skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moved from Dallas to Seattle and haven't looked back. No comparison - much better startup scene here.
The Return of Ada
I actually don't know what Tumblr is. Is it a twitter clone or something?
Why not be an A/S (or ApS)?

Easy. As a startup you need to have a cool DKK125,000 (USD20,000) upfront in cash as share capital to be honoured with the ApS label and DKK500,000 (DKK81,000) to be an A/S. Btw. A/S is pronounced “Ahh. Ess.” and not “Ass”, you would be suprised the amount of foreigners who make that mistake.

There are also lots of other annoying paperwork and rules and regulations and what have you. But the above upfront capital requirement makes it inaccessible for most bootstrappers.

This disease seems to be widespread across Europe. Austria has an up-front capital requirement of €37500 for a GmbH (the equivalent of an A/S or limited liability company), I think Germany requires €10000 in capital, etc. And the governments are surprised at the small number of startups. Sorry, a partnership just doesn't cut it.
it works. i just told them too.
Agree - I'm from Denmark too.

I find that the biggest problems are that it is hard to find ambitious people, and that the general level of start-up knowledge is pretty low. Also the recognition you get from wanting to change the world is pretty non-existent.

That said the programmers and the girls are worldclass :-)

Maybe we should get together and do something about it?
Cool just making sure because it is still up and you would assume something like this would be taken down immediately.
This doesnt sound like the whole admin panel... its possible nobody has even used this panel since testing...

It is a problem, just saying that I vote the developer keeps his job cause i like tumblr
Don't you think it's a tad unreasonable-- almost stupid-- to post something like this here? At the very least, it's immoral.

You can essentially take control of Tumblr.
Everyone's always talking about the need for a new mobile social network, but one already exists - it's called Twitter. It completely sidesteps the fact that most mobile browsers suck (iPhone nonwithstanding) by building the platform on text messaging as the lowest common denominator.
Facebook Opens Up Mini-Feed To 3rd Party Services
They were the first popular tumbleblogging platform. It's a really good service, this incident notwithstanding.

The perverse irony of all of this is that the incident reminded me that I've got a Tumblr account. Before today, I hadn't logged in for over a year!
I'm not advocating firing the developer. If every developer got fired for every stupid silly mistake we'd have no working developers in the world. I was just clarifying the seriousness of this specific flaw. :)
I can believe they stuck their admin at /admin, but it's hard to believe they didn't create an admin bit as part of the users table and check it to access /admin. That takes about 2 minutes if you do it when you create the system.

Oh well, everyone overlooks something that seems obvious to someone else, I guess.
Do you have a thing for guns?

Anyway, don't forget Norman Borlaug and Ingvar Kamprad.
Brilliant. Blue Jeans Cables is a plucky company. I've regarded them quite well in the past, and now even more so. I think I know where I'm buying my next set of cables from :)
Why I hate Flash
What the hell is Tumblr? And what happened to vowels?
It'll be interesting to see how this news spreads through the Twitterverse. Break the popcorn out: http://www.tweetscan.com/index.php?s=tumblr&u=
Technology is the only thing that has ever solved social problems. You just have to find the right technological solution. :)
Oklahoma Leaks Tens of Thousands of Social Security Numbers, Other Sensitive Data
I am from Texas, but now live in NYC. From what I hear, the money is drying up in Dallas. People are having a hard time fundraising; which, doesn't mean anything other than companies are going to move to where the money is. The Angels I have talked to out of Dallas are having a hard time.
Hmm - good question... perhaps graphics-intensive games (yeah, I know, there's not much of these that are web based yet)? Writing long online document? High-resolution pornography? Maybe stuff involving heavy research (e.g., large medical publications) where you want to cross-reference multiple documents and/or take notes?

I guess it's basically stuff that either works best with a large detached monitor for graphics-related reasons, or stuff that requires any amount of intensive typing. I suppose there's not a huge amount of that type of thing on the web yet, but there are a few examples and probably (?) will be more in the future.
Tumblr is an awesome blogging platform that's dead simple and has some Twitteresque social features (ie following) built in.

Also has a great bookmarklet and a neat api.
For the curious, it looks like this:

Admin dashboard: http://img.skitch.com/20080415-ef6k9c8hpbasi9g137j6u4iqrs.jp...

Clicking "password": http://img.skitch.com/20080415-day5r87i8tbt9iaqrtf73tpnnd.jp...

Clicking "email": http://img.skitch.com/20080415-bg12j2y7wxmeqn44pmctcs69e3.jp...

And clicking "edit" tumblog: http://img.skitch.com/20080415-cg7iwrmc7gu2a58qkmcnfre6ka.jp...

