skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Try solving your own problems. Your own company is not unique, there are probably two hundred others who have the same problems.

But if someone solves the same problem as you, whine about it and have a quasi book-burning ordeal where you get it permanently removed from the internet. (Campfire)
You are More than Your Portfolio
ning is the future of the web imo.
it is the solution to the noise to signal ratio as you can join the networks that mirror your interests and get links filtered by other users on that network.

every ning network should have a digg/reddit type page generated for it automatically...
Isn't DHH a speaker at startup school? I'd watch out, apparently his company has some sort of imaginary patent on all chat clients.
That is a body building routine. Most people don't want to get a huge ass and well muscled but still protruding gut. It's also absurdly split up and apparently designed for someone already huge. Two different sets of squats AND deadlifts in the same day?! That is for some puffed up monster. That's just a complete waste of time for an athlete or someone going for fitness.

> Aerobic exercise is great, but you shouldn't do it to lose weight.

WTF? Distance is THE way to lose weight. There are a ton of bloated guys throwing around barbells. I never see a fat person making good time on the trails.
Actually, I saw quite a few fat people on the trails today. Not making good time, well that's physics.
I'll qualify that a lot of genuinely fat people have insulin sensitivity issues and increasing muscle mass is actually a higher priority than aerobic training for that reason. But if you're just pudgy? Distance burns that off lickety split.
Is It Good For Entrepreneurs to Laugh? I Think So.
"It happened with his product, the launch of huddlechat, but that as you know was taken down."

DHH != 37signals
Reputation is only involved if you are a reputable source, and this may not be the way to become one.
李连杰
功夫之王
It's supposed to be. We haven't made it yet :)

This isn't a launch; it's a demo.
I wasn't aware of quotas. Thanks for the info.
Oh, I'm not offended in any way. Sorry if it came off that way. I just think the power of his speech was lost in translation.

The notes are really good, actually.
This would only work if someone else made their radius cover the entire US and Canada. The way it works is that both parties have to be inside each others' radius. This prevents spamming and assures that if you're only interested in a very local scope, you only receive messages from people close to you.

We'll try to make that more clear when we launch the beta. The screencast will help too.
Several years ago, I discovered a way to manage my emotional state as a byproduct of something else I was trying to do - relearn Russian for an overseas project. I had read in several places that you can 'replasticize' your brain for learning by doing neurofeedback and sought out a local practitioner.

He stuck tiny gold sensors on my head with a conductive paste and hooked me up to his PC and told me to 'make the beeps come'. I laid back and tried to clear my head and think of nothing. Every once in a while I'd hear a beep and then I'd _try_ to do the same thing and no beeps would come. After a few times, my mind would wander and one day I thought about when I was playing with a puppy earlier and I smiled to myself and suddenly there were lots of beeps.

Between weekly sessions, I'd practice for 20 minutes daily. Did it help my Russian? Maybe, I really don't have a way of getting the data for it. I think it might have, but also being in daily email correspondence with a real live Russian and having my livelihood dependent on writing in Russian contributed as well.

One of the things I noticed was that on days that I 'meditated', things magically got done with a lot less resistance and internal drama and that I was far more productive. How much more? Well, in true Hacker's diet tradition, I made a spreadsheet and tracked it. While I didn't have a numeric scale, and therefore couldn't apply a weighted moving average, I was able to look at the todo lists and see what kinds of things got crossed off and what didn't and make a qualitative evaluation that I got about twice as much done on days where I laid down and connected with my inner puppy in the morning. This is after tracking for three months. It was obvious that it was beneficial before I started tracking, but I was very curious as to how beneficial and the three months tracked over two different kinds of projects - one creative and one analytical. I think the meditation also helped the transition between the two - which usually takes some time if I'm changing disciplines.

I explored several other forms of meditation and eventually had success with the thinking of nothing for twenty minutes. There was one with counting to ten over and over that felt like training wheels and I didn't like. I kept coming back to that puppy and found that it was the most effective.

This is a fascinating question and one that I'll follow. I'm very glad you asked it.
Paul Graham said that 57 of the 80 startups they
funded are still alive, for some value of alive.

PG was also including companies that have been acquired or merged as "not alive", so the number that have outright gone out of business is lower than 23.
"Where once a musician would spend months praying that her demo reached the ear of the right A&R scout, now MySpace and GarageBand allow her to reach anyone, anywhere across the world."

No, it's actually still a huge amount of work to get any kind of success in the music or fine art worlds. Now, you get to be your own marketing team, label, and booking agency. And the labels wait to see who wins that game, then grabs them.
“The entrepreneur's factory” encourages employees to come up with fresh ideas
Seth Godin’s Meatball Sundae – 14 Trends No Marketer Should Ignore
Chocolate.com : A start-up innovates in an unexpected field
My first business, which ran profitably for about 5 of its 7 years, was a solo effort. I don't recommend it. Your definition of vacation changes, your number of friends will plummet, and your health will probably suffer. I'm a bit of a health nut and a vegetarian and that didn't change much, but I stopped cycling--which was something I did heavily throughout my youth, through college and up until the solo startup...I'm riding again now--and put on a few extraneous pounds and had slightly high blood pressure.

