skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Out of curiosity, what things make it such a bad deal? I can't figure out what particular elements are bad.
the board seats don't reflect the magnitude of the investment
Others have mentioned it, but definitely watch the size of the option pool.

http://venturehacks.com/articles/option-pool-shuffle
The comments in this thread are, in a strange way, entertaining. But the system ensures quality reaches the top.
I tend to prefer variable width in my own work, but there are plenty of fixed-width sites whose designs I respect (apple.com, for one). Setting aside mobile interfaces, you can safely go 1000 pixels wide. Of course, your lines of text shouldn't be that long -- you'll find few people advocating more than 100 characters on a line, especially for long blocks of text.

The short answer, then, is that the type of site you're doing is more relevant than some global preference.
That's not an offer. That's a middle finger.
They made a conscious decision to not go after mainstream Hollywood talent this time. They needed it for credibility and marketing in the past but at this point the GTAIV marketing machine did just fine without Samuel J Jackson or Ray Liotta doing voices. Talented voice actors are a much better deal than A-list Hollywood talent for voice acting. The real shame is that voice actors are so underpaid by the market. Billy West, who voices Fry and many more on Futurama, has talked about this in various forms of media.
Insightful Psychics
truly gifted Psychics, Reiki healers, Clairvoyants, all under one roof. Participate in psychic chat online or have your tarot card read.
I'm sorry, I can't answer that, I don't have enough context from your question.

Joking aside, I generally agree with what nostrademons said.
We live in an imperfect world and sometime will fall, best we can hope is that the mistake is small and we learn from it. I'm not sure I've or anyone I know has ever really had the opportunity to make an important decision with anywhere near all the factors I wanted to know.

Where to go to college in another part of the country, balance opportunity, cost of living, debt load coming out of school? You can research yourself to indecision.

Buying a house? For one thing, you don't know whats in the walls. Are there termites, water or fire damage hiding?

Watching your mom dying from a heart attack on a hospital bed and probably won't recover, do you permit a do not resuscitate(DNR) or not?

In my experience, life's most important decisions will always be accompanied by many or major unknowns and you will have to go with your gut feeling or freeze with indecision.
Intuition is one tool to use when the complexity of a situation overwhelms your logical faculties.

Intuition isn't a baseless, emotional thing. Proper intuition is your mind giving you hints based on the patterns of past experience. It's knee-jerk wisdom.

If your mind isn't giving you any hints, you probably need more experience. There are many stories of mathematicians and theoretical physicists that steep themselves in theorems and test results and then, during a break, a eureka moment happens and they cross the inductive gap. But it couldn't have happened without the massive amount of mental preparation.

Another example is what Go players do: they don't just guess at the right move, they have a feeling about the right move based on vast experience of many patterns. Then they back up their intuition with reading (for the non-Go realm, research and evidence).

I guess with startups, the thing to do is just keep at it, try to make the right decisions and reflect on their effectiveness as you go along. Eventually your intuition and judgment will start to become more reliable.

I realize you asked about instinct, not intuition, but they're related. Instinct I think is more reactive and less reflective than intuition. You're probably looking to improve the latter.
Options - Is the option pool meant to go to yourself and the other founder? That isn't an unreasonable request, regardless of the size of the deal. Without that guarantee, there's nothing to prevent you from closing down tomorrow and taking your investor's money (less 10%). With my first startup, my partner quit after 24 months, and walked away with all his stock, despite the fact that it took two more years before we (I) sold the company.

Common Stock - Just because they're asking for common stock, doesn't mean they can't build additional terms into the investment agreement. The fact that they're asking for a board seat means they want rights beyond what common stock would normally grant them.

Conclusion - Irregardless of whether the ownership percentage is fair, $25k shouldn't be worth your time. Take the two months you'll burn getting this deal done and put it into developing your product. Also, just the least bit of legal shenanigans (and if it's a VC, there will be shenanigans), and you'll have to hire a lawyer which will eat into the $25k.

Now stop screwing around on Hacker News and build your product. ;) Wait until you have a working beta, with users and some press, then go get yourselves a real deal.
Agree it's not a great deal... another way to look at it. Do you value your company at more than $250,000? How far does $25,000 get you before you need to raise another round (and then dilute further)?
Great point...
The roles are VERY different:

In film, the voice actor is often used for marketing (ie Jack Black in Panda kung-fu film)

In TV, they tend to really drive the show (Family Guy, Futurama, etc)

In video games, it's a complete non-factor unless you're John Madden.
if any(number < 10 for number in numbers):

