skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
StartupDigest: A list of startup events in your city, emailed once a week.
Remember when NTP sued RIM and won over $400 million? Their patent for sending email over RF seemed pretty silly at the time too. So, while this is a good article on the whole, it may be a bit naive to assume that Oracle can't win the case on a few simple patents. This case appears to be the only reason they bought Sun, and I suspect they're smart enough not to place a $6 billion bet without some very smart lawyers feeling like they've got a good shot at winning.
AKA "Reverse Verdanagate".
the reality is you’re doomed if you’re even asking yourself the question. You know what I think? I think people who tell themselves ‘if I make $X million, then I’ll stop working and do what I want’ never make that $X million.

I'm not sure the OP has grasped the complete psychology of FU money. Surely the value of FU money is not to allow one to stop working, it is in the emotional pay-off for the security it represents. This is a big deal, especially for people who, for example, experienced financial insecurity as children. I am guessing there are also tangible social benefits to reaching that stage, even if you changed nothing in your life upon achieving it.
Bootstrapped Equity Business - Myth or Smart Move?
What a great example of killing the golden goose. "Yes, I spent a full minute clicking through your results to find what I needed. You showed me 3 more ads than normal, and now I'll never, ever, return."
I think people who tell themselves ‘if I make $X million, then I’ll stop working and do what I want’ never make that $X million.

If that's the case, then why do so many start-ups sell to bigger companies? Every month we hear about another one. The "swing for the fences" companies that go through to IPO (Facebook, Google) or massive acquisition (Youtube) are more and more rare.

The Angel's question is meaningless unless you also know how optimistic you are about the company's chances of growing enough to deserve a much better deal.
One of my favorites, especially the 2007 edition where 160 leading scientists, philosophers, programmers etc. answer the question, What Are You Optimistic About And Why?

http://www.edge.org/q2007/q07_index.html
Move over Lady Gaga – Lady Java rulez
"I do not have any other possession than what fits into my two suitcases" ... "Wherever my 30 inch monitor is, i call home"

isn't that a little counter intuitive? you're hardly portable.
Whereby "Take it" he says:

No. If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it. Take [the web server software] Apache: once Apache got better than our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it – a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all – you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane. Keep in mind it's not that good in most places yet. We're a big supporter of Linux. At some point we may embed Linux in all of our products and provide support.
To answer the authors question. Absolutely sell out, if your first success buys you the freedom to fail a thousand more times it is worth selling. He said those that would sell out are those that don't already have FU money, that they aren't in the club. Those founders that hold out might already have that FU money and are free to risk holding out. Each founder in those cases can't be compared.

A man asked me to follow him into a startup I didn't believe in, he could go in and fail completely and come out the other side without a scratch because of his previous success. The risk was too high for me because I didn't already have FU money to cushion a complete failure.
Holy cow, didn't notice that - I thought it was some wise ass seeing what he could get away with as a joke. That this is meant as a serious patent and was accepted, oh boy.
Which is a real pain when you're trying to develop a responsive Flex application. (Something I have to do at work, not because I want to.)
Interestingly I find a similar drive within myself. Many years ago I told myself I'd start a business when I had $10k in hand. Then it became $20k, then $50k, then $100k, now it's more...

Of course I realize that there's no good time to leave a good job -- just like there's no good time to have a baby. It's a moving target -- and if you want to do something, you just have to jump the nest and do it.

Because our minds work on a relative basis ("I make good money but he makes more") and because our dopamine payoff from money is never as good as we anticipate it to be ("no, winning the lottery will not make you happier"), it makes sense that more is never enough.
Here's a good post about a successful single founder:

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2010/01/will-single-foun...
How to Display Your WordPress Sidebar on Other (Non WP) Sites
How Running a Business is Like Casting a Movie
I would try looking here (if you haven't already): http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html
By the way, I love the Hemingway reference in the SN. Feel free to email me and I will brainstorm with you.
Agreed--way to early to add 4sq to the list. Otherwise it's interesting though.
"only" a million users? Yeah, that's really pathetic.

Not counting robots, I think my blog has two users... but my wife probably doesn't check it very often.
"Before anything else, let’s do the numbers: money market funds yield around 4%."

What? The Vanguard Prime Money Market Fund (VMMXX) is yielding about 0.13% right now, and I think that's fairly typical.
Replicating Flipboard's "page fold" animation
This is an interesting contrast to the article by A Smart Bear about why he 'sold out': http://blog.asmartbear.com/rich-vs-king-sold-company.html
If you focus on body builder type workouts, then you won't be training your aerobic power, which means less endurance. That's really just a case of if you don't practice, you don't get better -- you can work around that by combining body building with endurance exercise, but that would mean taking time away from bodybuilding, which is a question of priorities and goals.

