skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are a couple of things you should ask yourself:

1. Do I need that much money? Maybe you do, but I'd guess that you probably don't need that much yet. Why not accept a smaller amount (for a smaller slice of the company)? In the future, if things work out you could give them an option of investing further.

2. Are you comfortable taking the money and possibly losing it? Odds are that you'll likely fail (sorry, not sure how else to word this) - will it ruin relationships? This isn't an easy question to answer.

If I were in your shoes, I'd probably try to take a small investment from each which will give you the capital to run for 3-6 months. After that, if things are going well (and hopefully they will be) - think bigger.

Disclaimer: I've never taken any investment so feel free to ignore my advice completely.
True that. But it's just a wish from my perspective since I'm running on a VPS with limited memory so I can't really afford to have both running.
Just 70 days though? I would have thought it would be much longer.
I have a question, after so much reading and commenting in this thread (and the original post). How many of the people here (programmers and non programmers) have peer-reviewed a paper, or written a paper (mind you, not in CS) that has been peer-reviewed?
Yeah, $75k is what you need for a decent, immediately-habitable house in a happening neighborhood like Lawrenceville.

If you're willing to, y'know, take a bus or walk a few more blocks to a neighborhood center, and you can do some work on the house, a house costs ε dollars in Pittsburgh.
I think you would be able to reduce the total time on your 10-queue example if you factor in/allow jockeying.
We, as tax payers, are being asked to bet over a trillion dollars on this research. It not only affects the first world economies, but it will be a serious source of problems to third world countries ("you know how we got are standard of living so high? well, you can't do that too"). The refusal to hand over code just leads to more suspicion. This is too political already and secrecy doesn't help. It is bad enough that the basic measurement methods are in dispute.
The Washington area and the greater Mid-Atlantic region has enough startups and related events to keep you busy. Check out http://www.socialmatchbox.com for information, and check http://www.dctechevents.com for events.
An excellent example of how blinkered most people are by the world in which they grew up - people are indoctrinated to live the life their parents lived. But we don't live in that world, and the number of beads in the jar can be radically increased through the application of biotechnology over the decades to come.

[Ob reference: http://www.sens.org ]

If we choose to do that of course. But if everyone walks through life with blinkers, assuming that it can only be the same as that of their parents, then nothing will change.

The future depends on people who break their indoctrination and work to make things different. Acceptance of what you saw as a child is death and stasis.
You mean I'm consistent with my beliefs?

OH THE HORROR!
I just returned from an international trip a couple of weeks ago and am glad I missed this. However the snap on my pants (!) must have set off the metal detector so I was still patted down.

In what other business is a normal, paying customer treated this way? Not quite the golden age of commercial aviation . . .
> the poverty levels I see in the US is shocking and appalling to my over-protected Canadian ass

I daresay American tourists find the poverty levels in Vancouver's downtown eastside just as shocking and appalling.
Very true - for both "in business there's no right or wrong answer", and "no plan survives contact with enemy". But on the other hand simplified principles and rules-of-thumb help us make rapid decisions with some good accuracy.
I would argue that relevance is exactly what he's looking for though.
I've seen similar results. It's nice to see it everything do it on the fly but I'm guessing doing all these optimizations on a large website will take up more processor cycles?
There are major Ruby Apps out there in the top 100: http://rails100.pbworks.com/Compete+Rankings

hulu.com
yellowpages.com

also major sites: like justin.tv. slideshare etc

The argument that "Ruby cant scale" just doesn't hold. Check out Ruby EE by passenger.
I don't think you can call yourself an academic if you're unwilling to share and describe your methodology in sufficient detail that others can follow it. That's the major difference between academia and industry. Also it should obviously be mandatory for taxpayer-funded research.
Need a Drop.io Alternative? Tonido is a Groovy Service Worth a Look
At the Wegmans I remember, the manager would pick people from the front of the line to move them to the newly opened registers (to keep things fair).
Unipoint-mode: A minor-mode for Mathematical Unicode
Download: Skype for Mac 5 Beta, now with Group Video
I wonder how the contractor did this. If it was a physical attack (unplugged a bunch of cables), then it would mean that the LSE has a rather weak SPF vulnerable. If it was a software attack, it's probably even worse: it means that developers have way too much access to the production systems. In a startup, it's fine (necessary even) for devs to get access to production, but in a large financial institution, that's a huge no-no, both in terms of data protection issues and security.
Thanks for the comment.

In regards to my Dad, he truly believes in the idea and he is of the opinion that if I take it to the VC's who now own the company that acquired me they will take it and be the ones who make the money.

