skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Im not saying you are not truthful with how the story happened. Im just saying with the blowup of Google and Ebay right before this event that wearing a Google shirt, you knew what you were doing.
You're right, I wore my Google shirt because our product uses Google Checkout and I wanted to show support for it as I felt it was dealt an unfair blow by eBay. However, I didn't expect to get thrown out of the convention for it.
AFAICT the only extra overhead with Ubuntu is that there are more desktop-oriented packages installed by default. Yes, the upgrade cycle is shorter than debian stable, but it's longer than debian testing. It doesn't sound to me like you'd have any reason to switch your server from debian to Ubuntu.
It's very common for people to display brands that they want to be associated with. E.g., in fashion, you can't copyright a clothing design, which has led designers to sell plain T-Shirts that say "Ralph Lauren", "A&F", "Hugo Boss", etc. Wearing a Google shirt is saying, "Hey, please associate our tiny little start-up with Google!" It worked! And check out the press they're getting for rocking the boat via the existing eBay-Google flap.
I'll come out and say it because everyone else is being polite... you were thrown out for being a smartass and you are riding the conflict between the two companies for publicity. It's cheap... effective but cheap. No offense to you dude but that's accurate.
Right.. it's implying the founder can't say "leave your personal life at home", when he actually should. Ehh, it was just a quibble.. one can figure out the meaning by reading it more intimately.
What is the valuation of my company?
Say I've put in $50,000 to the company as the founder and I own half of it (I hold 50% of the issued shares). The two other founders have 25% ownership each, all sweat equity since I'm the only one putting up cash.

What happens if one of them decides to leave? What is our stock valued at and how much would it cost to buy it back from them?
On the subject of feature requests, different colours for read/unread (well, previously seen/unseen) comments would be nice.
:) current avg monthly wage is ~ $720
I guess I picked the right year to turn 30. Never seen so many "us vs. them" ageist articles before.

I'm strongly anti-ageist having been too young for everything in college (started early), and now apparently I'm too old for the Internet.

The most awesome thing about being a long-lived primate is it's like you can start over, but with experience. Your twenties are like another lifetime, all in the past! It doesn't matter how good or bad things were, they're over, and no matter your age you have to continually make things good in the present.

Buying into this "over 30" nonsense is as wrong as buying into the "you can't, you're just a kid" nonsense most of us already learned was bogus. Do yourself a favor and expect yourself to keep coming up with good stuff your entire life.
All Transactions are based on Trust, Part 3: Facebook & openID
Create And Share Interactive Floor Plans
Correction: I wanted to say staging/testing instead of staging/production. Production is runnin on 6.06
I have a different test. How far can you get with zero "employees", meaning no equity?

Salaries with no equity just keep you on the economic treadmill. Thus I feel somehow it's unethical and expliotative to employ anyone the traditional way. When I read stories about immigrants folding cardboard boxes for HP printers all day, to me that is not an acceptable cost of having a successful company. Of course then there's the issue of motherboard manufacturers in China and Taiwan using sweatshop conditions or something close to it -- making products we all use -- and people claiming this is an improvement for those workers. I find the whole notion of people having to work dead-end jobs -- often in poor or even appalling conditions -- just so they won't starve, to be extremely distasteful.
"What is it with pet supplies and Internet booms?"
Yahoo replaces CEO Terry Semel; Yang takes over
It depends how much of your stock was in return for the money you put up, and how much in return for your work as a founder. If your work as a founder was worth zero, the valuation of the co (at the moment you invested) would be $100k, since you bought half of it for 50.

In most startups you don't have to buy people out if they leave (in the first year) because most startups have vesting with a one-year cliff. I.e. none of the founders get any of their earned stock till they've worked for a year.
Yahoo! Co-Founder Jerry Yang Named Chief Executive Officer (Yahoo press release)
"Fostering a culture of winning?" Ouch. Can't imagine Google saying something so corporate. Plus it makes it painfully clear that this is to be a departure from the previous culture of losing.

Yahoo probably will do better now, though. Jerry's a hacker, and that's what Y needs.
Do you have a vesting schedule? No?

Quite simply, company is worth present value of future cash flows. Is the company profitable? If not, it's worth zero. It doesn't matter how much money you've put in and how much sweat was put in and how much opportunity cost was sacrificed... that's all sunk cost. If you're not profitable and have no revenues, you're worth zero and that's where you should start your negotiation from.
Steve Jobs is a Rifter
The new Google product that could augur the death of Microsoft
The value of any company (new or established) is the expectation of its future profits.

It's harder to estimate the future profits of a company that isn't profitable yet, but that doesn't mean the company is worth nothing. In fact, there is a whole industry based on buying the stock of newly founded, unprofitable companies. It's called venture capital. Its leading practitioners are all extremely rich, which they would not be if their work consisted of buying stuff that was worth zero.
Just what yahoo needs. Hope this changes Yahoo, the way Jobs changed Apple after Sculley.
Migpwr, you sound jealous and negative for no apparent reason. I don't see how my article could have offended you personally to warrant your string of hateful replies.

