skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
YC: Tales From the Startup Crypt
I'm currently working for a startup that has lasted 6 years without a series B. I was talked into joining it 7 months ago by a friend, but ever since then things have been downhill. Recently the VCs brought in a consultant who basically was the CEO of another failed startup which died before it got off the ground. He in turn connected us with another consultant who was key in turning a couple of startups around that are now major companies (if you've ever bought anything online you've used their services).

This guy was given the task of forming contacts with other companies that would be interested in our technology. We receive a forwarded email about a month later by our CEO (who has now basically given up most control to the VCs). In it is an email forward from this consultant to an interested company. The email is chock full of features and promised to be beta ready by June 1st. Our CEO sent this out to us and has denied in emails going back and forth that there is anything to worry about.

Engineering is ticked because none of this information was even checked with us to see how much work would be involved. Meanwhile, our CEO founder keeps saying we just need to get this one feature and this other company won't care. It really sounds more like a case of overpromise, under sell. Whether he realizes it or not, 4/5 of the engineers are actively seeking new employment.

Unfortunately, it gets more dysfunctional than this.
Birth Clock: Break glass when you are ready to take the leap.
Yes. Or at least I hope so. I think it's convoluted, cumbersome and an embarrassment. We can do better.
Unless you are able to seriously influence things for the better, you should also consider your options and leave if need be. 6 years is a long time in the startup world and they have had lots of time to get things right.
Lets say if it spreads from single member to friends with bubble effect; then having name of the member(preferably genuine name otherwise userid/handle) in subject line can help in long way.
e.g. morbidkk wants to keep up with you on Twitter

I personally dont even read invitation mails from strangers.

1) so avoid generic subject line. - A friend invites you to xyz
2) Also check shelfari invite mail; which is very impressive as it just introuduces everything what can be done on shelfari in small but concise mail.
RegEx buddy is great, it's well worth the money if you are doing lots of regular expressions. I had to give it up when I switched to Ubuntu (though apparently it works ok under wine).
I actually need help. This is not a spam. click on my user, I have created my account over 2 months ago and never posted yet. I submit my start up to Ycombinator and Techstar this year but didnt get accepted. So I am looking for help. Techcrunch dont teach you how to get funded, there just tell you who get funded. This is why I asked. Sometime question may seem obvious. No matter how much you know, you can always learn more.
It's not an escrow service. An escrow service holds money until conditions have been met.
im just saying shit happens. you pick up. go on. maybe go work at mcdonalds? theres heaps of work out there.
Get a job
The Mundanity of Excellence
7 Unlikely Sessions At Upcoming BarCamp Boston 3
Google relieved Microsoft-Yahoo pact failed
Actually, some of Microsoft Research's Haskell experts have done work to take the concepts from LINQ and port them to Haskell, because it's a cool idea that didn't exist there. Taking monadic combinators and applying them to the problem of generalized querying is indeed something that hadn't been done before.

There are various slick data access techniques available in open source, but LINQ is not a knockoff of any of them.
You sound like you are natural CEO material. The daily life as CEO of a startup doesn't require you to be deeply immersed in any one particular subject (unless the company is so small that you have to do a lot of stuff yourself) but it does require you to have a broad overview and an operational knowledge of a lot of disciplines.

Good luck mr. CEO.
Facebook could succeed if they figure out the "word of mouth marketing strategy online. Think about it; when you buy something offline, or even online most people ask their friends and family what they bought, and from whom ... and then make their decision based on recommendations.

When I pick up new web design work, the #1 vehicle is word of mouth from my already serviced (and hopefully happy) clients recommending me to their friends.

If Facebook can use the "Twitter" style of outsourcing questions to your friends, they can tackle this problem of 'focus'. I could ask my FB friends what type of music player they all use, and my responses could have targeted ads based on what they say.

