skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there's a lot more to it than that. As a simple example, you can have the best solitaire game out there and every one of your users may love it, but there is nothing viral about that. Even if you get a great review on a blog and a million users download it after reading the review, it's still not viral. It's just popular. It doesn't have a built-in mechanism for spreading from one user to another. You can argue that it goes viral by users recommending it to other users, but that requires active behavior from the user that has nothing to do with using the game.

Now if you take a multi-player game where I have to send out an invite to another user to play, that's viral. It's built into the game. That's why a game like Scrabulous can spread so quickly within Facebook (and that's how I was introduced to it).

There is another comment here that Google is viral. I think that's another example of popular, not viral. I can use Google 100 times a day to search, but there is nothing that I'm doing that introduces Google to other users unless I just actively send them an email. Hotmail, on the other hand, seems more viral to me because, as a user, I'm using it just to send mail, but I'm passively promoting it to every person I send an email to because there is a link in the message -- I don't need to do anything other than just use the product for its intended purpose for it to be viral. That won't happen with Google.

Some might argue that some videos are viral even though the user has to actively pass the link on to someone else, but I don't think that's how a site or an application becomes viral. Also, most content goes viral because it's posted a relatively small number of times to sites with relatively large numbers of visitors (Digg, for example).

I may be off-track here as far as what most people consider viral, but I get the sense that in general, to be viral, the increase in users has to be either from passive behavior of existing users (like Hotmail) or because there is a real benefit to an existing user by introducing new users (like Scrabulous or even Facebook in general). Maybe the term "viral" has been so overused that it is now synonymous with "popular". If that's the case, then you can ignore this entire reply ;-)
Interview: Xerox PARC’s future focus
How To Make It Hard For People To Find Your Startup Online
"but I have talked to some ex-startup vets here in Wisconsin"

I see what you did there. Nobody lives in Wisconsin.

Seriously, though, while I'm sure such metrics would be useful to someone, I don't think pg needs to convince people that YC provides value. YC gets hundreds (possibly even thousands) of applicants for every program. If you need a chart to prove to yourself that there's value in YC, go for it.
Report: In Emergencies, People Turn to Facebook
Sure, but I'm interested in other resources as well.
You might like the book High Tech Startup by Nessheim. It's basically a collection of statistics about startups.
Well, don't build easily reproducible shit then. Become a Photoshop, not Gimp. There isn't anything "as good in every way" as Flickr. And if you give me a crappy toaster as a gift, I'll throw it away and pay for a better one.

I don't understand why "web 2.0" entrepreneurs think they're different. I can imagine it may be hard for many to accept that what they do isn't worth a dime in consumers' eyes. Accept it and move on - build something with value, and do it better than the next guy.
Xiaonei, the Facebook of China, raises $430M — better funded than Facebook
Well, hopefully the VC's don't have majority control of the xobini board after one round of funding. If your VC's don't want you to sell early, they don't have the power to stop you unless they have this power written into the terms of your funding agreement. I've heard of VC's trying to get a liquidation preference with a 2X or 3X cap, which would effectively deter founders from taking quick exits, but I haven't heard of them getting flat-out veto power. So I imagine that the Xobini founders certainly did have this option. Why else would they have wasted time negotiating and signing a letter of intent to sell?
I admire their guts and their determination. It's awfully hard for 20-something folks to look at 20 million bucks (probably $10mil by the time the investors got their share, but still serious lifestyle-changing money) and walk away from it. Of course, as Matt pointed out, VCs don't like such a small return. 100% in 18 months isn't bad, but it's also not the kind of returns VCs need to see to make their math add up right. They can afford to fail frequently, but they can't afford to succeed modestly on a few investments and fail on the rest of them--they can only afford the failures if the successes are huge. So, it's either fail hard or win huge. It's a weird model, but it seems to work for the investors (the entrepreneurs might not always be getting a great deal out of that math, though).