Don't worry, I didn't do anything!
Holy crap! That's true..
I didn't know what Tumbler is and I created an account just to confirm the hack (the security hole is still there). But this got me thinking about another post at HN on how to market your site - I guess a blatant (fake?) security hole is one way to do it.
That just floors me. What a stupid and counterproductive policy.
I just shot them a mail to let them know.

Ironically they don't obey one of the primary rules of usability for websites: have a link to contact info on the front page.
I can't believe, >30 min out, that this is still open
Still works. Still up. Still the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
Elevation of privilege FTL.
I usually do not ask celebrities about their work. it quickly puts you in the "eager follower category" and gives you little chance of getting outside of that. I think i would ask Jeff what his favorite beer was, and if you could take him out for one sometime. I suggest just talking to him like a friend. You will have time for work later.
They turned it off at 4:07 eastern
Yeah, this was the bit that held me up on the data site for a long time. It didn't seem like succeeding could do anything but depress people. But talking to others in this sphere, there are some legitimate things you can do with the data: for example, Dennis Hastert (R-IL) recently had to resign in part because of some earmark data that someone uncovered; he was replaced by a pro-reform Dem particle physicist a month ago. So I think connecting it up to the media and building voter scorecards and stuff out of it could be effective.
And it's fixed
Those can be rented... in fact where this will really change things is when the local grip rental houses start renting these things out by the day/week.

Even if the rates are more expensive than the equivalent 35mm kit, the cost of film stock far outweighs the rental costs.

So now for the cost of a day rental, an indie filmmaker can shoot at 3k quality, and only be limited by hard drive space (which is way cheaper than film, and is renewable) rather than the $600/min cited above for 35mm film stock.
Your second edit nails it. I thought the brightness in HSB was equivalent to value, which is what I built my second graphic around. If you use my shitty grayscale converter (Desaturate in Photoshop) they all come out to the same gray, so I thought I had it right.

Using Black & White gets me results much closer to what you've made.

Thanks for criticizing my graphics and putting up improved ones. (The second one isn't working, but I understand your point about the green – again, Desaturate convinced me they were all the same value.)

It's really hard to isolate and demonstrate one property of color at a time.
BookLamp - Pandora for books
They shut it down now...
Open Library, the other main thing I've been working on, is set to go 1.0 this week. So I guess that could be a qualified success. I did a more detailed review of projects on my blog: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/projects2007

Jobbook was a project I was doing with Seth Roberts; it got abandoned largely because Seth's publisher demanded that he stop working on it and focus on finishing his real book. If someone else wants to pick it that would be cool; I agree it addresses a real need.
[4:09 pm] Problem fixed. Response time: 43 minutes.
You may want to change your passwords and your mobile email address. Both were accessible.
Syncplicity, those four consecutive consanants make my brain hurt a little bit.

I second dropbox naming. Simplicitus Prime.

<- SimplSync ->
Lesson: Man your support email 24/7.

Oh, by the way, if you can't code, have somebody look at your code.
Not anymore people. Nothing to see here, hole is fixed
It's Web 3.0, and Someone Else's Content Is King
Did someone at least remove Jakob Lodwick's blog while the exploit was open?
The Man Who Gave Us Ruby
Interestingly, I've looked at your comment about 10 times and just now noticed that you transposed the 'm' and 'b' in Tumblr. :)
To err is human, but to really foul things up, you need a computer for that.
Uh yeah. You must be part of the same marketing team that advises car manufacturers to stage huge vehicle safety recalls. That'll really get the customers knocking.

Tumblr has a great but small team, just like most of us on this site. As someone who makes mistakes, I offer them empathy and sympathy.
Major Security Hole at Tumblr
I have been living in dallas for the past 8 years. I dont think dallas is the place for web 2.0 type startups. Well, there are couple of telecom startups. I dont see a vibrant VC community here.
Is that true that the passwords were revealed? All I saw was a reset link that I didn't click on.
My Eccentric Approach to Entrepreneurship
is anyone on here hacking on cuda right now?

I am not working on cuda (though I intend to now that I see what it can do), but have experience with LAM, MPI, etc.

i don't know anyone who has a clue about working in a massively parallel environment...

the basic point of any parallel programming is to decompose a problem so that it is without crippling dependencies during its execution, and parcel out the tasks amongst the nodes/cores/pipelines/whatever, having them report their results as they complete. There is much more to it, in a practical situation, but a GPU is very nearly an idealized situation and thus this may be all you need to know.

Matrix computations are a classic example -- for each row i and each column j, the multiplication of an ixj matrix by another ixj matrix results in (i x j) parallel tasks, none dependent on the others. lather, rinse, repeat.

Parallel programming is superficially simple. Your goal is to find serializing bottlenecks and kill them one at a time, from the tightest loop outwards. What makes it complicated, of course, is the fact that not all programming is a series of matrix multiplications, nor are all serializing bottlenecks trivial to decompose.

