skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Taking exception with some of the above statements on valuation. There are actually three relevant methods for deriving a value, with the circumstances & audience dictating which approach (be it single or blended) to use:

1) Income Method

As stated, discounted cash flows.

2) Replacement Cost

What would it cost me today to recreate this asset from scratch?

3) Comparable Sales

What price has recently been paid for similar assets?

My assumption was that the OP brought this up because he needed to justify a valuation to the co-founders, not because he is trying to dictate a replacement cost to potential buyers.

NB. There are many nuances to each of these approaches and most situations can be taken into account with the appropriate tweaks; if anyone is curious, there are firms which specialize in this or you can start here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_valuation
It's amusing, but not a very surprising outlook for the tech industry; platform shifts are opportunities for competitors to break in.

Linux came a little bit too late to make inroads on the desktop vs. the incumbent DOS/Windows platform of the early 90's - if it, and the GNU tools, had reached the 1991 level of development in the mid-80s when the PC clones first took hold, that story might have been a different one - but in the real world, it still devastated the competition on servers when the Web started its massive post-1994 growth.

Now we're hitting the juncture where, again, a new platform category is poised for growth; recall how netbooks started as Linux boxes, and only ended up running Windows after a combination of effort(Win7), strongarming(subsidies and licensing agreements), and initial advantages(the desktop ecosystem, which is largely netbook-compatible) from Microsoft. This time around, those tactics can't work.

It might actually work out that the desktop still shifts towards Linux in the end; the "bottom-up" nature of progress in tech means that people are going to want a desktop that does everything their mobile environment does (plus desktop things). Hence, desktops will start running Android or a compatible variant...which would naturally work out to mean you'd be running Linux, even if it isn't today's Linux environments.
Awesome, you've identified one of your biggest weaknesses. Also, you've gotten better at it recently.

It seems to me like you need some time to work on that. For me, learning to say "no" and establishing my authority to clients regarding the direction of a project was HARD. It took me at least 2 years from the first time I noticed to get to a point that I could run a project pretty damn smoothly.

Also, I suggest you take some time off. Like, a day or two just hiking / playing around / having sex / whatever. Just go outside and so something away from computers and away from your customer's emails. Then come back with an objective mission of taking care of shit in a prioritized way.

Thats my last advice : write down what needs to be accomplished and check it off. Do it each week or monthly at first and eventually you'll be banging them out daily and feeling stoked.

Good luck!
Facebook revenue (2009): ~$650m

Twitter revenue (2009): ~$4m

Twitter just don't seem to have a business model. They're making a paltry handful of cash from sponsored tweets and a slightly larger handful from the Bing deal. Beyond that, they don't seem to have much of a plan. I don't see how you can effectively monetise a platform like Twitter. It smacks of bad old bubble era thinking. Great protocol, great community, great service, lousy business.
I think as HN has become more mainstream (in spite of its focus), I surmise the diversity of the audience has increased too. I like the idea of a self-correcting community (just as the markets should correct themselves in a capitalist economy) but from time to time outside intervention is needed when they stray too far.

Perhaps I should rephrase my OP. Sub-HNs not to solve the front-page problem but as a way to segregate related posts.
My take on this: http://berislavlopac.tumblr.com/post/615858128/the-future-of...
Man, some of the comments in this thread have a very high harsh to helpful ratio.

- The page could use more structure. The elements seem to be floating around but they're not anchored in a way that feels right to me.

- The page is way too big. Bring it down to about 960px (Rust also covers this in this thread). You should also center the layout.

- The logo should be a little larger, and you might consider centering it. Though if you do center it, make it large enough to fill the space so that it doesn't look awkward.

- Re-style the highlighted text at the top ("Social advertising on Twitter, Done the right way."). Consider placing it under the logo

- Tell us more about how it works or what requirements your service will impose. The more information you can provide the better.

- There is a bit of free-style capitalization going on there which makes it annoying to read.

- The form for submitting your Twitter username could stand to be a little smaller. Maybe make the label ("Type In Your Twitter Username:") stand out a little more. I think it would look better if the calculate button was to the right of the input box.

- The "We pay you per click!" text should be restyled, maybe with some kind of icon or in a box with rounded corners. Right now it just looks like it was an afterthought when really it's an important bit of info.

- Contact, about, and privacy policy are a must have. The less you can tell who made a site, the shadier it looks.

