skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Rejection forced the creation of Google
Go BIG is Hiring! Two Client Service Managers
1. This is off-topic.

2. If you know Obj-C you also know C, so you can use the standard POSIX system calls to open and mess with /dev/fsevents. I couldn't find docs for this interface, but a quick google search shows a bunch of code that works with /dev/fsevents. Also: http://lists.apple.com/archives/darwin-kernel/2007/Jun/msg00026.html
I know of two couples (my wife's side) who have started and continue to run successful businesses. They started in their 40s.

They aren't tech startups, but these businesses certainly required a lot of time and energy when they started up.
Competent young people deserve the chance to compete where it counts, and many will surprise us.
"What can be done?

"I believe that young people should have more options--the option to work, marry, own property, sign contracts, start businesses, make decisions about health care and abortions, live on their own--every right, privilege, or responsibility an adult has. I advocate a competency-based system that focuses on the abilities of the individual. For some it will mean more time in school combined with work, for others it will mean that at age 13 or 15 they can set up an Internet business. Others will enter the workforce and become some sort of apprentice. The exploitative factories are long gone; competent young people deserve the chance to compete where it counts, and many will surprise us.

"It's a simple matter to develop competency tests to determine what rights a young person should be given, just as we now have competency tests for driving. When you offer significant rights for passing such a test, it's highly motivating; people who can't pass a high-school history test will never give up trying to pass the written test at the DMV, and they'll virtually always succeed. We need to offer a variety of tests, including a comprehensive test to allow someone to become emancipated without the need for court action. When we dangle significant rewards in front of our young people--including the right to be treated like an adult--many will set aside the trivia of teen culture and work hard to join the adult world."

-------------------

Wait, so instead of creating across-the-board age limits, you judge the competency of each individual... individually?
Startups and Copyrights
I have been thinking about this and wonder what startups do about the issue of copyrights... if you have an idea for an application that could potentially be used for copyright infringement would you still create it? How would you decide this?
1. Yup, my apologies for being off topic. Noob error. Can't find a delete on YC (pass expiration time?).

2. Yeah, you're right but wanted something I didn't have to digest.
I just googled "Google Checkout." It looks interesting.

If it wasn't for Gary Briggs, Chief Marketing Officer for eBay North America, I'd still be blissfully ignorant.
I agree. Once they're there though, it's a little too late to kick them out and not expect fallout.
Ten Canadian Software Companies to Watch
Absolutely. If you limit yourself only to technologies that can't be used to infringe copyrights, you've basically eliminated everything relating to computers.

I'd think twice about writing something whose primary purpose is to infringe copyrights. Aside from the legal ramifications - hey, my job is all about intellectual property, it's a little hypocritical to do my best to steal other people's intellectual property.

Basically, I'd be comfortable inventing BitTorrent, Gnutella, or YouTube, but would feel a little guilty about Napster and AudioGalaxy.
They even offered it to Yahoo! I think some of the biggest favors we get turn out to be the rejections.
"None of these have the potential to be a self-sustaining business"
You can use a 'zero width space' (&#8203;)in some browsers to hint a breakable point, but it might affect C&P-ability.

Some other discussion of options here:

http://gojomo.blogspot.com/2005/03/cross-browser-invisible-word-break-in.html
Perhaps rejection also forced the creation of a slew of other companies no one has ever heard of because they went nowhere;-)
Funny that Reddit catches most of the flack. If "rufy" is around, I'd love to hear his take on the now undeniable success of Reddit (apparently not the biggest success story from that program, but the one we all know about).
Well, his basecamp clone was rejected... sour grapes?
No, in a marriage it implies parity: each party gets a veto on decisions that will affect them both.
Mark Shuttleworth: Merging is the key to software developer collaboration
Clearly, the original poster is polygamous.
Computational Finance - The Silent Killer
It was. Several times.

Auctomatic/Boso - From the UK, on 90 day temp visas. I believe they've gotten back to the states now.