FB needs to be careful though becayse as you said, people login to FB to "hang out" and don't think "buy buy buy" first like they do with Google.
Leveraging social media for your business (podcast)
This is a good point, Facebook has 1 part of the puzzle, Google has the other. Facebook knows "who you are" better than Goog, Goog knows that you want "right now" better than FB.
A List Apart: Zebra Striping: Does it Really Help?
Firefox 3 supports native text rendering. There's a couple demos that show this (although you're out in the cold in other browsers, for now at least).
In my testing the JavaScript version had a better "boot time" (it was able to begin showing results instantly) - and rendered better/faster for simple examples. However, the Java Applets simply scale better. They can handle pretty much anything you throw at them. If you're just tackling simple stuff (pretty much anything that I demoed on the site) then Processing/Canvas is probably the way to go.
Right on about Need vs. Awareness .... Think of Coca-Cola or McDonald's, or even Budweiser. There are many large companies that use TV/Internet to keep their brand strong. Everyone knows about these brands, there is no direct "need" for any of their products (one could argue against this but I digress), but they need to keep advertising so when you are hungry, or thirsty, or sober you turn to them first.
ASP.NET MVC is pretty close to release, so I wouldn't be afraid of it. If you know Rails or Django, many of the same concepts will be applicable.

Manning has an early access version of ASP.NET MVC in Action that may help you on the book front, but I can't vouch for it. Books for brand new technologies are always a tricky topic. Worst case, there's all sorts of info all over the blogosphere.

The best general-purpose .Net book I have that the moment is Apress's immense Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform (Fourth Edition). It covers all the general C# and .Net stuff and also has all the new LINQ pieces, lambda expressions, etc.

VS 2008 has some nice enhancements for web development, including some nice CSS debugging pieces that help you isolate where a bit of style is coming from and a decent JavaScript IDE with a debugger.

For database access, you can use LINQ, NHibernate, or the (prerelease) Entity Framework. If you've worked with Hibernate on Java, NHibernate is an obvious choice. Otherwise, LINQ is pretty slick, and there's a ton of information out there on it.
DotMobi Buys Mowser For Mobile Web Integration
I don't get the hate. Sure a lot of web apps abuse the hell out of it but there's some wonderful things done with Ajax. Google Maps, Meebo are two of the most well known. Gmail does some cool things with Ajax as well
Don't worry - we believe you

:-)
I can't believe someone used Elance as an example of a solution to Ebay's problem. Elance is wrought with it's own issues of underbidding and serious off-shore dominance of almost every available web project. What was once a great way for freelancers to pick up new work, is now just a project farm for offshore companies looking for American work.

Don't get me wrong, I've used outsourcing firms myself and have no issues with it, it's just Elance is no longer a reasonable venue for small domestic firms.
AJAX, like Flash is a tool. Back in 2002-2004 everyone thought Flash would take over the web. I got resumes/applications from designers who 'only' did Flash and tried to convince me it was the future. Fast forward to today and Flash remains a very important "tool" but only a tool and not the answer to all our woes. AXAX is now just another tool in my virtual toolbelt, one I use from time to time, but not something I'd base my entire site on (hmmm kind of like javascript was in the late 90's early 00's)
There's a lot of UI terrain we haven't explored yet, and AJAX makes more of that terrain reachable. It seems silly to suggest it's on its way out just because it's no longer the cool new thing.
take a cue from the other engineers and start looking. you don't need to jump ship, but find out what your options are, and if you do actually like them better, get out of there.

edited to add:
if you find a good option but don't want to necessarily leave, you can then have a heart-to-heart and try to direct the flow of things back on track, or jump ship.
I believe comments without a certain amount of points have nofollow tags attached to their links.
Cool! Such experiences are awesome.

A. If I hadn't come up with it, someone else would have. Pure Lisp was a discovery, everything that has been done with it since has been an invention.

This brought back thoughts about Gladwell's recent essay which was posted here.
I tried to stay and talk afterwards, but was shooed away.