- Where's the little Twitter bird? :P

I hope that helps.
Quick mathematical summary of the problem:

An octave is a 2:1 ratio between frequencies, so 880 hz is one octave above 440 hz. A perfect fifth is a 3:2 ratio between frequencies, so 660 hz is a perfect fifth above 440.

In the modern western system of music, twelve perfect fifths is harmonically equal to seven octaves. In other words,

(2/1)7 == (3/2)12

Unfortunately, we know this is mathematically untrue.

Furthermore, three major thirds is harmonically equal to one octave:

(2/1) == (5/4)3

This also is mathematically untrue.

Hilarity ensues.
ACM Classic Books Series (some free PDFs)
37signals' Jason And David At LessConf: It’s All About The Work [video]
I ran the benchmark with the thin server using the following httperf command:

httperf --hog --num-conns 1000 --num-calls 1000 --burst-length 20 --port 3000 --rate 1000 --uri=/pong

The best I got was 258 requests / sec and 13.5 average responses / sec. The chart on the website plots responses / sec. So thin seems to perform worse. I'm guessing that we're running into the limit of 1024 file descriptors. I didn't test with the libev version of Snap, so my testing had that limit too, but my guess is that Snap is faster and manages to stave off the limit long enough to serve a reasonable number of requests. But I don't know for sure.
Introduction to Statistical Thought -- free book
you are mistaking adsense with adwords. Currently adwords revenue dwarf adsense
Similar tricks have been used in even more far-flung corners of industry, like identifying fake vintage whisky:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/foodanddrinknews/526...
I'm in agreement with you about customers after reading the astute distinction you mentioned to Wheels (prospects vs. converted customers). Once you've curated a stable base of good customers you absolutely must tend to them and that relationship can be very enlightening.

My only issue with your reply to OP was that it seemed unnecessarily sharp in tone ("Go pursue some other passion. Leave the start-ups for those of us who really care") and addressed an effect ("snubbing customers") of his problem rather than trying to untangle the source of the problem itself (being addicted to inertia but lacking grit).
The interesting thing is that this site should be a reflection of those participating in it. That means that either the audience is growing in a direction that is not consistent with the original participants or that there is some other force at play trying to alter the content of the site.

The first thing to do would be to figure out which of those two scenarios is at play and address that. If the tastes of the users has changed (or an influx of new users that have different tastes has emerged) then I'm not really sure what the answer is.
I say an editor is enough to ban posts about facebook selling our mothers or apple killing its employees in vietnam.

Hackers don't like gossip and HN is not a yellow tabloid.

No need to diversify.
Ask HN is already a sub-HN. Jobs is the next logical one. I don't think we need create-your-own like Reddit, but a few major categories would be awesome. The "ask" page has already become my favorite part of HN.
How to subscribe in a blog via Feedburner
Ask HN: To obfuscate or not to obfuscate Java bytecode?
What is your take on bytecode obfuscation, specifically obfuscating a Java / Swing app that will have a trial version publicly available for download?

I know that obfuscation is not 'safe', and that there's always a way to decompile Java bytecode. But still, I have the feeling that I should do something to discourage enterprising users to decompile our code.

I have experimented with some Java bytecode obfuscators, and for whatever reason, they make the end result crash a lot. Now, I could probably dive into the inner workings of these obfuscators and somehow make it work, but it got me thinking: Does obfuscation actually make sense?

My thinking is that decompilation would be interesting to two groups of people: Those who want to crack the licensing mechanism, and the competition.

For the first group, I know there's probably nothing that will stop them. I have other means in place to discourage casual piracy, but I know there's no absolute security, and I don't plan to enforce that strictly (for the cost of unnerving paying users).

For the second group, my hunch is that it probably doesn't matter as well. If competitors can gain an advantage by looking at my (decompiled) source code, probably my business model is not robust enough, and I should rather be outperforming them, and stay ahead of the game.

What is your take on obfuscation? Does it make sense, and when so?

All your input is very appreciated!

Some background: We are working on a desktop application developed in Java / Swing, which is geared towards the enterprise market. Since the potential market is quite large and diverse, we want to make our app available as a trial version for download from our website.
I didn't know the answer to that till you asked, but I just checked and the answer is yes, roughly. The percentage of applicants we accept may be going down slightly, but only slightly.

Which is odd, because I've had a definite impression that the startups we've been funding are getting better. If that's true and we're funding about the same percentage of applicants, then either we're getting better at picking, which is probably too much to hope for, or the applicants are getting better.

