skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, so I wasn't clear. I'm not talking about bare-bones. I am talking about 'luxuries' as a means to get developers. I'm also talking about market rate salary and benefits since to get experienced devs, the types that might have families, mortgages to pay.

I'm not talking about 3 guys sleeping rough in a studio, coding to all hours.

I realize many/most startups don't start with the needs I am describing.

Also, I'm also just looking for a completely rough-guess answer.

If you think it's $1 million then fine, if you think it's $500 million or 2 shekels, great too. Just add a little insight into your quote and it would be appreciated.
Good idea, but I don't see a Caps Lock either...
in 1999, OLTP was still new, and, hence the bug.

No, OLTP was not at all new in 1999. OLTP probably means something other than what you think it means.
I wasn't offended, I just wanted to be clear to you and anyone else that I wasn't kidding and I realize the naivety it carries in some ways.

I cannot elaborate on the product.
My comment was regarding weapon systems deployed, as that was the subject of the article, not which pile of bodies was bigger.
One needs to clearly and quickly communicate requirements.
Google's Eric Schmidt says Android is profitable
Tools For Deconstructing Other Sites' Keyword Strategies
as an emacs user, I don't like the ctrl alt placement. the kinesis looks to do a good job at that (i haven't bought one yet but i want to)
I liked that your post didn't start with "we use MongoDB and there's some problems with it". I haven't used MongoDB on production, and while I'm interested to learn about specific issues, the format of this post gives the reader the opportunity to evaluate your problem from a platform-agnostic perspective first. Instead of having Mongo interfere right away, I can think about how our systems might hit the same issues.

To echo others, I'm interested to read the more in-depth post-mortem.

Good luck!
As others have mentioned below, there are probably at least one or two intermediate steps between where you appear to be now (earliest stages of business planning)and being in a position to raise a significant financing round. You'll need a product and probably some initial traction with users and, hopefully, revenue.

That said, you can calculate a rough monthly burn rate by adding together the estimated monthly salaries of the employees you referenced in your post and increase that number by 130-150%. This roughly accounts for all the operating expenses. If you need guidance on salaries try checking out resources like salary.com.

You'd probably want at least 18 months of cash in the bank. This gives you a year to execute and six months to focus on sustainable profitability and/or additional later stage financing.

So, monthly burn rate x target number of months of cash in the bank is your target financing amount.

Hope this helps.
Sounds good. Have you seen Epic Win or Chore Hero? Both are iPhone apps that seem to do most of what you say here (haven't used them myself).
there's all kinds of factors that could affect that answer.

for example, we have a core team of four with five additional interns at the moment. our cost? zero. we're as bootstrapped as it gets, and nobody has taken any pay to date...but we're based in athens, ga where the cost of living is minor.

i would recommend considering 100% of a pie and how much each member you described would be worth. from there, be flexible & generous with your equity as you're filling out the team. equity is your biggest asset at the stage you're at. hope that helps!
This is clear and exactly what I needed. Much appreciated.
One way this sometimes happens is that the company has to pay you while you're not working.

I know of a guy who worked at Capital One (credit card company) who left and Capital One had to pay his salary to him for one year while he agreed not to work for any of their competition -- if he wanted to he could have drawn his salary while sitting on his ass at home doing nothing. He took his salary and also worked a job in a different industry.
Apple Intentionally Under-stocking Apple TV
Sigh, Cherry keyswitches. I've tried them all and am just not a fan.