I believe in my idea whole heartedly and in my mind there is no way it will not work, but I am also very hard on myself and I know if for some reason this venture failed I would feel terrible and probably even morally obligated to pay back the money even though it would be a total loss for me.

Does that make any sense at all?
I noticed if there is no beer in the house, usually I stop drinking.When I stop drinking sleep more and better and feel more creative.
Is just a cycle that needs to be altered.
Close your eyes and imagine that you took a sum of money from friends and family, gave it your best shot and burnt through it. Would you be able to face them positively after? Would it undermine your relationship with them in any way? If it would, then it's not worth it. If your idea is any good, there will be a lot of opportunity for investments in this market.
I wonder if the iPad and e-readers will provide s better platform for Chris's Interactive Fiction ideas than the Desktops/Laptops. It always seemed like IF was books++ and reading the tablet/e-readers are far better suited to this.

Maybe he was just 20 years ahead of the tech?
Only ever take money from people if you are willing to face the possibility that some day you'll tell them, to their face, that it's all gone.

That's a very real risk in startups, no matter how optimistic you may be now, so you don't want to take money from people who don't understand that risk and aren't prepared to face it.
How do you separate the credibility of a website on its own from the credibility lent to it by exposure on websites like HN? Ideally you'd hope that the reason something gets exposure on HN is because it meets a minimum level of inherent credibility on its own, wouldn't you?
Stay here long enough and you begin to enjoy the cold winters and hot summers... At that point you'll become a super-aggressive driver, focused on making money right away and someone who likes Puritan laws that aren't enforced evenly.
Doesn't it depend on your precise definition of Fractal. In nature they're not self-similar repetitions at altered scale but approximate the same¹. There is always a limitation in nature of resolution (lumpiness of atoms) just as no true circle can exist in nature (at least in our realm Plato², please correct me if I'm wrong).

So technically most (all I think) fractals do not occur extent in reality but only the mathematical description of them occurs.

--

¹ note the precise definition of "similar" in geometry, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Similarity_%28geometry%29.
² I can't recall Plato's take on [perfect] forms of biological "shapes" like trees and such.
There are a lot of moving parts, but these are separate sub-systems with well defined boundaries of interaction. Each sub-system is implemented using technologies selected for specific characteristics.

Mono for long-running and complex backend processes.

nginx, PHP, MySQL, memcache - for presentation - quick!

node.js provides an event bus between PHP and Mono

MongoDB is taking over from storing large blobs of JSON in MySQL.
mongo is still a joke for most applications
Well that's actually true. But i guess that voting the pattern was not intended to be "people voting down good things" but "people voting to prohibit changes"
Having been divorced, I'd say a big YES.
Well, maybe. If I'm a musician, and I want to be relevant, I can drag the world over to my music or drag my music over to the world. It may be that becoming "relevant" means making pop music.

I can't speak for him, but if he wants to stay true to his vision, the most likely outcome is to influence the world to come a little closer to where he is. Dragging himself over to where the games industry is today would mean making games that aren't very Chris Crawford at all.
... a clean room implemented, BSD licensed MySQL client library.

I believe MySQL/Sun used to make a lot of money dual licensing the GPL client library. No longer!
Absolutely. Generally, we're talking about building robust, reliable systems, though. _why specifically thought this hampered creativity. I can't find a citation for you right now, though.

Part of making his projects my own? Adding this stuff. I can see _why's point, but I don't think it's right for Shoes/Hackety themselves.
This reminds me of Eddie Izzard's encore on computers:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6C_HjWr3Nk
Best Practices of Combining Typefaces
What Happened to NewsBlur: A Hacker News Effect Post-Mortem
One particularly troubling decision not mentioned in this post: a new version of the XNA development tools (4.0) was recently released that introduces many breaking changes from the previous supported version, 3.1. Some of these changes actually reduce the number of windows machines an XNA game can run on, and other changes remove features entirely (even though they worked before).

As a result, many games cannot realistically be ported to 4.0 unless the developer only cares about shipping on XBox 360 at any cost. Under most circumstances, this would be fine, but Microsoft has decided that any games developed using the previous version of the framework (3.1) cannot be released if they wait more than 90 days after the official launch of the new version. Oddly enough, games previously submitted using version 3.1 will continue to function, so they're not dropping support for the framework - they just want everyone to move to 4.0. Essentially, Microsoft is forcing a release date on the set of developers who actually tried to develop games simultaneously for PC and XBox, even though this kind of simultaneous development was originally one of the things that made XNA interesting.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/shawnhar/archive/2010/10/12/xna-game...