It's certainly possible, and most of my mistakes were not related to being solo (though I might have been able to think more clearly, and spend more time on correcting strategy and the direction of the business, had I not been abusing my body and mind by working for too many hours and under too much stress). Raising money is certainly a problem in a solo effort, though I had a couple of offers with my previous business (angel money, as well as a relatively serious VC offer--but it was in 1999 when everybody and their brother was getting money).
Colin, don't forget to mention your Open Source credentials if you do decide to raise money (if your OSS work is part of your startup, even better). It's not going to impress every investor...but we've found more than a few that recognize the value of someone that has built products used by millions of people. It is, at the very least, proof of competence and ability to execute on large projects.
I think that's the pertinent question. Can you web really be used to rise above the noise or is it still a mainstream media world?
Ask: Is WordPress really as slow as simple benchmarking suggests?
I've never run my own copy of WordPress. To experiment with it, I installed a simple LAMP bundle (XAMPP) with the default settings and then installed Wordpress (which is very easy if you've ever used databases).

Then I benchmarked it a little with the Apache benchmarking program ab.

I made a test post and then called ab on the page - the URL was http://localhost/wordpress/?p=3, i.e. I was running this locally on my machine. I called ab with various numbers of clients from 5 to 40 and basically WordPress topped out at 27 requests a second.

Retrieving a small static file, on the other hand, ran at about 3000 requests a second.

Now, the way to make WordPress, or just about any web application faster, is to use caching. In the case of Wordpress, there are app-specific caching plugins and you can also use bytecode caches like APC. These greatly increase the speed of WordPress, but probably 99% of all WordPress installations never use them.

I think, out of the box, WordPress should be able to produce many more requests than it does. I'm very much a fan of the "batteries included" philosophy, and I think you shouldn't need to install any plugins to get good performance.

The hardware I'm on is: Core 2 Quad, 2 GB RAM, Windows XP, 300 GB SATA2 hard drive.
Full stop.

Incentivizable offers are a good short term solution. I went from $60 a day to maybe $2 a day whereas subscriptions of $5/month hold steady.
Reminds me of a similar concept in the wine industry recently where some academic used statistical tools to predict which wines would be best.

I'd be interested to see if one could actually taste the difference between tcho's and Hershey's chocolate.
I was half expecting to get rick-rolled with that title.
What's the ideal blog post length?
Boeing vs Bloomberg: Visuals are the key to situational awareness
In terms of insider/outsider politics, the key factor is developing trust, collaboration and accountability from the start
Favorite SUS presenter?
Who was your favorite presenter? Bezos was pretty sweet.
Packed House At Y Combinator Startup School
A nice, basic, simple (but not easy) way is this:

a. cut the gratuitously bad stuff out of your diet. Drop sodas, chips, candy, etc. If you eat fast food, get a grilled chicken sandwich and a salad instead of a double cheeseburger and fries.

B. add some exercise. It doesn't have to be a lot, but what has worked well for me over the years is walking on a treadmill, and gradually upping the incline to increase the resistance as my conditioning improves; and/or increasing my speed or adding time to my sessions.

You'd be amazed how much weight you can lose if you walk on a treadmill for an hour at 3.5 MPH, with the incline set all the way up, 4-5 times a week. Just be patient. Trying to lose more than 2 lbs a week is probably not a good idea, and it takes some fairly hard work (see above) to lose even 2 lbs a week.
Really, as soon as Justin TV gets the video online, people should see it. DHH's presentation really was the best of the bunch in my opinion, followed by San Altman's.

He really made a lot of sense. There is so much talk and buzz about getting funded that it was really refreshing to hear some one talk about just plain starting a business. The profit margins in the software business are very, very high. If you can offer a decent product and get people to pay for it, you can make a rather nice living for yourself without having to play the funding game.
Seed Fu: Simple Seed Data for Rails
I have one of these:

http://www.ikea.com/us/en/catalog/products/40141079

It sits directly behind my monitor and lights up the room so that I am not blinded by my monitor. It isn't enough to read by, though, so if I need to do that I use a regular desk lamp. But for computing, this sort of setup is ideal (IMHO anyway).
What do you think will happen to Bebo now that they have been bought by AOL?
> Effectively, this is about casually describing your work to random people and finding serendipitous connections to other projects or learning unexpected, but relevant information.

I work at home, but I find that IRC is a fine outlet for this. There is a much bigger pool of people to draw from when you're talking about a worldwide network as opposed to a few people in your office.

