skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you like this, hear him more recently on the same subject (an interview I did with him earlier this year): http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/paul-english-on-...
i like it.

my advice to the company i invested in was make it integrate-able in a similar manner.
Gabriel Weinberg does an interesting interview with English on his views on hiring. http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/03/paul-english-on-...
Jinx.
it's all a learning process ..

you might want to change case for the footer .. the caps don't help :)

i see you're a RU grad .. i'm an RU alum, now in Boston.
Thanks for translating. I learned more from your comment than the post itself!
Twitter Ignores Convention, Goes Big with New Tweet Button
I've found this useful: http://www.slideshare.net/jeff_croft/beautiful-layouts-throu... as well as this: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/settingtypeontheweb/
To sum up Digg:

Jay brought: great track record with equinix and strong reputation amongst investor community.

Kevin brought: strong reputation in the tech community that lead to intense growth.
I got a 3 year old son, and a job, and in the process of starting a company.It is not easy because there is not much time for it.I can work after 10 PM couple of hours.Hopefully in a year or two I could work full time on this.
Finishing on the Bubble: My Experience with the TechStars Application Process
Does this problem still occur when you use even higher-resolution screens, like the "Retina" display?
That seems like something you could sue them for. Is this not an option for people? (In small claims court at least.)
I wish this article had spent more time talking about dividends in addition to price appreciation in stocks. If the equity premium is indeed going to be lower for the next few decades, then you should start to see increasing dividends to reward stockholders.

We might have to get out of the "holy shit I gained 400% on this stock in 6 months" mentality and instead start learning that an income producing basket of dividend stocks at 6% is the way to save for retirement.
The risks of entering programming prizes
Designing Web Applications for Scalability
I haven't had much experience viewing a Retina display, but since it displays at about 3x the resolution of a normal display (as mentioned in the post), fonts like Garamond should render much better on it.
Bypassing wifi paywalls with MAC address spoofing and static IP
If anyone is interested, I whipped up a stand-alone app this morning that does the same thing: http://github.com/clayallsopp/VolumeCamera

Made it pretty quick, so YMMV
Another site with open source fonts is The League of Moveable Type: http://www.theleagueofmoveabletype.com/

They only have a handful, but they're pretty much all high-quality.
Introducing Voice Actions for Android
I have GOT to stop reading these sorts of articles.

They make it big because they are networked with the sorts of people who have money to spend (either by being a former employee of an acquisition-happy company, or being pre-vetted by a group like YCombinator). Based on other articles of this type, they also make money because they are young, they are pretty, they went to Stanford or MIT, they live in Silicone Valley, they had a good idea, they were able to pivot in just the right way, they have no other commitments -- no spouse, no kids, no mortgage -- or ties, etc...

Sure, they "worked until they endangered their health".. but they were also the lucky 0.0001% that had everything else line up so that hard work was all they needed.

Reading this sort of thing is a drag for those of us who do not have any of those advantages. Who try year after year to support a family and also find a business that can actually work out. (got another idea last week... looking to feel out some potential customers ... wish me luck!)

So, uh, yeah.... I should stop reading these kinds of articles
Demand Media’s IPO: Everything You Need to Know
There are a number of factors.

1. As PG points out, startups are sorta pass or fail. If you could raise $1m for 25% of your company, or $8m for 25% of your company (which, btw, is a realistic possibility when comparing angel vs VC investors) you would take the $8m because your business has much less chance of going broke. Clearly I'm simplifying here, as there are a lot of other relevant factors (who the investors are, terms, the needed valuation for an exit afterward, etc.) but you get the point.

2. They probably have a lot of ambition. In the case of Flipboard, my guess is they're not thinking "we're just making an iPad app." They're probably setting out to change the way people interact with social media, and the iPad app is just the first step along a very long road.

3. Peace of mind. As an entrepreneur I can tell you, there's something very nice about knowing you're not going to run out of funding for awhile. Everyone breathes easier, and it lets you take bigger gambles when not every product has to be a winner. If you're already wealthy from a previous startup, and you're shooting for a massive exit, your path will involve hiring a lot of people and possibly a large marketing budget. To not have to worry about money requires raising a lot. (This is one of the primary advantages, for first timers, to raising angel money. They don't need an IPO increase their net worth by a factor of 100.)

4. It's what worked for them before. The companies that merged to become PayPal presumably raised a lot along the way. I know TellMe had one $47m round. When people raise a lot of VC money, then have an enormous exit, they're probably going to tend to do the same again. It's what they know, and they have empirical evidence that it can work.