Anyway, I'm optimistic that the guys have the flexibility to evolve their ideas into a $100mil business. Wider platform support is crucial, of course, but so is solving a "hair on fire" kind of problem. Email is obviously a huge industry, and I know there will be many more huge successes in email-related startups, but they've got some stiff competition.

So, get back to work guys...you've got a long hard road ahead of you.
for the Major Method, there is an application helping with the encoding step:

http://www.phoneticmnemonic.com/

(it works quite good, but only on short numbers up to 3 digits, so you have to split longer numbers 'manually', which isn't so bad IMO). It's also available as a FF extension (didn't test it myself).
I have also gotten that feeling with KDE 4; it feels to me as if it is barely customizable.

KDE 3.5.6, however, I think is quite good and doesn't force you into anything. Everything is customizable, it's speedy (-er than v4 by a lot), and GNOME apps as well as others work perfectly on it, so its not taking over anything.

KDE 4, though, needs a lot of work. I hope the devs improve it quickly, or keep supporting version three for a while, because as it is right now, KDE 4 feels unpleasant and junky.
I don't know enough about electronics to know how sensationalist this article is being.

does it really have all the implications that are mentioned in the article? (analog computing, AI)
VCs should allow a company to be acquired when they believe its value has peaked, not some preset ratio or return. A smart VC would sell at 80% return if he thought it was only down from there.
Google: 5 Reasons to Stay, 5 Reasons to Leave 
Why is Google so special?? And even more importantly, why should employees leave now before it’s too late??

Listen, don’t get me wrong I love Google, but hey, people are leaving and I’m here to make sure you know why.
I wonder what ever happened to Weed, the Mint rip off??!? Last I heard a V.2 was coming, but then it just fell off everyones radar.
If I'm reading this correctly, I can't believe Microsoft blinked. All the talk of proxy fights and deadlines and new boards...and now this? I'm not much of a businessman but raising your offer before the other side makes a counter-offer, and after the "deadline" you tried to impose has passed with no effect at all, just makes you look real desperate. If I were Yahoo I would see no reason at all to come down to $33 from whatever they are targeting.
Should it bother me that the Chairman of one of the largest equity funds in the world doesn't know Smith from Ricardo?

I guess not.

....

My father wrote in my sixth-grade yearbook quoting Hamlet - Polonius to his son, Laertes: "To thine own self be true."

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord [viz, Polonius], one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Deferential, glad to be of use,
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;
Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous--
Almost, at times, the Fool.
I think there are pretty good obfuscation tools to provide some degree of protection to C# or Java apps (although I don't remember if they are free). But if you have some proprietary code that you don't want anyone to see the best solution is to run it on your own server and just expose an interface to code that runs on customer machines.
"... The deal would have been a natural for Microsoft, which was offering to buy the two-year old startup for somewhere in the $20-million range ... Xobni offers a plug-in for Outlook that makes it smarter and easier to use ..."

The product is a strategic choice. A choke point for desktop users to the Internet. Microsoft desktop users. The low offer could reflect the lack of competition. So the question can Xobni adapt to what people want and bring in a competitor?

Then I read this article ~ http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/04/28/xobnis-secret-project-m...
Actually, it's a pretty good C book. I'm just surprised you knew many people who used it for their first book. I would have thought its popularity as a first book paled in comparison with K&R.
What's Up at Ning? Apparently Not Much - Ning's Down
Google's New Mantra: Make Money Off YouTube
http://www.paulgraham.com/googles.html

"Tip for acquirers: when a startup turns you down, consider raising your offer, because there's a good chance the outrageous price they want will later seem a bargain. [1]

From the evidence I've seen so far, startups that turn down acquisition offers usually end up doing better. Not always, but usually there's a bigger offer coming, or perhaps even an IPO."
rewind. that was so damn well written. bad ass!

i think viral is so overused it could be called the internet.