View3 - 2/3 from India (I think), on education visas

Virtualmin - 1/2 from Australia, on a long-term work visa (Oz has its own batch of visas...it's easy to get one of these, apparently)

Heysan - From Sweden, on some kind of work visa, seemingly long-term as one of them is still in the states

I think that's all from WFP07. I'm not sure about previous programs...I think they were predominantly US citizens.
The act of convincing is an important one. You need to convince your spouse that it's important to you. More important than all the other concerns (that's the hard part).
I recently had a personalized information session with quantitative analysts at a "top three" investment bank. They have a group of 300-400 PhDs, all working extremely hard to produce money-making mathematical models quickly. Their compensation is unreal. Probably, better than viaweb's. (Assume a 10% success rate, and that a viaweb founder's comp of $2.5mil/year, in funny numbers, that is $250K/year.) Ok, working for a big company sucks. There are small hedge funds like Renaissance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_Technologies ).

The technical problems in finance are more difficult that most in the average startup and the pay better. If you are one of the few people in the world who have the technical skills that these companies look for, then why would start at a startup rather than go into finance?

I've been thinking about this for a few days, and the best answer I can come up with has something to do with culture. In finance, you're extremely secretive. Secrecy is downright unhackerish. Working for 10 years, amassing a fortune, and no one knows who you are or what you've done. Which is why I call finance the silent killer. You disappear into this pile of money. Anyone else want to share their feelings on this?
Gyro, ever been in love? Do you even understand how a partnership works? What about co-founders? Do you just individually do whatever suits you, or do you discuss what's most important for the company and make decisions together?

Same goes for a marriage. It's a partnership - all decisions are cooperative. All major decisions (should) be by consensus. (flame edited out by author).
Overcome security threats for Ajax applications
It's official: Google buys Zenter
I was offered 1% of a startup recently and a chance to be employee #12, I turned it down, the salary offered along with it wasn't livable (and I mean livable, not doable).

Do what you need to do to survive, but I would suggest you are being taken advantage of.
Congrats guys : )
I've asked this over on programming.reddit also: any of you dudes using a distributed version control system like bzr? I'm looking at that and Mercurial.
Can you start your own finance company? Can a PhD good enough to generate these models start his or her own hedge fund without a hundred million dollars?
Well, now you have something to say to all those haters (the ones that think you abandoned your families or whatever such nonsense).
Awesome - well done!
(Full disclosure: I'm a recruiter for hedge funds -- including Renaissance):

One of the points PG makes in his essays is that it's absurdly cheap (in terms of capital required) to start a startup: if you have a computer and an Internet connection, it's not much more expensive than doing nothing at all. This changes your risk perception: startups can afford to hire unusual developers doing obscure stuff, because someone with a 10% chance of utterly destroying the business is just going to change your odds of failure from 90% to 91%.

Hedge funds and i-banks don't have that sort of equation: they're brutally competitive (you can start a new service and hope that Google doesn't know about it until you're too big not to be bought -- but if you start trading an obscure derivative, everyone is going to find out about it) and they tend to be risking millions of dollars of other peoples' money. So they're crazily cautious, which shows up in their hiring practices: one company I work with brags about rejecting all but one in five hundred candidates (yes. Their acceptance rate is less than MIT-squared), while another requires a BS/MS/PhD with a minimum GPA of 3.7 to be considered for an entry-level job. To attract people, they offer the ridiculous salaries you pointed out -- but there's an equilibrium between the absurd compensation and the absurd lengths you'd have to go to earn it.

If you want to talk to some quants, try: http://www.nuclearphynance.com/
Good to hear, I hope it was a good payout for the founders!
I can't really disagree with him though, Reddit really is a Digg clone minus the UI.
wow - well done!
An incredible win-win. I'm looking forward to hearing the official buyout cost! (And I'm looking forward to using the app.)

Will the founders survive at the Googleplex for long?