5. Because they can. That shouldn't be a reason, but it definitely is. A big VC round is the startup equivalent of a trophy wife.
VC Insanity: How the economics of venture funds explain the crazy things VCs do
iTV? That's going to cause some confusion in the UK.

http://www.itv.com/
One killer feature remains exclusive to Lisp: macros. However, in languages as flexible as those you mention, with higher order functions and good type inference, you don't need macros as much as you might in less flexible languages. I'd love to see a serious evaluation of the cost/benefit of s-exprs and macros in real-world production code but I'm not sure how exactly how you'd measure this.

My own cursory examination of the clojure-contrib library's use of macros, for example, suggested to me that many of them wouldn't be necessary in a language like Scala, but I'd love to see a more rigorous study.
"Why is software so expensive?" [Dijkstra]
What prevents the rest of the pump system from being stolen?
How did you find a startup to join? I wonder if that's good general advice for others with this problem?
Me specifically, yes. But I was born and grew up in the same country. I still think it's presumptuous to say that you can at a glance determine a person's place of birth. I have friends- people I've known for some time- that surprise me both because they were born overseas when I thought they were born in the states and vice versa.

And I'm talking about a relatively easy case of Chinese vs American. Are you going to tell me you can tell a Canadian-born person from an American-born at a glance?

Yes, many times you can tell where someone is from because of stereotypical cultural things that are difficult to hide. But to assume you can go for a walk and identify with certainty who is American born and who is not is ridiculous.
Thanks - these are beautiful!
At some point everyone was a nobody with none of the above. You can actually start to check some of these boxes off. It's also not some definitive list either. Don't just look at these points, but also look at all the same shit the successful ones went through. Don't give be discouraged.
Google responds: Facts about our network neutrality policy proposal
I think the point of his link was to show that OSX contains easter eggs, implying that Apple is being hypocritical by including easter eggs in their own software while rejecting iPhone applications that include them.

But this reasoning is flawed: Apple allows easter eggs in iPhone applications provided that the hidden behavior is revealed at review time. And running tetris in OSX's emacs is not an easter egg; tetris is a documented feature of emacs: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/tour/
That was a crystal clear, high level explanation of Deolalikar's approach, and the issues with it. Terry's clarity never ceases to amaze me.
I thought it was pretty much settled that the old "stress causes ulcers" theory was a myth and that current medical knowledge is that ulcers are usually caused by the H. Pylori bacteria.

I always felt sorry for the poor guys that would get ulcers and then everyone piles on about how they need to relax. No, it turns out they just needed antibiotic.
Relevant question on Quora: Why did the web services (Web 2.0) group at Yahoo faill after acquiring Flickr, delicious, upcoming, mybloglog et al:

http://www.quora.com/Why-did-the-web-services-group-at-Yahoo...
The biggest trap of raising too much money is what I call "Maserati Limbo". You have raised $70,80,90,etc. million and have a huge staff to support current operations. You might be just about break even or even worse, not profitable. With that amount of money raised you're sort of in a limbo while maybe driving a Maserati:

1) You're limited to being acquired by a handful of select companies. If they don't want you, yikes.
2) You would need to go public, but you don't have the rev numbers to justify it.

So what often happens is the following: massive layoffs, fire sale occurs, and founders make diddly squat. The investors maybe make their money back and possibly .5-1x more due to liquidation prefs.
Not enough people know about Yahoo's projects. Some interesting ones are mentioned in this thread.

I have trouble defining "hacker culture", but surely it's about more than just the engineers working at a company.

If Yahoo's engineers work on these great projects, but no one hears about them - then it's probably because the culture at Yahoo isn't "hacker-ish" enough to motivate marketing to drive awareness for the projects.
> Take tons of photos, they change a lot very quickly.

Speaking of photos, make sure you have an SLR/interchangeable lens camera with a good fixed ("prime") portrait lens.

The image quality of large sensor cameras is way ahead of compact cameras (not to mention camera phones). Given that young babies spend most of their time indoors, you need a fast lens to use natural light and avoid using the flash.
Yup but I somehow missed noticing following point in your post:

_They got lucky_

Don't you think luck plays (or played) a great amount of role while raising funding?

PS: I define luck not as some sort of divine act but rater being "at the right place at the right time", something which can't be replicated per se.
Is Fexl open-source, or even available for download? It looks pretty neat.
There's a lot more resistance on the volume buttons on the iPhone 4 than on a P&S camera.
The region I know was the Midwestern US, the industry was manufacturing and the generation was my father's. He worked 25 years for a big company, got a decent pension, did reasonably well on his other investments and retired at 55.

He died at 57.

Life is too short. My attitude is to live now, work now and build something of my own.

Pensions are all but gone anyway. Stocks are flat. The one real way I've seen to wealth is by building equity in one's own business.

