skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask YC: Shotgun clauses, good or bad?
My partner and I are working on a partnership agreement for our new startup right now and have most things settled, but we're on the fence about whether or not to include a shotgun clause and we wanted to solicit some real-world experiences and not just to proceed purely on the advice of the lawyers.

On the one hand, it's meant to provide a means of breaking up where a partner is forced to offer something they consider to be fair (because they would have to be willing to accept it themselves). On the other it seems like something that could be manipulated to the advantage of the partner with access to more cash, and I can see such potential abuses being particularly plausible in high-growth scenarios like startups.

Everyone would like to believe they can trust each other and that these are just formalities, but situations change and when the going gets tough, who knows how someone might react? So is a shotgun clause good or bad for startups, and can simple arbitration provide the same thing?

For those not familiar, here's some info about shotgun clauses:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shotgun_clause
How about make a service users actually want to use? You were doing that too, right?
Have a story worth writing about (that you would read yourself, if it wasn't about your startup).

Watch the video. He really does describe ways to get TechCrunched.

My startup was profiled earlier this year (and it was a great generator of traffic, leads -- and customers). So, at least in our case, it was worth it.
Eight Years Later, Is Rackspace Finally Going To Try For Another IPO?
Ask YC: Which hosting company do you prefer?
I've been using Godaddy, and their performance is slow. Even their home page takes 3 minutes to appear when Google is at 2 seconds.

(By watching his video blogs, it appears that the CEO has been putting more effort in figuring out whether the new Godaddy girl should be Eliot Spitzer's former hooker or Danica Patrick.)

Does anyone have other apps hosting companies to recommend for bootstrappers?
xcode. textmate if you want a very sweet programmers editor on steroids.

depending on what you do though that may not be the answer. lots of ways to develop for mac. is there something in particular you had in mind? xcode is the absolute wrong answer for some things (like java, ducks flames).
xcode + emacs
Haven't used a Mac in a couple years, but when I did: XCode for writing native programs, Aquamacs for everything else.
videoegg isn't such a hot place to work, unfortunately.
Web Design Newcastle Upon Tyne
> The "design" branch is the one concerned with the design of things that don't change the function of your product, just the appearance. It's makeup.

This is where you are pointing out a big problem in most organizations. Design in many organizations is treated as purely visual, when it really shouldn't be. If this is the role of design in your organization, then yes, absolutely, it is expendable. Lipstick.

But you don't want lipstick. There's also interaction design / product design. You want someone who can, BEFORE a person even puts a line of code down, understand what the user wants to do and make sure the user experience makes sense in that context, through real user testing and rapid iteration. It's just cheaper to think and change on paper or a whiteboard. Once it's implemented, it is very costly to change. This type of design is not lipstick. It is the process by which a product takes shape... and it is not expendable.
I always see Mercurial vs Git, but no one ever talks about Monotone, considering it was a major influence on git. Its kind of disappoint b/c its a really great scm.
This doesn't imply anything about load balancers not working. Load balancers work by creating what are called VIPs - virtual IPs, which aggregate the IP addresses of the balanced services. In a lot of cases, the individual services need not even be routable from the public internet as long as they are reachable from the load balancer's internal interface.

(edit: fixed a typo)
yes thanks for the tool i was using it for our market research ! Unfortunately though it looks like the API restricts any search topics beyond 200. Is that correct?

Maybe Twitter allows for a fee to access all tweets on a search topic from day one?
Head First Java is a good book for beginners. If you want to increase your Java knowledge (especially in designing framework/library), this is the book to read.

Of course, this, and other books that specifically talk about JVM.
Ah, I get it. You want someone here to build it for you don't you?

Well, I think you're going to be disappointed.
I think that's because they both use WebKit for rendering. Am I wrong?
There's [something] wrong with infinite types
Build custom templates for your data-driven Web sites
that's not enough in a real startup

What else is there to being successful other than productivity?

