skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I am going to say something that you my have trouble reading or hearing..

You waited too long to handle the cofounder developer problem. Cut your losses now and get your second wind and attack the other startup ideas in your mind
Didn't know that

In that case 1000 x 0 < $$$$ !!!
They don't throttle those guys a little. They throttle them a lot.
TFTP was mentioned in the netboot discussion. http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1350
You haven't truly started a business until you've made your first sale. Sure, this is an opinion, but it's one that I firmly believe in. From what I know of people who "start businesses" these days, most end up not actually making any money. It's a huge resource sink until they fail. Life isn't a Disney movie, but failure isn't the end of the world either.

One thing you haven't mentioned at all is whether you think you will launch and have a revenue stream. How are you going to make money? Do you have customers lined up or just some hopes and prayers that people will flock to your product/service once launched? The reason I ask is that I also firmly believe (again an opinion) that when you do launch, you probably have another 2 or 3 years before you'll get your head above water financially.

I started a business when I was younger and failed (quit gracefully but the trajectory was never headed up). I was hired by somebody I did business with; and trust me when I tell you that on paper I am the prototype of mediocrity. It was actually my mom who suggested that "maybe I stick it out in a real company so I gain some experience". It was a comment that at the time was piercing and hurtful but ultimately right. I did really well at that job, realized I was better at some things than I expected, and that I was worse at some things than I thought I was. I treated it as a learning experience, and the money didn't hurt either.

A lot of companies would be happy to hire you. In their minds, you may not have made it as an entrepreneur, but you'd make a great intrapreneur: someone who is entrepreneurial minded and can succeed within the confines of a safe sandbox which is the company.
I know I'm echoing what the VCs tell you, but...

If you've been working for a year and a half and still haven't launched, that, to me, indicates that your product will almost certainly need another year of iteration at least before it starts making any money. Probably 50-90% of the work that you've done so far will be scrapped when you figure out what your customers really want. (yeah, everybody thinks they're different, but they're not)

Combining that with "we're about to run out of runway", and this results in a really bad picture.

I don't know what exactly is right for you - you'll have to make that judgement call yourself - but if I were in your place, unless there is some really significant information you're not telling us in this post, I would revise your estimate of "I 'm at a startup in New York that has, in my opinion, an excellent product that is near launch" - you're at a startup that has a product that's probably 1-3 years away from being able to make significant amounts of money, unless you have a crazy awesome sales force that can sell ice to an eskimo.

In view of that, you should definitely take every step to plan for the likely failure of this start-up. If you've built a product that needs to be perfect from day one, you've built a product that's probably going to fail (and if that's an inherent requirement of the product category, then it's not a good product category for a start-up).

So, looking at your specific questions:

1) Assume it won't launch at all. What can you salvage? Well, actually, you do have a lot to show for it. If you worked at a large corp and built a product for them that they never launched, you wouldn't have "nothing to show for it". You must have learned a lot on the way. I know (from personal experience) it's hard to be positive when your startup is falling apart, but it's really a matter of perspective. Discuss this with a positive, can-do friend who'll help you bring out the positives if you ever need to interview.

2) See earlier comments. You can't recover from that damage - you need to launch and iterate. If you can't launch and iterate, you're dead in the water.

3) That's all a matter of how you sell yourself. I would suggest looking for other start-ups to join though. They definitely won't look down on your experience as "worthless". Some corporate departments might - but those are probably not the ones you want to work at anyway. Others are desperate to hire "entrepreneurial people". If you sell your experience right you should be able to make it worth your while.

4) That's not really related to the rest of the post. Forget about that for now and focus on the cataclysm unfolding around you. You'll need all your wits on the present moment.

PS: Feel free to come hang around in #startups on freenode for further discussion of this.
Go back to the old skool... FSP. Back in the days when gopher was the go-to tool for document sharing and network pipes were smaller and less reliable we used this for lightweight anonymous ftp. It was very resilient in the face of random packet loss (a requirement since it only uses udp.)
Drunk History: When Nikola Tesla Met Thomas Edison
It may just be that I'm British but I found that intolerably cheesy.

edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Umq6ac5r5uM
Raw RESTful data sources?
Can anyone provide me with links to on-line data sources providing raw RESTful XML or JSON data? E.g., Cornell Lab of Ornithology's eBird:<p>http://ebird.org/ws1.1/data/obs/geo/recent<p>or Google Maps:<p>http://maps.google.com/maps/geo<p>If you know of other services that produce data streams like those, please send them to me:<p>doug.elias@gmail.com<p>Thanks!<p>doug
What Yahoo's New Ad Agency Didn't Tell Carol Bartz
That wasn't a civil and thought-provoking contribution to the discussion, which is what HN at its best is about.
Ways to ruthlessly acquire users
Dally must have got round to reading the CS books from the 1990s

I got a laugh out of this, considering that Professor Dally writes CS/EE textbooks.
The whole net neutrality debate scares the shit out of me.