One positive to my father's reasonably frugal ways: half that pension and all the investments are now keeping my mom from living in my basement. :-)
Excellent Essay PG!
I was at Lycos about the same time, and what was going on there was very similar to what you describe at Yahoo.
Search was considered a commodity and out sourced to FAST.
Lycos wanted to be considered a "Media Company" too.
Humility is very often correlated with smartness. I have seen this as a common quality in most great engineers and scientists: truth comes first.
He isn't wrong though. That is a pretty good list of reasons why a large funding round may have happened. They aren't requirements, but they do all help.

The good news is that none of those things ensure a large funding round, and also that large funding rounds aren't needed for a startup to succeed. I don't think anyone would suggest that you shouldn't start a company if you can't check three of those boxes. But you probably shouldn't start a company that needs a $20m Series A just to have a shot.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=define%3A+evil
heh, really funny. My original draft in textmate had that as the last point. I left it out because it's hard to nail down as something replicated/recognizable. It's also sometimes the cause of many of the other points.
When someone raises a mammoth Series A before launching, then no. It's almost entirely that they had previous successful startups under their belt, saw a hot market, and were really good at whipping VCs into a lather and creating a market. Luck doesn't do that, skilled fund raising and a hot team and market does. If you took two founders who had separate, large exits previously, and had raised a lot of money before, and were making a startup in location based services, or cloud computing, they'd have a 100% shot at a big round.

When someone raises a large round a year after they launched, which almost always means they got a lot of traction, then possibly.
InDesign is bloated while Word isn't?
he sounds like an awesome guy, but his wife sounds like an amazing woman too. lucky bastard! :)
CM is a very light font. I used to set things in Palatino and AMS-Euler, which cooperate surprisingly well; CM and Euler do not get along very well. If you decide you want to use that, the following magic will set it up in normal LaTeX.

\renewcommand{\rmdefault}{ppl}
\linespread{1.05}
\RequirePackage{eulervm}
==1==
\AtBeginDocument{\normalfont}
\RequirePackage[T1]{fontenc}\relax

If you want to use Helvetica and Courier for SS and TT respectively, insert the following at ==1==.

\RequirePackage[scaled]{helvet}
\renewcommand{\ttdefault}{lmtt}
I think you are making some very valid arguments however I disagree with the principle of your position.

1. Status quo.

Yes, it's standard accounting practice to move huge amounts of liabilities off the balance sheet. Yes, whenever there are rules, people will try to game them. So what? It's wrong, and the status quo doesn't make it less so. When people like me call it out, it's not because we were born yesterday and have somehow missed the big bad world in front of our collective face. It's because we recognize that complexity (as applied to this situation) is made up to maintain the above mentioned status quo. When I had my startup, I chose to book profits on a cash basis instead of an accrual basis because I felt it was the sane thing to do. Would it have been perfectly legal for me to choose the accrual basis? Of course. Would it make any sense to pretend that I've made thousands of dollars where I've made zero? I don't think so. I am not comparing myself to Cisco but I don't think it's right for Cisco to pretend that their fantom profits are real either. Lucent did that and they are now bankrupt.

2. Lazy investor.

My apologies for the dramatic comparison, but the "lazy investor" argument is a bit like the rape victim argument. First you are going to say that the investors who do not pore over financial disclosure documents deserve being "misled" because they are lazy. Then you are going to say that the Nigerian scam victims deserve it because they are gullible. How long before you say that a young woman is "asking for it" when she goes to a bad neighborhood at night, alone? I am not saying you personally would subscribe to that argument of course, I am just pointing out that if you take that logic to its conclusion, only the strong survive, and that excludes all of us. It's no more realistic to keep up with miles and miles of financial disclosures and other assorted small print than to keep out of bad neighborhoods at all times.

3. Tinfoil hat nonsense.

I am not the biggest authority on the stock market but is there not a clear consensus that the current devaluation was caused by the financial firms' failure to recognize mind-boggling amounts of liability on their balance sheets? Perhaps I am misunderstanding what you are trying to say but it seems to me your last point was that that's just a wacky conspiracy theory. What do you attribute the devaluation to then?
This is ridiculous. PayPal is not some evil "big brother" - they are a company whose entire business model relies on stopping fraudulent activity, and as such, things like this often occur. Pick your poison - either have this happen on occasion, or have your money frequently stolen and more likely, be made essentially impossible to transfer safely on the web.

I will take the occasional inconvenience in exchange for a payment method that makes my life much, much easier.
I've tried this. It's extremely neat. Much better than emailing a URL to yourself.
A friend contacted me.

I read there are plenty of opportunities in silicon valley. YCombinator startups are always looking for engineers.
Ask HN: Where do you store your sensitive info?
I use multiple laptops for both personal and business use. How do you keep track of credit cards, passwords, and your online accounts in general?

Right now I store it on DropBox, or my inbox, but that doesn't seem very secure.
Proggit has a wonderful comment for this story. For those of you who don't go there often, here it is:

Back in my early 20's, when I was just out of university and doing any old contract job that came around, I happened to be working on a particularly complex project that involved a heavy amount of annoyingly complex javascript (before the days of jQuery). I ended up burning myself out trying to hit an impending deadline. I collapsed into bed in the middle of the day.

