skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You might want to go the business broker route (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_broker), but don't pick one from a directory at random, try to get a recommendation from your lawyer or accountant.
Actually, given the choice between an engineering school and a LA school assuming gender ratio parity, engineering schools win hands down in terms of just how nice and interesting the gals are, theres no contest there. Sadly, I chose the wrong one myself.
Depends on your environment. MBAs with no engineering background value other MBAs. Engineers value other engineers. Real leaders and innovators value real qualities and abilities of others, whether those abilities are business-centric or tech-centric or design-centric.

Sadly, these sorts of attitudes are prevalent in many large IT shops. Personally, I run away from anyone who views any meaningful role (coder, CFO, COO, admin ass't) as just requiring a random body.
Looks like his gross revenue is higher from what he's saying and that 120k is net?
There's no doubt it's wealth (all information is). Keeping in contact with people is big business (cell phones, Outlook, vacations, dating sites, etc) but there just isn't a way to monetize this wealth. If it was open source or non-profit, it would be around until people got tired of it), but if Facebook doesn't get money in exchange for the wealth they've created (and soon), then that wealth will disappear and social networks in general may be branded as a bad investment. Actually, if that leads to a free and open alternative, that might not be so bad afterall.
Stackless Python makes a lot of these possible without fancy generator tricks. Not that I don't love fancy generator tricks, but I think the stackless model is more intuitive.
I don't even know that a poll is necessary here. I would bet that choosing something instead of accepting the default is one of the best predictors for finding great programmers (or great practicioners in any field).
1) My point was that these people have decided to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars. Saying they "haven't thought about it" because of an application form seems to be jumping to conclusions.

2) It's a programming language joke. MoleHillFactory (a Haskell example would be better, but I don't know it) wouldn't be able to return objects of type Mountain. Maybe it's not funny, but I kind of liked it:-)
There are plenty of men with money that have a hard time attracting women. If you don't have the personality and (less important) physical traits women find attractive it's not going to happen.
midgets standing on the shoulders of giants, as even the mighty will admit. what matters is the evolution with each new generation. get the right mix of memes and you end up with something very powerful, which YC arguably is
Are you kidding? I'd love an environment like that, as long as I had a little cave to retreat to. Knowing your coworkers casually is the best way to increase communication bandwidth at work.
Why stop there? Why not have a week where everyone's user id is displayed as a randomly generated syllables based on the hash of their current user id and the current topic id?
When Asking A Favor, Specifics Do Count
$120k is our turnover. Actual expenses are very minimal (hosting costs, $500 Adwords and a few others) as we do other things - time spent on it is around 1-2 hours a day between us. If we all pulled a wage purely from this though then it would be quite low. My main thing is its taking up brain space now and I want to be able to concentrate on my latest idea.
> I get a lot of messages on Facebook, but unlike email, I have yet to receive any spam. That's pretty remarkable.

That is pretty remarkable. My Facebook experience is defined mostly by spam. Application spam, newsfeed spam ... etc
IP Litigation Arbitrage Tactics
Rensselaer will require all engineering students to study abroad
I Blew Off the Boomer Advice and Got Started on My Dream Right Away
Why nerds are unpopular (and that's OK) -- explained by South Park
I thought good experimental design involved not telling people what you're testing if they have any means of altering the test.
Hilarious idea. Very cool.
Is a VC About to Steal Your Startup Grant?
What can you legally take from the web?
I guess ad-revenue does not make sense as a business model anymore. So where does that leave us?
- Subscription revenue
- Donation
- Sell your company
The Mobile Web Must Live On!
Oldtimer LimeWire still top P2P software; uTorrent rising #2
He gives verifiable evidence, uses clear logic, and doesn't try to disguise the opinions. Worrying about conflict of interest is more or less ad hominem in this case. It's a mild curiosity worth knowing, but that's all.
Mark Fletcher (founder of bloglines) gave a good talk which touched on this. Here's a transcription:

http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2006/05/mark-fletcher-blogl...
I think this article is jumping to conclusions. YouTube isn't a turd. Google just haven't figured out the best way to advertise on YouTube.