The real problem is that when you work at home, it's very easy to go for days (or weeks) without talking to anyone in real life. It's not bad in general (communicating on the Internet is not that different from communicating face to face), but it is difficult to meet girls :) (To be fair, it was like that when I worked at a big company too. I'm 22, everyone else was in their 40s. I would rather be alone than to have to talk to those people :)
Suspension of disbelief applies to networking
The first 6 months of my startup the 3 founders lived together , and worked from the same (large) apartment. I would say that was a keystone in us being able to put in the 24/7 focus/communication/time necessary to get it off the ground.
Three Certain Things: Death, Taxes and the Shift to the Web
intrigued, i bought a bunch of their beta bars and sent them some friends as presents. even those who don't care much for dark chocolate really like the bar. i'm pretty sure you'd be able to tell the difference btw hershey's and tcho. it's cool b/c i could taste a lot of different "flavors" like grapefruit. i am biased b/c i'm a bit of a food geek...
JSSh: TCP/IP JavaScript Shell Server for Mozilla
Struggling to Evade the E-Mail Tsunami
Full Video: Today's Y Combinator startup school
Ask YC: Anyone Record Startup School?
I'm trying to find a recording of the speakers at startup school to download and watch as I have time.

I see that Justin.tv recorded it and I can watch it there, but there were some gaps and other issues with their copy of the event.

Does anyone else have a copy of the event recorded that could post it somewhere for us?

[Edit] I see that http://startupschool.org/faq.html says

"Will you podcast startup school?

Yes; check the site on the day."

but I haven't seen it yet. Maybe tomorrow.
I haven't seen them all yet, but I did see and like David Heinemeier Hansson's presentation. It was energetic, covered an important topic, and was entertaining/funny (though NSFW at some points).
Are videos of the complete talks going to be posted some place? The recoding on Justin.tv is spotty and incomplete.
Someone (Paul Graham?) mentioned that Omnisio was also recoring the proceedings. (At the very least there were certainly two cameras so we can be reasonably confident a second version will appear.)
Check Justin.tv tomorrow. Bill from JTV said at the end of todays session he would post them tomorrow so maybe the missing pieces will be added.
Thanks. I'm also hoping that I will be able to find downloadable (not .flv) files - maybe even broken up by speaker if possible.
Data management for Internet-scale identity management (MySQL ain't gonna cut it)
http://www.justin.tv/hackertv

Advised there will be a link available
Testing for problems is one way to not get burned by bad code, but the best way to avoid being burned is to not write bad code in the first place.

Hint: it's bad to globally modify classes. You should keep your modifications scoped to the smallest part of your program possible. (This is also why we stopped using global variables.)
That's quite a strange list of highlights.
You can't compare a web server serving static content to a serving dynamically generated content that comes from a database this way. All dynamically generated database bound content no matter what language or framework you use will be orders of magnitude slower than static content.

27 requests a second is just fine and vastly more than 99% of blogs will ever need. For those very few than need more, as you say, it only takes a few plugins to install caching to get speeds that match static content serving.

27 requests a second for 24 hours is 2.3 million hits a day, very very few websites out of the millions and millions in existence, get that much traffic. Why exactly are you even worried about this? 27 requests a second is not bad performance.
True. I learnt this in my second week in SF. At my first salsa lesson, we split in two lines, between "leaders" and "followers", to match up, and I see this guy in front of me.
Me: You are in the wrong line
Him: No, I am not. I hope it is ok with you

umm...... ok, sure.... it was kinda awkward,
For a time, 4 of us live together and work from a house our investor owned in bel-air. The year is coming to a close and I must say, it was both worthwhile for the company and a blast as a personal experience. Felt like 3 years crammed into 1...

Make sure to give each other personal space... and be very tolerant of each other's annoyances, cause you have them too. :)
Haha, Bezos' fan thanking him for Gmail or something lost in translation was the defining moment; although Bezos' AWS pitching to the ground made me groan.

Definitely, Hansson's was better; who'd have thought charging your customers wasn't a bad idea after all?
Startup School 2008 - Thanks for a great day, Y Combinator! (photos of the speakers)
Bezos was good, though it was primarily an ad for AWS. I did find him quite entertaining, though. During the Q&A, when he passed the question on to an AWS developer (I presume), the answer was painfully weaselly--completely without an answer--and Jeff's response was along the lines of, "since that didn't answer your question, I believe that means if you call him up he'll take care of your problem". It was a very nice way of calling out his employee for giving such a weaselly response.