I'd suggest this: DHH mentions "an amazing ability to get stuff done when the objectives are reasonably clear", but in a startup, often there is no "objective" - reasonably clear or not. Instead, there is something more like a search heuristic based on "the view form here". With time, the heuristic changes, and the objective changes, and the strategy changes, and the product changes. If I remember correctly, Flickr started as a Flash-based chat website. To get from there to what Flickr was acquired as required the notorious "startup hours". Basecamp went through no such life-changing make-overs, and so didn't require those kinds of hours.
One misguided view or incorrect theory does not a fool make.
_Dramatically_ increase the size
of your Ad Trafficking Team!

Hilarity.
Dell to offer Windows XP beyond June 30 cutoff
It's open source now, so you can go ahead and submit a patch to the core-libs-dev@openjdk.java.net mailing list.
Startup Reactor: Jason’s Thoughts
I don't mind the message -- no, you don't have to live in SF (your loss! :-) and no, you don't have to be single.

It's the delivery I have a problem with. More and more, it seems like DHH and his sidekick are deliberately looking for fights. Like they have something they need to prove.

Therapy?
Shotgun clauses are a fair way of handling things if your relationship deteriorates. (That's the whole reason you're writing the agreement down in the first place)

I wouldn't sign one if you are dirt poor and your partner is loaded, but if you have a decently equal access to cash, it's not a problem.
oddly enough, i have news.yc mapped to this site...and /. to slashdot, proggit to..proggit, trac for the trac site of one of my projects, gmail for gmail, g for google and so on thanks to a convenient Safari addon called Saft. :)

The problem with the group version of this is that while people here may map "news" to "news.ycombinator.com", someone else might map it to cnn or news.google.com or drudge report or any other news site. it would be inconvenient.

(so I guess what I mean is that that's a sweet idea, but it needs to be able to be overridden by the end user.)
Have you followed the rise of social entrepreneurship at all? Under its banner there are quite a lot of startups taking on problems exactly like the malaria dilemma you describe in the piece. They come at the issue from the opposite side of the spectrum: they're reacting to all of the waste and inefficiency in the old fashioned non-profit world, where something gets done because a millionaire's brother's wife is interested in it and done badly because she's not very good at solving the problem. So, they're trying to harness the power of market forces and the attendant efficiencies and motivations that go with them in order to solve these big intractable social problems. The social entrepreneurship movement encompasses everything from micro-finance -- which was pioneered by Mohammed Yunnus at Gramin Bank (for which Yunnus just won the nobel prize) -- to a revolution in funder logic and an increased focus on effectiveness metrics.

I'd be curious to read your thoughts on social entrepreneurship from a startup point of view.
You should be asking: Why should we focus on being techcrunch'd?

Look Here: http://tinyurl.com/5lacfh
The Algorithm And The Crowd
So it's gotten this far now? DHH loves to start fights so much that he had to come over to PG's forum and start them?

PG, who is always civil here, dragged into a stupid semantic fight?

I boggle.

"So 37signals would have been a startup if we sold to Google tomorrow, but not if we kept on as an independent company just making money?"

No, man. You're just playing semantic games, and you know it . The company would have been a startup if its founders had the intentions of being large or becoming part of something large.

Really, you have nothing better to do than to come to this nice place and crap all over it?
We apply a similar framework that tracks all the Stages of a business journey; I like the additional depth and experience this adds (through both the graph and the labels, however humourous) to the initial Start-Up Stage.
yeah, definitely read some things. but is it about joining the "hottest startup" on the block always? Sometimes going to a good startup, that lets you use your skill-sets is the best option :-).
Raise millions, then crash spectacularly. Deadpool posts are way more enticing than success stories.

