skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This seems a direct contradiction to everything PG advocates ... no funding (not even seed funding). No VC's. No IPO. No buyout. Just doing what you love, without a boss, and getting paid well for it. Claiming a higher probability of happiness than the "funding" route.

And yet, PG is eerily silent... does YC cater to people following the 37sig model? If one decides to stay a private company, how do investors ever make back money?
Not sarcastic. :) I was considering the merits of using SimpleDB the other day.
oh god. please stay where you are, rents are already too expensive, an this city has too many guys and not enough girls already.

At least find a job first.
It sounds like you should launch and think about moving to Silicon Valley. YCombinator is in Boston this summer. But if you wanted to be a part of the experience you should go to Silicon Valley.
Is there shorting? Can I short sell?
Reminds me of that old Joel on Software article on incentive pay http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000070.html
Apple's Trojan Horse is licensing ActiveSync for the iPhone. Can't imagine they won't incorporate it into Mac OS X as well.
Microsoft’s Mesh Revealed
Hacker?
No.

In fact, the book is an embodiment of it's own thesis.
I've just been busy with other stuff today and I haven't read it. But the answer to your question is yes: Wufoo, for example, is very much following the 37 Signals model.
It is actually a different block party centered around the park between 7th and 8th on Folsom. It caters mainly to the mexican people who live in the area. I've never heard of a block party in Noe, either. My apologies for bringing up race, but I used to rent an art studio in the Bayview and that was the only place in SF that I've seen block parties. I've lived mainly in white yuppie neighborhoods in various parts of the country and never encountered a block party in any of them. There have only been annual "street fairs." The only other place I've seen a proper block party was when I lived on the edge of a puerto rican neighborhood in Brooklyn.
I'd let you know but I'm pretty sure all the parties involved are regulars on this site, and I've already revealed too much...
I did upvote your post mainly b/c I don't want more people to move in here. hehe....
My major gripe with SF is actually the dating scene, it sucks ass (unless you are a gay guy, which probably will be great). Ratio of guys to girls in most work places is 3/1. It is expensive to live, so girls in early 20s choose to live somewhere else.

There is also very expensive housing (second after manhatan), and potential of earthquakes, but compare to Boston and most of the South is much much better.

And I agree, transportation is kinda sucky. I find myself using a car, even within the city.

BTW, not everybody works in Southbay or peninsula. I actually do work in emeryville (east bay), and the commute is about 25-35 mins, depending on traffic.

But, also many young startups are choosing SF and not peninsula to start up. The problem to find cheaper place will come only when the startup grows a lot, and you really need a lot of space.
> Are you sure you want to listen to someone who has never lived in San Francisco?

Perhaps. But on the other hand - what value is the opinion of someone who has only ever worked/started-up in SF?

To have a basis for comparison you'd need to have experience both in and outside of the Bay area. Probably multiple places outside of the Bay would be needed for a reasonable basis for generalising.
As for the music scene, it depends what you like. If you like House/Electronica SF is great.
> the breakdown of the family is a very big problem.

Why assume that "the family" is perfect as it is? If the freedom to trade money for videos is detrimental to a social structure, to limit freedom to preserve a social structure seems regressive.
The non-idiotic domain name shortage is indeed a problem that's only going to get worse. One odd side-effect is that tech-conscious parents are now naming their babies based upon the availability of the domain name. Bad luck for anyone named smith.
Ask HN: do you spend more time on HN when your work sucks?
I have four medium sized projects which I consider extremely distasteful on my plate for the next two weeks. These are things I simply can't stand doing, but need to finish in order to move on to better stuff. Since my company is more like a DHH company than Facebook, I can't really afford to pay someone else to do this stuff. (+1 for outside capital!)