Let me repeat - I didn't go to eBay Live to start a controversy. I went to get some users to try my software, which I worked hard to build for the past 5 months. Things took an interesting turn, so why wouldn't I try to use this opportunity to get some attention for my software?

I posted the story at YC news because most startup founders would hopefully find our low-budget marketing story interesting and maybe even inspirational. If I just wanted free publicity I would have digg'd it or something instead. I don't even have a digg account.
Obituary: Terry Semel's reign at Yahoo
We had a little chart that weighted the monetary contribution to 25% with sweat being worth 75%.

(Did a quick calculation, not sure if it's right... does this mean we're worth $400k??)

The reason why I'm asking is because I'm trying to convince the others that vesting is INDEED necessary since I'm worried that someone could just pull out and we'd lose all our startup funds in order to buy the stock back.

Our lawyers are apparently too busy to answer these questions because I've asked them and they haven't been any help at all. PG and others, if you can point me in the right direction that'd be great.
You can have it chop off the end of the URL with "overflow-x: hidden" and an explicit width, but the only way to have it insert a linebreak is to count characters on the server and insert a break manually.
As I understand it, traditional search engines already use the feedback of which links people click on (I think they used to mangle the links in order to be able to track this, but it seems that at least Google has now switched to some JavaScript trick.) If the goal is just to improve search quality (and this may not be the case, I'm not sure), then whether you'd reach that goal will hinge on whether you can get more accurate information by letting people vote explicitly, and after they have already seen the page, rather than implicitly, and after they have only seen a short summary.
The fundamental problem is real though. News sites, including social news like reddit, are riddled with errors. Finding the truth often requires a real effort on the part of the reader, and for the most part I'm just too lazy/busy.
Heh, that's the first thing I thought of too.

Good read, thanks nickb.
Paul, that's speculative investment valuation or the valuation for the purposes of speculation a.k.a. the VC method: http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b01/en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=288006

In a court, judge appointed assessor would not use VC method but would instead instead use NPV method to value a company. As you know very well, there's a lot of risk and uncertainty associated with startups and it would not be prudent, for a judge, to value something based on the VC method since court decisions work the opposite: on minimization of uncertainty. Clearly, the poster is looking for a valuation that would arise if his case ended up in the court.
Well said. There's something very American about rifting.
Exact, the thread is here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21107

"Of late I've had at least one Web2.0 person express an interest in working for us."

Well, you have a second interested person now! But I'm not a web 2.0 person; I'm an embedded software developer (and I, too, find this whole web hype very boring). Where can I find more info? Your profile is empty :(
This is a page out of The Innovator's Dilemma, in some ways, if you look at a "rift" as a disruptive innovation. Of course, it's not quite the same thing, but the description of how companies react is quite similar.

Links:

http://www.squeezedbooks.com/book/show/13/the-innovators-dilemma-the-revolutionary-book-that-will-change-the-way-you-do-business-collins-business-essentials

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disruptive_technology
Maybe we could share the effort. It's just an idea, not very original, maybe bad but here it is anyway: PGP had the interesting concept of a "web of trust" (it was used in other places as well such as advogato.org). Maybe this concept could apply to news sources as well. E.g. my friend Bob is an expert on topic X, so I tend to trust him on said topic. I have a reddit-like website where I can see a selection of news "approved" by friends I trust instead of a website where a dozen of dumb high school kids (I'm actually talking about the reddit crowd here) I've never seen upvote/downvote articles. As it's a web of trust, I trust people who Bob trust as well (but a little bit less, maybe).

edit: found this on the front page after writing this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28980 ("All Transactions are based on Trust - Part III")
When you're bringing some technology closer to Microsoft's platform, obviously you're not killing it.
Which photo sharing sites do you use?
Flickr + BubbleShare
Facebook and Flickr.
What are the best hosting options for a new startup
They're getting paid to FARM in video games. That's very different from "play", which involves significantly more freedom, novelty, joy, and discovery.

Not to mention the sheer irony of spending their lives to increment a number in a remote computer representing virtual gold pieces. Not exactly efficient.
'... communications equipment ... there's a lot of opportunity there for domain specific expertise that often times requires an advanced degree and experience in the industry ...'

And significant hurdles to market. In some ways you have to have balls to launch a hardware product. In coms, you have to create the software but the physical hardware as well. Much harder than pure software. You also have all the problems of creating & selling physical things, logistics, inventory, packaging. Yet more skills, risk & as you point out, more reward.
Man, these horrible new SEOified urls are a graphic disaster.
I ought to make the sw automatically tinyurl them...
Serverbeach for mid-range, Rackspace for high-end, Amazon EC2 for development
(Step one)
In preparation for Windows developers to test their iPhone apps. Allowing Safari for Windows just opened up a whole new developer community.
What about [reddit-style links?](http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28990)
The lack of a "culture of winning" sounds like someone's knock on Semel that bubbled up from boardroom debate to press release subtitle.

