skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would you do a deal with somebody who doesn't have any skin in the game? You're going to burn runway while you work on a product that you can't sell personally. They are going to have the right to sell it and not put any money in? I don't see any upside for you.

If I were in your position I would structure your take as a percentage of the gross sale price. They should pay you an advance[1]. That gives them some skin in the game, and keeps you from eating up your runway making money for somebody else.

[1] Be careful that things are constructed such that you keep the advance if they screw up in any way.
You'd be banned for spamming.
In fact, he said "sick to my stomach", and "Seriously, I want to vomit". Extremely strong judgements going on there.
Ask HN: Mundane startup financial details?
How do folks handle business banking? Payroll, HR, etc?
I represent a company in California that needs top ruby people. Send me a resume and let me see what we can do. We can move fast for the right person. I also know other companies in SF that need Ruby guys if you are good there are opportunities out here.
And you can write Atari 2600 games :)

http://www.atariage.com/2600/programming/index.html
The big print giveth, the fine print taketh away :)

Just because you have a 10 gigabit pipe (which is 1.2Gbyte/sec) that doesn't mean you can fill it. And filling it with a benchmark is different than filling it with NFS traffic.

So far as I know, nobody has come close to what SGI could do years ago, i.e, stream 100's of MB/sec of data off the disk and out the network and keep doing it.

I've tried with Linux to build a disk array that would do gigabit, not 10-gigabit, and couldn't come anywhere close. I think about 60MB/sec was where things started to fail.

I'd love to hear about a pair of boxes that could fill multiple gigabit pipes with the following benchmark:

$ tar cf - big_data | rsh server "tar xf -"

You can set any block size you want in tar, I don't care, the files can be reasonably large, etc.

If you manage to fill one pipe, then try it with 10-gigabit and let's see what that does.

I'd love to be wrong but so far as I can tell, we're nowhere near what SGI could do.
I hate to say it, but while historious might be pretty awesome, you have a lot of factors working against you.

First, there are things that already do this, and they work well enough. My browser address bar (FF3) finds 95% of stuff that I'm looking for. The other 5% I can open up my history and search. And, if that fails, I can retrace my steps somehow (re-searching Google, etc). I don't find it to be a big deal.

Second, Historious has a pretty large barrier-to-entry, and the pain-point may not be strong enough to overcome that. By barrier to entry, I'm referring to the effect of users finding it very difficult to switch the way they do things. I'm sure this is well documented, and there's a name for it, but if a user has their own way of doing things it will take additional value over just the new process being better, because there is a cost to the actual switching itself. By routinizing a process, it actually feels easier (even though it may be much more difficult than other methods). Since finding things you've previously browsed probably happens a lot, people probably have their own way of dealing with this. I'll just search again, or look through my browser history.

Third, it makes me think. I don't want to constantly evaluate whether or not I should historify a site; which is necessary since it'd be ridiculous to historify every site I come across.

It's hard to gain a fresh perspective on something you've worked so much on. Believe me, I know. I've been working on an the most incredible bookmarklet (guaranteed). I use it all the time, and I love it. But I've been routinized, and that's one of hugest problems. Even though it solves some pretty annoying problems and is awesome, I've found that people who try it out will not connect the fact that it solves problem XYZ, and they have problem XYZ, so they should use it. If they already have a solution to XYZ, that comes up to the top of their mind's list of how to solve the problem.
You can set "showdead" to false in your profile.
"Desperate entrepreneurs"
Lionhearted, it has struck me how often you live up to your name; but on that one isolated occasion, you shamed it.

I was thinking it would be hard for you to make amends. Removing the submission from HN is an excellent start, but it's still on your blog: http://www.sebastianmarshall.com/?p=251 I don't think Patrick should have to do or say a single thing in order for you do the right thing.
If he asks you to restore it, then do so.

This isn't about your reputation.

EDIT like edw519, I (FWIW) also want you to stick around. It's OK to make mistakes, provided you fix them. So... fix it, quick! Of course I can't speak for Patrick, but remember what happened with _why.
Things I learned while Facebook was Down
This sums up how I reacted to it as well. The post has a bizarre, obsessive, controlling creepiness to it. And seems not to really contain anything all that interesting. I'm glad I missed it when I looked at HN this morning.
Then one day, you kneel down to check your engine oil, and bam, there go all your credit cards. There are downsides.

I'd prefer if they just made the loops a little more sensitive. A 200 lb piece of metal would seem to suffice for a true positive...
There is some degree of international coordination under the International Telecommunication Union (radio waves don't really recognize national borders), but individual countries still have leeway to make their own internal rules. There is also some international cooperation aimed at keeping people from stepping on each others toes (e.g. I cannot use part of the 70cm amateur allocation because I am too close to Canada who makes different use of those frequencies). That said, as far as I can tell, it seems rules adopted by a significant number of countries (or a number of significant countries) are likely to become international.
Patrick has made absolutely no secret of his religion so there is no need to speculate.