Anyway, I've noticed that whenever I have to do work stuff I don't want to do, the amount of time I spend doing random internet things goes WAY up. HN just happens to be the procrastination drug of the moment. Anyone else suffer from this problem?

p.s. the no procrastination flag doesn't help when there is that prominent "override" button.
this is pretty cool, but I remember seeing something very similar to this being demoed in Japan about 8 years ago.
2-3 years ago this would have been interesting. I'm not sure how many Linux developers are going to start writing Java software all of a sudden.
I'm late to this conversation but thought I'd weigh in anyway because I found myself in a similar predicament recently. I was able to recruit a talented developer-partner on the grounds that he'd receive 40% of the sale price of the application. Maybe my experience can help you.

When it comes to recruiting, I think the answer lies in speaking candidates' language (if it's a business guy, remind him that startup experience looks great on a resume; for developers, make sure they know you appreciate the importance of their role to the success of your project). I think it's most important for the latter that they believe they'll do important work and feel appreciated... it's regretable so many of them have had bad experiences with crappy employers, but you can use that history to your advantage by setting yourself apart from it.

The rest is details: Write up a job description using your best Ogilvyian copy (reference copyblogger.com). Headlines matter.

I also suggest you use a triangulation strategy when you talk about compensation. I approached it by offering candidates their option of 1) $2500, 2) $1500 + 8% equity, or 3) 40% equity. On its own the 40% arrangement wouldn't have stirred much interest, but set against the backdrop of the other two options it looked like a great opportunity. I designed it that way deliberately with favorable results.

Hope this helps.
Given that the vocabulary (by a loose definition of "vocabulary") of any new skill is a significant portion of the barrier to becoming proficient, I would say that making that aspect a solved problem would be a miraculous improvement in learning efficiency.

For example, learning a new programming language (once you know how to program in general) is at least 50% vocabulary. It's learning the keywords and syntax, library functions, etc. Likewise for most kinds of skills. Sailing is largely knowing the names, the knots, and the laws (plus practice). Driving is laws, and a few basic automotive concepts. Law is lots and lots of cases. Medicine is lots and lots of anatomy. All of these things are memorization, and that memorization is a barrier to expertise.

Memorization is clearly not the most useless type of learning. It's core to almost every skill.
If Wufoo stays private indefinitely, doesn't this clash with YC's business model?

This probably stems from my naivete, but how do investors make money if a company has no intention of going public or being acquired?
Yahoo's stock price has not had much to do with their fundamentals for a long time. At this point, all of the institutional investors are just placing a bunch of over/under bets on the Microsoft acquisition going through, hence why it's basically at $30 per share.
Startup from any city.. not just San Francisco! From my bedroom in Baltimore my startup has been recognized by prominent publications and is backed! I have ventured out to San Fran a few times and have enjoyed my visits, but it's cheaper here to live!

There is also a vibrant DC tech community an earshot away!
That sounds a bit different. There's no real risk. The exchange is voluntary, after-the-fact, and if you make $10B the school doesn't (necessarily) get a percentage. That's basically a loan: you get school paid for now, and you pay it back over the next several years.

One or two fraternities, I'd heard, actually have you sign over some small percentage of your salary (1-2%?) for life. That's equity.
That would be nice initiative. But his main point seems to be that you just can't give your customer the truth. Even if it's not viable, for some reason, to make sure the situation that happened to your customer never repeats itself again, the blogger seems to say that you better agree with the customer. That's just wrong. You better give a straight answer, like "we are not capable of teaching that to our workers, you should teach them yourself the next time".

Of course, in that particular situation, giving instruction for the people working at the parking lot shouldn't be a big problem. So I agree that he should have done it, but I stand by his choice of giving a straight answer instead of saying he feels bad for the customer and will change things, but in the end he doesn't.
sure, I doubt i'd disclose how early i'm planning on retiring though.
In a word, yes. I work for myself but that doesn't mean I don't get bored of the tedium of some of my projects. In those times I turn to HN.
37 Signals will probably eventually be acquired. Bezos bet on that by investing in them, and he is pretty smart.
Storing Data For The Next 1000 Years
If you're good at getting your bearings, yes. But having witnessed myself and others struggle to figure out "wait, which way is which according to this map?" for a little bit before getting our internal compass aligned with the map's orientation, it would be much simpler to literally point your camera at something and have it tell you what's in that direction. Depending on how precise the tags are, they would also be useful just to provide information about various interesting objects in the area, particularly if you can see tags that everyone puts on real-world objects.
Makes some intuitive sense but I'd like to see a reference.
I liked simulscribe and spinvox sucks or at least their api does...for $200 they should have better documentation.
Boring Stuff Thats Critical To Your Startup's Existence
You forget to mention that I make about twice as much here in SF as I did in Boston.
And my lifestyle and quality of life improved dramatically...