there are many things out there considering to be viral since they are growing. bottom line: who cares. i think if your site/product is good it should grow (grows better with math/analytics) and stick around (if you continually improve it).
Where do people find the time? - on the 'Cognitive Surplus'. [video]
Companies turn to Facebook in search of staff
You can have control of the board, but veto rights on acquisitions is a very standard provision in the Investors Rights Agreement for institutional rounds. I'd be shocked to hear of a series A financing without that provision - that would be truly unusual.
He's counting the combined company of Reddit + Infogami (Notabug) as both of them. Conde Nast's acquisition was for all of it, even if Aaron did get fired a couple weeks later...
I really think that if Xobni sticks to it's guns, they can probably have a nice ISV and make quite a bit more than $20 million a year without breaking a sweat. If they price their product for $100 a license, then they'd only have to sell 200,000 licenses a year to reach $20 million a year.
Stackless Python MUD framework
Clojure also supports this Lispier syntax:

(.someMethod instance)
OpenBSD 4.3 released
Finally Google PR updated
Post about google finally updating their page rank + what to do to get and maintain PR
How to Make a Cheap Multitouch Pad
The thing that struck me was the point about Moore's Law not being applicable to cars - which seems to go against his point of not believing in limits.

If we all expected cars to double their efficiency every 2 years maybe people would be working on that just like they are working hard to double the number of transistors every 2 years.
My newish blog got a PR4 yesterday, this is with 10 PR5/6 blog post links, a .edu link, a blogroll or two, and a whole lot of reddit links.

And... be careful. Generally this audience doesn't care about SEO topics, so continually submitting your SEO blog is an easy way to get banned.
Google Sets Sights On 3D Map of the Oceans
'When it comes to business and relationships, I don't buy this idea of diversification. It neglects comparative advantage. The best way to lower risk is to specialize: Put the things that you love into one portfolio.'
Schmidt to Brand Advertisers: Google is a BIG Gamble
16 "must have died"...just goes to show that startups don't really die, they just fade away. The only YC startup I know of that officially ended at a specific time is Kiko; are there others?
I have just recently created a command line utility for making clojure scripts/plugins for ImageJ, from within ImageJ. Release details very soon at http://pacific.mpi-cbg.de/wiki

Clojure is an excellent language for extending any java application and using java libraries.
great resource. thanks!
Seed Funded Company Looking for Web Developer
Looking for a Fun Summer Job?

Want your work actually to make a direct and tangible difference? Looking for a fun place where you will be taken seriously and will personally shape the direction of a budding company?

StudyBuddy is an online academic networking startup aimed at facilitating student-to-student academic communication and interaction on college campuses. StudyBuddy, started by Harvard undergraduates, was recently named a finalist in Harvard's new $80,000 "Innovation Challenge," and was one of 12 teams chosen from more than 200 to participate in a summer business incubator program this summer. StudyBuddy is in its early stages, and is looking for another team member to join us in developing on our revolutionary academic communication framework.

Summer interns will join the StudyBuddy team, receiving competitive compensation and the potential to receive equity in the company, becoming a central figure as we grow beyond the summer. Interns should have PHP, HTML and CSS experience. Knowledge of servers/web hosting, MySQL, and graphic design are a plus. Above all, we're looking for someone who's excited to join a high potential company that will affect the lives of students across the country.

Interested in learning more?

Contact:
Shankar Ramaswamy (Ramaswam@fas.harvard.edu)
this does not look like an IP buy for MS, it looks like a human capitol buy. It's one thing to have a product, a business and be allowed the freedom to innovate. Its another thing to be brought in and fix someone-else's problem. Its my guess that MS wanted Xobni to re-vitalize outlook rather than advance their product.
Missing services for Google App Engine
Justin.tv is hiring the smartest hackers from News.YC
We got abstractbill. Who is next?

Justin.tv is the biggest Flash live video site online. We serve hundreds of thousands of video streams a day, and have supported up to 30k live concurrent viewers. Our site is growing every week, and we just signed a contract for a 2gbps commit in our colo. Our unique visitors are up 900% since January, and we just broke the Alexa Top 500 yesterday.