The reason GPUs are an obvious target for friendly parallelizing toolkits is that 3D graphics are inherently representable by series of 4x4 matrices (superficially you'd think 6x6 per point/observer but there's a cute trick you can use to reduce the dimensionality to 4x4... take a 3D graphics course if you are interested in this sort of thing)

Whether this should interest you depends intimately upon your problem domain. If you have a lot of processes talking to each other in sequence, maybe not. If there are a lot of tasks that don't really depend on each other that are slowing your program down, maybe so. (Sometimes even MCMC and MLEM simulations can be artfully decomposed so that they turn from the former into the latter... that's the fun part)

sorry for the editing laziness, I need to get back to my simulations. hope this helps a little
people would notice only if the site is already known or else nobody would care, but it would probably hurt the site than do good
How is Austin?
I would imagine that serializing your server's execution state to the client would require some pretty careful sandboxing to avoid security problems.
Austin is known to be the best startup city in Texas (as others have pointed out), and frankly, Austin leaves a lot to be desired. I moved from there to the Valley, and while I miss the Texas weather (only two seasons: "hot" and "a little chilly") and plan to eventually go back...it won't be until I've got a successful business or two under my belt. The startup investment climate in Silicon Valley is a world apart from anything else (only two seasons: "hot" and "a little chilly").
Selling a Working Web 2.0 Website - Where to Sell?
Where is the best place to sell a fully-functional, web 2.0 website? eBay seems like it won't attract the right audience and I really cannot tell the difference between the myriad of SitePoint-like sites. What has worked well in the past?
Blog Badge - LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Mahalo + Widget
Seagate sues a competitor, STEC, a maker of solid-state drives, alleging patent violations.
Thinking Functional
Indeed, if making such information easily available results in "actual changes", as opposed to merely "availability of information", then this would be totally awesome.

Of course, a website like this can only make the information available, but hopefully it will be used productively. Best wishes!
So, instead of the dot com bust, we would have had a com dot bust?
Heh, what do you suppose the intent of the question was? He's fishing for startup ideas!
Whoops. Well they've done studies to show common typos don't affect the meaning too much. I've updated it though -

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe." - http://www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/Cmabrigde/
It was only open for an hour.
Charging is not the holy grail of spam detection. There are services that should remain always free. CL can't (or shouldn't) charge for posting in categories where the user is not going to perform any economic activity. Charging an amount (no matter how small) in categories such as Personals or Missed Connections (besides not making sense at all) will decrease the amount of legit postings, ruining the quantity and quality of the service. By turning into a pay-per-post site CL could become something like ebay (a pure commercial "I sell you my collection of Russian dolls") + job postings site. That is, trust me, out of question.

Those non-commercial categories are the ones which are receiving far more fake postings, so the problem on the commercial categories could be considered closed. In non-commercial world, there are several measures being taken care of, such backend data analysis (the most obvious choice) and phone authentication for posting on a small set of categories (such Erotic Services).
The Fight for Yahoo: Five Scenarios
Anyone interested in this project should read the story behind it: http://www.cangooglehearme.com/chapter1.php
I realize simp|sync has 4 consecutive consants too, but it alliterates awfully nice.
Why I think Ruby on Rails is an ideal web development environment
Selling a website and domain... it is hard to get a good valuation out of it. It is a lot like a hot rod where a person has put in thousands of hours but when they want to sell there car no one will give them enough to justify all of those hours.

Try this site http://www.codango.com/, you can list it for license there. This way you can license it over and over again I believe you will make more this way then a one time sale. If you get a good base of people who have licensed it, you can create upgrades for another thing to sell.
Thanks nickb. But for some reason I don't think it will catch on HN.
Why do you want to sell it?
No, it was only open and public for an hour. It could have been open for months, maybe longer.
But everyone asks this question, and the response is always the same. You can ask a question like this if you're getting a written response, but when you're asking someone to immediately think of things in person and then justify them on the spot, it doesn't work well.
hang on, they're storing passwords in the clear? really?
"Can entrepreneurship be taught/learned? I don't think so. It's like a personality disorder. You are born with it."