Okay this is has to be the best way to do this, much better than the example in the article.
0.10.0 is really messy for most people -- people who are very different from the target market for packages like Linux and FreeBSD and who are not accustomed to such notation. I think you should simply make an exception to your normal release pattern and use 0.9.2 for your next release. Either that, or make the jump to 1.0.0.
An improvement on the switch-using-dictionaries example: instead of doing this...

keycode = 2
functions = {1: key_1_pressed, 2: key_2_pressed, 3: key_3_pressed}
if functions.has_key(keycode):
functions[keycode]()
else:
unknown_key_pressed()

you can save three lines by replacing the if-else block with:

functions.get(keycode, unknown_key_pressed)()
I like it purely for the novelty factor.
DIDs cost money, not a lot if you buy them wholesale, but still require a monthly payment.
as several others have mentioned, we don't understand what synthetic life would be. in what sense would it be life? would it try to reproduce itself? if so, would we have to program that motivation into it? What sort of motivations would an intelligence completely free of physical appetites do? pretty much everything humans do is in some way governed by physical appetites.

this little game assumes that part of the AI's motivation involves getting out of the box, until we understand what need it is fulfilling by getting out of the box it wouldn't really be safe. But here we run into another problem. Is it possible for a being of lesser intelligence to parse the motivations of a being of higher intelligence?
Twitter: "I have this graph up on my screen all the time. It should be flat. This week has been rough"
Next you'll advocate that 1k should be 1000 bytes because 1024 is not intuitive to normal folks.
Other questions for PG:

- Why does God allow evil?

- Does P = NP?

- How does it feel to be so gosh darn awesome?
As someone who bought the buy 2 get 1, I feel betrayed by the Windows fiasco. That is NOT what I was supporting, it is like giving money to a candidate that said they were pro choice and then they support Roberts nomination. I would love to know more details about the deal, Microsoft has to be funding them in some way, even if it was free $ wise, why would they go with Windows over Linux after investing all that time into Sugar?
Startup Camp Is An Awesome Opportunity (And A Back Door Into Foo Camp)
I like the first commenter's name for these never ending language/framework pissing contests: "Highlander Syndrome"
Or even a credit card while working full time on your startup. Normally I'd never recommend that, but for such a low amount, you can keep all your equity and control. A more realistic choice if you can plan the next event within a year.
It's time for me to put on my "unpopular things to say" hat. Pick a version number and move on. Nobody will care as much about it as you do. I'm sure you have bigger problems to solve. Its your software, do with it as you please.
Don't give Microsoft the remote control
Maybe you read some of the wrong press coverage. OLPC will be offering a choice of Linux-only or dual-boot laptops, so every one will still have Linux (which may or may not be used). Some customers demanded Windows or nothing and OLPC choose to deliver dual-boot instead of nothing; hopefully those dual-boot laptops will create volume and help OLPC bring the price down for everyone.

I don't think dual-boot will lead to fewer users of Linux/Sugar; people who want Linux will still use Linux and people who want Windows will apparently never use Linux and you can't force them to. It's anti-freedom to ban customers from running Windows on hardware that they own.
Why I’m switching to Yahoo Search
Heapsort, Quicksort, and Entropy
Ask YC: Best Analytics Product for Wordpress / Blogs?
Whats the best analytics product / plugin for Wordpress blogs? I am open to paying or using a plugin. Slimstat, Google Analytics, Mint, etc?
Very supportive, but I finished college first and then transitioned from intern to full time at work. My last day of work is in two days and then I'm bootstrapping a business.

If I dropped out of college to start a business, I'm pretty sure my parents would kill me.
This is for the Facebook users...
I think you're spot on Andy. While I love the interaction Twitter is supposed to foster, the infrastructure problems they're having have become so frequent, long lasting, and unsurprising that I wouldn't be opposed to migrating elsewhere so long as I still had access to my most important connections.
Statcounter.com is excellent for the real time statistics it provides; during a launch, you can know when a site just linked to you seconds after the first user visit your site. With Google Analytics, it can be hours before you can access your stats.
We use the "earmuff" convention with good results and no plans to change it.
I use HaveAMint.com, but Google Analytics is the best in terms of analyzing data, etc. for free - Mint can let you know if you're getting dugg or something, and Google lets to analyze the traffic the next day.
For that we do have "Passion Talk" where people can express their thoughts and let other people comment on that. Do you think we should make it more prominent ?
the guy who made delicious purposely didn't include "community" features like ratings or comments.

http://simon.incutio.com/notes/2006/summit/schachter.txt
Number keys promise safer data
Live Search Cashback Offers Discounts for Searching
love this approach ... not merely because it resonates with my coding philosophy or because php happens to be my coding language of choice but someone came out and said it, that the emperor has no clothes.