Anyone who brings desirable content and lots of viewers together is basically doing the job of a TV, and there are ways to monetise that (even though they are changing). This video was very interesting, on the topic.

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1720068211869162779
Any hints as to what you're launching?
Would someone sell a site for this kind of money on Sitepoint? I've seen $15k-$30k on there, but not an amount as high as this. A quick glance is that even in the 'premium' category most are in this ballpark or less

Edit: sorry, don't mean to offend. Just curious if you know of any that have sold for this amount
Piracy is Good?
Facebook is not going become the next Google. If they do get lucky, they may be the next Microsoft, though.

If Facebook manages to crowd everyone within their walls because of the hassles of spam and anonymity, Facebook will have an enormous amount of control over protocols and standards.

Part of my negativity towards Facebook is because I think that will be a very bad thing in the long run. I agree that it's possible, but I'm praying something better comes along.
Is there a problem with the C code that is automatically generated being too slow or inefficient for the embedded system?
CNN on "coworking"
"Kids Who Don't Play Video Games Are At Risk"
Thoughts on Organic Growth in Universities
How about StreamFocus? http://www.streamfocus.com

Here's my review: http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/streamfocus-an-org...

The reason they have such strict filters is that lots of vendors are after their $$$ and because of their size, training and maintenance on any new app is expensive. Plus medical and government have lots of regulations that entrepreneurs often don't know about (this is where a "domain expert" comes in handy as a partner)
I don't know why so many people presume Google are trying to turn a profit on Youtube. Google has deep pockets and long term thinking; it seems far more likely that they are happy to position Youtube as the dominant online video site, while crushing competitors by giving it away for nothing. Then one day when online video has settled down and bandwidth is even cheaper, they can just turn on the revenue tap and drown themselves in video-ad money.
Dude do you have a blog?
"Geeks and males and bloggers need to be characterized, judged and condemned where necessary."

Here is where I believe you're wrong. There is no need to judge and condemn individuals in a web discussion, in fact it's counterproductive. When an argument becomes heated and sparks fly, that heat and fire should be directed at the content of the argument. Otherwise you're just insulting someone, who will then insult you back, and bingo, a typical message-board or blog-comment back-and-forth name-calling session has begun.

I agree that it can be necessary to point it out when someone is using tone to leave "emotional trapdoors for people to respond to," but if the way you do it is to attack the person's character rather than by showing that the appeal to emotion is a poor argument, then you're just heading towards a flame war.

You say that attitudes such as "don't feed the trolls" lead to dull conformity. Don't you think that the dismal sameness of all troll-provoked flame wars is far more dull than an atmosphere of simple courtesy in which people actually listen to each other? I would go further than "don't feed the trolls"--in any web discussion that has descended into acrimonious personal attacks, one should unilaterally withdraw. You cannot have the last word on the Internet and the smart way to avoid flame wars is to leave them.

It's trolls and flamers that are the surest way for a forum discussion to go downhill. The best way to help a forum be interesting and lively is not to remind everyone of "rules of rhetoric" or of conduct but to follow them oneself. But many people haven't thought about it in a systematic way, so it can be helpful to read a set of recommendations and apply whichever of them you wish. Publishing such things is not an attempt to control, but to persuade. You may have a beef with the attitude of "smug nits" who tell you what to do, but that doesn't mean that their recommendations aren't good ones.
Sure, it's fun to trash MBAs, but why does anyone think business is different from hacking? There are tons of crappy MBAs, just like there are tons of crappy programmers. There are elite, valuable MBAs just like elite, valuable hackers.