He regularly refers to 'his priest' in his comments here.

For instance: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1428539

But I really don't see the need to further the 'psychoanalysis for the absolute beginner' based on the common 'guilt of the Irish', please.
If you take the Prolog route, this is a fun text: http://www.amzi.com/AdventureInProlog/advfrtop.htm
Everyone should be polite, but I don't see why we become women when we do.
Hmm, I see what you mean, thanks. I disagree about the fact that you're evaluating whether to historify a site or not, as it tends to become a sort of "hook" when you realise that a site is interesting. For me, it's "hey, what I'm reading is pretty good!" and then an (almost involuntary) click.

I agree that it's hard to get people to switch, even though your solution might be better. However, delicious (and various other services) did it, so I'm hopeful. My problem right now isn't low conversion rates (although that is a problem), it's that I can't even get visitors, to begin with. I just want to solve the problems in order :P
I missed that on reading the original the first time around, you're right. But Patrick is pretty up-front about his religion.
Voir Emelec - Ecuador vs Dep. San Martin - Peru
This was exactly what I first thought. To make things worse, I hate Apple, and so I immediately associated your product with all the problems Apple has caused me.
Dog poop powers methane lamp in dog park
If you have 100x as many users, you will look like an idiot to 100x as many users too.
CoffeeScript is hardly "exotic", as other comments on this post mention. But, if you want to try playing around with a mini programming language of your own, it could serve as a good starting point -- especially if you want to make something that runs in the browser.

It's one thing if you want to deal with integer representations and memory allocation, and quite another to want to experiment with language design, grammars and object models (and be playing with <canvas> animations tomorrow). The CoffeeScript codebase is only 2,200 lines of code in toto, and it's all annotated to help you get started and make sense of things.

http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/documentation/docs...

I'll second the motion for you to write your own thing.
Agreed. The fact that its still up there, unedited, gathering link juice, says a lot about the motivations of the author.
I shall continue to boldly split all the infinitives I please. We speak English, despite the best efforts of medieval Latin grammarians.
Scala, I've had a lot of fun with it. You can also try generative and meta-programming using emf/gmf/acceleo maybe some xtext as well. Learning exotic frameworks can be useful/fun as well. Maybe try a different domain like physics, finance, or even buy a fpga and learn some vhdl?
HN standards are the combined standards of all participants, if we had objective criteria for voting and flagging we wouldn't need those user interface components on all those pages, just a few would suffice.

Everybody gets to apply their personal criteria moulded to whatever they think is best for HN, with the guidelines at the back of your mind.

So, what I think is 'appropriate' for HN may be quite different from what you think is 'appropriate', if the moderator(s) agree what you flagged will be removed if not tough luck, maybe better next time.
Here is the reason why.

1. Businesses started pushing the cost of job training onto colleges. Then everyone had to go to college.

2. Colleges realized they were selling too cheaply when students could pay off tuition by working summers. They can't stop increasing the price because a competitor that kept increasing prices would use the extra money to become a better college than they were.

3. Because of 1 and 2, more parents and relatives became willing to help pay for college.

4. For people without parents or relatives that wanted to help, loans were the only way.

Since it would be too "socialist" to directly reduce the cost of college, the government decides to hand off the subsidies to for-profit entities that have become an $85 billion industry in a program called FFEL. Instead of reducing or reigning in the costs of college, they do what any sane business does: increase profits at the expense of someone else (students). They form partnerships with colleges to get kickbacks for every student loan.

And when all of you (including H-1B exploiters like Google and Microsoft) complain that the US is falling behind in education, more taxpayer money gets siphoned off into these corporations when a politician decides to get reelected again by keeping these programs in place.

http://niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=background.vi...
I was gonna say assembler too, but something more relevant, like ARMv7. Lots of uses there.
I really like this idea. Too often we hear about young, single founder with no commitments. Well yeah it's easy to hack away to 3 AM if you're living in your parents basement! I used to code all night long when I was still in school.

Now I'm 27 with a 9-5.30 job and a partner, friends, family. I like to go swimming, I like eating out and cooking meals in, all that gets in the way of marathon hacking sessions. Carving out dedicated time in the weekly time-budget is a good way to manage the balance.
This is stupid. If these people had voted properly maybe we wouldn't have racists in the Swedish government now
Competitors and Dirty Tricks - Where do you stand?
AngelGate Parody
Thanks, I still feel duped, but at least it's recomforting that this actually happens to others.
I fully agree with that, leaving it up only compounds the chances of damage and further indicates that this never really was about helping Patrick since it must be obvious by now that that is not the effect.