In this context it actually sounds more like a campaign promise.
Post data on friendster, hi5, myspace and blogger
If you're considering obfuscating them anyways just truncate the text inside the <a> at some number of characters (you could even add an ellipsis if you want to get fancy).
'... I get the feeling these guys are more hype than substance. ...'

One thing they don't have is a clue about building a product compared to creating technology. The thing that tips me off is using 'NLP' and 'natural language' as a description of what the product is about. It reads more like ... "we have this great technology from PARC, what can we use it for? Ahhh search is a natural fit."

Just compare this to say google. I don't remember too many press reports sending potential users the message "google is powered by pagerank and is reliability because it uses linux based distributed computing" . Now I remember pagerank was bandied around a lot at the start and mentions of thousands of linux boxes. All this subsided when people started using google and it just worked.

'... Seems like when they finally release, it'll be a huge anti-climax ...'

This will more likely be a result of mis-application of NLP. NLP is a can of worms and highly dependent on context. You need to understand the meaning of things. To understand the meaning you either have to severely constrain the application and get something like Microsoft Clippy ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clippy ) or frustrate users with some horribly complex search process.

Is the natural language approach, a bad idea for search? Is this what pg means by 'solving partial solutions' but being 'trapped on a local maximum'?

Lets wait and see the demo.
How did you guys name your startup?
The link was marked dead before the conversation even started so I figured anything goes.
Lacking any imagination, I named my startup, Xackup, since we were doing X different kinds of backup (outlook, web-based, ical, storage agnostic, mobile, etc.) across X different platforms/devices.
I like the name and it looks nice in print, but I think a good test would be to tell someone verbally to go to xackup.[tld] and see if they spell it right.
One trick I've used is to listen & prompt youngsters to talk. Early speech requires mimicry of sounds. But listening to words for the first time doesn't always yield results. So you get a sort of 'human understandable babble' that sounds like a word, but isn't.

The result is unique, understandable. Sometimes it works, other times it might sound like something straight off the Teletubbies. It's better than trying to make one up out of thin air.
So, you wore a Google shirt to eBay live, right after Google and eBay had a massive fallout. If that's the best way you have of getting attention for your software, you're in trouble.

Then again, if I had just spent 5 months on my store and only had a beginners-book 30-minute Scriptaculous + scaffolding job to show for it, I might resort to wearing a Google shirt too.
Yes if you're over thirty, don't even try to be creative. Give up now because you just can't do it. Its impossible. You're just a drone.
Up Vote if you want long urls to be chopped
CentOS is a very common distro for rails production environments. Several high profile hosting cos use it, like RailsMachine for example. Hard to go wrong with CentOS.
I've never run into this with News.YC, but yeah, that sort of behaviour is a hassle.

In fact, on our site I've just implemented a form key that's generated with each request (for CSRF prevention). But if you open a form in another tab then it'll generate a new form key and the first submit will fail. Similar problem to the News.YC closure problem ... hmmm.

Anyone else have experience with CSRF prevention and/or this issue? Is the best thing to do to keep a list of (say) the 10 most recent form keys in their session instead of just 1? They could theoretically open 11 tabs and then the first one would fail ... is there a better or safer solution?
That's wise. When they do an LTS version, then bumping to 7.x is sane. ;-)
im not a big IT guy like most of the people commenting in this forum, and i can't say that i would add anything to the conversation. I have just begun C++ education, so i'm getting a grasp on the universe of IT very slowly.

The one thing i can say though, is that I've taken plenty of courses on politics, and i know from your comments that you're just a tool who's so afraid of "socialist views" that you'll stamp down people who bring up valid points to your own. Oh, and before you start typing out a response, I'm not a socialist.

Capitalism is a great thing, it allows free enterprise and strengthens a society. people no longer have to work outside farming for 14 hours a day, they have the opportunity to work in a job and buy their food and other supplies; they have much more choice than our ancestors in the past (although one could argue from a philosophical point if this is truly makes them happy, but i'll save that for another rant). In short, people are not obligated to any one position or limit and can choose to do anything at all, since all jobs give money, or some equal form of payment.

