thanks, yea, a destination to stay informed about local startups, and if you want, pursue job opportunities.
I only have an 8600 GTS at home and it's plenty powerful enough for 2x2560x1600.
You can do smart URLs without mod_rewrite. Ever hear of rails?
Yes but you can do that without mod_rewrite.
I agree with this one. Btw, I liked the site.
point well taken, since users can enter and edit the database of companies, how would you approach trying to keep some semblance of security for the database without knowing who is modifying it?
- Need a clear sentence on what you do or what the site is about.

- Images have been stretched
Why I like Scala's Lexically Scoped Open Classes
Wow. An actual Java applet. It's like 1998 all over again. Too much for a simple graph. You should consider replace it with flash... or even pure Dom/Javascript, like these guys: http://www.genoom.com
Opera + Flash 9 in Linux. I've tried in Firefox + Flash 7 in Linux too and it's somewhat messy there too. In both setups the ads appear and disappear at strange times when I move the mouse, not just when I enter the Flash area.
I'm not a programmer, but I did TFA for three years in Compton after graduating with a BS in Physics. I would say that if you are serious about your start-up, it's probably not the best fit for you: you simply won't have the time or energy at the end of the day, especially in your first year. This of course assumes that one would do TFA because one wants to actually tackle the problem of educational inequality, and not just because one thinks it will look good on a resume someday or one has a martyr complex.

A typical day is: get to school at 7, plan, hold before-school tutoring, teach all day (with a lunch break of 30 minutes), kids go home at 3, hold after-school tutoring until 4, plan, go home at 5 or 6, eat, grade papers until you fall asleep. This was my experience at least.

I loved it because for me it was about connecting with people who had a completely different upbringing than I do. The skills I learned in the classroom have colored most of my professional life. I found that students, in aggregate, are excellent judges of character, and I really had to step up my game to gain their trust.

Common Criticisms and responses:
"It's crowd control..." -only if you're a lousy teacher (and there are plenty)

"TFA is a cult..." -it is, but after your initial training, which is actually very useful, you can choose to be as involved as you want (I wasn't very)

"Teaching is for those who can't do anything else." -Maybe there's some truth to this. I think it depends on what a person believes is important. Effective teaching in an inner-city school is definitely not easy, and to be honest, I think it's a problem in need of a new solution. I think the world could use a better model of education more than it needs a better way to use RSS to find out what one's friend had for breakfast. So if you have the raw innovative skill, it's a huge opportunity.
is that something you put your curtains on?
I have read some LCD manuals that specifically warn against cleaners that contain ammonia -- i.e., window cleaner.

I've have good luck with a big micro-fiber lens-cleaning cloth dampened with a squirt of eyeglasses-cleaner. I've also heard that diluted isopropyl alcohol is a good choice. There are also cleaning fluids specifically intended for use on LCD screens.
anyway forgive me but I was under the impression RoR had performance issues?
Saying language X has performance issues makes no sense. Saying implementation X has performance issues does. It's not the language, it's the application/developer/configuration.
Confessions of a Caller-ID spoofer
YC dotted?
Interesting article. I've used Spoofcard in the past, and it is a pretty well designed service.
I really don't get VCs. So many wonderful, LEGIT, LEGAL ventures that would improve life don't get funded, yet they pour (read: waste) this much money into a borderline-illegal piece of junk like this that does nothing but piss off many people.

Oh and this article is wrong. The guy involved in this also has a U.S. version of this under a holding company; I know this because I tried to get Lily Allen tix from a venue in NYC and even though I got there like literally 10 minutes after tickets went on sale, I was told that they all "sold out".

"Impossible!" I claimed. Then I was told about this company - basically all they do is hire a bunch of low-lifes (read: college students who want quick pot-cash) to just hang around for hours before the tickets go on sale and they then just buy up all the tickets and resell them for 5-10X original cost.

Seriously who sees a future in a company that gets people aggravated by design and ads zero value to the process?

Are VCs that dumb, or just that desperate?
50% isopropyl alcohol + 50% h2o, mix in a spritzer bottle and spray directly to a microfiber cloth. Power down your LCD, and clean away.
My coding screen is dirty, but I want to clean the other one. :)
real coders dont need screens
Power down your house to make sure...
I tested once on a Dell Latitude C820 notebook - crappy enough to not care about.

It had a normal matte screen (non glare). I wiped with a wet cloth and I also used dish washing liquid to remove oil and fingerprints. Everything was easily cleaned. I also wiped very hard to find out how much abuse the screen could take. I did not damage anything. These displays are much sturdier than anyone would think!

So just go ahead. Subconsciously I am sure I wanted to destroy this crapbox. But I didn't. In the end I had to throw it with force on a concrete floor. That finally did the job ;o).

Oh, yes, I have forgotten: this is america. Please shut down the computer, disconnect all cords, remove the battery, discharge yourself, and no warranty. You act on your own risk etc. pp.
It used to be a caveman walked across the top of a mountain looking for deer to eat. He left trash wherever he went and even introduced "fire hunting" where entire mountainsides would be burnt in order to get the most game.

Now we go visit mountains where we stay on closely-guarded trails and hope to see a deer to frame in a picture. We drive up in our internal combustion engines and hike "leaving nothing behind, taking nothing but memories"

And we feel guilty for doing it.

I'm thinking the caveman got the better deal.
...

Well, hopefully that isn't the only way to turn the lights on and off.
"Add your company and the connections to investors and past companies of the founders and executives."

????
So this is for company owners? Why they should reveal their connections?

"Adding companies and links add credit points."

Credits points?
...which we are now going to tell everyone.

In headlines, "Secret" is not only contradictory, but weasely way to attract attention.
Ask YC: Anybody have any experience using Wufoo?
I'm not a programmer and although there are programmers where I am there are very few with a "startup mentality" ... mostly folks from big companies who like to live fantasy lives through "Tech Entrepreneur Startups"-type Meetups.

Anyway, I thought that until I find people who can lend a hand to help build what I have in mind, the best I can do is dive in and put together whatever I can by myself.

I was thinking just an intro page for starters with a "notify us when launching" type feature.

I'm looking at Wufoo, but I can't seem to understand some key questions I have, namely, where does the inputted data on my website go?

Does it come to me directly, if so what kind of d-base do I need to put together?

Does it go to them and if so, then what? Do they send me an excel/.txt doc with all the inputed data?

Is it automatic, included in the pricing option, or extra?

Do they maintain any rights over it?

In other words, I imagine they keep the data since if they just gave me the source code then it would be impossible to enforce payment, but on what terms do they keep the info?

Anybody have any actual experience using Wufoo on their own site/blog and care to share your experience?

Thanks in advance.
How many times are they going to 'fix' monetization? This starts to sound like a broken record...
Stores Use Sonic Devices to Chase Kids
Ballmer's bid turns hostile
Buy Google Adword ads to drive traffic to Yahoo offerings.
Ask YC:  Do you watch TV?
Ask YC: Do you watch TV?
How many elections since the invention of TV had there been in 1954?