I have an uncle in Worcester, and I visit it once and a while, and I think it is really boring.
The heterosexual dating scene in SF is indeed horrible. The only bittersweet encouragement I can offer young men in the Bay Area is this: If you stay here long enough, you will eventually get lots of dates with attractive young women... when you are 7-12 years older than they are. Just make sure you take it easy on the free soda and pizza. My apologies to all the 23 year old dudes, but 23 year old nerds are just nerds. 30 year old nerds are endearing, or a way to get back at her parents, or an easy mark for free drinks, or, most likely, simply a boyfriend who can afford to not have roommates.
A Few Tips for Managing Information Overload
The Webmaster's Turbo Kit: 50-Plus Tips and Resources to Improve Your Site's Speed and Performance
By now, nearly everyone knows that an effective Web site must be speedy. Take advantage of these tips, tools and resources, and you'll have a much better time capturing visitors' attention.
LC Was Right! Twitter Advertising!
Encrypt Anything: 50 Ways to Secure ALL Your Data, Regardless of Medium
To keep your data safe and secure, from private photos, e-mails and conversations to standard files on your computer’s hardware, check the following software programs, downloads and articles to better understand how data encryption can benefit your lifestyle.
This is bloody AWESOME!
Although they could develop the application for the iPhone right now, since it has all the required hardware inside. I'm worried about GPS accuracy although.
Wow. And who said you can't do great things with java.
The biggest OS X mistake Apple never made
I knew a kid from Vo-Tech who was homeschooled up to then. He was noticeably more civil & polite than the kids from public highschools his age, and seemed more mature in his poise. If anything the socialization you receive in public schools is a damaging exposure, I think.
Whoah -- I'm the one who suggested HN when Problogger tweeted on your behalf looking for startup sites. So cool to see you here.
I'd be interested to hear more about your b'more startup. Link or email?
Cruiser - Javascript Parser Generator
Yes! This is exactly why the live view is so useful.

I did a land nav course in the Marine Corps; we had compasses we used to sight landmarks so we could triangular our location. To do this you held up the compass and looked through a slit. I'd call that analog navigation: The live view of Enkin is the same concept in digital form.
I love Toronto (especially downtown Toronto), I hate the weather. Each winter finds me more and more grumpy, and less and less productive. Lack of access to a sea or ocean is also a big minus for me.

The thing I loved about my visits to SF is that it reminded me of (downtown) Toronto more strongly than any other city I've visited. Great food, friendly people, very multicultural, a lot more easygoing than someplace like New York. Yes, SF is expensive as hell, but downtown Toronto's not significantly cheaper.

If Toronto didn't have the winters it does, I probably wouldn't consider moving. As it is, if SF is a more expensive version of Toronto but without winter and with a larger tech community, then that's a price I'm willing to pay.
Short but worth the read. Usually "N Rules of Doing X" are what I would consider linkbait, but this one has a few interesting points.
Mr. Graham,

Thanks for this piece. It's something that's been kicking around in my head since Nov. '06 or so when I discovered Newsvine. I found a community and community genuinely interested in promoting quality news discussion and content, AND in making money. There's something powerful happening now, with the profit-motive acting in a socially-beneficial way.

Your blurb about the malaria company inspired me to do a little thought exercise about whether it'd be possible for a for-profit company to successfully help pull people out of poverty, and what that company would look like. If you're interested in reading it, here is a link: http://www.tightwind.net/2008/04/mesh-networks-relationships... .

Thanks again for your great piece.
Depends.