As for speed and power, they definitely decrease with bodybuilding workouts. Bodybuilding workouts DO build strength, but they also lead to higher muscle tension.

In martial arts, the LAST thing you want is a lot of muscle tension -- the big, strong guys that train with me tend to get very frustrated by how effortless my blocks are when they attack me, and how painful my short strikes are -- again with an apparent lack of effort. In fact, more effort almost invariably leads to LESS power, as well as less speed -- because of a few factors:
1) You tend to use fewer muscles, and smaller ones
2) You tend to fight yourself a lot more, which holds you back
3) You tend to unbalance yourself, which compromises your ability to move and therefore your efficiency.

Having said all that, you CAN build muscle without taking on those disadvantages, but the trade off is that you will end up spending a significant portion of your training time on something other than body building in order to do it.
Mmm... It's a toughie... maybe you should ask Google what you should do. ;)
I disagree. The phrase nakedly demonstrates it's about financial freedom - the freedom from ever having to worry about money every again. It's when you don't need your paycheck that you can tell people you work with or work for to fuck off. People who depend on their paycheck can't do that.
Ask HN: Suggest some basic books about startups.
Startup may not be all about some great ideas. There are various other aspects such as finance, capital, managing people and so on. Without basic knowledge of all this stuff it is difficult to think of building a business.

Can you suggest some books that a student must read if he wishes to start his own company in future?

I dont want the inspirational types books but something that will sensitize me to the basic issues in building a startup.
'Miracle' in Colombia jet crash: 1 dies, 130 live
That's not an argument, that's a link to an essay. Besides, that essay is about "stuff", not "space". Personally I'm not a fan of having too much stuff, but I'm not sure it's so easy to have too much space. I'd have a hundred acres of forest if I could afford such a thing (anywhere convenient). But I don't want, say, a deep-fryer.

If you think space is psychologically expensive, why not phrase it in your own words?
> So, will you sell out for fuck-you money?

I'm not sure if the writer is serious in his use of "sell out". I think it very funny. If you sell your company for a mere $10M you're a "sell out" but if you want more and more then you're the real thing.
I'm not sure where the value is

According to the OP they seem to think it's in the brand name, which is pretty bizarre - how much brand recognition can Lycos have? Last time I can remember using Lycos, something like only 1% of people were on the Internet, and at least some of us must have died since then :-)
I guess I should expect that parsing the English output of programming language designers would be difficult.
Thank goodness, the web font debate is now over. Now we can go back to revolutionizing typography through interaction and social text, without the annoying sneers about Georgia and Arial.
I'm happy to see the word trolls embedded in a legal document.

But the claims remind me why patents tend to be useless to actual innovation "The method of claim 63 where filing the claim with the patent office includes:filing the claim with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. " -- not only is that obvious, but it's repeated several times. (I'm sure these guys write better patents than I do, I just hate the metric that we use for "better")
FU money also empowers you to work on riskier and riskier ventures without as much pressure to succeed as the first success presented.

Who worked to make $X million dollars and then just stops working? You just work on different things, you never stop working all together.
More interestingly, in Java List<int> is a list of objects, boxed ints, but in C# List<int> is a list of int32s, with no boxing or unboxing.
Not really. It sounds like this guy is staying in one city and sleeping on his friends' couches. That's not travelling, it's mooching.
Personally, Open Source is my platform ... gcc, python, ruby, perl are my languages ... now with exciting new developments like Rubinius, Pypy, LLVM and Parrot.

Java always had a certain appeal to it, and I've given this platform 2 years of my life ... but the corporate stench just won't go away.

And here it is again, the owner of Java ... instead of redirecting resources to Java 7 which is a crippled release already, they are starting lawsuits.
I have to say, I nearly threw this article across the proverbial room after reading the second paragraph:

> Before that point, you’re just adding frosting on the lifestyle cake of your wage-slave existence. Beyond that point, you can forget about aspirational consumer buying of 48-inch flat-panel TVs. You suddenly confront the most existential questions in human life: what do I do with my life? What’s a good life? No one’s forcing me to do anything, so what do I do now?

I'm sorry, but that's just offensive. The fact that you can't imagine a "wage-slave" contemplating these questions is probably closely linked to why you can't imagine a successful startup founder getting off the treadmill either. If you were willing to take your $4.2M or whatever and be happy, you'd also be able to understand that you can live a good life without that kind of money too. (Free hint: it's not the 48-inch TV that makes your life fulfilling.)
It's worth talking about the math the VC community is doing here. They are seeing this 9% success rate that was quoted in the above article, and thinking "we need those 9% to be home runs."