That's too bad. I always noticed the distinction between professors who welcomed interaction with students and those who shooed students away. Stanford has a lot of the latter. (Update: my assumption is that this is truer in general of top-tier schools than average ones, probably because smart, keen students stand out more at average schools and so get more attention. Of course, average schools have fewer smart, keen teachers too. But if you connect with the right one, the experience can be life-changing.)
AFAIK there is no podcast. May be he means all the YouTube videos?
This article has nothing to do with its title. In any case, the question practically answers itself. Just look at what people are using.
Is there any word on whether other browsers will be implementing this in the future? It's what's keeping me from using canvas today, and partially what's keeping me from writing a certain app I've been thinking about for a little while.
More Capital Can Make You Less Efficient
Hmm, that is true but to be honest, it reeks of desperation.
The Source Code Is The Design
I have been a Founder/CEO for the last fifteen years which in my experience is different from being the CEO of an established company. Founder/CEO for a startup is an entrepreneur whereas a CEO is a professional manager. But I assume entrepreneurship is what you have in mind and the following is what I wrote in my post.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/vc-worst-enemy.html

"Anyone can be an entrepreneur but they must not have the mindset of a lawyer, an engineer or a doctor.

First of all, there are always more than two sides to an issue and often the right place is to be is in the middle - an option that a lawyer does not have. Also, there is not always an answer to every question; or if there is an answer, it might not be unique. So waiting for perfect data to arrive at a perfect solution is a luxury that I don’t have as an entrepreneur. If that bothers me, then I should go back to being an engineer. Finally, as an entrepreneur, I often have to shoot my patient (and I have)."

So my experience is that it has a lot less to do with skills and a lot more to do with mindset. In the end, it is about attracting people (a good Founder/CEO is one who is a "talent magnet" regardless of his/her professional training). Hope it helps.
Awful, egregriously bad article. Beyond wanting to tear my hair out from the prose itself, it doesn't provide any proof to support its central thesis. "The frenzied days of web 2.0 are over", "others believe this technology is on its way out." Citation, please? If you just pull something out of your ass, say so; otherwise provide some evidence for your conclusion. Is it worth pointing out that the principal reason the author gives for AJAX being on the "way out" is that developers misuse it? Boy, that sure hasn't stopped HTML, Flash, Javascript, CSS...

Ugh. How did this make the front page again?

"No", indeed.
Very cool. I heard Leah talking about this on Scoble's Qik stream at Google App Engine launch.

I think it would be cool to return a movie source parameter. This would be nearly identical to the way images worked.

The reason for this is you could then manage/edit the video file from a 3rd party application without having to parse the embed code.
How do you "uncover" terror anyways? Isn't it by definition public?
Digital Wrongs Management
How to Meet Women Without Really Trying
Java world: Hibernate, Ibatis, and so on

.NET world: NHibernate - NHibernate came out years before LINQ (though a good bit after Hibernate). It was stable and powerful. Besides NHibernate there were other similar .NET open source projects, but I'm not familiar with them

The same thing can be said of NAnt and NUnit
How to Know if a Start-Up is Right for You
With pretty much every creative endeavor, taste dictates the results. When used taste and as needed, AJAX can provide great functionality. It's not going anywhere.

The headline is just fishing for clicks.
Is that url nsfw? lol - I'm scared to click a link to "LoveMyTool.com"
This is a real time waster. In my opinion, if it helps people organize their thinking and read the data faster while at the same time makes my page look nicer, then it's a done deal. I always appreciate a good ALA article though.
It's so cutesy with the parable about the people of Foobr!
who wants to meet women? i want to sleep with them. haha.
wtf - this is shite. Off day? Couldn't think of anything original to post so you had to rip off the guy's whole article?
There aren't any good programming jokes.
Woltman's Law: Never program and drink beer at the same time.

Well, that's a load of crap.
Sorry that you had to use the mouse to escape. I was hoping you could suggest an escape key.