I wish I could get a Topre-based ergonomic keyboard without going to Japan. (Yes, I'll pay the $700.)
Any particular reasons that you'd like to share with us?
Well, just swap Ctrl and Shift and it's back to normal. It's that Tab key up in the middle of nowhere that's a real problem. This keyboard must be aimed at book authors rather than code authors.
There's a video on youtube of someone typing on a Kinesis Advantage, where one can see a lot of wrist adduction to reach the tab key.
The Maltron keyboard might be a better option for heavy tab-key users.
Are you doing all the parsing yourself or will you use ihackernews?
He almost certainly signed an agreement that prevents him from disclosing that kind of information.
i always try to make my presentations interactive and have the audience involved. i've found it to really loosen up the vibe...and it also gets them more engaged!

as another suggestion, you might want to try thinking of everyone in their underwear. don't be too uptight/serious ;)

best of luck!
It's mainly that gradient box in the right hand corner that serves no purpose besides distracting the viewer, and making the logo look cheap.
"at Dapper, we ship daily. Inside Yahoo, this may change somewhat"

Understatement of the week. Best wishes, but don't expect to remain nimble! When they come to talk about the billing system integration and cutover, run for the hills!!
Sounds a bit like a question you'd get out of a time capsule buried in 1998. But I guess you might have such a kick-ass idea that you have investors queueing up to fund it, or you might be rich and willing to fund yourself, and just want to budget.

Figure 200k/person for the first year including equipment, overhead of hiring, etc. You'll need to allocate at least 20% of your company's equity for stock options.

Server space is cheap and competent engineers will set you up with something on a "pay as you need it" basis. That said add $2000/month for kicks and giggles.

Legal is a black box. Are you doing a new kind of game? Around 50k for trademarks, etc. Going after the music companies? One trillion dollars.

Office: where are you? San Francisco? $1500-2k/month. Kansas City? They'll pay you to take the space if you throw in a little dance routine on Friday afternoons.

Travel - Are you sending your sales guy to Europe twice a month? Having board meetings in Aruba? I guess you can do a Kayak search as well as we can.

So if you're going to hire everyone and start building toward the Big Release, which is not recommended by the way, figure 1.5 million for the first year. If you read Steve Blank and Eric Reis' stuff you could probably do it on $200k with higher odds of success, but you'd miss out on hiring a bizdev/marketing guy, shopping for dental plans, etc.
I think two of the more impressive aspects of Facebook's growth - and Zuckerberg surely had a strong hand in both - was how smoothly the site scaled to accommodate the very rapid network effects, and how relatively uncluttered the site remains. Those both take a tremendous amount of knowledge and discipline that he couldn't just cruise through on.
HOT & SEXY COFFEE MUG
Ubuntu 10.10.10 Release Party in Hollywood
Let's celebrate Ubuntu's new release and meet new friends!

Who can come?
-------------
Anyone how is interested in free and open source software.

What are we gonna do?
-------------
- eat
- play ping-pong
- play x-box on a giant screen
- help people replace their Windows/Mac - with Ubuntu or other open source alternatives
- Free Ubuntu CD give-aways

When?
-------------
Mon, 11 Oct. 2010 6:30 - 10:00pm

Where?
-------------
Borderstylo Offices
729 Seward St Melrose Ave Los Angeles, CA 90038
(Free parking)

a few pics of the office:
http://borderstylo.com/posts/205-company-culture-at-border-stylo
http://borderstylo.com/posts/138-take-a-peek-inside-border-stylo

What we might talk about?
-------------
- Introduction to Ubuntu Desktop
- How to install Ubuntu on a typical laptop, PC or netbook
- Guided tour of the Desktop and basic admin
- contributing to open source projects (as developers and as non-developers)
- crash courses in Python/Ruby/Unicycling (or any other topic people can talk about)

Tech?
-------------
Free wifi

Should I bring anything?
-------------
Please bring your own food / drinks.
Are people downvoting this because of the last sentence? I think it's a perfectly reasonable point.

When your OS is only available on one product and one carrier, it's not an apples to apples comparison and analysts should try a little harder to prove if the trends really indicate popularity or just availability.
Totally agree here. I prefer startups to ask for projects instead of a resume. For my job (YC startup), I believe my resume design caught their attention, and my side-projects got me an interview.
Marijuana Dispensary Directory
The new GAP logo is really awful. I agree with you 100%. But this thread really doesn't really belong here.
If in doubt, choose consistency.
The psychology of loyalty programs
Indeed. http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6995033
Amazon EC2 Running SUSE Linux Enterprise Server
Ask HN: Experiences with askyourtargetmarket.com
Found this via the lean startup pack on Lessons Learned. I was wondering if anyone here has tried it and how useful it is.
MongoDB is designed to help ease the pain of scaling, but what you're asking for is magic. If all the sudden a large amount of requests start coming through that overload a shard (think very popular users, like if several very popular users ended up colocated on a shard), how is MongoDB going to anticipate this? Any kind of shard scaling will only work well in scenarios where you have a reasonable increase in load, not a crippling surge.