One the one hand, we have ISPs, all with near-strangleholds in their area, making decisions that the market can't effectively retaliate against (high barriers to entry and whathaveyou).

On the other hand, we have the slippery-slope of government regulation of the internet. I know I'm in the minority, here, but frankly, I find this option the more unnerving.

Are we simply damned if we do, damned if we don't? How do we take power from providers without giving any more power to regulators?
Absolutely can’t stand the inexcusably large mouseover area around the yellow "Posterous" links at the top of these blogs. That's the truly obnoxious thing here
In firefox the headings of the sections are very hard to read, the letters run together.
Top-Down Tech Clusters Often Lack Key Ingredients
Appcelerator Announces Beta Support For Blackberry
The 3 rules of reports: They must be accurate, detailed, and ... pretty?
Why do all of the Android websites look like crap on an Android phone? If there were a website you would think would have a good mobile layout, it would be one ostensibly dedicated to a mobile platform.
Paper tigers and hidden dragons
You aren't SOL, you can stop using so much bandwidth. You can be a conscientious user of shared resources. Using a constant stream like that is almost always a bit lacking in legitimacy. It usually means you are using the service in ways that your service plan wasn't designed to be used, either you're downloading and/or sharing large, perhaps copyrighted videos, music, or software, or you are running a server for gaming or something like that.

Those 1.5Mbit DSL is "maximum capacity." Not what you should try to consume. Ultimately, all the customers go through one pipe, or a shared few pipes, so those hogging the lines negatively affect others.

In my opinion, it's the users of the bandwidth that are greedy. Do they really need 1,000 movies on their hard drives? Many bit torrenters have more content than they could ever watch in their entire lives...
Yeah I figured the Macro chapter would be at least fairly complete before you guys published it. Just been too tired to dig into such a dense topic, since even with my limited dabbling in scheme and CL before Clojure I never gained any real skill with macros.
Such a great opportunity for a founder's blog to step up and say, hey we're a maturing business, here's this new setting, here's how to opt-out if you don't like it.

Gives them 95% of the value and 0% of the internets coming down on them.
Yawn. These are hardly JavaScript-specific programming tips, except the Firebug ones. You can easily build a stack or queue on top of arrays in any language, and common subexpression elimination helps in other dynamic languages as well.
> acting like greedy assholes to the point that the regulators step in

Yes, simple risk/return analysis? And they were warned too.

"Don't harass the chicken that lays golden eggs too much."
You might be interested in the Cryogenics Institute's yahoo group mailing list.
In addition to cool, I might suggest building something public which comes close to meeting business needs for people. With those provisos: yeah, it works great. Having a reputation in whatever your circle of competence is gets you more leads and lets you be pickier about who you work with, what you work on, and how much you charge.
In the United States, railroads are common carriers, so they're not allowed to have discriminatory pricing.

Telecoms are also given a lot of government protection, like local monopolies and no liability for the information they deliver, in return for the regulation. The government paid for a lot of the wires and switches with subsidies, which muddles the property rights argument. The government certainly has a right, as well as an obligation to the public, to ensure that its expenditures are to the public benefit.

I personally take the view that, for all intents and purposes, telcoms aren't completely private entities due to the legal and financial privelages they recieve from the government, so reasoning by analogy to other private enterprises is flawed. The crossover is enough to give them a civic obligation in addition to their fudiciary responsibility, enforcable by regulation.
It's called "leap-frogging." Preventing it is the goal of patents, but many here argue against those as well. It's like they want things to be better, but they don't want to allow the creators of those better things to benefit from the betterment themselves.

When you limit the innovators' ability to profit from their innovations, they'll stop innovating...
I think your problem might in part be from your claim that no problem exists.

I disagree with that while agreeing that a good outcome from this move is extremely unlikely. (Is you faith in the government that strong? In a political body who's partisan nature shifts from administration to administration?

And that was before I read the theory that this would freeze a lot of stuff while it gets fought out in the courts for the next few years.
I agree wholeheartedly on "waited too long". We all tried to keep him motivated and productive, but weren't able to in the end.

Honestly, the current venture, minus the bad apple and the rickety code he has written, is still (in my estimation) better than any other ideas in my mind. We still have excellent people and a great idea.
I agree that it sucks.

Just a logic check to make sure you are being consistent: when HackerNews does something that people complain about, are you one of those people who say the customer comes first? Or one that says that people who visit free sites shouldn't complain?

