skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Well, it's only about twice electronic arts' valuation:

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ERTS

...but consider the fact that facebook's awesome abilities include showing pictures on a webpage. No WAY anyone is going to crack through that entry barrier.
YEurope, Chaos and Innovation
That's all nice and well, and warrants are better, but who wants to spend that kind of money on legal fees for a small angel round. If you are doing >$500k than it's a different story.
List of TechStars companies (6 out of the 10 are listed)
Just curious, but why? It seems like you pay a premium for not much in return.
Its great to see people who haven't used a service making misguided claims. Pownce's advertisements are akin to those on Facebook's recent update page: they are simple text ads.

Nothing about them, and certainly nothing about the quote used in the article, suggest that they are using note context to target audiences.

This kind of article with haphazard speculation is no signal and all noise.
Recently I have seen the proportion of weak submissions become very high, high enough that I think a down vote arrow for submissions to help weed out content would be beneficial.
Noticeably lacking are any business applications, which I think are the next big (profitable) thing in web 2.0 (I am a bit biased on this, but I think the time has arrived)
Jean, your site is pleasant, but it doesn't have anything to distinguish itself from established entities in the same field (Digg and Reddit among others). Your application needs to have something distinct and interesting about it. At this point is essentially a Digg clone down to even the small details like "bury it" and the box that shows the number of Diggs... eh... votes.

Chalk this up as a loss. You probably learned a lot doing it, and thats what you should take away from it. Without a sizable user base you won't get funding for this website. You need to satisfy a need that isn't being satisfied, or satisfy an existing need better than it is currently being satisfied.

If you blog is doing well by all means move your focus to that while you look for a more original idea to implement. I hope things go well for you, I can sympathize with your situation, as I too have learned that "If you build it they will come" isn't always quite true.
"What you can't say" is definitely one that struck a chord. In fact, my paraphrasing the article online is the way I met my husband, so thanks Paul :)
Does this ever happen?
How to use auto-generated tags?
1. For a suggest feature in search?
2. For tags display of content?
3. Improving the auto-generated tag system through validation, in an attempt to not completely rely on user generated tags?
1. For a suggest feature in search?

2. For tags display of content?

3. Improving the auto-generated tag system through validation, in an attempt to not completely rely on user generated tags?
SEO is such an annoying game to play, but you've gotta play it for certain kinds of sites. This is a great, concise guide, thanks.
So mosaic, for example, was just a fad?
Ask YC: Reasonably Priced Office Chairs?
Gentleman, during my years as a full time software engineer I always suspected that chairs I used to sit on were not cheap.

However, after having shopped around I still refuse to believe that decent ergonomic chairs go for about $500. Used ones seem to be only 20% cheaper (on average).

Can anybody suggest a decent place to buy? (online or in central Texas area).
VC Bundling
If you cruise the hot deals forums, sub-$100 and sub-$50 office chairs come up all the time. They don't compare to Aerons, but they're really cheap.

Try browsing/searching www.fatwallet.com and http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.aspx?catid=40&for...
What kind of apps do you mean by this?
It's happening already, you just don't hear about it because enterprise software shops usually sell direct to their customers and don't care for publicity outside of their industry.

The curious thing is that this time, consumer companies seem to be leading enterprise companies in technology, and much of the bleeding-edge innovation happens in the consumer market. My boss remarked about this to me - in the past, enterprise tools have been far ahead of the consumer apps technologically. Software features that made it to home PCs in the mid-90s were available on enterprise workstations in the early 80s, and in some cases the consumer market still hasn't caught up (take a look at early Lisp Machines for an example of what was possible then). Nowadays, it seems like Google and Yahoo have locked up many of the best developers, and the features that come out of Google/Yahoo!Finance often are better than the equivalent features from, say, Bloomberg.

I'm not really sure what this means for the enterprise market. Probably not good.
Wasn't really his point...