What an awesome way to put it.
It was the result of a change today, right before it hit Hacker News (so sayeth Marco of tumblr in the #tumblrs irc channel, anyway; I believe him).
The lack of cut and paste annoys me greatly (from the user's perspective when viewing a webpage)
Why not enter the search market again? A9 had some cool features... and it would be fun to access that type of data via EC2.
kiko was sold on ebay for around $250k
Monster Venture lead by Robert Monster is a very good $100,000 to $200,000 investor. He sees value early on and really lets the founders make the most of the potential startup. I know, because we are one of 18 companies he invested in 2007.
www.sitepoint.com

forums.digitalpoint.com

Those are two of the biggest out there for selling developed sites.
I can totally agree with you here cousin_it. I've noticed this problem a few times on the main user-facing [more] link at the bottom of the news listings and I don't see any reason for it. From what I've seen/read/advocated it's best to use continuations for the backend things such as the admin pages, but keep all of the forward-facing pages as continuations-free as possible in order to avoid just these types of problems. As a user of the site, I should be able to bookmark any page I desire and return to find it still exists rather than the continuation has timed out and I lost a list of really great articles that I was hoping to read.
Yep, count me in. Looking forward to it.
Ask YC: How important is location when your startup isn't looking for lots of VC money?
I have read in many places that if you are considering a startup, Silicon Valley, Boston and Seattle are your choices for places to work and live. The odds of success in these places are significantly higher than anywhere else in North America.

I am asking this because I am currently living in Western Canada in a fairly low tech area and my future plans include web startups.

My co-founder and I are trying to weigh the pros and cons of relocating. Because we are not planning to look for large rounds of funding or to begin a hiring binge in the near future, are there other large benefits to basing our web company out of these "startup friendly" centers?

Does Canada have any areas that stand out as being startup friendly?
if its Berecruited.com - i would get TC to blog about it or mashable and drum up some interest. That site has had a lot of coverage,
It's more that I come from a family of mechanical engineers, rather than an ag-tech background.
He should use this opportunity to hire someone competent to design the Blue Jeans Cables website, and then convert the amazing publicity he's generating into sales.

Perhaps he could turn this into the tipping point for his company. Right now, the site is so hideous, I wouldn't trust it with my credit card information.
1. Resources
2. Talent
3. Money
4. Travel Costs / Accessibility

These ideas all come to mind on why you would want to be in a major hub. That said I believe a start up can start anywhere but needs to be prepared to relocate should the needs of the business demand that they do so.
The idea behind it is that since you are not personally liable in a limited company there should be some minimum amount of capital always present in the company, so that potential creditors can get their money. As a potential creditor you know that in maximise Aps. there is at least DKkr. 125.000 and in maximise A/S there is always DKkr. 500.000. This amount doesn't have to be in liquid assets but can take the form of tangible assets too, meaning that any accountant worth his money will be able to value your PC and you office chair at DKkr. 125.000 and you have your reserve for an Aps.

This, by the way, also works if you want to start a limited company - get a registered accountant to value your PC. and office chair at DKkr. 125.000 an you're good to go. Downside of this approach is that you will be income taxed for the 125.000.

Silly? Absolutely.
We sold kiko.com on ebay for $250k.

If you can drum up enough coverage, it works quite well. The key is getting coverage - the more people know it's up for sale, the more people will bid.
I would love to have the ability to communicate with people in, say, the same coffee shop that I'm sitting in even though they may not know me. Can Twitter do that?
At last year's Web 2.0 conference, Google's CEO said that local and mobile where the key hot areas, as far as Google is concerned.
The more Yahoo wait less they will get. Just sell it to MS now!
Chalk one up for PHP!
So what is his plan to avoid the site being biased?
Why I hate Flash: outside of youtube, 95% of all Flash content is just advertisement - including flashy corporate home pages. Very little actually affords any utility to me.

Flashblock is by far the most valuable Firefox extension that I use.
The reason there are few Googles or Microsoft's, etc. has more to do with the structure of competition and markets than it does with the factors outlined in your essay.

The reality is that the companies that grow largest are those that foster the growth of an eco-system of smaller dependent companies. The large "focal point" companies, by the nature of their particular market disruption, create opportunities for others to grow new businesses or do old businesses better. But, at the same time that they create opportunity, they limit it (intentionally or not) by ensuring increased competition for the dependent companies.

Creating opportunities means lowering barriers to entry and lowered barriers means increased competition, lowered returns and limited capacity to grow as large as the "focal point" or "platform" company that creates the opportunities.

If anything, VC's have been too liberal, not too conservative, in funding companies. I recently wrote about this at some length. Please consider reading my post at:
http://bob.wyman.us/main/2008/04/liquidity-and-c.html

bob wyman
Where Have All the Bold VCs Gone?
That said I believe a start up can start anywhere but needs to be prepared to relocate should the needs of the business demand that they do so.

Yeah, moving away from major hubs can be a good way to save money.
Good article, but why that title?
Ask YC: Where are the real web 2.0 apps?
The vast majority of the business community relies on poorly designed software. Though Twitter, Reddit, Facebook... are all impressive products, they have little "value" in the sense of building airplanes, treating medical patients, or running a country.

Apps in industry need to go beyond functional and user friendliness, they need to be user intuitive. Surely medical document management, social services, government run institutions, and even big nameless corporations need better software - how do we get through their (IT) gates?
The charmed life of Amazon's Jeff Bezos