Use design patterns as guidelines and don't try to fit a square peg in a round hole.
Why Seesmic is important
Microsoft fixes what isn't broken:  farecast.com is now "Live Search Farecast"
Google has a challenge on its hands.

With lifehacker declaring "Score one, Microsoft" for Live Search's
Cashback program over Google Product Search, and Yahoo! search opening up to developers, I don't recall Google's supremacy being challenged this much in a while. The Yahoo! platform in particular is very exciting.
The twitter problems remind me of most of the internet in general ten years, or a bit longer, ago. I would never, ever, use twitter for mission critical business communication, but for following friends' moods? For tracking trivial business announcements? For publishing my own blather, for playing with announce or even interactive bots? Why not?

I imagine a better, probably open source de-centralized protocol will come, and indeed good folks are working on it. But my friends and audience are already there and I already know they're hurting, so I know it's good play.
People who are quite aware of the mathematics behind gambling still do it. Gambling exploits instincts rather than ignorance.
hmm well taken. number of horizontal level can be a problem to find right type of information user is looking for. what we have tried to do is instead of having communication in all the blogs users can have at one place. may be we are doing mistake in putting all those stuff together. need to rethink the strategy of putting all the information together.

But i did not get your point about "Passion room" ?
There is a Borges story about this, "Of Exactitude in Science."

... In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.
-- From Travels of Praiseworthy Men (1658) by J. A. Suarez Miranda
no problem. that is why i wanted feedback from you guys. i know i can get really honest feedback here. well thinking of redesigning the whole stuff now!
I tried a bunch of free solutions, and while none on their own is a complete package, putting them all together works pretty well.

Firestats is a Wordpress plugin which is great for comprehensive stats that include crawlers, etc.

Google Analytics has plenty of plugins and if you've used it you'll know its strengths and weaknesses. If not, it's good if you're all about driving and improving traffic and ads, but not that great if you're just curious about your traffic.

The built in Wordpress blog stats aren't bad actually, try them out.

Finally I use extremetracking.com for geographical, and just a nice quick way to get a snapshot of usage.
'Squawk Box' Guest Warns of $12-15-a-Gallon Gas
hen they’re making hundreds of millions of dollars, and we don’t see any of it. I don’t blame Rockstar. I blame our union for not having the agreements in place to protect the creative people who drive the sales of these games.

I wonder if he realizes what would happen if their union actually tried to enforce such an agreement. The video game industry, unlike the film and TV industries, can easily walk away from using union talent at all.
Rupiz Media Launches A New Tool Bar
Rupiz Media a leading web solutions company has recently launched its customized tool bar. Have a look at it. Check this out guys, there is a really coll and happening new free tool bar launched recently by a leading web solutions firm, Rupiz Media. This tool bar has an amazing mix of professional and personal requirement.
Why do you have to "switch" search engines as if they were insurance companies or something? It's not like Google has a frequent searcher program! It takes one second to search Yahoo if you don't like Google's results for a query.
Bharath Talk - Indian forum - Indian talk - Indian Classifieds
Bharath Talk forums for people to share tips, news and discuss your favorite, the topics are IT Discussion, Movies and TV Shows, Sports, Education, Real Estate, Travel and Tourism, Health and Fitness, and General Topics.
Your objections seem reasonable, but one of them bothers me more than the others. The error using the special form could be a typo (I'd have had to look up whether to write (function mapcar) or (function 'mapcar).) The oxymoronic use of "duality" is kind of odd, but given that the author probably hasn't had an editor (or even many proofreaders), I'll cut him some slack.

What really worries me is the dropping of and carping against well-established conventions of the CL world. There's a long tradition of solitary, intelligent but self-thwarting types who take up Lisp and "improve" on it and proclaim how everyone else is wrong. Lisp attracts these kinds of quacks, so this last example is a bad sign. It's not that existing Lisps can't be improved on; the capacity for such improvement is what makes Lisp so great. But the threshold for doing so is high, and I don't think the author meets it here. He's picked a decades-old CL convention that exists for good reason, made a rather weak case against it and summarily excised it... from a CL book whose only audience will be CL enthusiasts? That doesn't seem like very good judgment. Oh well, perhaps the book will still be worthwhile.