Design matters a lot. You can easily completely ruin the user's experience. But only bad design will get a reaction. People expect websites to work, and to let them easily do what they set out to do. Nobody compliments designers for building websites that don't get in their way. But oftentimes the best compliment for a designer is to be unnoticed.
UK Rolls Out Police Headcams
There is a good thread to read on flickr about machine-tags that you can read here ~ http://www.flickr.com/groups/api/discuss/72157594497877875/

Using rdf you can represent tags as "foo:bar=foobar". So your use is really only limited by the limitations of the format itself.
There is nothing in the article 'claiming' that Pownce advertisements use note context - the article fully discloses (check the headline for crying out loud) that there are concerns about privacy, not that user privacy has been compromised.

There is no claim in the article that Pownce scrapes content, but nor does Pownce's privacy policy state that they don't. So you tell me: if it makes them more money, and they haven't said they won't do it, what will they do?

This kind of comment is at least as misleading as a self-professed speculative article it is reponding to.

P.S. Which do you work for - Google or Pownce?
That's the one that cured me of trying to evangelize Lisp. If the combination of pg's success and pg's essays wasn't going to win people over, nothing was.
As a quick preface, I usually think its much easier to have a coherent conversation when we actually reply to the comment we referring to, otherwise it won't be listed in the threads section and will easily go unseen.

"Moreover, they will "run some small advertisements in your list of notes" which sounds a lot like GMail., which crawls through emails to find keywords then uses those to display ads on your GMail pages."

That sentence insinuates that Pownce is--or will--use data context to increase ad relevancy. I don't believe I am inaccurately representing the article by saying so. I don't know the details of the Pownce private policy, but I do know that the excerpt I quoted (the only excerpt of the policy contained in the article) is meaningless in regards to using context to serve ads.

Sitting back and accepting this sort of speculative commentary is detrimental because it adds confusion and misinformation without bringing with it any merit to redeem itself. This article could have been done in a valid way, by an individual with an understanding of the American legal system, there may indeed be more than illusionary specters to the issue of Pownce's privacy policy, but we won't learn anything from the haphazard and speculative inquiry that this post embodies.
Optimized ob. quote:

"Premature &#8594; evil."
Let's just keep this simple:'

1) We know Kevin Rose isn't a man of principle - he sides with corporations to save his skin, then the mob if he risks losing his followers (see: Digg HD-DVD scandal)

2) There is money to be made by targetting ads that used scraped content as a basis for choosing what to display to who (see: Google)

3) There is nothing in the Pownce privacy policy that says they won't scrape your content.

So a guy who will do what it takes for his company, right or wrong, has a ton of content he could scrape to increase ad revenue and he isn't saying that he won't do that. Is it reasonable or not to then 'be concerned' about ones privacy? You tell me what part of this you disagree with.

"Many companies offer programs that help you to visit websites anonymously. While Megatechtronium will not be able to provide you with a personalized experience if we cannot recognize you, we want you to be aware that these programs are available." (Pownce.com/privacy)

What do you suppose they mean by a 'personalized experience'?
Google Gears and Version Control
agreed but we must do what must be done.
office depot, we got designated 'heavy use' (8 hours a day) chairs for about $120-$140.

Well worth it.
"The personal information you provide may be used for such purposes as responding to your requests for certain products and services, customizing the advertising and content you see, and communicating with you about specials, sales offers and new products."

The privacy policy clearly states that they will do what the article is insinuating. The article didn't even bother to quote this relevant segment, or to even mention that it exists. It instead makes it argument based on an irrelevant quote that doesn't support its insinuation. The article is poorly done, and fails to make a meaningful point because it builds a foundation on thin air, even though there was a solid foundation for it to rest upon in the first five paragraphs of the privacy policy.

That, rather than slandering Kevin Rose, is what quality journalism is based upon.