In addition, it's very, VERY difficult to scale writes against a single object, such as Justin Bieber's profile data, say, if you've got a view counter on it. You can either serialize writes on read like Cassandra does, which has it's own drawbacks (the more writers an object has, the more expensive reads become), or you can have single-master-for-an-object sharding like MongoDB employs and most other production sites (Facebook, Flickr, etc) use.
Three days ago, the Sequoia Capital branch in TelAviv (Israel) have announced explicitly that they wish to compete with angels and would provide a pre-seed and seed funding up to $500K for startups.

(Sorry guys, I currently have it in hebrew only, http://www.themarker.com/tmc/article.jhtml?ElementId=skira20...)
It's not the password they want, it's the evidence in side the "safe" that your password protects.

You're compelled to provide access. You could probably make a legitimate case for not actually revealing the password if you provided access for them.
Starbucks via ready brew vanilla flavored coffee
That's true, didn't realize that. Guess you could get the international version and use AltGr as an additional modifier. Or you could maybe use the left and right Ctrl or Alt as different modifiers...I don't use Macs, so I have no idea whether that would work in practice.
Emiller's Guide To Nginx Module Development
I think you have me confused with someone else. I haven't spoken at a Chicago CocoaHeads conference.
Facebook’s “Like” Button Used To Be The “Awesome” Button
Sounds like a good system. I've noticed that people tend to do things like shard based on even/odd, and then they realize that they need three databases.

I've never had either problem though... but if I ever need to shard I plan on doing it based on object ID. Then one request can be handled by multiple databases, "for free", increasing both throughput and response time.
There may be some good ideas in this paper, but I find them obscured by problematic details.

Under normal kernels, the standard OCaml garbage collector cannot guarantee that its address space is contiguous in virtual memory and maintains a page table to track the allocated heap regions.

They couldn't find ~1 GB of contiguous address space (out of 128 TB available) under Linux, so they threw out Linux completely?

Each Mirage instance runs as on a single CPU core, and depends on the hypervisor to divide up a physical host into several single-core VMs.

GIL getting you down? Just define away parallelism and let the programmer handle it!

x86-64 does not have segmentation, and Xen protects its own memory using page-level checks and runs both the guest kernel and userspace in ring 3. This makes system calls and page table manipulation relatively slow, a problem which Mirage avoids by not context-switching in ring 3.

That processor has hardware virtualization acceleration for a reason. Working around performance quirks in obsolete hypervisors doesn't sound like a good use of time IMO.
The Future of Google's Street View
Sqlmap: automatic SQL injection and database takeover tool
Wapiti - Web application security auditor
You may want to try posting this on a Roguelike, 4X or RPG gamedev forum. Some useful map generation techniques are often discussed.
The MPAA telling you that is no different than me telling you that. I have no legal authority to do so, no matter how many lawyer's names appear on my letterhead.
Most effective way to meet Angel Investors
The most effective way to get set up with people who will invest in your fledgling business
There was no sudden crippling surge in this case as far as I can tell. There was no mass-updating of a single object either. It failed even though it fits your ideal situation pretty much perfectly.
They can do that. They face their own consequences if they do.
My skills are design, writing, business, strategy, and product vision.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm intimately involved with every piece of UI across our product line as well as our marketing sites.

Some of the UI I design myself, some I work with other designers on, and other bits I give advice, feedback, and guidance on.

I also write the copy on all of our sites, and I'm involved with most of the copy in the apps themselves as well.