I'm the author of jsvi.
You travel a lot. Are there any cheap places left in the Caribbean? I've thought of buying a sail boat and floating around there for a few years.
Sounds painful, but I have seen startups succeed by over-promising before. Most salespeople will do this, and when you don't have much, it's often the only way to get by. You can get mad, or you can try and make it work.
History Of The Color Wheel
Adaptive Path Begins CEO Search
Adaptive Path has started their CEO search...
If anything, tools like GWT will enable a whole new level of AJAX powered web interfaces.
Marketing the charity auction
The Ultimate Twitter Revenue Model
Wow. This is a wonderful article that contains an analysis of excellence based on close observation of competitive swimmers over several years. One could even describe it as an excellent article, using its own definition of excellence. I doubt I would have run across it otherwise, so it's a really good example of why I read HN.

Tip: Google Books leaves out a few pages (in my case, 34 and 35). To read these, I went to Google Books in a different browser and searched for text from the top of the next page I did have (36). Their back button then took me to the missing pages. Note that using a different browser is essential (I suppose they use a cookie).
I would also suggest using SubSonic over LINQ and NHibernate if you like ActiveRecord
Django Djumpstart: Build a To-do List in 30 Minutes
SEO Guide for Designers
advertising as a means to generate business may be superceded

I would say advertising as we know it, but other than that - I think you're spot on.
Analyzing Hacker News Users’ Join Dates, Karma, and Profiles
That doesn't necessarily reflect poorly on the developer.

What if 11.5 months later the entire product changed drastically?
Masters of the Void: tutorial to program Macs using Xcode and C
Yup it does, and it's been recently added to the spec (http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#text). Unfortunately, the font rendering as currently in the spec won't return the path of the font, which is a feature that allows nodebox to do some really neat things (eg http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/LetterKnitter).
Good advice I suppose, but how many times is someone going to write a blog post about the same thing
Two points:

First, no article complaining about Google cutting off the traffic to Site X or Site Y is complete unless it fills in X and Y with specific examples. I want to know exactly what we're talking about. Otherwise I tend to surmise, perhaps unfairly, that articles like this are astroturf: They're written by spammers or spammer apologists who are angry that their highly profitable link farms have been effectively cut off. After all, if I find myself reading a random article on this topic, it's probably because a) it's ubiquitous or b) my subconscious has been lured to it by a well-crafted linkbaity headline. And who is good at making posts ubiquitous and tempting? Spammers!

So knock it off with abstractions like "sheep" and show me some real examples, so I can empathize properly.

Second, the reason why Google doesn't take a "rule of law" approach is easy to see, isn't it? Nobody on earth is better at gaming complex sets of rules than programmers. Create a clear specification that defines "spam" and the spammers will promptly craft a ton of elegant and technically legal ads and then flood Google with them.

Why doesn't this happen with the "rule of law" in a legal setting? Well, it does: People play fast and loose with laws all the time. But the real secret to the rule of law is that the ultimate arbiter of that law is... groups of actual humans called "juries" and "courts", who are empowered to use common sense to throw the book at those who get too creative with the edge cases. Real-world law has intentionally fuzzy edges. (Of course, when the fuzz spreads into the center, you've got a problem.)

Proposing to turn Google's ranking system into something resembling a legal system -- which is perhaps equivalent to taking our existing legal system and applying more of it to Google, i.e. legislating certain elements of Google's design -- is an interesting idea, and it may eventually be tried, but it's not obvious that it will improve anything, or even change anything. And it's going to be hard to discuss how well it might work unless we use... real examples!
You can also save an image via the toDataUrl method of a canvas object: http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#todataurl
What the inside of a container data center looks like
Given the other posts, there's a mix needed, and a startup CEO might need to be very different from a scaling company CEO.

In a startup, who's on your team matters. Are you a two man show? You (the generalist) and your co-founder/CTO (techie)? The two of you alone probably don't have what it takes to promote/market your product after it's built. However, if you're good at managing teams and can pull in people who can fill gaps (marketing, sales, etc.) and coordinate all the people in the initial phases to make things hum. However, if you can't find these people, you may need to be kick-ass (a specialist) in biz-dev to get things going.