Microsoft has also dropped support an entire platform: Version 3.1 of the framework allowed you to target games at Windows (DirectX 9), XBox 360, and the Zune. Version 4.0 allows you to target games at a smaller subset of Windows, XBox 360, and Windows Phone. Anyone developing a Zune game is entirely left out in the cold (that's what you get for being an early adopter) as well.
It's not a movie but the show 24 was always the worst...in less then 1 hour, real time mind you, they would decrypt insanely complicated stuff...but alas I still loved the action on that show
Those are very wise words!
I'll say take the bare minimum (that means no new machines or such) and start off.
Ask when you need more. This will keep things in check.
Too much money and money at wrong time can kill a startup.
Could you use some of the $1M exit to self-invest and avoid diluting your stock at this stage?

The cheapest financing is frequently your own, if you have it.
"So given all that, it hardly seems a huge deal to not be able to use someone else's code, as long as you know what the code was supposed to be doing."

But that's a vacuous statement. The only description of what the code is doing is the code. The description you get in a paper is the goal of the code, but goals aren't results. (Mistaking stated goals for results is a surprisingly common systematic error, programmers make it all the time when they believe the hype a project puts out before the project actually has any results. Once you start looking for it it's hard to see a day go by without someone doing this.) I can make a simple information theoretic argument that it is blindingly obvious that any significant code base will have many more bits in it than any journal article could, so it is literally mathematically impossible for a journal article to accurately describe the code. If goals were the same as results all of our jobs would look very different.

Moreover, the reason why you can't use the other guy's monkeys is purely physical. If they could use the other guy's monkeys, they would. They try as it is; the entire purpose of controlled breeding gene lines is to try to erase variations. If they could use guaranteed-atomically-identical lab hardware, they would. (The story of cold fusion would probably be very different if this were possible, for instance; instead of an effect that nobody could reliably replicate, there would be one set of results that everybody could replicate and probably rapidly explain. Note I'm not making a claim about cold fusion itself, just the way history turned out.) Don't elevate an accidental physical limitation to an essential component of science. Very few things hit the true ideal of science, and in general the closer you can get, the closer you should get.
While I do think "stop making excuses and just ship" is correct advice, I'm not sure how useful it is to you.

You sound like you have a procrastination and/or executive function problem. I highly recommend reading a book called Procrastination [1]. The first step in changing your behavior is understanding why your behavior is the way it is. This is not a self-helpy book; it is written by two clinical psychologists relying on their lab work, patient work, and a wide breadth of historical research on the subject.

From the product page: "Based on their workshops and counseling experience, psychologists Jane B. Burka and Lenora M. Yuen offer a probing, sensitive, and at times humorous look at a problem that affects everyone: students and scientists, secretaries and executives, homemakers and salespeople. Procrastination identifies the reasons we put off tasks—fears of failure, success, control, separation, and attachment—and their roots in our childhood and adult experiences. The authors offer a practical, tested program to overcome procrastination by achieving set goals, managing time, enlisting support, and handling stress. Burka and Yuen even provide tips on living and working with the procrastinators you may know. Wise, effective, and easy to use, this new edition shows why for 25 years Procrastination has been an immediate must-have for anyone who puts things off until tomorrow."

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Procrastination-Why-You-What-About/dp/...
I think introverts or those with social anxiety disorders have more to gain with Rejection Therapy than highly social extroverted people (like yourself).
1. I probably do not currently, but this is a situation where I could run into needing that amount very quickly depending on server traffic etc. I could take a smaller amount from each, strangely that is something I had not thought of/

2. That is what I am struggling with the most, I could take the money from an Angel of a VC with no questions asked because I truly believe in this idea (and in the words of a big name angel investor I met on my last project, I "have too much of an ego to fail" so i am confident it will work and work well, but I guess in the back of your mind you worry about how relationships will be IF it does not pan out like everyone thinks.

Thanks for the comment and the input, it is greatly appreciated.
I'm sure jockeys make fun of ridiculous horse racing scenes too. Real life is boring.
LARP in that case... The parallels are eerie ;-)
Let's say you've gone through that step, step 2 which is just as important, assuming that you're fine with the consequences, is making sure your "investors" are also fine with that particular scenario. Explain that you'll do everything in your power to prevent it, but the fact remains the possibility will always exist.

If THEY'RE not fine with it, then it's time to walk away from the deal. They need to understand the risk at the same level you do.

Something else you can consider: if they're somewhat comfortable, but not 100%, why not spread the risk out between your father and your other friend?
Somebody please fork mysql and get rid of oracle once and for all.

