skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What's the Best Way for a Startup to Apply for a Loan?
Hi Guys,

I own a startup in the states with about 100 customers and 10K/month in revenue. All are recurring subscriptions.

We've been in business for about 2 years.

We've hired our first programmer a few months ago. I need to hire two more developers and also a web designer so I can stop programming full time and take the company to the next level.

I have two options. One, is keep things organic, and keep acquiring 2 to 4 customers a week until we can afford our next programmer, or take revolving line of credit from a bank and speed things up a notch.

I met with a couple of banks, but didn't apply because the process seemed too automated. I feel if someone took our business and studied it on its own merits (passion, customer satisfaction, processes, etc..) we will have a much better chance to get approved.

I'm looking for around 250K line of credit or loan.

Have any of you applied for a loan and got approved?

Are there banks that understand technology/startup companies better than others?

Any tips or help that you can provide would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you!
I have a feeling that redditors would not like having their like/dislike information sold.
Idea de trading con el par de divisas dólar – peso mexicano (USDMXN)
Well... You work at a startup which produces a website (for example) to distribute porn. You are kind of uncomfortable telling your grandma about this. This is understandable. However, you can reduce this. Why does the semantic of the images and videos distributed by your website matter? You are overall producing a distribution mechanism for various media, like images and video.

To a certain degree, you can apply the same measures special forces or the mafia applies: You hide as little relevant details as possible to stay close to the truth, but to remain far away enough to be clear.

So, as a first conclusion we can say: We could work there and not tell people, while telling people what we do, even our grandmother.

Second, there is something which kinda aggravates me. "Oh my god! He helps others to distribute porn! He helps someone live their sexuality! Burn this (meta-)witches!". But I'm rather not gonna get worked up on that.

Given these two, for me, there is clearly no problem in telling friends, and no problem in telling the family, even though it might be necessary to reduce the truth a bit depending on the person you are talking to.

Second, considering it. Given the second point I made already, I can just ask: why not? You are just building a distribution platform (for example). This platform usually is independent of the contents it distributes. This might be porn as well as cute little kitten pictures. And again: What is bad about porn?

so, tl;dr: 1) yes. 2) yes. as much as I can without offending someone.
It's been a while since I read the book, and I don't remember this use of regexes; but is it by chance covered under Ovid's HOP::Parser module (http://search.cpan.org/~ovid/HOP-Parser), or another in that family (http://search.cpan.org/search?query=HOP)?
I think "help" for many people means "just get it done, and I don't care how". When I ask for help, it's usually from people who are more knowledgeable than me; and it's usually in the form of "how does this work?" rather than "can you do this for me?".

Maybe this is holding me back in some way that I don't realize?
Is this getting voted up just because it mentions DDG? It's fine for HN to have a crush on DDG (it's a good site), but I'd like to suggest that we should be a bit more discerning about what we vote up.
Ah, silly me. Somehow I read “only built-ins” instead of “including built-ins”, and so thought that it was something more than (or at least different from) ordinary tab-completion.
"It's like the evolution of the LAMP stack that has served so many sites so well for many years. Too bad there isn't a snappy acronym like LAMP for it. Maybe we can call it the Duck stack."

Nginix, Memcached, PostgreSQL, Perl, FreeBSD.

Duck stack? Is DuckDuckGo really the first to ever use these together? I highly doubt it. This article is very kiss-ass and I can't tell why it's on a site that talks about open source software. Writing your crawler and backend in Perl doesn't mean you're built from open source, nor does using FreeBSD as your operating system. Or does it? Also, I noticed in the first sentence they link the words "search engine" to DDG instead of "DuckDuckGo" (the first word in the first sentence). This article is contrived and looks more like someone just paid to have it written up.
I am @fahdoo

So far I'm liking it. Besides just being really well made, its great to have a place where I can get feedback on designs and works-in-progress, and to talk shop about design and development. I'm hoping it'll become my hq for all design related links/questions/inspiration.
The comments are the most interesting part there. It's OK for Skype to defend itself against erroneous claims, but if they're not going to step up and produce the clients that their customers want, their customers are going to remain ticked off.
i LOVE the idea of getting your users to design the shirts...

Also, given your market (pot smokers), you should look towards impulse buy items.

T-Shirts are fantastic -- marijuana supporters love to buy "420" and "legalize it" type gear.

As someone running that site, don't you have some insight into what your target market likes? Beyond the "ice cream" level stuff.

Alternatively / complementary, couldn't you sign up for an affiliate program with one of the online glassworks shops? I bet you'd make more money that way than doing adverts for other people.

Your site is so targeted, and with such a well defined user in mind (the "stoner" image is self-applied and identifying for users) that you should 100% be doing affiliates for online glass works, or t-shirts and knick-knacks (just think of things that would "blow people's minds" for under $10).
The concept of affirmative action has never been about individuals. It's a RACE-based correction for RACE-based discrimination. I don't know what makes you think it's not racial.