As for the personalized experience issue it seems more likely that anonymity services will impede assignment of cookies and thus the cookie framework used to maintain persistent user sessions will be rendered non-functioning. This is a protocol issue, not another mythical infringer of privacy to point fingers at while screaming hysterically.

The article uses bad evidence deceptively when good evidence is readily available, and could have been used to make the point cleanly and without making leaps of faith in the argument. Why would one waste time reading analysis performed by someone who clearly doesn't even care enough to perform analysis?
Mainly business productivity and collaboration applications as well as the basic office suite of applications. Advances are also being made in Sales and Marketing, with SalesForce being a prime example, and internet lead generation companies another (which I use in my Architectural Firm)
Provisional patent filing tips?
What experience have you guys had with filing patents, particularly provisionals? At Startup School one of the speakers mentioned that you could do it yourself for around $500 or so. Anyone have any insight into this or tried doing it themselves? Any links to good how-to's would be great. Thanks for the help!
Technological advance in general is a good thing, obviously :). The developers will follow the money as their investors will, and if the consumer market gets saturated and looses momentum while the business side starts picking up, with businesses willing to actually pay to use services, then the developers will follow.
Hahahah awesome. So you basically criticized the article for doing something it didn't do (make misguided claims), then in the same breath you yourself made misguided claims. This is almost too funny for words. You wrote:

"Its great to see people who haven't used a service making misguided claims."

Then you wrote:

"The privacy policy clearly states that they will do what the article is insinuating."

Misguided claims? Now you concede that the article was correct and that its claims were not misguided. So you made the false claim that the article was making misguided claims without bothering to make sure your own claims weren't misguided. What a mouthful! Yes, the article could have had more relevant direct quotes from Pownce, but it was based on solid fact as you now admit - unlike your own claims which were patently false. Let me sum it up: the article was right, and you falsely accused it of being wrong, thereby doing exactly what the article didn't do and what you criticized it for - making misguided claims.
Is that what they call "graduation"?
Yeah the tech talks are awesome. The Museum of Computer History has some great lectures on tech talks. One that I particularly like is titled "Great Principles of Computing". It's a nice summary of the past few decades of computing principles. Here's the link: http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=5494452304620274339
ocw.mit.edu is where MIT keeps alot of their material for their CS classes, also Berkeley's webcast has video of their classes for each semester.
It should cost less than $500, I believe the filing fee is $125. Getting a lawyer involved will increase the price by several thousand.

I'd recommend the Nolo Press books on the topic. http://www.nolo.com/product.cfm/ObjectID/1F0E4794-D236-43C3-... You can buy the pdf online or if you don't mind violating international copyright law they're mostly available on emule.
For me it is the news..get the right buzz at the right time.
Some Times You Have to Roll Your Own
Feeling Low on Motivation?
oops. I mean half. What happened to the edit button?
This is what we did in my previous start-up: we wrote up the process of all that we were doing, then researched as much as possible about what kinds of patents already existed in our field, and rewrote what we had to avoid infringing on those. The research was the hardest part, but now http://www.google.com/patents should be a big help. Then, we took what we had to a lawyer and asked him for advice. He ended up helping us file the prov. for less than $400.
Phil Emma of IBM has written in recent issues of IEEE Micro a useful (IMHO) series of 2 page articles about patenting. No-nonsense tips from someone with over 100 IT patents.
Man, Stallman is like the prime example of what happens when your nerdiness gets stuck in a feedback loop. Not that I haven't known others, believe me.
Widgets Suck
A Computer Science Degree DoesnaEURXt Hurt (Much)
Craigslist, though it may take a little while. I spent our first to weeks in CA in a wood chair at a very tall kitchen table. But we soon found a guy getting rid of 40 chairs and we got 4 for $6 a piece.
This is a great way to learn how to program production rails...
chk this out http://www.patentwizard.com/ along with the nolo.com book, you should be good to go
A Sundry Collection of Venture Hacks
A few old hacks from our personal blogs.
Don't you have better things to do with your time than to hunt for $6 chairs on craigslist?