Was Google's earlier vaporware announcement a strategy to get Zenter at a lower cost? Probably not, as they really need that app one way or another for the suite. Excellent recovery that Zenter got bought instead of ending up on ebay.

Also congratulations to the Y Combinator team - yet another good call added to the record. The PR from this will be big.
You can use your models to trade your own funds (that's what Simons -- the guy behind Renaissance -- did), but it's probably not worth it. Imagine that you're good enough to beat the market by 500 basis points: you earn 15% per year when the market does 10. Investing your own retirement funds, and starting at 100K, you'll end up just about doubling your money in five years.

Hedge funds typically charge 20% of profits and 2% of assets. Let's say you spend your $100K paying a lawyer to incorporate you, and you take a year off to raise your first $5 million. Over the next four years, your earnings would start at $250K for year two, and hit $332K by year five. Even accounting for the missed year, the earnings from starting a hedge fund would be an order of magnitude higher than those from running your own money.

This is obviously simplified (I'm ignoring taxes and inflation, which if nothing else will get me dirty looks from my fellow libertarians), but it should illustrate why so many PhDs are getting rich running money for second-generation MBAs.
Really exciting. Congrats.
This makes the second service I know of (after Youtube) that Google's acquired despite already having internal teams working on a product.
We use Git. It's been great so far but it is a bit complex if you're not used to DSCM. The amount of commands that you really use in day to day development is very, very small however. I haven't tried Mercurial myself but a friend of mine uses it. There's also monotone to try out. For those researching SCM tools and want to move away from the horrible Subversion, start with these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monotone_%28software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial_%28software%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29
Way to go, guys. Brilliant!
Happy Father's Day (one of the founders is a father, right?)
phew, now I don't need to pay back Robbie for that dinner I owe him.

Happy 1st Father's Day Wayne!
those are two different things because the interests and constraints of your spouse will be quite different from those of your investors or consumers.
It is trivially easy to start your own hedge fund. I've got a friend from college that's done it, and obviously my employer's customers have all done it (I work for a financial software startup). All you have to do is file for a LLC - it costs like $45.

The tricky part is a.) finding investors to give you money and b.) investing that money well. Your limited partners have to be "accredited investors", which means they need income of over $200K for the last 2 years or a net worth over $1M. Obviously, it takes a fair amount of persuasion to convince someone to fork over a million dollars. But if you've got a Ph.D in physics or successful experience on Wall Street, it's not all that hard.
If only I knew this podcasting startup before...
I would suggest watching the personal comments and insults. The fact that we view an issue differently does nothing to indicate that your view is correct, and your conclusions are wrong.
Nobody should ever get a veto over your dreams and aspirations.
I'm currently working at a financial software startup, and thinking of leaving for the far less lucrative world of consumer webapps. Here's why:

At the end of the day, the financial industry is all about making money. If you do a good job, it means you and your customers get rich, and some other shmuck out there gets poor. Unfortunately, it's a zero-sum game. If you do well in the market, it has to be because someone else is doing poorly. Either that, or the market is bubbling upwards ahead of a crash.

I kinda want my life to be meaningful in addition to lucrative. I'd like to think that I've produced something that makes other people's lives nicer and doesn't just transfer wealth from them to me. Finance doesn't give you that - you can go home with a fat paycheck, but that paycheck is your only legacy.

If you're into money, though, a hedge fund is definitely the place to be. The hours are reasonable, the work is challenging, and the compensation is out of this world. I just can't shake the feeling that my industry is somehow "dirty". (And I don't even work directly for the big funds...I work for a small software shop that supplies some of the smaller funds.)
Holy moly. Way to go!
If you want to learn Lisp, be ready to meet the scowling faces (and don't even think about mentioning PG in #lisp)
TechCrunch coverage here:

http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/06/19/google-acquires-zenter-to-fill-out-coming-powerpoint-application/
Rejection increases volatility. Or, since 'rejection' is what happens when you don't apply, you can restate it as: 'Acceptance' is a progressive tax on brilliance; no matter how plodding you are, you can probably find someone to pay you for showing up 9-to-5 -- but if you're brilliant and you want to capture even 1% of the wealth you create, you'd better accept the risk of working for yourself.
"If you do well in the market, it has to be because someone else is doing poorly."

