skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This will all stop when the average VC can’t get any of his/her companies to scale because there is just too much VC sponsored free stuff out there."

Markets don't disappear because they're too crowded. When they're too crowded, some people are forced out and it moves down to a more reasonable equilibrium. That's like saying that a theme park will fail because it gets too crowded -- when something is too crowded to be worthwhile, people stop going and it then becomes not too crowded anymore.
Passenger (mod rails) coming 'some time next week'
Ja, genau.

http://www.toytowngermany.com/lofi/index.php/t971.html
I am the primary contributor, but I have small circle of friends and family who also post, which you can see here: http://pageonetimes.com/leaders
I am making backup for my bootleged XP right now. I know it is popular to bash MS, but XP Sp2 is pretty good OS.
Vista is an god aweful overbloated OS, the number one reason I might want to think switching to a Mac or Linux on my next rig.
I think we're on the same page, but... They're useful labels until you have to explain them to someone else. If you need to explain the words you're using to explain a concept or idea, it's probably a detriment to your argument.

Using jargon to explain new concepts is taking the easy way out. Figuring out how to communicate complex ideas with plain, straight-forward language? That's the name of the game.
Though its lifespan is coming to an end, it will live on in the nightmares and therapy sessions of millions for years to come.
Read "Smart & Gets Things Done" by Joel Spolsky:

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/05.html
Facebook poaches Google chef
Very helpful. In our case, our company exists to solve a problem. The problem is a combination of a medical and design problem. (I don't want to give away anything). Before I found a hacker, I did a lot of the design work, and have been accruing medical information on my project for months.

Our strategy is for the hackers to create a demo and backend to achieve my design objectives while I flesh out the rest of the medical research.

Armed with a demo and medical research, I will be able to prove to potential partners and angels that there is a big medical problem, that design can solve it, that much research, when considered together, provides a picture of haw to solve the problem, and that I solved it. Then I will find a partner for business aspects and look for funding.

One thing I'm definitely not doing is trying to get fat on the work of others. I don't want to say that I don't care about money, but my motivation is entirely solving this problem. I need hackers who want to be partners and are excited to grow a company they have a good stake in.

Thanks for typing so much, it's very helpful and constructive.
doesnt link linux. FAIL.

jk.. this is one of the better projects ive seen come out of google. 5 times speed increase is huge for big apps. does anyone know if it was a 20% project? hopefully this gets picked up and ported around so that it becomes a viable alternative to the gcc linker.
1. You usually DO get caught.

2. There are ALWAYS more effective things for you to to do than forging positive customer feedback...
Twitter Has Changed My Life
I agree. The three column newspaper theme is a little overwhelming. I also think legibility could be improved by changing to a sans-serif font.

I see potential, but the name really should be more sports sounding.
I have thought about it and may add it in the future. Right now I want to focus on the tagging parts, such as having it configurable in the profile, and supporting logical ANDing and NOTing of tags.

The thought is to make this a great "browse engine", to help people find what they are not looking for.
I'm just waiting for Google to start making their own motherboards, chipsets, and CPU architectures. That seems to be the logical conclusion of their tendency to respond to the uniquely demanding requirements of their mission by creating new, improved infrastructure.
I ordered it. It's on it's way. Thanks for the suggestion!
Will this mean the end of those annoying security updates and the nagging reminders to install them? Excellent.
how they monetize this?
it ads adsense for every new executable? :)
That's interesting...before last night it was sporting helvetica font throughout, but I switched it to times to give it a little bit more of a newspaper feel. I like the logo in times, but the content looks better in helvetica. Is it a design atrocity to have a mix?
FastMail.fm also has a similar service. You can use <something>@<username>.<domain>.<tld> and messages are automatically put into folder <something> in your account.
http://www.splashup.com/

This is a nice one.
what do you mean by A/B?

if you want to do load test use jmeter

http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/index.html
I don't know because every business is different. I'm sure if you're programming all day long you don't want to deal with lawyers, investors, vendors, etc as well. Also, you likely CAN'T deal with them as effectively as someone who might have experience in doing so and WANTS to do so.

Besides that, you don't need to be a programmer to help flesh out a design. You don't need to be a hacker to help grow, shape or evolve an idea. With an end-product in site, there is plenty of work to be done away from TextMate or BBEdit!
Such as improving the product so more people want it. Sounds like they employ people who aren't doing anything productive and have to dream up crap like this.
XP has been the best Windows product by far. In the very few times I've had a problem with it, I just think back to the extremely regular, much worse problems that '95, '98, and '00 had. Or compared to what people say about Vista.
Being a huge BSG fan, tonight is definitely noteworthy. Dunno if this is Hacker News noteworthy though.
"Are you suggesting a "dividends off of profits" type of thing for growth companies? Aren't growth companies supposed to be reinvesting profits in their own growth?"