I bet the whole community will support the new sql.
Predicting whether a startup will succeed or fail.
Just out of curiosity... A nano-poll. How many people have spent significant time playing Chris's actual games, like "Balance of Power" (my personal favourite)?
I thought only women operated the machinery where women were scanned and only men, where the men are scanned?
Sometimes opposite of good UX brings (at least short-term) revenue:

http://wiki.darkpatterns.org/wiki/Home
Forest fires seem, to me, the low hanging fruit. Lots of economic damage for little effort so the fact they're not being done make me doubt the omnipresence of Emmanuel Goldstein.
the sponsors of these laws were businesses, so it makes sense and isn't necessarily even bad for the law to be written for the common cases.
I have been without cable tv for about 5 years now. I dropped it because I never watched it and when I did I was watching dvr'd shows. Since I have subscribed to netflix for my entertainment needs and invest in the occasional purchase on iTunes through my apple tv. Sports are a bit o a problem but MLB.tv takes care of that. Either way it's a great way to save $600 a year.
There's this 500-year plan in place to resolve the weather situation. It's finally coming to fruition.

In essence, it involved developing new methodologies (the "Scientific Method"), which were able to lead to new technologies (loosely grouped under the label "industrialisation") which have produced large amounts of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

This has been a particularly tricky plan, but it is basically in place and is now steadily warming up the planet, according to most reports. It should only take another couple of hundred years and England will be a good 5-10 degrees warmer.
Yep. The Wiimote simply tracks points of infrared light.

In a pinch you can use two small candles as a "wireless sensor bar".
Fashion for Nerds by Example
At the risk of proving that I am immature (since these words can be read as me rejecting my mortality, which he mentions in the article) I wonder why so few of these posts acknowledge the possibility that new technology will allow life to be extended?

A lot of people seem to have a mental block regarding the possibility that our biological clock, like almost everything else, may eventually be changed by technology.

I am especially surprised by science fiction writers. Why are there old people in so much sci fi? Why are there old people on shows like Star Trek? Does anyone seriously think we will grow old and die 500 years from now? And isn't sci fi suppose to lead the way in this area? I mean, what is the point of sci fi, if it doesn't help people imagine how the future might be different? (Obviously, I'm talking about that branch of sci fi that avoids fantasies and dystopias)

Virginia Postrel has sort of hit on this theme in her writing, where she wonders why sci fi tends to be less optimistic than it used to be. The future is no longer what it once was:

http://www.dynamist.com/weblog/archives/002834.html

A lot of things that used to be sci fi are now real: space travel, global communication devices, computers that can fit in your pocket, medical treatments for once untreatable illnesses, etc.

It would be interesting to have a poll on Hacker News and ask people how long they think they will live. Since Hacker News is a community of forward looking individuals (and pro-technology too), such a poll would give a sense of how much a forward thinking group thinks medical technology is going to change in the next 60 years.
I will indeed, in fact I was planning on boot strapping anyhow, however I know that the amount I have and consider free for investment (about$250k) will not be enough to get me through the entire project, and the people offering are not doing so because I need the money or they do, they are doing so because they believe in me and my idea. Which is what makes it so much more pressure filled
When I had Tivo, I definitely watched things like Modern Marvels, Mythbusters, etc, more than other things like whatever was supposed to be on at 8PM. If the model was based on recommendations and voting, like Tivo, I think a lot of those shows could definitely survive.
haha, right, like Rocky is an accurate depiction of boxing
They're actively making changes to the service that make it worse, so it goes a little further than 'failing to improve'. The platform was already in need of significant improvement to serve as a real revenue stream for indie developers - only the biggest successes on XBLIG were bringing in revenue streams large enough to justify further development as anything other than a hobby. The changes they've made have actively made this situation worse, by making it harder for end-users to discover/purchase games and harder for developers to support their customers. Their current trajectory indicates that their only concern is the success of Windows Phone 7, and based on how they dropped support for Zune, if WP7 fails they will probably kill the Indie Games program entirely and use the funding on something else.
Perhaps you're thinking of the Transportation Security Administration?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_Security_Adminis...
There is a non-trivial chance I had already written one before you were born.
We got rid of our cable about ten years ago and never regretted it - not even our kids, who seem to recognize that most of it's crap anyway. With some of the savings from not having to pay a monthly cable bill, we occasionally spring for DVDs of the few TV shows we actually enjoy.

It may be just my own selection bias, but it seems to me that the best TV shows are getting progressively better - by which I mean more connected rather than episodic, as well as smart and content-dense enough to hold up under repeat viewings. This may be a response to the increase in the ratio of home library : broadcast viewings.

On the other hand, I've also noticed that embedded advertising seems to be getting more common. In an episode of How I Met Your Mother, the credits identify Cadillac as a sponsor after one character calls another "the Cadillac of rebound guys".
London's version of Silicon Valley complete with change to IPR law