There are a lot of pieces that fit together to make Justin.tv work: our video cluster, IRC server, our web app, and our monitoring and search services, to name a few. Both our video and chat servers are written in the Twisted framework, and we're looking for talented engineers who want to improve these things and build more.

Responsibilities

* Contribute to product design and implementation discussions
* Implement projects from the idea phase to production
* Test and iterate code before and after production release

Qualifications

* We like dynamic languages. You should too. A lot of the things we build are in Twisted or Rails.
* Experience building web applications.
* A strong desire to work on website with passionate users and ideas for how to improve it.
* Experience hacking video streams, python, Twisted or rails all a plus.

While we're growing rapidly, Justin.tv is still a small, technology focused company, built by hackers for hackers. Six of our eight person team are engineers or designers. We believe in rapid development, and push out new code releases every week. We're based in a beautiful office (see pics) in the SOMA district of SF, one block from the caltrain station. If you want a fun job hacking on code that will touch a lot of people, JTV is for you.

Note: You must be physically present in SF to work for JTV. Completing the technical problem at http://jtvproblems.weebly.com (for non-Flash devs) will go a long way with us. Cheers!
Recursion confessional
Would you read programming books if I offered you free pizza?
even if Aaron did get fired a couple weeks later

I think he quit more than got fired, but spun it off that way for the romanticism. It's funny how being fired can be romanticized :)
If I had to choose between RAM-speed HD access and cheaper HDs... The former completely changes the game for so many things, the latter not so much.
EBay-Craigslist Fight Is About Kijiji and Control, Complaint Shows
Same question, for Django.
Redmine - Excellent alternative to Trac
We use Analytics primarily here, I've always wanted to give RM-Manage a go (interface looks pretty).

One app we're currently trialing with scout (scoutapp.com).. looks promising so far, I haven't had a chance to go in and really look at the data produced to far though.
Will Urchin track AJAX requests?
"If they price their product for $100 a license, then they'd only have to sell 200,000 licenses a year to reach $20 million a year."

Since the price of MS Office Home Edition is $150, imho they will have a tough time justifying a price higher than $29.99 (with the current feature set of Xobni at least). Don't get me wrong - I like Xobni... I am just saying this from a practical sales standpoint.

Considering this and considering they have to pay income tax instead of capital gains tax, they may have to sell at least a million copies to make $20 million.

Of course they can make it into a product with a ton more features making it worth $100 a piece in the eyes of Joe CubeDweller.
I'm honestly surprised by all the fuss over xobni. I have it running on my Outlook at work, where I get a ton of e-mails per day, and I frankly haven't found it to be very useful as of yet. Maybe I haven't fooled with it enough.
Ask Hacker News: Picking code for mainframe jobs
I'm currently working as a mainframe operator, but my career aspirations lie in programming. I'm being granted an opportunity to learn more JCL, which is the language used to control jobs on z/OS mainframes.

I'm currently studying "z/OS JCL" by Gary DeWard Brown, and one of the first exercises has me programming a really simple job. However, none of the examples use straight JCL. Instead, they utilize (respectively) COBOL, PL/I, FORTRAN, and C/C++. I'm encouraged to use the language I'm most comfortable with, however, I have no practical experience with any of these languages.

This could be a defining moment for my early career. The code I choose to utilize will probably be the one I work with for the extent of my time with JCL. Therefore, I'd like to pick one that will make me a "better programmer" and more desirable to future employers. Please advise.
Somewhat justified - it allows nano-scale analog processing elements and storage. More details here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memristor
Interview with Ebay Founder: Pursue Your Passion
Javascript - Event compatibility tables
Would a VC pass on 2x even if they knew it was the sweetest the deal would be?

What if its the best possible exit?