Yeah, dividends-off-profits. The growth-company thing is an issue for the initial ramp-up phase: it'd probably be 10 years or so before the fund would start having additional capital to invest. But in the steady-state, older non-growing businesses throw off cash that can be reinvested in small growth businesses.

"So if Berkshire invests in a value company that throws off 3% dividends per quarter, that's great. But it's only great because they can get their cash out at any time."

Berkshire can't cash out of their value companies at any time. Their typical modus operandi is to buy 80% of a successful privately-held business, leaving the other 20% to the founders. The companies remain privately held, and their stock is not sold on the open market. The only way Berkshire can cash out is if they find another buyer, like a private equity firm or large conglomerate, to take the whole business off their hands at once.

Also, dividends thrown off by private companies are often a lot more than 3% (public companies have such lousy dividends largely because shareholders lack bargaining power). Take See's Candy, one of Berkshire's early acquisitions (http://valueinvestingresource.blogspot.com/2008/03/sees-cand...). They bought it in 1972 for $25M on earnings of $5M. Since then, See's has required capital infusions of $32M and spun off dividends of $1.35B. That's a dividend-to-profit ratio of 98%, in comparison to the normal Wall Street averages of 30-50%.

Of course, few startup entrepreneurs would be willing to sell 80% of the company from the outset. Berkshire functions in reverse to VC firms, providing liquidity and multi-million-$ payouts to firms that have already gotten successful. But what if you reversed the terms? 10-20% of the equity for the chance to be your own boss? With the investor's dividend payouts protected by a legal clause in the investment documents, guaranteeing that after certain profitability and cash reserve milestones are met and growth has fallen below a certain amount, X% of the profits are distributed as dividends?

This is all idle speculation, since I don't have money to put where my mouth is. But if I had a billion dollars or so, I'd definitely want to try it. Because if these assumptions are true:

1.) Startups are the most productive part of the economy

2.) A small initial investment would let many more people quit their day jobs and found startups

3.) Getting bought destroys most of the efficiency advantages of being a startup

Then a logical consequence is that a firm that buys-and-holds small profit-oriented startups should do better than one that invests in large public companies.

Besides, it'd be a cool financial hack.
Twitter Local
I love this quote: "The truth is, start-up-land is littered with mavericks, iconoclasts, drops-outs and misfits."
I can't agree more. And the result is that no one is willing to improve upon something good enough but that's free.

For example there are very wild problems affecting almost every internet user, like email. I bet that there are many hacker teams around that are able to come up with a better gmail, or simply a web based email system more biased towards advanced users: but how can you compete with an alternative that is good enough, is under this big name, and gives you all the space and free access to POP, IMAP, ...?

Result: no enhancement over gmail, we just need to wait for them to release the next feature.

Is this really better for users? Mostly not, the email or other core internet services are such an important thing for users that to pay 30$/year is nothing compared to the advantage of having a better internet experience.
The Fine Art Of Doing Something
That's pretty cool. I've worked on projects where the link stage would take minutes, and therefore constitute most of the incremental build time, and it's not like you can avoid it. Visual C++ has a special incremental linker, it always surprised me that nothing similar ever hit the mainstream GNU toolchain. It'll be interesting to see if this gains traction.
Headline is misleading. There's no problem posting reviews of your own products, as long as you identify yourself as being affiliated with the company. Posting ratings, on the other hand, is always unethical since they forcibly affect the average rating.
Identify and verify users based on how they type
When approaching hackers, perhaps you should present yourself as someone with expert domain knowledge, as opposed to someone with a business plan. That's probably more enticing to a hacker; it says "I know an interesting problem that we can solve" as opposed to "I know how we can make money."

Caveat: I am a graduate student, not a startup person.
> The good news is at some point VCs will indeed
> realize how dumb all of this is and stop giving
> away everything of value on the Internet

This is unfortunately not the case since VCs know
that for companies like Google and Yahoo is valuable
to buy a startup that is not able to be profitable
from itself, but added to a core of other free
services it will be worth the money.
I think he's arguing separate points, one good the other not:

1) Pizza flyers are expected to look a certain way and despite the fact that this look is deemed trashy by snob designers, it's actually appropriate for the product and audience. This is true and valid. See also:
http://www.graphpaper.com/2006/09-04_class-and-web-design-pa...