I'm hoping you're consistent. I know I've long said that if I visit your site, whether I pay you anything or not, a social contract has been created. I have certain expectations. Others, however, take a much different view. If you had a list of articles on HN where folks complained about stuff, you'd find a lot of arguing on the other side. I challenge those folks to either be consistent with their previous position or change their mind. (I don't think this applies to you, but since you were the first to comment I'm using you as a bit of a straw man. Hope that's okay)
Tiered value-based pricing
> Why is it different for the telecoms?

Because the telecoms have gotten tons of help from the public, via the government, over the years. At the Federal level, the cable and satellite companies got the original anti-circumvention laws that led to the DMCA. They also get to be exempt from a lot of state level regulation that they might not like, in exchange for the far friendlier FCC. And at the local level, telcos get to use public rights of way and often have monopoly grants.

They're in no way comparable to a small entrepreneur. They're like a company that's been given (or bought) permission to operate a toll road. In exchange for being allowed to make money, they need to charge everyone the same tolls and the amount of the tolls that they charge is going to be subject to regulation.

As for why the government doesn't just build and operate the infrastructure itself ... if the telcos keep it up, that may just be what happens. Critical infrastructure has been a frequent target, historically, for nationalization when the owners of that infrastructure are perceived to be rent-seeking to excess. The public tolerance for toll roads evaporated in the 1880s [1] and they were almost entirely stamped out by the Progressives; the telecommunication operators of today would do well to keep that in mind.

[1] http://eh.net/encyclopedia/article/Klein.Majewski.Turnpikes
Digg Cuts 10% of Staff
Internet Archive puts 1M scanned books online for blind and dyslexic
Early humans may have bred with other species – twice
>How can a website make the web a worse place?

It's easy. Someone sends you a Scribd link. Scribd is written in Flash so maybe you can't read the damn thing. Before Scribd, people would just send you PDF links. Everybody can read PDFs.

Scribd harms the web by reducing the number of people who can view its content. That's what I call "providing negative value".
> You should never put anything on the internet that you don't want others to see. You shouldn't talk about things online that you dont want others to hear

I understand the practical aspect of this advice, but is this either realistic or fair? People will always have things they wish to communicate to only select subsets of other people--why should they give that up when they're online?

Permanent digital records of this kind of communication is a new thing, and while you're right that many people act naively about it despite warnings, it's also true that socially we haven't figured out how to handle any of this, and many of the complaints about Facebook are important expressions of how people think it /should/ be handled.
The most obvious reason that I can think of is that most of these companies have near-monopolies in many local markets.

The overarching point is that it's a clear good for society. It doesn't have to be fair - we're not required to be nice, or fair, to corporations - they're not people. We're required to maximise the benefit of the citizens in the country. Sure, being 'unfair' to corporations can have negative long term outcomes, which is why you only do it in cases like these: where the outcome is so clearly a positive for the system as a whole.
I say this out of sincerity, and not to be a jerk. You want to be a "somebody"? Then launch. Two years without a launch is very concerning. Start a blog and work on it DAILY. Force others to recognize you in your industry as an expert.

I realize that I'm saying this from an outsider's perspective and I don't know the insider's scoop. Part of being a successful startup requires discovering your MVP (minimum viable product) early. This will then allow you validate your business model and focus on customer development. I highly encourage you to research Steve Blank (if you haven't) and his Customer Development model. Read "Customer Development" [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Gary_Blank]

I wish you the best of luck and good success.
As per the article, it appears that privacy concerns played a bigger role (than security concerns) in the UC decision.

Your comment solely addresses security, but privacy concerns are not necessarily the same as security concerns
I'm a Posterous user and I really like the service but it has been interesting to watch the moves they have made lately since Tumblr has been getting a lot of positive press.

I wonder if these changes have been influenced by investor pressure to increase their brand awareness and to start to press the revenue button in order to compete with Tumblr.
Actually, it's not quite that simple in Canada.

Corporate contributions to political parties have been effectively cut off by the current Prime Minister (Harper), you can only do personal donations and only up to $1100 per person.

Harper had a lot of grassroots conservative support and the liberals had a lot of corporate support. The liberals were basically financially devastated and have had to build up from scratch (doing better now).

Still, the US has a strong pull with Harper, he looooves capitalism.
Totally agree... one thing you can do with custom themes is move that link all the way to the bottom of the page.
I don't really think crowdsourcing app ideas is the best idea. Mostly you'll end up hearing from a loud minority. For example, there is a request for an Illinois Compiled Statute app....I don't really think that would have huge market appeal.