A little while later, my (then) girlfriend (now wife) came into the bedroom to ask if everything was ok and, waking up in a stupor and not really being conscious about what I was saying, I mumbled that it was all going wrong and I was hoping she would help me (she's not a programmer and wouldn't know where to start). I woke up a few hours later to find her stressing over one of my javascript reference books and looking at me with sad eyes, saying she didn't make much progress, because it was all a bit confusing.
I somewhat disagree with the Kevin's "strong reputation" - he had an audience for sure, but I think his reputation wasn't wholly positive. He'd done startup type things before that went nowhere.
Facebook's stuff was slowing the page down? I didn't notice much of a difference on my site. Were you using the async javascript version?
Ask HN: Office Space - Important?
I have an architect friend who has rented a nice office space for his own business, and he's said that the spare desk in there I can rent from him.

Its a very nice office, its the art room in a school that is being converted into business offices, so 1 wall is nearly all glass to let in light. He is only asking for £150 a month (mates rates) and that seems like a bargain to me. Its within a short bike ride from my house (30min) or a walk and a bus ride. I will use it mainly for getting my own business ventures off the ground as a way to help me procrastinate less and get in a business mindset when there.

Did anyone else find that getting office space and a desk increased their productivity? Its more of a personal preference really, but anyone able to share any advice or past experiences?
You say it is only occasional inconvenience that Paypal freezes/keeps their clients money?
AT&T keen on Google/Verizon net hostility proposal
Historically speaking, as in, over the past several thousand years, what was your best retirement plan? Loving children. Are we returning to that world?

To be honest, though, I think things are not as bleak as we think. We are fantastically, fantastically wealthy, overflowing with technology and the tech keeps coming and growing. We are not poorer than our parents; we are substantially wealthier but we have accumulated a proportionally greater load of parasitic loss and bad commitments, and a proportionally greater idea of what we "should" be able to afford. (It is no win to be twice as wealthy as your parents if you try to spend three times as much.) Defined-benefit plans will have to come to be seen as a peculiarly-20th-century delusion, as will the idea that the government is an unlimited charge card.
It takes a lot longer to become a truly proficient hacker than most 'business' people of an equivalent age have had doing 'business stuff'. So the ground is less for hackers to make up when learning and gaining business experience than vice-versa.
$20,000 for 8 months work isn't very much. It's not very clear how much time he spent per week but it sounds quite significant.
Tips for Startups on Naming Your Company
Gah use python!
One killer feature remains exclusive to Lisp: macros

Lisp can't rest on its laurels here either:

http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Template_Haskell
So which companies need to have a hacker-centric culture? Which companies are "in the software business" in this respect? As Yahoo discovered, the area covered by this rule is bigger than most people realize. The answer is: any company that needs to have good software.

In my time, I've heard and seen an number of non-software companies choke, stumble, and even become acquisition targets because of bad software. Budget car rentals was one that immediately comes to mind that I can actually talk about. For awhile I had a spate of bad customer service experiences where the reps explained that "our system crashed."

If PG is right, all companies are going to need a hacker-centric culture!

Another takeaway from the article: Bogosity kinda works, but only on shorter timescales and for a minority of participants.
That's... one of the best Twitter monetization ideas I've heard.

It pushes Twitter's real-time social analytics value to businesses while obviously strengthening a company's brand on Twitter. If the Tweet Button catches on, it could be a very easy sell.
>SLEEP WHEN THE BABY SLEEPS

Agreed. Check out this book: http://www.amazon.com/Healthy-Sleep-Habits-Happy-Child/dp/04... .

New borns sleep 18-20 hours a day but the few waking hours are distributed throughout the 24 hour period. This means your sleep will be disturbed in the middle of the night and you will need to make up for it with naps during the day.

Sleep is critical for brain growth and function. Tired dad/mom/baby == crabby dad/mom/baby. It can even lead to a negative feedback loop called being over-tired where one becomes too agitated to enter sleep easily.

After a couple months, you'll want to consider sleep training. This means allowing the kid to cry for increasing periods to unwind and adjust to the solitude/quiet needed for sleep.
Overlay sounds so much better than popup...
Map/Reduce to recommend people connection
He probably should have used valid syntax: "&#10005;"
I loved the last sentence on hacker culture:

"But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example."
Another reason could be this:

My understanding is that most PE/VC funds typically have a "2 and 20" compensation structure. 20% of profits, and 2% annual fee on committed capital.

That incentivizes, regardless of performance outcome, committing as much capital as possible.
Google : Facts about our network neutrality
he used 10 hours/week as an example, and that would put it in the neighborhood of $60/hr