If you're 'new and growing' that won't work, so keep in mind there's more to TechCrunch than Arrington - I met Duncan Riley at BlogOz last year, and if he's a reflection of the other bloggers then they're all approachable and keen to hear your interesting story.
No, man. Someone is arrogant because his attitude seems to say "I know better than you, pretty much all of the time."
Not that I'm an expert on the celebrity chef restaurant business or anything, but I can name one example where this is at least partly true: Ferran Adria's El Bulli (voted best restaurant in the world a few years ago) actually operates at a loss. Adria supplements his income by putting out books and by selling some of the more unusual ingredients he uses.

(edit: typo)
(> (+ hands super-glue) bare-hands)
=> T
What Can Virtual-World Economists Tell Us about Real-World Economies?
Maybe I'm in the minority. I think DHH's arrival here is a big gust of foul air.

Suddenly the arguments are getting out of control, and pg's participating. Nitpicky, negative, petty debates.

I've read every DHH post that's appeared here in the past days, and every one of them comes off like the work of a sophomoric contrarian who believes that the minor success he's had entitles him to tell the world how to think.

I like this place better when positive, hopeful people are having conversations.

This air just stinks.
How about a flagging option, like "flag this as spam". Lately, /newest is being used more and more to flog whatever site (currently web design in newcastle upon tyne, of all things)
Can't wait to see how someone will argue that even if the submission is not great, it can spawn an insightful discussion on this one.
Y Combinator Dataset Update Utility Version 1.1 Released
To keep your Y Combinator Dataset ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=172701 ) current, feel free to use the update utility used to collect it. It is available by accessing http://www.xirium.com/ycombinator-news-update20080424.tar.gz

This download is 0.004MB. To run, type:

./mirror.pl ycombinator-news

The script can mirror from many sources and it is already configured to mirror about 30 blogs and forums, including CodingHorror, Guy Kawasaki's blog, Paul Kedrosky's blog, MySQL Forge and Microchip's PIC forum. It also has example configurations for PHPBB forums and Yahoo Groups.
Startup School: David Heinemeier Hansson vs. Everybody Else
I haven't read the source or followed along with development... but I think it's a coincidence. Everything on OS X uses the same font rendering engine, and everything in KDE 4 uses the same font rendering engine, but those same font rendering engines are different. So I think the algorithm was borrowed from OS X to Qt 4.

I could be completely wrong though. Konq is the only KDE 4 app I use, and I'm using the super-experimental Debian pacakges. I also don't use it heavily. (Too many firefox extensions :( )
how is the business model of wufoo different from 37 signals? Are they a startup or a shoe store? A startup should simply be a company that is just getting started. Once they become profitable feel free to call the a "business".
Slicehost is great when you're starting small. The way the hosting plans work out -- you never get an oversold server. Seems more expensive than cheapie VPS providers, but will prove to be worth it over time.
Amazing how short the memory of science journalists can be. This is old news. As you'll find out if you do a quick google: http://www.google.com/search?q=humanity%20near%20extinction

A lot of the results are older than, well, last week.

I believe this idea was even mentioned in a National Geographic documentary. Humans are smart because they're the descendants of a small group (some say around 2000 - so much for inbreeding being bad for your offspring, I guess) that managed to survive some terrible event at some point. The dumber ones died off.

Along those lines, btw, I read somewhere that even after this near extinction it was still only a limited number of people that actually produced any offspring. The worst example of this is the Inca and the Dahomey empires where only the emperor / king and a few highly placed officials could actually have sex, but even in Medieval Europe most peasant males (that is to say, most of the population) did not have any children at all.
Webkit is a fork of Konqueror. Konqueror may have merged in some nice stuff from Webkit by now... :)
Its not that theres a conspiracy its just that sometimes when you have a structure in place its hard for it to change or improve. Does the US government even have a group of people working on just that topic? Surely the three main branches of government can't be the final word. Alan Kay talks about glorious cathedral structures in Smalltalk and a similar structure has set in with science, where researchers are careful with how they write their papers to the point where a mis step could have them falling from the rafters, career wise.
I gave up on running LTS on my servers. After a while it becomes painful to manage, especially if you need to install packages that require newer version of core libraries. It depends on what you're building, but I'm perfectly fine with upgrading my servers at least once a year.
Right, thats his thesis ... His blog indicates that the book has more than what's in the thesis ...
Perhaps the long hours are a consequence of the determination rather than a cause of the success.