Have you read Hayek? I think it's hard to discount the importance of information. The market is able to do some pretty amazing stuff -- like tell you whether we, as consumers, would prefer more online stores or in-person stores or search engines or ranches. It's not as if the balance between those demands is intuitively obvious, and it's hard to believe that knowing the answer isn't worth making a few snotty New Yorkers pretty crazily rich.

Not that this is why anyone does it. We're all out there to get rich, but for the most part it's hard to make money without somehow making the market more informative. If you're right, you make the transactions that say so -- and you can't make those transactions without pushing prices in the direction they need to go.
Congrats to all yall as we say in the south!
As far as I know, this is largely an American (U.S.) phenomenon. I don't think many other countries have the kind of disparity between managers and other employees that American corporations have.

I have also read analyses suggesting compensation is often influenced by the fact that board members are usely CEOs of other companies who know that their compensation will go up if the compensation of other CEOs go up. If true, that would qualify as "sinister" in my judgement.
Web 2.0 Media: Share Online Whiteboard Easy
I can do you one better ... Robbie OWES me a pizza. I like my pizza with pepperoni and shares of GOOG.
YC totally got a recipe.Paul G.tell us what it is. It has to be more than "Make something people want".
"... Will the founders survive at the Googleplex for long? ..." && "... second service I know of (after Youtube) that Google's acquired despite already having internal teams working on a product ..."

I was wondering about this as well, then I read this post. It must have an impact on the 'engineers' who work there having groups of buyouts with vesting periods and larger payouts. There must be some level of resentment (it's human nature). How does google manage this?
A surprisingly common answer to (a) is to just kind of casually ignore those rules for a while. Nobody recommends this, but Warren Buffett, Michael Milken, and James Cramer all admitted to doing it -- and it definitely worked out for them in the end. The spirit of the accredited investor law is to protect the ignorant from the malicious; in the case of smart people willing to risk small sums on other smart people, it doesn't quite apply.
Don't forget

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/browse_frm/thread/88a36fb2c239a44e/89405e202723a377
Holy jeez, that's way worse. I guess I should consider myself lucky.
The lesson here is complexity != commercial viability.
If you're in a relationship like that, you're both sharing the risk -- and if you can't convince her of the rewards, it sounds like there's a serious problem.
Are you referring to Loopt?
You should pick up a copy of The Little Schemer. It's entirely Socratic, assumes no background knowledge, and is probably one of the best books ever written on any subject. And it just happens to be on Scheme, so all the better.

And while Scheme varies in syntax, the concepts are the same.
Cool. Does Scheme work on Windows?
Yep. Check out DrScheme: http://www.plt-scheme.org/software/drscheme/
Wow; what an amazing breath of fresh air.
We did that sort of thing in our CPS Web-app. You can give semi-permanent URI to the continuation closure, if the closure only refers to the persistent objects and not any transient state; for example, the "reply" link attached to each comment.
The link works as far as the persistent object (in the "reply" link case, the comment) lives.
There's a lot of ways to get rich. Some of the Aramark vendors selling beer at Shea stadium are pulling over 100k a year working only 80 home games a season. According to John Taylor Gatto's back-of-the-envelope analysis, some of the hot dog vendors on the sidewalks are pulling over 100k a year as well.

Taking into account accelerating change, you're going to have more toys than you could ever possibly dream of in 20 years anyway.

I think, therefore, that the social status is more important than the money.