It's like those open letters that are almost never intended for the addressee.
That's why I was suggesting a sort of penalty clause like "you must sell x units or you owe (large dollar figure here) by this date."

This would force them to have some skin in the game, no?
You can crawl so long as you respect robots.txt and don't retrieve more than a couple pages a minute. (Conservative, I know, but we're serving 800k pages a day off one server, using an app written in a slow language.)
Come on, Paul. Do you really believe that Facebook is building this vast social graph and treasure trove of personal information, and they'll not try to exploit it in every way they can for huge profits? That's really what we're talking about here.

Facebook can spin it any way they like, but in the end they will have to invade everyone's privacy in order to make money. There's just no other value on that site. There are lots of brilliant engineers at Facebook, but it seems they are kept so preoccupied with "hacking" that they don't recognize the evil empire they're helping to build.
If there is such a thing as 'damning with lots of praise' then then was it.
Look, OP asked for investment advice. I gave my honest answer and what had work for me. If you have constructive criticism, post them instead of whining about downvote.

All investments have up and down. Just because there's an overdue big downturn in real estate, it doesn't mean it isn't a viable investment vehicle. Actually your negative reaction to real estate represents the general public sentiment, which is a perfect contrarian indicator. It really points to now it's the time to look into it to invest.

OP is 25 and has just seen the big housing downturn, which is great for him, lessons learned on other people's expenses. He has the next couple years to learn about it and accumulate capital to get into the game. If he asked couple years ago, I would have advised against it.
Forget the exotic tag, learn clojure or Haskell.
I've always suspected that it would discourage some OSS-focused companies from acquiring you, but I don't have any proof. It would be interesting to hear if there are any startups that had difficulty finding an exit because their product was built in .net.
Sorry, I can't see how this is an improvement over Boost::Phoenix:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_44_0/libs/spirit/phoenix/doc...
I experienced a facebook outage yesterday afternoon (-03:00 UTC) although the DNS resolved the facebook I could not ping their IP addresses. As you can read in facebook's twitter timeline.
Not ads. We post links to people who like us on Facebook, and we also get traffic from people who share our articles with their friends.
last.fm scandal -1 (although I'd award him more than -1 for that :D)

Point is, someone else could probably cherry pick situations that make him look wrong.

Everything Arrington writes should be taken with a large dose of salt; because he is, essentially, a gossip journalist. And even before the internet you did not believe every word a gossip journalist speaketh :)

Often he is right. Sometimes he is spectacularly wrong. Sometimes, and I think in this case, he gets a rough truth and then tarts it up to make a bigger story (either deliberately or subconsciously, I couldn't say)

Bottom line is; there is no point to this post.
When I was at my last company we encountered many a client which considered Java the "alien technology". I remember particularly one of the five largest banks in the world absolutely would not allow the JVM in their data center even if it was on our box. (This was the type of place where it took about a month and 3 or 4 signatures to get a port opened in the local network).
Posted to wrong thread
Yes, you're right, I'm sorry I missed that.
But who was phone?!?
Generally love these types of arrangements (i.e. partnering with someone who brings domain expertise and connections), but are there are a lot details that you shouldn't overlook:

1) Do the numbers make sense to you? Learn enough about
the margins and the market that you are comfortable
with the business opportunity.

2) Get the terms right. Be sure to address any equity
stake, timing of payments, expenses and record
keeping/trakcing. Take a look at Amazons affiliate
program agreement for examples of the kinds of issues to
keep in mind.

3) Greater Risk = Greater Reward. If you expect a
"minimum tech wage", do not expect to reap the full
fruits of your efforts.

Good luck.

P.S. Depending on your level of trust/confidence/req'd investment in this project and your partner, consider having a legal document drawn up to address your biggest concerns (but I wouldn't even bring this up until talks get much more serious).
This is because you've used this thing thousands of times.

Prospective users, however, will weight the cost of learning/remembering a new thing, and changing the way they browse, versus the benefit of "now it's slightly easier to recall things that I've browsed before."

Imagine you saw some crazy weird looking mouse at the store. If you bought it, it'd feel weird at first, but it's pretty much guaranteed to be an awesomer mouse. However, your current mouse works fine. Would you buy this new mouse?

Probably not. It's easier to not switch, even if it would be beneficial to do so.

In terms of improving your conversation rate: If you are requiring people to create an account to try historious, you should immediately get rid of that. Let them try it with as low barrier to entry as possible, and hopefully get them hooked.
Forth could be interesting to look at. It does offer a quite different perspective to programming.
This is pure speculation on your part. You could replace Facebook with Google and make the exact same argument.