I hired DHH as a programmer (and then made him a partner) because those were skills I didn't have. I've done some PHP programming in the past, and I met DHH when he was a PHP programmer, so I was able to evaluate his talent at a very basic level. Beyond that, however, I liked his business mind and general approach to things - they were closely aligned with my own.

I hope this helps explain the dynamic a bit. Let me know if you have any other questions.
This video has some samples of the Koro language:

http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/player/news/cultur...
Here is a diagram showing who is suing who in the mobile space: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/oct/04/microsoft-m...
For reference, a 2000 Calorie per day diet translates to about 100 Watts.
Great job on your first project! I think a cool next step would be to use twilio so that users could add lifechores through text message.
I'm guessing that if the fire department put out the fire then only people who's houses catch fire will pay. This probably won't generate enough revenue.
Internet Governance in an Age of Cyber Insecurity
Privacy concerns as some Apple iPhone apps transmit UDIDs
Wind Power: The Miserable Hum of Clean Energy
So bribe somebody going to YAPC::Asia (or other japan-hosted conference)
"No one made that bed but Apple, and it is but another example of Apple putting Apple first."

It's an example of Apple putting its products first, and by extension their customers. Breaking the innovation-killing death grip the carriers had exerted over the mobile phone industry until 2007 was one of the most important breakthroughs of the iPhone.

Contrast with Android. From pre-installed bloatware to sacrificing long-held core values on net neutrality, Google is very cynically putting market share first, and by extension the carriers. It's breathtaking how quickly and willingly Google has thrown away the very hard fought gains Apple made against the carriers.
Facebook drops "Clear Chat History"
Along with several other visual updates to their chatting box. They seemed to have dropped the clear chat history feature.
Wow. Why does it feel like a throwback to the Transputer and Occam.

Though, I have always wondered why an idea of a free distributed operating system was never implemented. With the old HeliOS, all you needed to do is add it to the serial links and processes would migrate to it as needed. And when a machine was turned off, those processes just migrated elewhere.
I've been using Historious for the past few days and it has worked pretty well for me so far. We'll see how it works in a month or so when I need to find that Really Useful Article :)

One thing that I did notice about the cache is that when qntm's server was getting hit hard, it was taking ~5-10 seconds to load the cached page. I think this is because even though you cache the page, it was trying to load the CSS, images, and js from qntm's server. Not that big of a deal, but I was expecting it to load faster.
What's the best way to visit startups in the valley?
How does one connect with startups who are interested in hosting visitors for a quick tour?
Congrats man! I'll try to use this as motivation to code something myself.
This is why I don't like small companies; the owners read blog posts like this and then add "social media clauses" to their employment agreements.

I think the counter is to get employees to ask for salary for 2x the length of the noncompete period. Sure, I won't solicit your customers for 6 months after I quit. Because I'll be taking a one year vacation at your expense.
Chore Hero talks about reward points, but doesn't mention what's done with them. Epic Win seems to be the one that made me think "XP, for what?".

I've seen a few of these sorts of sites around, but they seemed to lack incentive or real motivation. How many people have tried a bunch of To Do apps and never stuck with any of them? I just keep going back to scraps of paper.

Of course, to-do apps and choretrackers are like black holes for developers but I can't help but wonder if there's a tack yet to be tried with both.
What I've been wondering is why Apple doesn't pony up and do just that.

They could say "Hey artists not [yet] on a label, join the iTunes Label. We're a great distribution channel, and we'll give you a 70/30 split."

OK so it's a bit far-fetched, and it really depends on what iTunes-as-a-label would provide (but with GarageBand/Logic/CuBase who needs tons of financing?). Really the only thing iTunes doesn't have a great story for would be touring (but even then, what better way to sell concert tickets than through iTunes/Ping?).
What if I like it and want a second for work? :)
Graphene Electronics Inches Closer to Mass Production
Just to add, the authors themselves note that "this is an observational study and cannot establish cause and effect."
Remove Car odor | Odor remover
The Auto Vaccine is the most powerful odor eliminator ever available. Get rid of smoke smell from car forever!
I was thinking there ought to be testimonials above the fold. I think there might have been with there old design.