Your solution for the societal crisis you face is to keep those at the bottom at the bottom, just so that your kids will have a 0.002% higher chance of entering one of a few colleges.

You have a large underclass of people whose parents were raised in institutionalised dicrimination. These people are the lowest caste of your society. There is a policy in place that favours a very few of these people to get into spots they would not otherwise get into.

Without this, the status-quo would continue to exist. The problem is this - the status quo is pretty bad. Blacks are less educated, less likely to get jobs, need more welfare, have higher crime rate.

To me, getting more into college seems like it would solve some of those problems.
This is awesome, but someone really needs to take it to the next logical step and let me play some fucking Zelda in Manhattan.
The Tenacious Buzz of Malaria
Team productivity hack: Todo list as IM status
Last week, I came up with a weird trick that's actually catching on inside of my office, so I thought I'd share it with HN. It's pretty simple: keep your TODO list in your IM status message field.

I mean it: this should be your primary TODO list, always up to date and in roughly the right order. Whatever you're working on should be at the top. Here's my TODO list: http://img.skitch.com/20100712-nkc6q1syeimrci8d56b8c9dyy4.png

I started doing this as a coping mechanism to let people know how much stuff had fallen on my plate and to make sure they knew I hadn't forgotten about their requests, but it ended up being very helpful for us to know what everyone is working on.

Try it out and let me know what you think.
Except for the fact that Apple blocks tons of apps that have large user bases. Google Voice, Netshare, emulators, etc. Surely you aren't implying that Cydia is only full of apps that were rejected because they are crummy? Not to mention the fact that, for example, Google allows "Wifi Tether for Root users" on the Android Market. Show me something comparable on the AppStore. It doesn't exist.

Also, the fragmentation argument is weak and old, I won't bother refuting it or answering it here. APIs are backward compatible. If you target 1.6 you work on 95+% of devices out there, etc, etc.

Heh, I would say Apple's refusal to accept Netshare, PDANet, oh any other tethering app, etc pretty well shows that they won't accept tethering apps. I'm kinda shocked that this is news to ... anyone really.
I wonder if anyone has ever seriously proposed adding a rule to the NBA (US professional basketball league) that requires a minimum of say 75% of the players to be white? In order that the diversity of the team more accurately reflect the racial composition of the US, and to be more fair to white people. Also require that say 12% of all swimming teams are black, and so on.

Just food for thought, not serious proposals.
I'm not sure why people are voting you up. Nowhere in the article (or even in the title) does it say DDG is open source. It says that it is built from open source.
It was less flexible, and every year, we "don't have enough money" for a raise. Eventually it was very stressful, my input didn't matter at all, and I got paid nothing.

As always, it depends on the company you're working for (it sounds like you're working for a great one!). I'm sure there are plenty of people who could claim the exact same thing while working for a big corp.
sigh It was part of Weblogs Inc. which he cofounded. When AOL bought the company, they didn't get Hackaday- it was spun off as a separate blog before Calacanis bought it back.
I suspect the reason is closer to what you wrote in the second paragraph than the first paragraph. Personal point of view, longing for education and hard work may be accounting for most of the immigrants' success, and vice versa. This attitude, imho, does stem (perhaps to a very large extent) from the racial situation in the USA before the 1960s, however, it is not its direct consequence and, moreover, that situation was not unique to the US (especially if we go back to "that slavery thing", widespread in the West Indies and indeed around the world, unfortunately).

Incidentally, while I appear to mostly disagree with you on this issue, I had to upvote you back to neutral (1 point) because I thought your comment was legitimate and thoughtful and did not deserve a downvote.
"Don't Let Yesterday Take Up Too Much Of Today."
Founded it. With the recent Mahalo stories, it can be hard to remember all of the good Calacanis has done but he has a pretty positive history when it comes to Weblogs Inc.
Yes I remember the 90s, I was working for the later part of that decade on and off.

I encountered a number of die hard Apple fans during that time who simply wouldn't consider another computer other than a Mac and continued to buy whatever Apple made. That was before the iMac really hit. No technical person I knew would use a Mac in the 90s, which they more than fixed with OSX in the 2000s.

Numerous computer companies failed in the 90s though Apple didn't, I had thought it was due to that loyal fan base, but maybe not? (though clearly they still needed a turn around when Steve Jobs returned)
Just what I want to do as a paying customer: go into the store and act like an ass to get what I already paid for; great...
Um, Apple' has always concentrated on well-designed, top-end products. They have always charged huge margins. The drum beat of their marketing throughout the '90s was "our products are better designed". And they were. Even the "boring" beige pizza-box Macs from 1995 were amazingly well put together, both hardware and software.