If there was a Hacker News equivalent for MBAs, wouldn't you want one of those guys on your team? The best hackers might be able to do business better than an average MBA, but not nearly as well as the best. I'd take a Phil Knight or someone like that on my team anyday. I'd also take a killer salesman because it would lower the bar for producing highly profitable B2B software.
You Can't Teach Normal Users About Security
How to work an 8-hour day
This looks pretty impressive. It's on my radar for when my business gets underway.
I'd argue that the more important measure is who your classmates are, but where their ambitions lie.

I went to a prestigious engineering school with high-quality instruction and top-notch students. However, the professional culture of the school was very much defined by a finance-heavy recruitment culture. Very few graduates of the school go on to do engineering, and thus the peer culture there doesn't contribute to advancing one's career in the sciences.
Um, no? Should there be? Oh, you're talking about the 'tweaking'? Sorry, I was talking about some specialised edge cases where it just isn't worth trying to make the work automated. Basically all of the boiler plate code is automated, and all of the unique code for each class is coded by hand. But generally it is about 60% boilerplate and 40% unique code. The result is that programmers do 60% less coding, and only need to muck around with the unique/interesting code.

It's not perfect, but it takes a lot of the drudge out of the working day, which was kind of the point I was trying to make in the original post.
So we might not be able to determine the absolute truth, but we can still do significantly better than taking a wild-ass guess.
The author is a neocon ex-speechwriter for Bush II. Note the bizarre focus on the nominal wage of college graduates instead of the relative bonus college graduates earn over high school graduates. Wages may be falling for college graduates, but they truly suck for high school graduates.

Given his strange inability to put together a logical argument and his entrenchment in the Republican War on Science, I'm not surprised he considers his college degree worthless. The professors are all liberal anyway.
The benefit he's selling isn't one that friendfeed users get. Only the owners of friendfeed as a company can monetize the social graph. I don't think friendfeed is looking for acquisition, so I see the financial value of social graphs as a benefit (or potential benefit) that he owns himself, not as one he needs to sell.
I'll guess that longer term free video will be distributed via some p2p system. Torrent-like capabilities will be transparently integrated into players, the kinks will be worked out and video will be smooth, and free sites for reliably indexing and distributing the "torrents" will emerge.

I doubt youtube is viable long term. They are popular because they hand out free bandwidth and storage, and have lots of copyrighted material. Youtube will be pointless once it's as easy to post a video as it is to stick a picture somewhere online.
No offense taken. In their premium section I have seen some things on for near this neighborhood (the lower part, though). My bigger concern is that sitepoint is about sites for sale rather than businesses for sale. To that end, I wasn't necessarily suggesting sitepoint so much as describing how people kept their privacy. If someone knows of a sitepoint equivalent for technical businesses, please post it--I'd like to check it out.
wow, that was quick:-)
10 reasons entrepreneurs should take more vacations
Nope, this is my "blog".

kirkubakaran, I am hoping to finally meet you sometime this weekend. Let's touch base offline sometime today.
Europe Looks for a Peer-to-Peer TV Alternative
We sold Kiko on eBay for $250k, which is around the neighborhood you'd want. The issue is that for that to work, you need to get a lot of attention. Since you have real revenues, I'd consider going to a boutique investment bank and seeing if they'll help you sell it. At the very least, even if they won't sell it themselves, they will probably tell you where you should sell it.
hackers love to work on operating systems, window managers, text editors, and compilers, because they use those things themselves. hence all the free software advances in those areas. but a distributed email/calendaring system? not so much.

there has been one attempt: chandler. seems like mitch kapor's heart was in the right place, but after six years of glacial progress, he left the project and took his funding with him. it's doomed.

apple is more focused on home users than businesses, so an exchange killer is outside their usual m.o. as well.
Rensselaer to Require All Engineering Students to Study Abroad
same here - I'd be willing to pay a small fee
I don't believe there is any correlation, much less causation, between the attributes cited and "greatness".

So, instead of looking at possible cofactors, why not just look at actual results?

Did it get done?

Is it fairly accurate?

Is it high quality? (I know, lots of room for judgment here.)