I didn't notice until now, but there aren't any customer testimonials about their SaaS products. There are only a couple about their books.

This seems like a bold move. Maybe they're onto something. Perhaps most people are tired of seeing testimonials, and that relying entirely on organic word-of-mouth is a better strategy.
Great Job! I also wanted to let you know that your website, seems slightly broken in chrome: http://imgur.com/liF73.png

I am not sure if it is due to being in chrome-dev, but it took me a second to understand that the actual content was down the page. After widening up the browser the main content div popped into the right place.
ok... i'll play along.

what revenue?
where are the customers?
how much are they paying to acquire them?
how much affiliate revenue do they actually receive per transaction?
how do they retain customers?
how are they planning to overcome the non-existent barriers to entry in that space?

scorpion032's comment: "Steve has enough from the Reddit sale." is dead on. think about it.. these guys could self-fund the project without breaking a sweat and yet they still sold 20 point equity stake. why? --diversifying risk or pr, really.

either steve realizes hipmunk's a longshot and isn't quite sure that he and his co-founder's street cred will actually play out in terms of long-term customer acquisitions and retention so he's cashing out now while the handful of early adopters (their "e-following") will still look like an aggressive growth curve), or he's trying to get some free press. basically.

edit: i say "longshot" in the sense that i feel it's unlikely that their competitors will do nothing to adapt to any serious hipmunk rise... so unless their competitors are clueless-- which i doubt they are-- and unless they develop some sort of non-replicable competitive advantage-- which i dont see happening-- i think they'll have a hell of a time gaining any ground.
Ask HN: Client Password Management
I work at a small company that interacts with a lot of clients. We frequently have to get on their FTP servers, in their hosting accounts, and more. As such, we have a large amount of client account and password information that was previously just written down and placed in file cabinets with other documents. This made sharing the passwords difficult and resulted in going back to the client to ask for passwords several times.

When I got the the company I decided it would make things easier and more efficient to set up a better system. I installed Dropbox and KeePass on all systems and built a protected password database for our office. It has made things much more efficient.

However, with this setup, it opens us up to problems. This is purely hypothetical at this point, but it crossed my mind yesterday.

What if we hired an employee and later fired them and they decided to get revenge by using the passwords that they (could have) easily backed up to abuse client (and our own) accounts? Is there legal protection? Is our system terrible? What are your thoughts?
To Dev or Not to Dev. The Nokia N8
Thanks, I had never noticed that before.
Thanks!

The color scheme is definitely more what I'd like, rather than the audience so that's a good point. I'll definitely add in pictures soon.
most desks are really too high to rest your elbows on- it tends to bring the shoulders up and forward instead of being able to keep them rolled back. Under the desk is often preferable.
I don't think start ups are too into visitor hours...
Why It Doesn't Feel Like A Recovery: at 3% growth it's 2020 for 5% unemployment
Avg Time On Site: HN (1:56), Reddit (0:27)
I would say spend more time developing a solid prototype and use that time to find a co-founder. You can't be perfect and there has to be someone out there to compensate for your own weaknesses. With a good prototype, it should be much easier to attract a co-founder and the added time should allow you to really make it solid and increase your chances of getting into YC.

edit: Keep in mind applying isn't a binding, one-time-only thing. It's not like you can't apply for the next round if you don't get in this one.
Integrate it with your speedometer, look ahead on your GPS route, factor in time of day vs. likelihood of presence of law enforcement, take into account accident data and risk based on location and time of day, and rather than a HUD, simply have an ambient dash light that boils it all down and glows related to your risk. Integrate GPS+radar detector+Whispernet (real-time wardriving for speed traps).

I'm sure with the radar detector this would already break laws in about 30 states, but the core idea still would be viable if all you did was integrate crash data to alert people to risks in areas where their perception of risk was off.

If they remake the movie "The Gumball Rally" again in a few years, I'd expect to see this device featured by one of the teams.
Does text communication cut down on crime?