2) "...the logic suggested that if a pizza flyer does its job then, no matter how awful it looks it must, by definition, be 'well designed'." No it doesn't. Just because it does its job doesn't mean it does its job WELL. I keep a copy of local pizza flyers because they're local, not because they're well designed. One flyer could still be designed better than another. But a badly designed flyer costs me a few seconds at most, so I don't really care.
I like the simple short presentation or articles. At glance I get to see pretty much all the latest articles. I will also suggest a change of domain name pageonetimes sounds very yahoo news to me. Cool stuff, I’ll add it to my Sports search engine.
"I've found that most languages I consider worth learning have fairly small overhead...Lisp..."

Scheme yes, maybe not Common Lisp :P
What is this nonsense about the number of files slowing the system down? Surely seeking to a bunch of little libraries is slower than loading one file initially, but does it matter in the long run? Once you're up and running there should be practically no noticeable difference, right?

I can't imagine that the number of libraries is what's slowing Vista down... rather, it's just what those libraries are actually doing.
i'm working on a medical-related startup myself ;)
FINALLY! Now can someone please rewrite GCC? That is the ugliest piece of code I've ever seen.
Hi LPTS, I think we should talk more. Are you going to be at startup school?
Some intern probably wrote a MapReduce job which discovered that Google engineers collectively spend thousands of hours per year linking, so writing a new linker can be justified as a cost savings. :-)

OTOH, http://xkcd.com/303/
Great idea, seems well executed.

A suggestion: Maybe you should try a different design technique to differentiate the stories.

There is a lot of text on the pages. It's kind of intimidating, makes it seem like a lot like work. If you just broke it up more and maybe added more white space it would look friendlier to read.
I actually think that more often than not you don't get caught.
Cool I didn't know that. That'd make finding the spammed address even easier...

But... FastMail costs money for anything more than a 10 meg inbox. I prefer the 6+ GB (and growing) of inbox space for free that Google gives. And all the power of the google search engine to find my emails for me.
As a non-hacker on a team with two exceptional hackers, I would recommend the following startup advice:

1) DO have incentives that reflect contribution- all of us have equity split evenly, everyone brings something to the table; these guys will later also help determine the direction of future hires (and I trust their abilities to do so)

2) DO be more open than usual- the difference between bullies and real partners is being able to include everyone in the process, it makes everyone feel like they're working toward the goal. Definitely make sure that you're adding value and let others know of what you're doing and say why. Include people in meetings if they want, usually, your biz dev meeting are so boring that your partners don't want to sit in (they want to be there for the decision, but not for the meetings before it).

3) DO NOT micromanage- I think Sam Altman said this in an interview that the greatest startups are where you have a bunch of people doing amazing things all at the same time and they're driving to a goal. Definitely set milestones for each other, but do not question when your hacker takes time off to play Guitar Hero

4) DO make it about the company- You're building a company and that's the bigger goal, it's not about you, it's about the company. So, stick to milestones, stick to atomic goals, and go hard down the path to victory.

5) DO make the environment easier to hack- Your job is to get a product out, so that includes some management and creativity, while also doing the other tasks that distract (biz dev, etc.)

6) DO learn to hack yourself (not for the business, but for yourself)- I'm learning Python and it gives you a better perspective of what your hacker partners are doing. Don't hack for your business, choose some problems that you want to tackle yourself and do those on the side.

As to hacker recruitment, hire slow and make sure that person can work with your folks. It's all about that culture, so it starts with the list above and making a hacker-friendly culture. It's no surprise that Google and Facebook are obsessive about that.
Andrew Chen: Your ad-supported Web 2.0 startup is really a B2B enterprise in disguise
This is an excellent point. As I said in the article, I'm a business guy myself. I was in the business school of my college in fact- and the undergrad program was basically the MBA program in twice as much time. So basically, I've done all of the work, in twice the time, with none of the networking of a true MBA program. haha.

However, the point was really to bring up the fact that experts in any field are going to be useful. EP's rant was primarily that he felt that a mediocre business guy has no place amongst elite hackers in a software startup, and I would mostly agree with that. I would also say that a mediocre code monkey has no place in a startup either.

But if you can identify some true talent- regardless of their specific discipline, you could have a great addition to the team. Would anyone NOT give the next Seth Godin something to do in your startup if you had the chance?

P.s. Another crack at business schools- at least at our undergraduate program, this is also what all of the kids on sports scholarships were enrolled...