What's changed is that the good design has moved from the heart of their products out to the skin. Today an iPhone looks great (really, great) but you can't even change the battery! How far have Apple come from the days when they cared so much about their users that they even thought to put little pull-out feet on the inside, so that when you opened it up to change the hard-drive everything unfolded with an easy grace?
So far so good; some well received stuff some not so much, but still pluggin along. Awesome work on the jQuery Aristo port btw.
I'm sorry. Guilty as charged. I voted it up as soon as I saw DuckDuckGo in the title. I didn't know I was this simple, but I seem to automatically upvote everything relating to DDG...
To your last point - you know the untouchable caste in india? Imagine you have a poor untouchable caste, and you have a poor of the highest caste. You want to help them both, so you give them both some amount of money. Even when the untouchable creates some successful business, he is still untouchable.

That's the same problem you have - your society strongly associates black with negative. That stereotype will continue to exist, unless there is a proper movement of blacks into the standard college educated strata. Otherwise, they stay down in the 'untouchable' caste.

The child of a white person who was once poor does not have this stigma anymore. But the black persons child is still stuck with the stigma, because it's part of his skin-color.

That's the problem - your lower class is also the black class, and if you want to do things only the 'just' way, then it will remain that way for a long time to come.

And by the way, if you want equal admissions, then accept that you will not get into those schools because chinese immigrants and jewish people will probably get the best scores. So please, advocate merit based only or advocate that the school can choose, and accept that it can choose blacks.
The question of whether alumni-preference "punishes" some people
isn't even interesting, the question is a borderline-tautological "yes".
The question is, is that what we want to do?

I think we want to just stop it. Why is it even a question? I understand it is not that easy to do, but certainly easier (and less dangerous for participants) than stopping the segregation was, no? I understand there are important differences between alumni-based preferences and "race"-based preferences (such as whether the State and Federal institutions need to be involved etc), but I think these only work towards making it easier.

EDIT: quote format.
The date of the contract appears to conflict with previous accounts of the creation of Facebook. Mr. Zuckerberg built a predecessor to Facebook called Facemash in October and November 2003, but Mr. Zuckerberg didn't register the domain thefacebook.com until January 2004.

In 2009, New York's Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo accused Mr. Ceglia of defrauding customers of his wood-pellet fuel company, according to a news release from the Attorney General's office. The state claimed that he took more than $200,000 from consumers and then failed to deliver any products or refunds. That case is still active.

Sounds like this is a bogus case. I can't imagine the pit in Zuckerburg's stomach right now it were true though...
The list _delirium and I are referring to is this one of 4 items:

All three appear to be single white 20something males

I am in fact pretty nearly as bothered by the claim that it's a problem that all 3 are male, or in their 20s.

It's lame when someone writes off a group of people based on such superficial characteristics.
I'd imaging it's the p2p streaming and the encryption that's also holding it back not just the UI. Plus I like having Spotify minimised.
"Here everyone can join and communicate, and yet we can maintain a high level of communication. The ones who don't fit are quickly flagged or simply won't come back again."

Universities aren't run by the students. There is only so much space in a university.

I think selectivity is good, however it doesn't need to be enforced in the admission step, it will happen in the middle of the process. People who would not be able to follow the course requirements would quickly drop out.

"I'm not arguing that this idea would work (I don't really know), but based on the HN experience I think it should be considered."

A forum is easily moderated by the people that go there. The forum owner only has to pay for the bandwidth and make sure the system us running. This isn't the case for a university.

A university has a finite number of spaces. Even an online university needs to have people grading/teaching the class (and they only have so much time in the day).

They don't need to limit it. However, would you like to go to a university that is just a glorified forum that is taught by people that might no the subjects, but not necessarily a professor?
How to Identify a Narcissist on Twitter
This is a (my) similar project: http://fetchak.com/ie-css3/

A 2.0 rewrite is almost ready, will support different border-radius sizes per corner and any color of box-shadow.

The gradient thing is nice. Beat me to it. :)
Take reddit non-profit and have pledge drives a la wikipedia.

Reddit is useful enough to be considered a common good/ public property.
many people...would be left out...because they allowed everyone in

Logical paradoxes aside, surely the benefit of online teaching is that you can do basic filtering as easily as you can disseminate the coursework. Of course, that means employing crude metrics like multiple-choice tests, but such metrics play a large part in the existing admissions process.
If you think this rates high on the list of avoidable but unforeseen design errors, you need to study more engineering history. (And generally, all design errors are avoidable - otherwise they wouldn't be a design decision.) As far as I know, this hasn't killed, maimed or irradiated anyone quite yet.

It's a slightly unfortunate design decision on an otherwise elegantly designed device. It's notable because our expectations are so high - if this was from any company other than Apple it wouldn't get so much press.