Being frugal is one thing. Assigning an absurdly low valuation to your time is quite another.
wow! that thing is simply amazing - I remember just a month ago we did a domain hunt for our app, and it was so slow and frustrating. But with this I found a couple of great names in a matter of minutes! Definitely goes to my favs!
you are right willarson. if you build they will come isnt always true.
What do you think would be the tech to lookout for in the coming 5 years.

by the way your blog is offline?
I produced the spreadsheet myself using excel.

Julian Paling
Dfinitive
How To Build a distributed social network with OpenID, XFN, and hCard
The No Shit Guide To Supporting OpenID In Your Applications
The 80-hour Myth (Your best work is in bursts, surrounded by periods of dullness and inactivity)
Angels with Angles
Angel investors are changing. Here's what they're looking for, how they operate, and (because the devil is in the exit strategy) what they expect for their money...
Excellent article on the behavior of angel investors.
Well that's a good question. Maybe I'm really asking if anyone here sees value in the premium Sun is charging.

I've priced out a couple servers that would work as our first, and they are ~ $5k vs. a similar server from Dell running $3.5k. From what I understand the Startup Essentials program has some good discounting and so maybe it brings the pricing back to parity.
I have had great success with Dell 1U & 2U PowerEdge machines running FreeBSD. I simply see no reason to pay a premium given how far I can take these Dell machines in terms of scalability.

Maybe the price equalizes with this new program. I don't know, but I doubt it will over time.
Stats for your startup
As for the blog it was having a brief issue with psycopg2, apache, and python eggs... mutter. I'm still learning the sys admin side of things (but it is fixed now). In general it has been stable... (Apache2, Lighttpd for serving media, memcached for caching...).

I think the way to look for the future is like this: find something that everyone uses, and think of what unexamined assumptions we are making about it.

For an example, look at how comments work in blogs, maybe we could make a more localized comment system (you can make your comment close to the context you want to commenta bout), or at least inserting comment footnotes.

Essentially, look for places where the "proper" shape and form for an idea have crystalized, and then find a way to do it differently. At this point I don't think that web innovation is bounded by technology (horizontal scaling to build massive and efficient systems is a reality, albeit a n occasionally unpleasant reality for the implementors), but more by ideas.

Development frameworks (Rails, Django, TurboGears, CakePHP, et al) continue to trivialize internet development, so I think we'll continue moving towards an era where (for internet applications) ideas and design are the limiting factors rather than technology.
You're ignoring what I am saying, seemingly because you are focused on mocking me. As such I'll make a final attempt to explain myself, but it seems likely that communication will be thwarted yet again.

There was solid and easily locatable evidence that supports the premise of the article in question. The article did not use that evidence, and instead based its premise upon an irrelevant quote that did not support its argument.

Thus the article is fundamentally flawed: it arrives at its conclusion by making a leap from one disconnected idea to a second; there is no chain of reasoning to follow. Worse than simply making a leap in its reasoning, it misinterprets a disjoint quote and passes it off as support for its argument.

This method of pseudo-analysis will occasionally render correct segments of analysis. That doesn't matter. The pseudo-analysis is still flawed, unreliable, and devoid of value.
i'm not sure why nobody has said this already... but why would you need an extra filed for keeping indentattion nuber when you can use <pre> in html for that.
Similar, but a non-karma karma system. :)

One thing though, I am fairly uncertain about the color gradient. In the beginning I used red-green. But some cultures have the order reversed, and total red and total green excite the eyes differently. Then I opted for using colorless-color (white-"gold", since gold is supposed to be culture-neutral), but when I showed some people they were confused and told me to use red-green :/

I also considered the "full functionality after x threshold" but It's opaque to me what would be a reasonable x. I hope I'll be able to make a judgement later, based on real user data.
Those only last about 6 months. At least for me, I began having horrible back pain from mine. After a couple of tries at those chairs, I replaced it with a used Aeron ($460 at the Arthur Anderson auction...I wanted to bid on shredders, too, but my dad wisely noted that the ones at Arthur Anderson were "all used up"), which I've had for years and the only thing that's any different about it is the lumbar support bar has split some. Still pretty comfortable, and I don't have any back problems with it, despite hours sitting every day (though I do break it up with at least a few walks a day...one for lunch, one for the dog, and one for some random trip to the library or Asian market or bubble tea shop).