Did it take reasonable resources (time, money, help)?

I'd settle for these over possibly unrelated character traits.
Live Current becomes official partner to the IPL for $50m
I'm a reasonably hard-core XEmacs user and I'm perfectly willing to admit that it's just stubbornness (and the fact that it's the same on all of the platforms that I develop on). The "strength" argument hasn't been true for some time.

I don't think it says much about me being a good or bad developer. I think the question is more, "When is stubbornness useful"? I'm pedantic about Getting Things Right. That works for and against me.

A lot of these sorts of blogs / essays tend to assume that good programmers are interchangeable. They aren't. Pedantry is a good quality when doing system architecture. It's a bad quality in consulting.
I've seen the same thing happen with a rails app a co-worker created and populated with data for a demo/tutorial. It got indexed by the university's web crawler overnight and was empty the next day.
Great article. I've been looking for something like this.

Gives a nice overview of "Fair Use."

I'd recommend it to anyone who is pulling content from other websites.
I agree. Google simply followed the the semantics of http. They had similar problems with the the Google Web Accelerator before. But it's really hard to blame google for the mistake of other programmers.
'Private Tour' of Google on eBay for a Couple Hundred Bucks
Marissa Mayer: Totally Kidding About That 'Don't Be Evil' Stuff
EB Exchange Funds Provides Safety Net for Entrepreneurs
I hope no one who knows Tamil (my mother tongue) reads your comment. You just called me a lunatic :-D "kirku"

Yea I am looking forward to meeting you too.
My side project: an open-sourced comedy community
Hi everyone, I just launched a side project I've been working on for the last month or so ... it's fairly simple, but I'd love your thoughts.

http://www.ChompChompDead.com --> it's roughly what happens when you get eaten by a shark. We like to think of it as open-sourced comedy.

Anyways, there's a cast of 10 members who submit articles that are rated by the public. At the end of each week, the lowest rated cast member gets demoted, while the funniest member of the community is promoted.

Basically, this is one of those 'life is too short' kind of initiatives. I just love writing and reading comedy, nothing existed like this before, I knew I could build it... so I did. I'm not really expecting to profit off of it -- I merely wanted it to exist.

I'm launching it with the help of a bunch of screenwriters and comics I know. It's amazing how much the creative world doesn't understand about the online world, and vice versa. Hopefully this is one of those things that helps to bring those two worlds closer together.

Thanks for reading, and enjoy! Maybe you can even try your hand at being funny :)...
that seems to be on purpose because of the potential of violating copyright or until they find a good way to generate more money or until YouTube grows so big that will be an unevitable source for video (oh yes it's already that)

no revenue, no money to pay them in case you get sued.

which is why YouTube LLC still exists independently.
Peter, thanks for the review of our product. I agree with all of your points about improving the UI. Most of our early work was about the concepts and organization. The beta process is already helping us see where the UI needs work, and what needs to be presented or explained better. A screencast is a great idea - Fred will get right on that. We know the weaknesses now, but our goal is to make it as simple and streamlined as possible, because this isn't a product just for the wealthy, but for small biz and GTDers.
This tutorial is awesome. It is not just the content. The sequence and the presentation is just plain awesome. You are a lucky basketball.
Sure, you can sign up on the site, or I'll grab your email from your profile here. http://streamfocus.com/beta
Does Seagate own the patents to the flash hard drive?
Intel vs. AMD vs. Nvidia: The Coming Processor War
I still think it's reasonable to think the application form reflects thought put into the program. If I showed up shitfaced to a job interview it would be reasonable for the interviewers to wonder if I took it seriously. I may take it completely seriously, but I would understand if my behavior seeded doubt.

Your argument doesn't really sway me: I'm judging the program based on something real; you're judging it based on what must obviously be the case.

I don't completely write-off a YC-clone just because they put zero thought into the application form. But it does alter my impression.