This logic makes a huge assumption: the success rate of companies is fixed, and not related to how hard founders swing.

My hypothesis is that if the investors didn't push the founders for home runs, the 9% number would grow. If true, it really invalidates the math a lot of these guys are using.

The attitude really should be about maximizing expected value - and I don't think we have any data showing that always swinging for the fences does this.
I like the comedy website idea. If tracks or "bits" were tagged it would be even better.

"clean", "family", "kids" (for example)

And then I could hear Bill Cosby's cookie jar bit, or Bill Engvall's I.G.Joe bootcamp bit, I'd be in listening heaven.

HOWEVER, I know for a fact there used to be something out there similar to this. I think it was called "haha" or something like that. I don't know if it exists or went away, but I used to use it back in 2005 (I think).

How about a StackOverflow.com for Indie Game development?
Bed Bug Infestation Is Scaring Millions Of Americans
While I have no reason to doubt the good intentions of Eric Schmidt, I think this makes a lot more sense from Google's point of view, rather than the consumer's point of view.

Being able to suggest things you may like is in a way at the core of what advertising is. Currently Google does a pretty poor job, both because it's hard to predict human behaviour, and because they mostly use (or used?) the search patterns as a guide. But if you want to make money from ads the obvious area to improve is to tell you what you may like before you even know it.

In other words, to me this speech sounds more like an advertiser wondering how to improve the significance of its ads than a search engine wondering how to improve searching.
What about a service that acted as a relay for a remote user streaming their own collection of music?
A 30-inch monitor fits into a suitcase. Still, if I were rationalizing my life down to two suitcases (which, incidentally, I've done before, and I didn't much enjoy it) then I'd have more clothing and less 30-inch monitor.
I don't get it. Several of these are technologically very cool with terrible marketing and/or bad application coughsegway[0]cough. Others are "hahaha look at that silly fad (auto-tuning, victorian dresses) aren't we so much cooler now!". A couple, like betamax are the losers in a format war or feature war, not really bad themselves, just on the losing side earning a hatred from those who "wasted the money on one" (and forever including them in these lists for vindictive catharsis). Finally a small number like the pinto's explosion rate, or hydrogen blimps, are actually bad inventions.

This whole article feels kind of wantonly ignorant. Like the cool kids at school finding something, anything really, to mock rather than participating. Or like all the "that sounds like faggy talk" stuff from the movie Idiocracy.

[0] Creating too much hype which results in mass disappointment is just as bad as traditional "what were they thinking" bad marketing.
hmm...
I agree with the article about the current trends don't seem to favor VC. To a founder 25million is a win and to a VC it's not.

But my advise is still to swing for the fence.

What I figure is your first company goes towards creating something that can make you FU money(25million would do). Your second and after goes to hitting homeruns, google type.

I think VC should now start targetting already successful entrepreneurs, since making 25 more million wouldn't neccessary cause that much change in the outcome of their life. As a second time round entrepreneur, you would be more than likely looking to make your mark on history and by creating disruption.

I think VC can use this to their advantage. Also, a second time round entrepreneur is more likely to be successful.
I will take your question seriously and give a very personal reaction. (You are obviously not a flamer, despite 1 comment here.) I haven't tried modern Perl. Maybe you could lure me back to perl.

I programmed in perl for about 4 to 5 years on an intermittent basis. I though it was great. I then switched to python because my lab was doing a big project in python. I ultimately became more comfortable with python over perl for some very simple reasons. (1) Readability. I could understand code from others far more quickly. I could understand my own code better after leaving it for a while. (2) Introspection in the REPL. Things like dir and docstrings were very helpful. Initially I felt the perl debugger was superior, but I came to rely on pydb running inside ipython and got along ok. (3) CPAN. Python was way behind but got close enough for me after easy_install became common. scipy and numpy were important to me and the perl variant of these things (pdl, I recall) seemed to lag. (4) OO was always easier for me to grok in python, probably because it was originally designed with OO in mind.

In the end I found I really don't like OO all that much, and now I code in haskell, which is an entirely different story.

Looking back I would also say that Perl6 was a huge distraction without a big payoff. It should have killed off Perl 5, yet it lives. Seems like Python 3 has similar issues. I haven't done much with Ruby besides skim a tutorial or two and wonder why it has gained so much mindshare.

Again, this is strictly a personal assessment and not meant as advice for anyone.
This is a space that's starting to heat up a bit, but out of all the ones I've seen, I think I like neighborgoods the best.

Regardless, 'sharing stuff with people near you' is one of those things I'm keeping my eye on.
I remember seeing those in the store and thinking -- why didn't anyone think of this before !?
everything he needs to know about pursuing a bootstrap dream is embodied in your second paragraph. write an ebook and sell it online for $24!! if the bootstrapper thinks along such lines, he is bound to be successful!!!
I'm the opposite, e.g. I find Django templates too restrictive.