Interestingly, at the same time, I also bought a Keilhauer chair for $30 in "dirty" condition. A good cleaning, and it's a really comfortable $750 chair for practically nothing. Everybody was focused on the Aerons, so all of the other office chairs went really cheap.

I know used furniture stores are a lot less likely to let things go cheap than an auction (and Arthur Anderson only goes out of business once), but it's worth noting that if I'd had to buy a new Office Depot chair every year, I would have spent more than even a new low end Aeron by now and my back would probably be in worse shape (and I can't buy a new one of those). That's not to say Aeron is the be all, end all. Steelcase Leap is a great chair, too. And the afore-mentioned Keilhauer makes really good chairs that hold up for years, and because they're less well-known and don't look as impressive you might be able to find a bargain.
Google's Brin on Facebook: "If they come to us, we'd certainly be open to talking"
bls, Thank you very much for all the suggestions. GREAT information.
I think Facebook should buy Google.
(warning: rant)

The PDF cost only $3 less than the paper book?

"No shipping fees."

Well, mighty decent of them.
Yeah, I'm not big on the word 'karma' myself, but it happens to be what is out there.

I'm not sure about 'x threshold' either. If 'karma' assignment is weighted it wouldn't matter much anyways.

As for colors, what about a bar that increases vertically and has multiple segments? Higher is better and darker? This would give people two things to lock onto, just in case color is not enough.

just my two beans...
More or less content-free blog post.
I'm glad somebody has said this. I work in bursts myself and it's refreshing to hear that it's common.

Coincidentally this also makes me feel better for time spent on news.yc and programming.reddit.
How to Raise Money from VCs
Check out the video in the article, pretty funny, useful and confusing all at once.
For a typical transaction Ebay takes about ~3% of the sale, Paypal takes ~4%, and auctomatic would like another 1%? Good luck to them.
My favorite one is:
http://www.paulgraham.com/ideas.html

And this one really inspired me.
http://www.paulgraham.com/notnot.html
Don't publicize how small you are
I have already conceded that the article could have cited better sources, but my point remains: you could have as well. You implied that the article author did not know as much as you did. You suggested that they were not only not citing sources that didn't help the argument but also making factually inaccurate claims.

In so doing, you took an implicit position of authority on the matter by claiming (as a user with insider knowledge) that the author was wrong. That was wrong, which makes you equally (or more so) guilty of unsound reasoning and misleading or misguided argument. If you claim to know better and are wrong, doesn't that make your statements even more misguided than someone who raises 'concerns' about an issue and says it quote "sounds like Gmail' and turns about to be justified in these concerns?

The article clearly raises the entire question as a 'concern' as stated in the headline. Your statements were much closer to being assertions of fact based on expert opinion. Could the article have cited better sources? Yes. Does that mean the article author didn't know what he was talking about? No, and the article turned out to be correct. Could you have cited better sources yourself? Yes. Did it turn out that the article was right and you were wrong? Also yes.

You tell me. Seriously. You tell me: what is worse: (1) failing to site the right source but writing truthful content, or (2) implicitly claiming expert status and writing false content defaming an accurate source.
Did you really overload Paul's server?
I feel identified, and that is why I hate too much to work on traditional 9-18h (or whatever) working days and tight schedules. It's not unusual when I spend 6 h. on a 2 h. programming task only because I can't get into the flow, and then I finish a 4 h task in one.

Ah, I really need to startup ;)