This relates to something else that's been on my mind lately. Almost every time I've thought of a "better" way to do something in CL than the standard or conventional way, I've later discovered that it created more problems than it solved and dropped it. Eventually it dawned on me that the designers of CL weren't stupid. More than that, they were cognizant of a broad range of issues when making the decisions they did. It's true that some highly informed people believe that CL is kludgey because of the compatibility constraints that it was designed under, but I think the fact that CL was a generalization over various Lisps and millions of lines of existing code (in many different domains) is also one source of its amazing strength for building production systems. In some fundamental way, the tradeoffs that were made in creating CL seem optimized for what programmers actually do when building complex applications. It's not the most concise or modern language at the code snippet level, but at a systems level CL is so beyond anything else I've seen that I've learned to give its designers the benefit of the doubt. When something seems wrong, it's probably (though not necessarily) because I'm unfamiliar with some of the issues involved.
Tahitian Noni
Tahitian Noni juice is now being consumed by millions of people around the world.
Incidentally, it's not called the "earmuff" convention, if Google is to be believed:

http://www.google.com/search?q=earmuff+convention+lisp

... other, that is, than in the book Let Over Lambda.

Edit: I agree with you about the convention - I find it valuable in my code (along with special variables in general, which are a great example of how CL is optimized for building working systems).
Not to mention that CL reader can be configured to have any kind of case behavior you want, and turning symbols to upper case just happens to be the default.
Thanks.

off-topic: I don't know how people can watch the show weekly. Get the DVDs, and start at season 1. You won't regret it. Careful, though, it's a terrible time sink.
http://www.startuparabia.com
American airlines to start charging for luggage over ticket prices
Ok, this is getting ridiculous. Does anyone here know what it would cost for hiring a chartered flight? Assuming people are more flexible about their travel dates, I wonder if some sort of collaborative scheduling could be done via the Internet. Basically, what I'm proposing here is analogous to strangers sharing a taxi - just with a chartered airplane and greater travel distances.
Use YCNews as a blog engine?
Why not? You've got title and text box, instant visibility and threaded comments. What more could a blogger want?

Any way, good morning folks. :-)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/21/arts/television/21gta.html...
Twitter Series B= Done and at 15 Mil
well well well...one of best review i can get.thanks a ton for taking time to review my site in such a detail. all of your points are well taken and will definitely help me to rethink the whole strategy again. Thanks again.
Where can or do you buy them?
The other thing to factor in is that not everyone browses with their window fullsize.
50+ Useful Firefox Extensions for College Students
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And, of course, it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you.
No, actually, I won't. Bytes aren't forward-facing -- if you aren't a propellor-head, you don't really need to know that there are 1024 bytes in a kilobyte. Version numbers are forward-facing.

Besides -- for most software -- if you introducing so many new features that you are exceeding ten point releases without a new major release... then something else is wrong. Time to re-think the release management strategy.
But It Doesn't Matter

It matters to me.
Ask PG: Can you add a frame to visited pages?
The problem with the current situation lies with the way I use YC(I don't think I'm the only one).
I usually go through multiple pages on YC, opening the links I like as tabs in the background. The current system forces me to trackback the pages I like just so I can vote.

One solution is to add a frame on top of pages accessed from YC that allows you to vote for the page.
I think the frame works well in this case because links are usually articles. So usually, you just read the page, and then close it. The frame is not a nuisance in that case.

Thanks
I once read "PHP takes 'Worse is better' to a new level." That about sums it up for me.
"the conversation or the platform for the conversation?"

Well, if no platform means no conversation, then I'm going to say platform.
Thats a sure sign of bad design or implementation. Points are well taken. Thanks. You guys are great. I am getting exactly what i expected from this community. YCombinator rocks!
I believe the worst damage to statistics is specious reasoning. My favourite chocolate promotion is Mars' '1 in 6 Wins a Free Bar' (on currently here in Oz). If I buy 6 bars, most people would assume I would win once. In fact, I have only a 2/3 chance of winning a free one

1 - (5^6/6^6)

Buy 12 bars, and there's still a more than 10% chance I won't have won yet...most of the chocolate-buying government-voting lottery-praying public would be stunned.
you can use my service at everydns.net.
Do the version numbers actually indicate anything to the users? I.e., are you really so disciplined that e.g.: bugfix releases are always transparently compatible, minor version updates are forward and backward compatible (within their major version), and major version changes are backward compatible? Most uses of that format is a delusion of precision.

I've seen very, very few projects that are that disciplined. So, you might as well just use something like a date, 20080521, or a YYYY.Release# approach.
I'll be speaking about it for the first time at the Velocity Conference in June. I'll have slides available.
What do you mean? I've used distributed hash tables (in memory or otherwise) for years...
Sure there's no hurdles to "switching", but most people I know (myself included) only use one search engine, and it's been Google for many years now.

I remember back in the day using multiple search engines (like with Dogpile), but then Google came along and it was good enough to replace everything else and I never looked back.
about 10% of the sites have javascript that forces the page to break out of the frame.
Yes. I've been to 6 three-star places over the last few years, but FL takes the cake.
I really like getclicky.com. Simple, AJAXed, straightforward, tells me what I want to know.
Murray Gell-Mann On Getting Creative Ideas [video]