Plus, like Hollywood celebrities, people doing interesting stuff tend to hang out with other people doing interesting stuff. So if you want to have interesting conversations with interesting people, doing something interesting yourself goes a long way.
GigaOM Enter Zenter, Google Office is now complete
Yes. Also, SICP uses Scheme for its examples, so that's the other reason you want to understand Scheme code.

(If you look up SICP on Amazon you'll see PG's review on page one)
GigaOM Coverage: http://gigaom.com/2007/06/19/enter-zenter-google-office-is-now-complete/
I can, because the founders didn't know about Reddit when they started it. There's different fundamental design concepts.
Mercurial

Read the docs and hang out on the lists and you'll see a world of difference. Of course, trying it out for yourself makes it pretty clear, too. :-)
It often feels like the lisp way is to figure it out yourself, at any cost, and without any external help. For whatever reason the community feels skewed towards egotistical hackers without much sympathy.

I have enjoyed working with CL, and built several large projects in it, but the packaging is a serious pain. At some point you accumulate sufficient knowledge that you can use the different packaging systems, but until then you are essentially sol.

A number one complaint about CL is the lack of libraries, but I think the real issue isn't that the libraries don't exist, but that installing them often isn't worth the effort. C'est la vie, but its still a pity.
You made assertions that possible things were impossible, and asked how to do intrinsically non-functional things in a functional way.

I think you experienced a typical IRC reaction of "annoy the newbie because it's easier than answering him". It seemed to work. I've seen it in non-Lisp channels too.

You need to store things on the heap or on the stack, there is nowhere else. When you're thinking in objects, program in objects. To think in objects but then try to write functionally is going to cause you difficulty. You can write procedurally in Lisp, without OOP, it's not just a choice between OOP and FP. Lisp programmers treat these as tools, not lifestyle choices.
Palish-
I sympathize you. I recently read PCL and started to code a project with it. I have a pretty firm idea of where I wanted to go and ran into the same issues with ASDF that you mention. Fortunately I was on linux so I was able to fix them quickly. Still I was just fed up with a lot of the unclean syntax that I had to write to make stuff work. No one was sympathetic with my viewpoint on #lisp and they all said there was no such thing as "clean and consistent" code when I argued that I would use Arc if it was more clean and consistent than ANSI CL. I came to the conclusion that the community sucks and I don't want to be apart of it, even if their language is better. Anyway to celebrate my decision I went over and coded some rubini.us . Cheers.
I think you experienced a typical IRC reaction of "annoy the newbie because it's easier than answering him". It seemed to work. I've seen it in non-Lisp channels too.

Hell yes it worked; that's why I wrote this article. The problem with the Lisp community is that it's the first reaction, not the last. You won't get this on #gamedev. You'll either get a "Google it" or a helpful response.

I also asked if Lisp constructs could be stored on the stack, instead of the heap; not whether they could be stored in some magical place that doesn't exist.
Congrats dudes!!
So you went into a programming language's IRC chatroom and began arguing that a non-existent language is better then theirs. I don't really envision many language enthusiasts responding well to that. Is the next step is for us to debate with pg that Fortress is better than Arc?
"..it's a zero-sum game. If you do well in the market, it has to be because someone else is doing poorly. Either that, or the market is bubbling upwards ahead of a crash."

Man, this is a common fallacy. In the last 100 years the stock market index has gone up several orders of magnitude. How is this a zero-sum game? Or do you expect the DJIA to go back to 100 or whatever it started out at when this bubble pops? The world grows richer because people work and create value. There is stock market speculation, yes, but there is also genuine growth based on fundamentals.

Now it is possible that we are building up towards a more fundamental crash (peak oil, http://anthropik.com/2005/08/thesis-6-humans-are-still-pleistocene-animals , etc.). But I don't think you were talking about that. Perhaps it is all fundamentally zero-sum (http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/2025552, "Guns, germs and steel", http://www.newamerica.net/publications/articles/2006/the_return_of_patriarchy). But in the frame of reference where the stock market continues to function it is def creating value.