I disagree with your static typing argument too. "Mountain out of a molehill" means making a bigger deal out of something than it is. Which means both things could be class Mound, just with different values. So in this case static typing wouldn't have saved the day ;-)
Youtube will be pointless once it's as easy to post a video as it is to stick a picture somewhere online.

So it will be as pointless as Flickr is right now?
I'd second going to an investment bank or business broker.

This kind of revenue is similar to what a lot of small sandwich shops and retail stores get. While your business is different, there are many groups out there comfortable with deals of this size.
Using Meta-Programming for Performance in Ruby
I think you are on to something here

perfect site for the aspiring onion.com writer
The flickr of video is a vastly different proposition than youtube. Flickr has paying subscribers.
Does anyone know what Amazon used to build their webservices, what OSes, Languages, Framekworks, Databases etc ...
And unlike email there is no way to automatically filter most of it.
In the end all companies that grow to a certain size turn into the equivalent of psychopaths. There's nothing you can do about it.
FaceBook's only a small part of the average person's social graph, though.

If you look at my FaceBook Wall or SuperPoke or Scrabulous list, it's mostly friends from high school or violin. They predominate because I have no other means of getting in touch with them. The people I hang out with most in person are all Amherst alums in the area; they almost never appear on my FaceBook, because I can talk to them in person. If I do write something to them online, it's through PlanWorld, which is an Amherst-only social network hosted on an Amherst student organization's computers.

There's another group of friends I have: folks from my Harry Potter fandom days. I'm FaceBook-friends with nearly all of them, but there's little activity between us. Instead, I talk to them over AIM. Why put up with the latency of the FaceBook wall when you can communicate instantly?

Then there are former coworkers from work that I stay in touch with. Most of these people don't even have FaceBook accounts, though a couple do. I use e-mail and LinkedIn to keep in touch with them, or I send them an IM and setup a time to get together for lunch.

I think a lot of people that make a big deal about the social graph are Boomers and Gen-Xers that are keen observers of today's "always connected" culture, but aren't really participants. They know that social networking is a huge part of young people's lives, but have no idea just how pervasive it is or how many options people have. The average American teenager now "talks" through phone, text-messaging, FaceBook, MySpace, LiveJournal, e-mail, AIM, and a half-dozen special interest sites. There've been conversations I've had that were half-verbal and half-AIM, carried on through a mix of typing and talking with the other participant sitting 6 feet away. The FaceBook social graph is pretty inaccurate when you consider all the options for back-channel communications.
Getting Creative with PNG Transparency in Web design
Just-remind.us
Forum:the lost power traffic booster
sometimes, new bloggers or webmaster just forget how important forums are ,and they focus on english forum,check this post for more information
I think that's a really neat idea. I'd definitely visit.

However, the design needs improvement. Please stop using that font. Add some color to it. Segment the site a bit more, it seems a little jumbled to me. Perhaps encapsulate each section of the site into it's own box, like the comedy pieces and 'the cast,' etc. I had some difficulty reading the links under your header image. Give your headings/subheadings/piece headings some more differentiation - everything is black and I feel like on the home page, the heading for the first piece is a subheading for 'Fresh Kill.'

Other than that, congrats on launching. Seems like the type of field that could generate a very lively and tight knit community.
Book Review: Creative Capital, Georges Doriot and the birth of Venture Capital
IPhone's localization system can be easily spoofed
Pithy Insights On The Business of Software
One reason more to create a startup that sweeps away the colossus ;-)
Ba da, bing.
"How do I make this pony fly to the moon?"
I love CommandShift3.  What do you think?
Unfortunately the estimated cost for the infrastructure was about 1$CPM

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/04/30/did-youtube-just-raise-...
35M daily videos watched = 1000M monthly videos watched
monthly infrastructure cost was estimated to be 1M USD

Which means at 1$ CPM you are barely breaking even. And that is without any revenue sharing costs.

Perhaps Google had better economy of scale but I doubt its an order of magnitude better.