In a scaling company, your curent skill-set may be perfect. There may already be enough boots in your team to fill all the critical roles, and you, as a generalist can both coordiante AND help out in any one area, as needed.

At the end of the day, it comes down to this: your confidence in your self.

You're already a generalist, and though it sounds unintuitive, becoming a generalist is not something that's simple--people tend to become good at just one or two things (coders, carpenters, paineters, etc...). Do you have the passion for the idea? Are you willing to work hard to get from a startup phase to a growth phase? Given that you're asking the question above to a forum, you're probably already thinking about these questions--and these questions are good ones for you to ask.
Get out now.
[Sunspots] The small steps edition
To bluntly say no suggests you're passionate on the topic and therefore not objective. The author suggests that ajax has it's uses but the abuses of ajax are what's on the way out.

"My quarrel lies in the fact that many web designers and developers choose to <strike>abuse</strike> overuse this technology to the point of stupidity."
Sounds like NBC are creating a Meatball Sundae (to steal Seth Godin's term) - that is what his latest book was all about.
Man I was hoping that this would be an article on GTA IV. Color me disappointed.
Recent Changes Camp
As far as I can tell, the convoluted and cumbersome parts of AJAX spawn from two directions:

Differences in browser implementation (so we have some boilerplate to figure out what we actually need to do to make an XMLHTTPRequest) - which is getting better, and really isn't that much of a pain, and the nature of the web itself, or rather the nature of HTTP - namely that it's stateless, and we're doing more and more that relies on hacks around the stateless nature of HTTP.

Getting around that second one pretty much requires an entirely new protocol, unless you're the type that doesn't think that the web should be used for more interactive things, in which case the only thing I can say is "too bad, it is and there's nothing you can do to stop it".

Apologies if I've tangented in the wrong directions. Maybe you would like to present some reasons as to why you think AJAX is convoluted, cumbersome, and an embarrassment?
How Cloud Computing Changes Competition
Check out the coast of Honduras and the islands nearby. It's still plenty cheap and there are un-touristed beaches to be found. The little slice of Guatemala that touches the Caribbean is good too.

Good luck!
Matt's essay is actually consistent with what you said if you read all of it except the title. It seems like it should have been titled "Why Facebook's Ad Revenue Will Stay Less Than Google's."
It was a wonderful article until it suddenly stopped in mid-argument.

Google Books is like being strapped to a library and tortured. And I do not have time to dork around with three different browsers.

Could somebody paraphrase this in a blog post and free it from the tyranny of restrictive copyright?

Note to publisher: I see that your 456-page book costs $45. Today I just want to read one article that spans 13 of those pages, without leaving my chair, waiting 2-4 days, losing my train of thought, or spending extra money on other pages that I don't have time to read anyway. If it were technically possible, I would happily pay you 13/456 of the book's price -- $1.28 -- for an electronic copy of the pages in question. I might even pay $2. But it's not technically possible, so I guess I'll just have to hate you today.
I think this does a pretty good job covering it:

http://www.stubbleblog.com/index.php/2008/05/deliberate-prac...

You have a valid point - it would be great if you can buy books per page - especially compilations. Maybe there's an opportunity for someone.
My site, I'll answer - because you're guaranteed to get paid. We handle the payment processing, and only notify a seller that you've sold an item after we've captured payment. There's no PayPal two step.

As a seller, you don't care who your buyer is, only that you can get paid and that the buyer agrees to have it shipped reasonably. We take shipping choice off the table - everyone has to ship USPS within the US only (no foreign transactions yet, we'll add this choice later, but that's the brute force way to solve it for now).
"As much as I'm sure that both Zune users would appreciate having access to NBC's video library, the problem remains of how exactly Microsoft would do that, aside from splashing giant watermarks across everything.

"My money's on unicorn tears."
Are You Born To Be A Billionaire?
EA To Use Controversial Internet-Required DRM On New Games (Phones Home Every 10 days)
Google Confirms Plans To Put Display Ads On Google.com