Developers are better off looking at small problems or annoyances in their day-to-day that they can solve using the Android (or any phone in fact).
Nice quote. I loved "Stranger in a Strange Land." Recommended reading for all...
On the contrary, it was quite civil and thought provoking. It was simply terse, elegant, and to the point. "Naive" needn't have been interpreted as a personal attack, it was a sufficient and complete summary of the argument presented, implying it undeserving of response. Only lack of creative imagination would consider "Naive" not thought-provoking. It is not my responsibility to hand-hold and lead a conversation. If someone cannot immediately mentally extrapolate the implications of a statement, maybe they should ponder it and explore the possible meanings, giving me the benefit of the doubt as to poignancy. Instead, they vote it down, because it's not full of the superficial spoon-fed explicitness the down-voters expect.
For Android phones with a physical keyboard, the Gmail app allows you to select/copy text by holding the shift key and dragging over the text on the screen.
Meet the New Frontline Bloggers: Security Contractors
Do you prefer large corporations over FCC to "control the Internet"?
This was literally a bug fix due to user complaint about blog name truncation. There is no conspiracy here.
This should serve as a good reminder to not surf while logged into websites that may contain important personal information or that could cause personal damage if compromised.
Apple’s section 3.3.1 — A reconciling proposal
It's not really a branding grab. The reason is pretty simple. We were contacted by Facebook because our stream stories were in violation of their terms of service, which forbid "Calls to action" in the body of the stream story. For instance, take a look at the old style stories we used to publish:

http://skitch.com/vincentchu/dne9u/facebook-vincent-chu

In this example, the "Read more on postmodern babbler" text was in violation and we were asked to remove it. So we did. But I still wanted people to have a "Read more" call to action somewhere, so I put it in the "Action links" area. Unfortunately that field is only 25 characters long. We've found that most people's blog titles will not fit into 25 characters. In fact, we've seen blogs where truncating the action link after 25 characters leads to some unfortunate text. For instance:

"Read more on Vince's Analytics Site" would become "Read more on Vince's Anal"

So in the interest of not creating bad looking text, we changed the text
Facebook's early days: fencing, puking and punking Sequoia
Both of these events happened outside of Africa. Are they saying that the descendants of these interbreedings propagated back into Africa afterward? Or are they saying not everyone has this in their DNA?
Palindromic music video: Sugar Water / Cibo Matto / Michel Gondry: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN9auBn6Jys
Other themes have less obtrusive versions with transparent logos. Most people end up leaving the basic theme because that's what simplicity is about -- reducing the number of choices. People who care a lot can change it. Most people don't care.
The first time the page is hit, the browser should keep it cached for a year.

How much time will avoiding that first hit actually save?

Keeping a file compiled could be more generic too: just check which URLs get hit a lot, and keep those pre-compiled as a separate feature.
Did we evolve a special ability for catching cheats?
What I wonder about Dropbox is how profitable it actually is.

Assuming five million users and each only uses half their available space, so 1GB.

We assume they're at the top plan on Amazon S3 and people are transfering maybe 100-200mb a month. All in all about 7c/user/month for storage and bandwidth.

If we take similar numbers from Evernote (maybe a stretch?) and say 2% of their users subscribe at the lowest price plan ($99/year or $8.25/month), that's about 17c/month/user revenue.

So over five million, we have about $500k/month in gross profit.

Of course, we're ignoring the cost of providing the upgraded plans.

Not bad though, especially if their free/subscriber ratio is higher.
Personally, I think it'd be great to have a public wireless grid, but think of the privacy issues. The government could have much easier access to our emails.

But back to your point, the toll roads I travel on charge more for semi-trucks than they charge for passenger vehicles.

I understand the thought that the public is investing in these wires, so they own them, but the public invests in all sorts of industries, including pharmaceuticals (via the NIH), vehicles (buying GM), mortgages (fannie may, aig), but yet they don't regulate what gm charges for cars or Pfizer charges for their drugs.

I wonder why we believe it is okay for the govt to meddle in some areas and not others? Where and how do we draw the line?
How to: disrupt television
and maybe look here for UI inspiration: http://wellplacedpixels.com/
I just picked up indoor rock climbing about 6 months ago and would disagree. Many climbers at the gym I frequent are in their early thirties or older and already have a steady income from a white collar job.

While it isn't a particularly expensive sport like hockey or golf, I'd say it isn't cheap either. Day passes at the gym are $16, and it is packed. And it's growing too! There's lots of newbies starting the sport, especially parents bringing their kids, or school groups.

This could vary widely from location to location though.
My bet is on Austin TX.

All they need is a couple of rock stars, a couple of news sites, and a couple of big hits.
I think it's more an issue of most people don't care enough to send you a message about it. It's still extremely annoying and frustrating, because often times it simply won't go away, and so I have to move my cursor back and forth a bunch of times until it decides to disappear.
We would love to be able to put the full blog post title in there. The Facebook Stream API limits what we can put in that space.

I think this is a good candidate for an advanced setting. For other autopost sites we allow customization here. We'll discuss with the team.