I actually thought that people at Google were pretty reasonable. They weren't exactly 9-5, but most people weren't working 80 hours/week either (I certainly didn't).
I would like that too. We just need per-user feeds from news.yc. Patrick has actually written the code, but I think that perhaps PG is concerned about the extra load.
OS X has some great development tools and frameworks.

First of all, Xcode comes with gcc, gdb, make, and all the other usual Unix developer tools. And of course PHP, Python, Perl, Ruby, Java (and others?)

But for GUI applications Cocoa is an excellent API built on a great language, Objective-C. Objective-C is a thin layer on top of C that adds very dynamic object oriented features (actually somewhat similar to Ruby). It might take a little while to get used to the syntax, but it's actually quite readable and pleasant.

Cocoa is pretty verbose, but between the named parameters (sort of) and verbose API names, it ends up being very readable code, almost like you're reading sentences of English. Some people don't like it, especially at first.

Apple has lots of documentation for iPhone devs too, which is also useful for new OS X devs. In particular:

* The video entitled "iPhone Application Development - Getting Started" @ http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action

* http://developer.apple.com/iphone/gettingstarted/docs/object...

More detail on Objective-C: http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Ob...

And Cocoa: http://developer.apple.com/referencelibrary/GettingStarted/G...
It (also) seems to occur if the TLD is not 3 characters (i.e. 2 chars - .at in this case).
What Sun was trying to do with Open Solaris
Khoi Vinh on online newspapers
My co-founder has kids and is older than the OP, and we never felt like that had any impact on our acceptance to YC.
Hrm. I can't seem to edit my post.

Anyway, the mirror is:

http://sadiq.uwcs.co.uk/ycombinator-news20080424.tar.gz
Patterning Interestingness: Some Examples
Xcode and vim for editing, Perl and Python for automation.

The nice thing about Xcode is that when you don't need or otherwise want to avoid the GUI integration, you can: build rules can run anything you want, like a makefile or other script, and even show you the raw output in a terminal-like split view. Apple provides command-line access (/usr/bin/xcodebuild) for those cases where you want to start with an IDE-style project but still have direct build control from outside scripts. I've only dabbled in VS2005, but Microsoft's environment never seemed "avoidable" in the same way. The GUI tangled with every aspect of the project. It was so awkward that I once cranked open "vim" from Linux (over SSH) to edit raw VS2005 XML, and it was much faster than tweaking the project through the GUI!

Speaking of "vim", I often use this for editing on Mac OS X. It depends on the type of edit, I suppose; Xcode has some strengths (e.g. pulling a whole function out is easier with the mouse, and I often do edits based on project search results). But "vim" is deceptively simple, and is ideal for many kinds of edits. It has some pretty addictive features, like simple paren-matching with "%" even when in the middle of a function name.

It's really nice that Mac OS X ships with many scripting languages, because your project can depend on them. For instance, you can automate many tasks in Python and Perl, and other Mac developers can still build your code without a headache. Windows sucks for this; if you share a bunch of code that's heavily automated with scripts, odds are people will have to download and build all the interpreters you're using (and of course, you probably need a batch file to run it, because #!/usr/bin/perl is meaningless to Windows). It's just a completely different environment...I find Mac development infinitely more productive for many reasons but the Unix tool set alone is an unbelievable starting point.
We definitely didn't need the money, and we went to YC. I think plenty has been said about why folks choose YC, and it's pretty rarely the money. There are cheaper sources of financing.
My father and I tried setting up a Yahoo store recently, and it was web 0.5 ugly.
Time for Americans to start stockpiling food
I think it's quite interesting to see him here. He disagrees, in a polite way. That kind of thing is healthy. I don't really agree with dhh's definition of a startup, but there's probably not a sharp line between 'startup' and 'a new business' in some cases. In any case, I like the 37signals model, even though I have some nagging doubts about whether it's really quite so simple in an on line world where network effects and other economic factors are often very different from "the real world".
News.yc is a community site. YC partners may be the stone in the stone soup but the soup comes from the community.
You're not running enough servers or enough services on those servers, if you don't mind upgrading every year. Honestly, I prefer Debian with the volatile repository to address that problem. I find CentOS pretty good, as well--grabbing a Fedora SRPM or two and rebuilding is usually an easy way to get the bleeding edge version of something without much pain.
Thank you.