Buchheit is always enlightening and entertaining, though this one was a bit disjointed and far less polished than previous presentations I've seen him give. Still enjoyable, however, and his insights are always...insightful. His brand of dry nerd humor is very enjoyable, as well. He's also one of the most arrogantly humble people I've ever seen--he's smug about knowing the limits of his knowledge. (I mean this in a good way. It's a self-confidence born of awareness of the limits of human beings, which leads to him being really wise about a lot of things.)

pg was also a bit less organized than usual--it didn't quite hold together the way his "Why Not Start a Startup" talk from last year did, or the one he gave the prior year. But I think he's on to a really interesting idea, with his "do good, and you're more likely to be successful" theory...I think his excitement to share it led to it not getting the polish of his prior efforts (which is OK--I'd rather have heard it today in a rough form than have to wait another year to hear it in a fleshed out form--but I do hope there's an essay that gets it perfect).

DHH was a nice counter-balance to McAdoo--I enjoyed both, and think very highly of both. I think DHH thought he was saying something counter to what McAdoo believes, though...but I've talked to McAdoo in the past, as he's quite sympathetic to lifestyle businesses--his presentation was about VCs and what VCs look for. They aren't after lifestyle businesses, because they would make no money on them, not because they think you're an idiot for building a lifestyle business. Anyway, it's a good idea to have two possible paths presented.

I enjoyed Arrington. He was very forthcoming about the direction TechCrunch has been going as it has grown--while the site is generally quite generous to the startups it covers (and harder on bigger businesses), the comments are almost universally hostile. It's one of the things that makes TechCrunch far less enjoyable for me, and I was happy to note that it's a problem that he's aware of and is trying to do something about. I found him genuinely likable.

The lawyer, as always, was painfully boring. The Wilson Sonsini folks are awesome, and actually better than the non-WS lawyer talks I've seen, but still quite a snoozer that early in the morning (and there was no more hot water by the time I arrived, so I was running without tea...now that I think of it, the hot water is always gone by the time I get there...three startup schools in a row, now).
Chocolate.com is not the website domain name, it is www.tcho.com.
People seem to think Japan = Miso, Green Tea and Sushi, but let me present some popular alternatives - Tonkatsu - deep-fried pork cutlet - ice-cream bread (a loaf of white bread with the centre filled with ice-cream) - endless convenience store aisles of two-minute noodle bowl - prized marbled beef (which always looks to be 50% fat!), etc. Though it is true I eat a lot of cabbage here.
World Domination, or At Least a Couple of Bucks
He wasn't being a dick. I was also sitting there and I can attest that it's not near as powerful to read out of context as it was to see it.

A lot of that comes from the fact that he came on right after Greg McAdoo (Sequoia Partner) and just unloaded a totally contrasting view, and the delivery was excellent. Reading it in bullet point form just doesn't convey that (although the notes were great otherwise).

Everyone had great things to say, and Greg McAdoo really impressed me as well, but in the context of the whole day, DHH was pretty refreshing.
That's what I thought. Seems there's a subtext missing.
A halogen torch lamp with variable output. Nice indirect light and no flickering.
Video will be up soon, Don't worry Omnisio will post about it very soon.
I wonder if US culture's attitude towards introverts is going to change now that we're starting to be the new entrepreneur. I think it's been biased towards extroverts because people consider extroversion to be necessary for making the US great, i.e. cowboys. Not that cowboys were all that extroverted anyways.
What does a 6.4E9 N-body particle simulation look like? This. (large JPG)
Well phrased.
Supposedly the guys at Omnisio (http://www.omnisio.com) recorded everything and will have it posted soon, although I haven't seen anything yet.
Best highlight: Very nervous guy thanks Bezos for gmail.
I thought that Sam Altman's presentation was very informative. He gave great advise about VCs. His talk fit in well with Jack Sheridan's talk.

For me, David Hansson's talk was pretty obvious but it seemed to be very relevant to most people. It was well received by others.

I had heard Greg McAdoo's talk last year but I really enjoy hearing him speak.

Paul's talk was also very interesting about being benevolent as a strategy for a start up.
Full?
It will indeed work fine for most blogs. It's just that if anything any of your users ever creates is submitted to a popular site like Digg, it won't suffice.

The job of the developer is to solve problems for the user. I think not having adequate scalability built in is slacking off on the job.
Thanks for these notes. Very detailed and captured the meaning perfectly. But you just had to be there to see the frenetic energy with which he boils on stage.
We can't wait, this is the INTERNET!
True if you have access to capital. I think one message that I didn't get when at the 2005 Startup School is that you're not learning nearly enough if you try to bootstrap, because capitalization is important at every stage of the business. I also could have used the frame of mind in The Equity Equation more than the VC horror stories, which I already knew having been laid off from a dot-com in 2000.

At the time I figured, hey, I had more money than YC would give me and although I knew that the money was not the valuable part, I didn't fully grok the implications.

So I discovered this the hard way. Now instead of an entrepreneurship career, which I would love, now it's more like the end of a brief career.
http://www.justin.tv/hackertv/97554/Startup_School