Let's keep outrage for when outrageous things happen.
It's not new spectrum, it's using empty spectrum in the TV broadcast range. These waves are in the 500 MHz range, so unless part of your body is tuned to 2.5 feet (75 cm), you won't absorb a significant proportion of the energy in the wave. There's really no reason to expect a human body to interact with any amount of power in this frequency range. Not that there's much to start with, since digital broadcasts are using much less power than the old analog signals.
What I like most about Patrick's stuff is that he is such a vocal and visible contributor even though his personal start-up is such a realistic and achievable story. He doesn't make veiled references or never disclose his project(s) - he puts it all out there to the dollar. There's no outside investment, IPO, MSM press, etc. It's just one guy and his success in moving into self-employment. It's a happy life in Hobbiton (and I don't mean that in a condescending way at all).

Having read/skimmed Sebastian's article, it felt as though something ignorant and grand-standing had just trampled that.
What the hell? He used an unsupported procedure to install software of unknown functionality, compatibility and provenance on his phone, and blames Google for bricking his device?

It's never been very clear what "open" means, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't mean "untrained persons can perform major surgery risk-free".
It makes sense for cuts in ed subsidies to cause tuition to rise, but you'd expect universities to make up some of the shortfall by cutting services. There would be a drop in total spending, but smaller than the cut.

Instead, total spending increased by 30% (about 100Bn/yr) between 2000 and 2007 even though the student population dropped from 15M to 13M during the same period.

http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school.html

You could be right about the subsidy cuts, but they would have been a drop in the bucket compared to whatever else was going on.
You're quite right, I've thought of including a "tour" account that will wipe itself every hour or so, just to let people use the website. That should prove very helpful, I think.

Regarding your switching point, I'd definitely switch (and, so would anyone who uses vi/emacs (maybe I should market to them)), but I realise I'm not my target market, and that your point applies to that very much indeed. This just means that I have to make every aspect of historious easy to get into, though (fully-functional demo, easy account creation, extensions for all browsers), as I'll never quit :P

On an unrelated note, I just took a look at moreofit, and I'm very surprised by how accurate it is, so props for that!
Not to mention other platforms are more popular in other countries. For example, Google's Orkut is very popular in Brazil and I'm sure Baidu et al are working on offerings for the Chinese market. USA != world
Have you ever heard of Travis McGee? John D. MacDonald wrote about him. Quite a bit. Travis worked in "marine salvage", recovering lost or stolen property for a commission. His life plan was to take his retirement in small batches, as his life went along. Rather than waiting till later to take it all at once. Kind of an odd set of ideas about what is important in life.

Prior to going full time (such as it is) for BCC, Patrick worked at a big freaking enterprise working sixty hours each week. Often more. He built BCC on five hours per week.

So now his life has improved in measurable ways, and looks to keep on improving.

The thing that might be easy to miss about Patrick is that he is very intentional. You might call it goal-directed. Disciplined. I think it might be fair to say that he knows what direction to take his life in, what will make him happy.

And one thing that he is unlikely to do is to confuse what works for him and what others think should work for him.

It took me quite a few years (more than Patrick has so far) that being smart is not all it cracked up to be. Being smart works when it brings you wealth.

There is a common confusion that money and wealth are essentially the same thing. To my way of thinking, wealth includes to work on what you enjoy or love, to have choices how you spend your time, not having to agonize about having a roof over your head, to have family and friends to cherish and that cherish you, to have the respect of peers. It would appear to me that Patrick is on the road to wealth.

The fact that Patrick's version of success doesn't seem to include feverish addictions to money and fame has apparently made the author of this blog post "violently ill".

Were I to look to choose an example of how to live, I would be more likely to recommend Patrick, and I would recommend that the author of the blog post take a second look at his take on this topic.
Try to find a language that has "weird" features that you've never seen before. Try something like f#/ocaml, prolog, or vhdl/verilog. For vhdl/verilog run it in a simulator and look on opencores for source. Also, perhaps something like Cg or one of the other gpu languages, the further you get from Von Neumann arch the more you will learn, beacause so much of programming languages are leaky abstractions. Also, try forth it's pretty strange as well.
Banking:

- We use silicon valley bank. They have a pretty horrendous online banking system (essentially a bunch of third party services cobbled together- we have like 4 different sets of login credentials). But, their bill pay system is good. They also are extremely responsive. We have a real account manager to help us with issues. They were also able to make intros to a number of financial/HR vendors that were used to working with startups, which was really helpful.

HR:

- Our lawyer provided all the boiler-plate hiring docs.

- Paychex (SVB intro) handles payroll processing, withholdings, etc for like $10 per employee per month.

- Melita Group (SVB intro) handles benefits administration. We only have basic medical coverage now, but they have the capacity to provide all sorts of enhanced benefits if we need them.

Expense Tracking:

- We use InDinero to track all of our expenses by category each month. They do a better job of categorizing expenses than the SVB system does and it saves us some accounting time.
Keep all lights red.

Nobody moves, pretty simple heuristic solves for reducing automobile accidents.