You also want to mirror the update utility ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=173354 ).
I third it. I can't code, but I'd be happy to help design a search -- my contribution to the community.
Pretty abstract. I don't know if it really even matters. Just make cool stuff.
pg and dhh have been very civil in their exchanges, even though perhaps they're not exactly arguing over profound ideas. It appears that you are the one who has introduced personal attacks on dhh. Would you say those things to him in person?
I call myself an interface designer. But I don't consider what I do purely visual at all. I find that it's hard to describe. How do you describe to someone the feeling you get when you put your tongue on a lemon? Or how it feels to click the "next page" button on newspond.com?

Design is not how it looks, how it feels, or how it works. It's all of those things, together-- it's the experience. On the web, it's the way a layout makes you feel on a subconscious, visceral level and how the buttons and interactive elements literally feel when you click them. On a more tangible level, it's the way the volume knob on a stereo feels stiff when you change the volume, or how a nice doorknob makes a thump-click when you close it.

There's no way to "design" an amazing product if you don't consider everything at the very beginning. On the web, there are three things to consider: visual design, interface architecture, and underlying technology (an analogy would be the tires and color of the exterior, the safety features and interior design, and the engine of a car). If you skimp on any of these three things, your product will seriously suffer. Do you own a Chevy Nova or a Dodge Neon? Of course not. Both of those cars were built by sacrificing visual design and safety features for cheapness.

There's a philosophy of rapidly developing, rapidly releasing, and then rapidly iterating. I think a lot of companies take this too literally and rapidly build everything half-assed, rapidly release half-assed products, and then rapidly iterate half-assed features without ever going back and fixing their half-assed first revision. I think a better process is to design an easy to use, awesome version 1 with the simplest, most necessary features first, then iterate based on that level of quality. At that point, you've set a bar of quality that you simply have to achieve with every release.

To summarize, don't skimp on designers or hackers. Skimp on features. Features are free, and can always be added later.
One huge issue with this is phishing. DNS certainly isn't bulletproof, but combined with SSL it's pretty secure.

If I'm at https://www.bofa.com and my browser doesn't warn me, I can be pretty damn sure I'm actually at Bank of America's website.

If I were taken to https://171.159.65.173 by Google I would really have no idea whether or not it was BofA's site.
Do a google search of this site... it gets covered very regularly.
WebKit Rolls Out CSS Masks
Yeah, I run Slicehost, though people also like Linode which is slightly cheaper than Slicehost.

I don't think anyone here recommends shared hosting.
Well, the data is already available on hacker news, but ye gods! you couldn't figure out a better way to package this up than a separate HTML file for each user?
Mirror of the above download link: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/programming/datasets/ycombina...
You got it: http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/315/programming/datasets/ycombina...
We're talking about different things. The article talks about selling cereal boxes. That's expendable, or at least less vital than other things.

In a more general sense, design has its purpose, no question. How do you make something without designing it? Sure design is a big part of making a product, and is the heart of any business. But the article talks about lipstick.
Very good point. The pricing model probably assumes a high (at least 2x) gross margin. I've heard that specialty goods (i.e. made by small shops) tend to have high margins.