But capitalism also gives people in a better position the ability to take advantage of others; since people are no longer self-sufficient and rely on money to accomodate their needs, it gives other people the ability to exploit these people (often with fear tactics or conformity) and make them think "they really need this new 2006 model with 8 cup holders and all-wheel drive," or that "the world is dangerous and a rapist could be just around the corner, so buy a gun to protect yourselves from those rap music-listening-hoodlums." this is present in our society, and you can see it in most advertising.

socialism attempts to protect people from themselves by making everyone equal, and instead of people providing for themselves, the government does. all in all the debate can continue in another discussion as to which one is superior.

i dont necessarily agree with brandon's comments about walmart being evil, because they don't MAKE you go there, and they don't try to convince you. you really don't have to go to walmart if you don't have to, its that simple.

at the same time, bitgeek, your incoherent babbling seems to point every problem with our society in the hands of socialists, and that people in a free society can't be evil, but provide a necessary service (which some do and some don't). its utterly stupid and ignorant, so please find a time machine and go to the 1950's where you belong

thats all. i know this has nothing to do with MS dieing or anything, just thought i'd stamp out another idiot's rambling today.
Paul Graham, Please Start a YC Podcast
Technology startup names normally depends on available domain names. Try our domain naming service http://grabagooddomain.com We have helped some other startups.
There is something very very very wrong with big corporate America, whenever execs of poorly performing companies manage to squeeze $70 million in compensation. I fail to see any reasoning behind decisions like that, except old&stupid "well... it's the way these things work"
Thanks man this article should be very helpful!
I have a better idea. How about a reddit/digg style podcast channel on YC News where users can submit links to mp3s, and the community upvotes them. And then YC offers the top 10 as a podcast feed so you can automatically download them.

mp3s can be on startups, tech, entrepreneurialism etc.
Your not the only one, I've heard very good things about Debian as well.
Thanks for the response I'm definitely leaning on Debian...
I think thats a great idea. I am just so hungry for good podcasts and I go through them by Wednesday every week. If they can do jobs, podcasts should be easy.
I think a podcast by the YC partners would be cool too.
I thought this was intentional, to avoid redundant replies.
Yes I love some of ITConversations (or whatever it's called now), but it's like drinking from a firehose. I only want to the best ones.

We could also chuck in some classic ones like classic ones on Dr Dobbs etc.
I also want more startup/business related podcasts instead of straight up technology podcasts
Yes! One I like to listen to is Venturevoice.
too bad mp3 is a proprietary format.
Maybe the reason that IT Conversations still sticks everything into a single RSS feed is that they are secretly hoping for somebody else to do the fancy classifying and tagging for them...
You can podcast in OGG, if you insist.
I like Venture voice, but they haven't had a new podcast in months and I have listened to every single one of their podcasts.
Thanks! Now at last I understand the source of the current crop of incomprehensible business names ;-)
How about audio from the founder dinner speakers?
For some reason when I see that I think of Yackup, i.e. cat barf.
Easy. Just think of an awesome, super-cool name and check WhoIs. Repeat until you finally decide on something that sounds so stupid, nobody has taken it yet.
Sorry, podcasts are not my kind of thing. Jessica Livingston is about to start a blog, though.
I think podcasts and essays are close. Podcasts are just more efficient....

Not even for the founders dinner speakers? Looking Forward to Jessica's blog. I am about to finish her book.
Why not to do a startup
We could never record the speakers. Dinners are off the record so that speakers can say things they would never dare to say publicly.
Makes sense. I am just so hungry for information and tired of reading.

Are you writing a June essay?
1) Started out with a list of descriptive "taglines".

2) Modified various words/merged/played with them.

3) Searched availability of .com domains.
There is a traditional solution to this, in theory. The theory goes that a newspaper will meticulously edit and fact check, because at some point, they are bound to write about something I happen to know a lot about, and then if they are wrong, I will no longer trust them on other things. Unfortunately, the theory works a little too well: virtually all newspapers, if you read a few issues cover to cover, contain enough errors about things that you happen to know a lot about that you start mistrusting them. But there are a few publications for which traditional solution seems to work. I have rarely found any mistakes in The Economist, for instance, when they write about things I happen to know a lot about, which leads me to trust them more than most other news sources when it comes to things I don't know.
Option F and the Facebook 500,000
Yes, that would be much better. I hate tinyurl -- it completely obfuscates things.
You can harm someone indirectly through the in-game economy.

Out-of-game virtual goods trading can kill meaning of progress in a game- whether there was much meaning to begin with is another debate.

This economic link between worlds breaks the "magic circle" that separates game from real life. This can hurt or kill the experience of a game, depending on how much it relies on suspension of disbelief. Then again, this also opens opportunities to explore, both in game/experience design and in business.
It's funny that you mention the economist, because I used to feel the same way about them, but then a few years ago they published some article about Google that was full of errors.

Clearly the old model isn't working though. I think the solution must be collaborative. I don't know if Thoof is it, but at least it's in the right direction.
Symbolics was advertising their FLAVORS object oriented system in the mid-80s. And Symbolics was, literally, the first dot-com.

http://smbx.org/index.php/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=18&Itemid=76