Good times.
Check out clang, it's looking pretty promising.
Sounds like you definitely are bringing something to the table. Emphasize your demo and domain knowledge (from other comments:

"Once our demo is working, we will decide together how to go forward, but I probably will be focused on design and medical aspects"

"A large aspect of our company will include components like creating a medical protocol, clinical trials and medical demographics"

Also, as CEO you probably have the final say on decisions, so make sure you make smart decisions. In order to make smart decisions, you need to know the costs and consequences of technical decisions, and you need the hacker to give you these.

You need to have enough technical knowledge to assess what you're given. For instance, how much do you know about the iPhone, the new SDK, the background processing limitation, and the possibility of Andriod looming in the distance? If you can't have a discussion about that, you're going to have a hard time hiring a hacker that can do that work. Rule of thumb: you can't hire someone if you can't have a long conversation about what you want them to do.
Fun. I hope we are not competing. :)

Out of curiosity, are you working on implementing your own idea or did a non-tech person contribute the idea you are working on?
Spree - Open source ecommerce store for Ruby on Rails
It isn't against the rules to mix it up. I was just at theonion.com, and they definitely mix it up. The headlines are either serif if the body is sans serif or sans serif if the body or link is serif. The button navigation is also sans.

I think your page would be easier to read if you mixed it up a bit. It just looks like a wall of text which is intimidating. There needs to be differences in the text to distinguish if they have functions or not.
If I see that you are less intelligent than me, and do less work than me, but you make more money than me, then well what do you expect?

I think fundamentally it is a matter of respect. If you respect the hacker, the hacker will respect you.

I think the easiest thing to do is to demonstrate that you have valuable non-hacker skills that contribute just as much to the project as the hacker does.

It is also a matter of trust. If you trust your hackers, they will trust you. A big problem for you, however, is that it will be much harder for you to figure out which hackers are trustworthy without hacker skills.
I built a HackerNews firefox extension a few days ago to monitor new comments directed towards you or your submissions which you could port pretty easily to your site if you were interested. Or if you build an api to a users threads/comments (need just be an RSS feed) Id port it for you if you wanted it.

You can grab it here: http://wildstabmedia.com/hackernews and just save the xpi to disk and unzip to get at the source
We should talk more. I'm not going to be at start-up school though. I live in Washington and can't make it. I'm thinking about shooting for the next one (if it wouldn't be a distraction from the booming business development and R&D of my prosperous company by then ;P ).

EDIT: I guess to talk more you probably need this. lifepod technology systems (as one word) at the gmail.com one.
Curiously, I've heard DH1 (ad hominem) invoked in Computer Science circles. More than once, I've heard someone say that it's likely that P != NP, because lots of Very Smart People who've Worked Very Hard on the problem, and haven't able to collapse them. Of course, this isn't really a use of ad hominem argument in disagreement, it's a use in support of a claim.
The market might dictate that you enter a different fight. Beating a giant at their own game is hard. Kneecapping them from the side is easier.
San Francisco Cafes as Ad-Hoc Startup Office Space
Well, if I'm not allowed to casually wave my hand and invoke my legendary army of VB forms developers, my "argument" will evaporate, as you no doubt suspected. :)

Because, alas, I can't name any talented folks, working on interesting problems, who are obvious under-dabblers. This may be because I have led a sheltered life: Too many of the programmers I know are from MIT, where until recently they inoculated everyone against underdabbling by making them take an entire course on Scheme. I tend to work on open-source stuff that's hosted on Linux, another community where underdabbling is rare and overdabbling is the danger. I read news.yc, which incorporates plenty of dabbling -- much more than I have time for, really, and perhaps more than you have patience for. ;) Finally, I myself am only a programmer because I kept dabbling in software while I was supposed to be working on physics. If I had the personality that found it easy to focus strictly on one thing, I'd be a semiconductor process engineer right now.

Of course, the statements that the original article took such exception to -- the ones like "you should learn a programming language every year" -- are largely intended for the less-talented people that have just been defined out of the discussion. And, again, that's kind of where the original author ends up: "Once you learn one language... oops, make it two languages... no, five! Once you learn five languages, you should definitely stop dabbling!"
You can write operating systems and have low-level control over the hardware in Lisp too.
The principle doesn't translates across mediums. A newspaper interface works in real life but not on the web.
I wonder what my copy will fetch on ebay after that date. (edit: legal copy, original CD)
If you're trying to track feature requests from the users, you can use something like: http://featurelist.org (our site)

We also just launched the ability to have a feedback widget for capturing quick feedback from users and tracking them until you decide to treat them as a feature or ignore them.