But let's put things in perspective, it's not a Ford Pinto, Three Mile Island control panel, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Hyatt Skywalk, or DC-10. If you don't like it, you return the phone and get your money back. You don't end up six feet under.
Zuckerberg has nothing to worry about, everyone knows the he got the code from ConnectU.

On a more serious note, this screams Doctrine of Laches (sleeping on your rights). It's going to be rather difficult to have missed the emergence of Facebook and with an 83% share why he had not been involved in any of the VC rounds, or any decisions in a company worth $15 billion.
"So essentially what you're saying is we should judge people in the job market based on their High School performance which, IMHO, is kind of ridiculous."

No, I'm saying that letting everyone into a university is a bad idea because most universities don't have the resources to properly teach this amount of students at a college level. It will also cheapen the experience for the people that do attend.

I also don't really see a problem. If you don't care enough about your life to get moderately good grades in high school (which isn't that difficult), you shouldn't be going to college.
One year of Amazon Prime free for students
Votes don't matter, doing the right thing is not a popularity contest.

People who are raised in a lower class from which there is no breaking out become apathetic. In the west-indies or in Africa, even though they were poor, they could always become rich. They could always become upper class just by working hard and making money.

In the U.S, this was impossible until very very recently, because just by being black, you could not be upper class. If MTV would not play black music, then what white man would say 'sir' to a black man in the 80s?

When there is no opportunity for you to advance, you become apathetic and resigned to your fate. It's difficult to work hard when you have already been told you'll never get promoted.

Immigrant blacks don't see the ceiling. As more immigrant blacks come in, the american black children are looking up to these people, and the attitudes are changing. But this is a slow process, and would be accelerated by increasing the average educational level of the American black.
Of course it's "ideal", but in almost every case capitalization gives you a huge advantage and greatly increases your odds of success. You can only iterate and perform customer development as long as there is money to fund that. The less money you have, the greater your chance of failure (but the greater the reward at the end as well).
Why grades? Do they actually measure anything coherent?
And foo.bar+sitepoint@foobar.org.
From my perspective, making phone calls isn't the core function of a smart phone. Things like internet connectivity, and applications are much more important to me.

This is why I am still considering the iPhone 4 despite being aware of this flaw, as for everything other than making calls, it is arguably the best device in its class.
One thing that keeps amazing me about Spotify, is how there's seemingly zero latency when you jump to a new track. This is true for any track - even if you do a search query over the whole catalogue, then hit a random entry in the list of results, the music starts pretty much immediately.

This makes it much more pleasant to use than something like Grooveshark (Flash-based). I really don't see anyone pulling that off with a web client.
Apple has routinely rejected apps that attempt to mimic core functions of the OS. So, if you go back and re-read my comment where it says tethering is built-in to the OS, then it would make sense that 3rd party apps that attempt to enable tethering would be banned. This may be "right" or "wrong" depending on your viewpoint, but it would serve to ensure that users are not seeing/downloading apps that don't work or function as they are expected to.

My personal experience with Android apps (Moto Droid and now HTC incredible) is that a decent percentage of apps (mostly (but not exclusively) games and odd things like "LED Flashlight Strobe" type stuff) do not work universally across all devices. Reading the comments on some of these apps supports my personal experience, so I think there is still a general problem with any random app on the Android store not offering a 100% consistent or "functions as expected" experience across all Android devices.
How about making the elite institutions ONLY merit based. Then it would become 60% jewish and 30% asian, 8% white and the remaining 2% shared by the other minorities. Is that okay with you?
Mortality Rates in training hospitals 4% higher in July and August
Every instance of that happening historically has been while in the throes of devastating war, or revolution. It does seem necessary, and it really seems like the US is ratcheting up the pressure higher and that all three branches of government are now captive arms of the plutocracy to the point where they don't even bother with the illusion of evenhandedness anymore.
Branding Checkup: 3 Questions to Ask Yourself
We know stranger things have happened on a smaller scale: http://sivers.org/mistake

But given the case currently pending against Mr. Ceglia himself, I'm pretty skeptical about the whole thing.
Handy cheat sheet for 3D films: RealOrFake3D.com
But this guy says it's his design... It could be that Zuckerberg took the code from ConnectU and the design from this other guy to make Facebook.
It's hard to be opposed to merit-only requirements. It's not clear to me why we have to distort anything if we truly want to live in a world that is blind to color, gender, age, etc.

can you imagine if MLK's famous speech was this instead:

"I want my children to be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Unless applying for college. Or grants. Or aid from the government. Or (...)"
Admittedly, my list was a little short on specifics.
One thing I noticed today, was that with the announcement of the Google/MIT visual Android development initiative Google App Inventor (http://appinventor.googlelabs.com/about/), along came a flood of comments along the lines of "there's enough shovelware on Android already!" and "this will saturate the marketplace with crap!" etc.

Perhaps there's something to be said for the "app store jail".