Do you think the VC's are valuing xobni higher than $20m even in the face of Microsoft inevitably copying all of their features?
Some more details here: http://eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=...
"But you can also say "Gee, we couldn't get into with YC their (relatively) lower standards, how are we ever gonna impress an Angel/VC?" and you'll also be correct."

I would argue that YC standards are, and can be, higher. They see a lot more companies each year than most VCs. They can't see as much of the potential of the founders because it is so early in the process...but they have a lot more to choose from, so they're able to pick the ones that seem about to explode from excitement about their business and seem smart enough and dedicated enough to deliver it.

pg has said that investors (including him) invest in businesses that are like a train leaving the station, whether the investor is on-board or not. Investors hate to miss a success, even more than they hate to bet on a failure, so if you aren't convinced of your own success with or without one particular investor, you aren't what they are looking for. It seems to me that you probably weren't convincing on this point.
My favorite: "Focus on those things you do better than others."

After years of doing "okay" at things I don't particularly shine at, I'm coming to realize that the above advice could really yield dividends.
Author is clueless: "changes in voltage, or flux" - in this case flux is not change in voltage, but magnetic field.
Painting the bike shed. Classic.

Why should I care what color the bike shed is? The really, really short answer is that you should not.

http://www.unixguide.net/freebsd/faq/16.19.shtml
... company's valuation at over $560,000. Is unplanned downtime acceptable for a company thats in the half-a-billion club?

May be it is acceptable for half-a-million club? :-)
How to be a super hacker
They should have called it flux capacitor, because that's what it is.
I think your last sentence illustrates why guys like me (unfairly) have issues with Clojure wrt the JVM. I don't do Java at all; I messed around with it back in the days of 1.2 and pretty much forgot about it.

It seems like a most of the people using Clojure come from a Java background, and most of the things being done with Clojure dip heavily into the Java ecosystem.

Now as I said previously, I think this is an unfair assessment, from me or from anyone else. I realize that Clojure used to also live on the CLR. It's just that it is incredibly easy to implement the functionality from Java (and I suppose it was this way on .Net as well), so that it feels almost like it's loose DSL written in Java, not a full language that just happens to live on the JVM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flux

"Flux is usually the integral of a vector quantity over a finite surface."

So, I don't think the author is clueless. The vector quantity in this case is the electric field.

Edit: although, from reading a little bit more about the Memristor, it appears that it actually relates the magnetic flux to the charge.

d(phi) = Mdq

So, maybe the author is indeed clueless.
Up until Google, software products in Beta usually had many bugs. Typically, this would be desktop software that had not been tested in more operating environments than the developer's own computer. I believe Google was the first major web application to use the term beta, and at the time, it was a very strange thing to do. It was probably because they were in "beta" that they didn't try to place ads all over the place; they didn't want to worry about that because they were too busy trying to figure out the best search algorithm.

Beta could mean that more features are coming soon, like with Google. But Beta can be the original meaning--that the software or web app is available for feedback but may not even work correctly. That's not something new, however.
A higher offer was the second most likely scenario after a hostile takeover according to http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/04/if-microsoft-go.html
Usually the way startups die is that they launch something, users ignore it, investors are lukewarm, and they get demoralized and give up. Sometimes there are other forces encouraging them to give up, like the pull of school, or the push of founder conflicts.

It's normal for users not to like what you first launch with, and for investors to be lukewarm. (Investors are basically permanently lukewarm.) So the groups who give up usually are looking at about the same information as other groups who keep going and succeed. Most of the time it comes down to whether they see the glass as half full or half empty.
Back When Amazon Was a Startup ...
Yes, a number of them are. I don't know the exact number, because we don't have this info in all cases, but I've heard from several groups that they're now profitable.
Oops, yes, forgot them.
It's on the same level as the invention of the transistor.
Poll: Should Xobni have taken Microsoft's offer?
There's a similar poll on techcrunch, but the readership here is smarter and savvier :)

What would you have done in Xobni's position?
Take the $20 million.