Do you know anyone already using any of these languages? The path to enlightenment is almost always more easily tread when you have someone hiking it with you.

If no, choose by documentation. What do you find the easiest read? I was first introduced to lisps via PG's "ANSI Common Lisp" -- great book. If scheme's your thing, SICP is the way to go. I haven't been following Arc and I'm not up to speed on Clojure, so I cannot comment on those tools.

I chose Common Lisp. Openmcl on my ppc and sbcl on x86. Your milage may very.

Best of luck!
The Ozzie Memo—Software is Dead, Long Live the Web
I don't know, there's a fair few people out there in the community using Mono and a comparable high-level competitor could tempt many away.

That requires things like java-gnome to be top notch but it's getting there. There's also always Jambi for KDE.
Where do you go for news when you've read all posts on the YC frontpage?
this is my flow HN frontpage > HN new > techcrunch >venturebeat or gigaom> afterwards I find myself sort of stuck. NYT and Wired most interesting articles have already been posted on HN. Where else do u go?
I hope the guys who made the video get to check out
labs.live.com/photosynth/

Photosynth would allow Androids screen to display actual pictures of the situation when zooming in using the satellite view (not live view). The various people in live view could also add images to locations not already documented by photosyth's database.

Someday,

D T
Frankly, I never read all the stories on the YC front page. If I did I'd consider it a bad sign that I was procrastinating.
Big Blue Bets Big On Mobile Web; Announces New Mobile Applications
That's along the lines of what I was thinking. Say you had a laser tag game with this system. Then, online players could be projected onto a physical player's HUD, and visa versa. The arena itself could have RFID tags on corners to easily provide the geometry for clipping, so the virtual players aren't just superimposed on the HUD.

Now, if the technology that generates 3D details from pictures progresses alot more, then the system wouldn't even have to resort to hacks like RFID tagging.
Hiring a hitman would've paid for itself! ;)
Yoskovitz: Be a Data Hog, Make More Money!
You go do some friggin' work you procrastinator!
Read a book. Also, whenever I read a good blog post I add the feed to Google Reader, so I have a ton of those. Email me if you want some. Reddit/programming is usually good for something too.
Heh, this query is great: http://www.facebook.com/lexicon/index.php?q=party%20tonight,...
I have read about special forces training with something like this. It'd be really cool though if it can be replicated with cheap off the shelf tech.

Do you know how hackable cellphone transmitters and receivers tends to be? I really see the cellphone as the portal into a virtual/physical life hybrid. If there was a cheap, popular cellphone with hackable hardware, then this could be a reality right now. If it was also the hub for a personal network, then you could plug all sorts of interesting gadgets into the mix.
Also check out dictator, a more robust form of zapreader, but not for browsing. I think it helps me read alot faster.
Twitter! Japan! Ads!
Unfortunately, from the release announcement and the associated mailing list thread, it seems that the severe performance problems with large repositories have not yet been resolved -- and in fact, some operations on large repos have gotten slower.
Notes from Scaling MySQL: Facebook 1,800 MySQL Servers, 805 Memcached servers, 10,000 web servers
I've been tempted to write off Sun and Java in the past...but the past couple of years have begun to change my mind in pretty dramatic ways. Dynamic languages on the JVM, and Sun's support of those languages might be enough to save Java from its pre-destined fate as the modern Cobol.
> Where do u go for news when u've read all posts on the YC frontpage?

"u"?

I guarantee that if there were some even cooler place than HN for smart people to gather, I wouldn't ruin it by telling "u"!
Facebook launches Facebook Chat
when i read the title i expected it to be about asp.net

most people do use it :/ and they are silent
This is way cool...
The History of Web 3.0
To my own site where I aggregate lots of feeds that I like and where I put up various links I like to browse.

http://filtercurve.com
Advanced and Idiomatic use of Ruby's Splat (*) operator
Read less, do more
SBCL or Clojure, depending on your problem domain and your experience. I would personally not use PLT/MzScheme or Arc for the type of projects I work on, but there are obviously people who do use them in production settings. I think you could use either successfully, but I believe there are usually better tools available.