I have used Rails, but my web framework of choice is Tornado; I really like their design choices.
A somewhat irresponsible and hypothetical goad.

A truly bankrupt sense of self-worth would be refusing 15MM for a germ of a business. It’s one thing to entertain delusions of grandeur, but to rationalize it by concluding you’re an interchangeable cog who fell backward into a successful startup is disheartening. The rapacious quality you speak of would not preclude the acceptance of an exit; rather, it would fuel it.
There's nothing uniquely African about beautiful cities. And what does that have to do with "objectivity"?
> The Java specification has a patent grant clause for compliant implementations, which obviously includes OpenJDK

OpenJDK is safe because AFAIK the GPLv2 license also has a patent grant.

But if you want to take Apache Harmony and trim it down so it fits on a mobile device or on a pen ... the very essence of open-source ... then you're fucked.

If you want to take some idea from OpenJDK and use it in Jikes; a cross-pollination of ideas (not copyright infringement) which is again ... the very essence of open-source ... then you're fucked again.

Java is not an open-platform. It never was.
Personally, for that type of time/budget size, I would probably start a company that make mobile (android) widgets. I would like to see full screen ones made with more to offer than the ones that are out there.

Things like niche news portals (gaming, restaurants, real estate, music industry, auto news, etc...), stock trading info, local offline shopping sales, etc...

Basically, the stuff that has been done in this area is pretty crappy imo and you could take it quite a bit further. The development for something like this shouldn't be too tough either compared to making normal mobile apps because you're mostly just aggregating existing data.
Ask HN: Why is school rote memorization?
I'm a high school student. I'm incredibly frustrated.

I feel like all I ever do is memorize things about which I don't care an iota. Be it history, chemistry, grammar or whatnot; they are all the same.

1) Memorize the material.
2) Take the test over said material.

I'm burnt out. Oh yeah, I can memorize fine. But why? To get a good grade? Pointless; I'll forget it in half a year, if it takes that long. (If I don't care about it.)

So HN, is all of school, and eventually life, memorization? Do I just need to suck it up, and get on with my memory work?

How should I continue?

For informational purposes:

- Voracious reader.

- 30 on ACT. (With a 26 on math, because I had only covered 1/3 of Algebra 2. 34 reading, 32 english, 28 science.)

- Probably 110-130 IQ. (Never taken official test, but I can out-stride nearly all my peers easily; I live in a university town; had multiple educated people tell me I can do anything I want [i.e., the brains are there].)

- Love programming. (Have one site live at the moment, others that I've finished, but taken down.)

- Looking at Comp Sci major this Jan. (Provided I finish High School.)

Edit: Typo.
A patent application says "patent application." A granted patent says "patent."
I like the comedy website idea as well.
This is bloody brilliant. I mean I know my comment is supposed to be meaningful or something on here. But I'll be damned if I have got to say it. This patent is a total wingasm.
Are hydrogen blimps actually a bad invention? They were perfectly useful for many years, transported a whole lot of people a whole long way in an age when it was the best and most comfortable way to travel long distances. There was one high-profile accident of which we just happen to have footage, but I'm not sure if the death rate per passenger mile is any worse than that of 1920s-30s planes.

Segways, meanwhile, are a perfectly reasonable invention plus a bit of stupid marketing hype which media outlets were dumb enough to buy into. But the mall security guard market alone is enough to justify the existence of the Segway.
Need to be more clear on that. If you just say The Times, The NY Times is assumed.
Ask HN: Which user engagement tactics have you tested personally.. 
..and which were obvious to make a difference.

At the site that I work the following things made a measurable impact on the traffic, user retention and user engagement:

1) Make content shareable with social networking sites. A year after we implemented this our daily uniques increased by over 70% and social networks generate now almost 50% of the traffic.

2) Create badges for user achievements. After the introduction of badges the amount of user generated content doubled in a month.

3) Create a weekly newsletter to registered users who have not visited the site for a week. This is not as clear cut but after this was introduced the number of daily logins have increased by about 10% (could be a measurement error though).

4) Make the site load faster.

..and which did not make any apparent impact or made surprisingly small one:

1) Running banner campaigns asking visitors to register. Registration numbers didn't budge - maybe our banners sucked.

2) A feature allowing users to follow the content created by other users ala twitter. A few are really using this feature - maybe we had crappy implementation.

3) An invite functionality where users can invite their friends to register at the site. Only 5% of daily registrations come from this feature - I was expecting more.

Just in case you are curious, these experiments were conducted at: spoki.lv