Come to think of it, the latter is probably the explanation: the top end of the applicants are getting better, because we're now sufficiently legit that people who wouldn't have applied to YC 5 years ago are willing to. If that's true, it is in fact getting harder to get funded, because even though the percentage we accept is staying roughly constant, there is more competition at the top, where it matters.
Better yet, give moderator powers to the top ten users (or those who volunteer) and watch them closely just in case they abuse their powers. If three out of ten consider some articles yellowish they can ban them even if they are in the front page already.
How about "Enjoy programming, not dealing with pesky users/customers"? That's my excuse anyway.
I love that automobile visualization featured at the top, because it seems so promising, only to become increasingly disappointing as you try harder and harder to make sense of it. The low performance only makes matters worse.
Fake Steve Jobs switches to Android
You might be interested in the following discussion and reference:

http://www.law.washington.edu/lct/swp/Law/derivative.html
What if randomly the front page changed to http://news.ycombinator.com/newest? PG may know better from statistics, but my guess is that most people never go to that page to upvote newest stories and the few people who does, are those who shape the front-page.

Maybe it's a dumb idea, but that's what I was thinking.
It's the zip file your Nexus One will download automatically in the background during low bandwidth times of day (to avoid strain on the cell network). It doesn't do so right away, as they also want to stagger the rollout. If you do the manual download and recovery method, you're just doing what the update will do eventually.
I think it depends on your ideas as much as anything else. Web Apps? Operating Systems?

For web apps, I love Drupal. Drupal is a php platform, like Rails is for Ruby. PHP was easy enough for me to be building simple Drupal modules within a year of my first install, with Very little prior experience. So, keep in mind that php is not a huge learning curve and you also have jQuery, Apache, linux, project management, etc out there, fucking up your life, ;D
I think the goal of obfuscation should be to keep honest people honest. In the case of Java bytecode, I think they're already honest. You don't see people casually decompiling bytecode, because it's a royal PITA and the resulting source is usually pretty unreadable anyway.

If someone really, really wants to reverse-engineer your object code, they'll find a way to. If it's important to your business that they not...I'd find a way to make it less important to your business.
I'd be willing to introduce categories to make HN a better site, but I wouldn't want to do it as a way of solving the problem of the frontpage getting filled up with crap.

I think separating temporal from non-temporal would be useful. The latest news about the iPhone and a wikipedia article about deep-sea crustaceans are both interesting, but the former is likely to be irrelevant after a few days while the latter is likely to be just as interesting next year as it is right now.

If you take the non-temporal articles off /news and take the temporal articles off /best, it would probably clean up both quite significantly.
Win! Thanks.

One glitch in the linked instructions: when you get to the warning screen (android + /!\), hit power button, then volume+ - both at same time doesn't work. And the subsequent menus require use of the trackball, not the +/- buttons.

edit: wow...this feels turbocharged, in a variety of ways. Speed: better. Keyboard: better. Interface: much smoother. Flash: just works. Lots of small UI improvements. Feels like it's meant to compete against iPhone 4.
The biggest problem is it's best read right to left.
Depending on the state and whether or not the inquiry comes from local or federal officials, you MAY be required to give your full legal name and full address of your legal primary residence. That's it.

Ever since the Hiibel ruling http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiibel_v._Sixth_Judicial_Distri..., the states have adopted a hodgepodge of differing identity query standards.
I didn't mean to imply that you were anti-regulation, nor did I intend to come across as attacking your call to transparency - I just disagree with your stance on shorts. No doubt I elaborated a bit too much on the implications of this, but in a concrete, real sense, short positions in the market helped to drive the bubble higher than it would otherwise go. Eventually those positions did "pop" the bubble and bring prices down. AIG was the company sitting on the other side of a lot of those short positions when they finally popped the bubble.

Most of my understanding of how these short positions drove the bubble comes from articles like this propublica report: http://www.propublica.org/feature/the-magnetar-trade-how-one.... Any explanation I'd give would just be a summarization of what I've picked up there. I found the case pretty compelling.
Web prototype of Mail.app
He's playing smart PR by building up this cyberpunk persona of Julian Assange. Considering Wikileaks has gone from zero to CNN front page in under a year, this is the critical period of time when Wikileaks establishes itself as a media "brand."

It's a smart move to make all coverage about Wikileaks and the mission, and not like some celebrity fluff piece about the founder. No matter how much the MSM tries to TMZ-ify everything it touches, information is power, and the stakes are very real here.

In a counter-intelligence sense, the dominant strategy is to hold your cards & remain a blank slate as long as possible. Let everybody fill in the blanks themselves on an empty canvas, introducing their own wrong biases, rather than tell them what to think.