Clojure is definitely a moving target, but the JVM/Java foundation buys you quite a bit (JVM clustering products, pre-existing libraries, ability to use existing talent,etc.)

SBCL is very productive, especially if you're doing a "greenfield"-type project. We've used it quite a bit, and I would say you save lots of time by using it for prototypes and for certain types of projects - but you can also lose quite a bit of time dealing with the warts, as well. Some of the warts we encountered didn't appear until we were in a production setting and a few were rather expensive to correct. We ultimately opted for a commercial Lisp for most of our CL work. The SBCL team should be commended for their amazing work, though.

I'm always interested in hearing about how others use Lisp for deployed apps, so please come back and post once you've made some headway.
if some1 is offended by "u" than they r clearly complicatd and taking life a bit too seriously. and besides isn't this web 2.0 where we have flickR and Youniversity I think those are more morphed than my "u"
Figurative speech. I read all the stories that catch my attention (maybe 1/5).
haha srsly
"Thanks to key computing shifts, supporting their appetite for Apple is now a straightforward option for IT"

The problem is, IT departments don't know and - more important - they don't want to know. Ours don't take the time to check options because they are too busy hunting windows bugs.
Matt Maroon - Oblivious to Obvious (Corp)
ReCAPTCHA Makes Me Want To Work On Machine Vision Problems
i totally agree. unfortunately this is how i earn part of my income. reading all sort of tech news, gathering the info, and use it to help clients get on the boat.
thanks for http://filtercurve.com/aggregator/news . i got enough to go for another hour.
i spend way too much time reading on newscred. its my startup, so i'm biased. but losing track of time and getting hooked is a good sign for the product i guess.
The power of links and the value of global knowledge
After my RSS feeds have been dealt with, I have a ton of links saved in my Instapaper account to read... then there are the pdfs, not to mention the books...
Oh, and I haven't even got to the work yet!
(p.s. - Instapaper.com, I love you)
"who reads news" Google Query is TechCrunch article about Hacker News Banning ValleyWag
At least at my location, and cross checked on another computer.
Exactly. My response was going to be "make your own news."
Wired discovers Twitter
i think this is a universal challenge. i currently work fo a global oil company with a worldwide staff strength well over 50. i am based in the Nigerian operations. there is intense competition. But i really dont see what the competition is all about. we tend 2 push solutions 2 users rather than do what they need. there is a funny ranking system which forces u do workk and not share. I have been here for a year and a few months and i look forward to move on in the next 2 months. i think life was better even when i thought i was earning 1/5 of what i earn now. it is miserable working for huge companies. some people sure have to do it. But count me out soon. Life is beautiful and free. I agree.
Reddit, slashdot, boingboing
I had a hard time explaining the web to my father in 1994. I guess that will never take off either.
>Hell, try explaining it to your wife or girlfriend. Oh wait, I forgot, you’re in the tech industry.

omg, like totally burned
Climate Debate Daily (best articles from both sides)
Just you wait till Japan starts selling their robotic women. Then look who's laughing!
That's fine. Please, though, write properly (i.e., capitalization and spelling). You can take the time. We are a community that would really, really prefer it.
Apparently Twitter is big in Japan. Coincidence?
Funny, Dan, considering your profile comment:

Daniel Ha, former #1 on the leader board. I will make my return. One day.
I make my own news. I work.
Actually, I think Matt realizes techies value intelligence over looks, so all their significant others will be just as techie as they. Consequently, it will not be difficult to explain such concepts to them. Really, his comment is meant as a tribute to the beauty of techie relationsips.
Thesis: symbols can think, given a strange loop structure.

I just didn't see that hanging together.
The Ozzie Memo: Software is Dead, Long Live the Web
Poor choice of title IMO. This article is more about how to be productive than it is about bootstrapping. "1. Love the idea." or "2. Make sure the idea solves a problem / fills a need." just aren't specific to bootstrapping; those are reasons to start a business. IMO the only bullet point that I would consider specific to bootstrapping would be the one about using a project mgmt system that is free.