It's informative to flip through history books, and see what has happened to the guy telling the King's secrets.

In almost every instance, that guy ends up dead. (The usual method being suicide via two gunshots in the back of the head.)

With that in mind, it makes perfect sense to publicly reveal as little as possible about one's personal life, just in case pissed off Mossad agents seek vengeance decades later, for example.
Bookpanda is memorable enough that I could tell another student about it and they would remember.. fairbooks seems very forgettable.
My name is definitely easy to pronounce.
What don't you like about XML-based templating?
It's good news for internet innovation but regulators won't be successful if you look back how antitrust was prosecuted against Microsoft a decade earlier and the current success ratio of lobbyist influencing regulations in the Washington.
To Be A Nazir, Or Not To Be A Nazir - That Is The Question
Lamson still drops email that it can't transcode, rather than preserve the octets from the wire. Shaw is on record as believing this is acceptable behavior. Please make sure your users agree before you run it.
A better question might be "What other protocols are we missing?"
What a PITA :( <insert standard .ca mobile rage here>. I passed on the Milestone from Telus because they did the same stupid shit.

So sad that Google's dropping the direct web sales post-N1.
If there was one simple thing that could improve the quality of HN, it would be a new section of all recent moderator actions whether they be automatic or manual: bans, privilege removal, etc.

People would know the right things to do and why (by seeing the wrong things), and they also see the implementation of the guidelines.

The only issue is that protests may be raised, but the benefit is transparency. Also, something good may come of the protests anyhow.
I was under the impression that most balanced binary trees were red-black trees. I know most C++ STL std::map implementations are red-black trees, as is Java's TreeMap.
This reminds me of abstract reasoning questions from IQ tests. You know the kind of thing: you're often given the first three diagrams in a sequence, and you have to infer the logic behind the sequence and choose the correct fourth diagram from a multiple choice; or perhaps you need to find the odd one out.

But such questions are usually not really abstract at all; rather, they rely on learned cultural ontologies for classifying shapes and transformations, a language for describing circles, ovals, squares, rectangles, rotations through right angles, mirroring and symmetry. To my mind, these tests largely measure conformance to a cultural perspective on the world.
How about monetize search.twitter.com like Google does with its search? How about providing analytical tools for business, such as monitoring their brand and sentiment? How about providing businesses with user profiles on likes/dislikes, i.e. potential customers?

They'll figure it out.
It's hardly "built entirely with valid HTML5 and CSS3" if they're using proprietary -webkit- properties rather than CSS3 properties.
Too much work imho to constantly moderate/edit content.
Bingo. They are taking it slowly and it seems to be paying off. I mean, shit they didn't even have an official mobile Twitter client until recently. I use to be so critical of them, but I think they get it, but they want to be sure that their users don't feel like they 'sold out.' They want to actually provide values in their services and the way that they monetize.
Phrased another way: IQ tests are for testing how well you do at IQ tests :)
Apple will be 5 years late to the _smartphone_ party when the iPhone will eventually be released. People would have already made their choice between Blackberry and Nokia.
"My favorite part about being self-employed is that I can say something nobody can say at a big company: "The firm will not benefit from my further presence today. Well then, I'm done. See you tomorrow."

I say that on average about once or twice a week at Google. (The other days, the firm would benefit from my further presence, and I'm there till late.) Nobody bats an eyelash.

I wonder perhaps if a large part of Google's recruitment and retention advantage is that they get this, and understand that you're responsible for your own productivity and should do whatever it takes (including taking time off) to maintain that. If you want to come in at 1 and work till 10, nobody cares as long as you're getting stuff done in those hours. There've been times where I worked 12 hour days for 2-3 weeks, followed by 6 hour days for the next week after that. The guy who integrated the PacMan doodle was in the office from about 1 PM to 8 AM a couple days before it was scheduled to go live, but then yesterday he came in at about 1 and left after dinner.
I've been on the lookout for a blog chronicling bad visualizations. Something like Regretsy for charts and infographics, but perhaps with more constructive critiques. Surely something like that must exist?
A better explanation of the problem:

http://www.yuvalnov.org/temperament/

Also, if you listened to samples in the Slate article and couldn't hear any difference, try this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhZpvGSPx6w&feature=relat...
I didn't intend to imply decidability at all. I just meant that since a quantum computer is equivalent to a Turing machine, and complexity classes are often (and I think were originally) formally described and proven in terms of Turing machines.
Train (or How I Dumped Electricity and Learned to Love Design)