skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
young = time but no money
older = more(ish) money and less time.
i still see facebook as something people fool around with in their dormrooms, a kindof tv/DVD kind of thing - if you want to sell to this demographic, sure facebook is king. i just don't see any utility to it for the older set (who incidently, are not without disposable income of their own...)
Let's see if I have this right. Someone paid you to provide them with something for competitive purposes (if it's business, why else?). Now you're using their IP to provide someone else (who may be their competitor) with something for competitive purposes. It's NOT up to you to determine who is competing with whom, how important someone's IP is to them. or whether or not "it's a big deal". I've seen multi-million dollar deals terminated and careers sidetracked when there was even a hint of impropriety in the air. DO NOT UNDERESTIMATE how important most business people feel about this issue.

Of course, no one owns what's in your brain, but that's all you own. Move on.
Idea #63 - Become the next Michael Arrington
You can absolutely sign away your IP rights in a contract. Unless the contract is crap it will certainly hold up in court. The contracting business would be a lot less healthy if this wasn't the case. Everything else you said is correct from what I know -- at least in California.

The neat thing about the labor laws in California (and some other states) is that they protect you from signing away lots of other rights as a full-time employee. It's difficult to enforce non-competes against former employees for example.
It isn't close to what?
How can you call him a dumbass? Haven't you read the Jeff Pulver bio by Jeff Pulver? http://pulver.com/jeff/

He's an amazing man, really, just ask him.
OT: Note to anyone who knows the Scribd guys, please have them create a feature that lets me do something like this:

http://www.janestcapital.com.pdf.scribd.com/yaron_minsky-cuf...

That way I don't have to download/upload or worry about copyrights but I can still view it on scribd automagically. I promise it will make them more popular.
Saying it's accurate is the kindest way to put it: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23497
Not YC, but I know of quite a large web application (in the order of a million users, but not that heavy traffic) that makes use of SQLite.

I don't think it's the right tool for every job but in this case no data is shared between users. Therefore partitioning is achieved by having an SQLite database per user.

Don't underestimate the power of SQLite (and to some extent other flat file databases like BDB, TDB or CDB for fast lookups).
I figured as much but put out a lowball figure purposely to ask the question, "Can a founder get out by paying back investors (invested sum), taking the money and running?"
Good suggestions! Have been thinking on the same lines myself. Have a system design ready, and will post it in 2 days to get it reviewed. cya then :).
I rarely click. I do mod on the reddit page though.

Now if only we could mod in the RSS feed.
"I also usually prefer to keep them on my local computer and not to share them with the world".

You could keep it online, without sharing it with the world. This should be done with a transparent encryption scheme. The server stores only the encrypted version of your list. Your browser decrypts it and shows it to you, wherever you are. This should work for anything where searching/indexing is not needed. Sadly, this would remove the possibility of targeted advertising, which is the main (only?) source of profit these days.
Google, Microsoft, Yahoo Accuse Content Makers of Exaggerating Copyright
I use my own site as a start-page, where I store a list of links. I put up a relatively simple interface for adding-removing links, plus some extra visuals.
http://www.lkozma.net/links
EBay Experimenting with Ads on Voice Alert Calls
Newly launched mobile company UnWired Nation, with its partner Apptera, is enabling eBay and others to not only contact customers with phone calls using a voice interaction system, but to play them ads as well.
Does Conformity Increase Startup Success?
Harvard Business School professor Mukti Khaire has an interesting theory - that startups can grow by conforming.
Startup BizCast #9 - TV News Coverage for your Small Business
On Startup BizCast #9, we're talking about how to approach a TV reporter about a story, what opportunities exist at stations for stories about small businesses, and some "dos and don'ts" for seeking coverage.
New Boston Startup Blog (not mine...)
Since YC has some affiliations with the Boston area, I thought I would post this blog which started last month. The content looks decent so you can decide if it's worth looking in to.
Erlang vs. Stackless python: a first benchmark
Yes I am.

Incidentally, Founders at Work is not affiliated in any way with Coders at Work other than having the same publisher.
Remember Webvan? So Does Amazon
Reddi's recipe for startup success
"Finding the right product idea is one key activity, but a lot of times it's about how you fund your idea, how you position it, how you market it," Reddi said. "There are some extremely smart people with great ideas, but the companies that succeed don't necessarily have anything to do with those people and those great ideas. So one important lesson is that there is a real disconnect between great ideas and what becomes a great company."
F# might not be as conceptually cool as lisp (I don't know enough of either to comment yet), but I would bet that enterprise users, especially those who already have a .net codebase, would rather switch to F# than lisp. Not to mention that in the case of the former, it wouldn't have to be a switch; F# is meant to be used alongside C# instead of replacing it.
I originally had your mindset, but I added a del.icio.us button on my pages for the heck of it. I immdediately saw several posts to del.icio.us to my site and surprisingly these were the first posts people had ever made. Even after several weeks people hadn't learned to use the tags yet - every post was system:unfiled (or they didn't find the need to use tagging).

As hard as it is to believe, not everyone knows what digg/reddit/del.icio.us are. You're right that existing users would probably already have plugins installed, but the buttons on the page can help new people register.
How to Sic Michael Moore on Your Insurance Company
So after a long "discussion" I was reassured that 8 months is a perfectly acceptable amount of time in which to settle a claim. Then the representative stated that she refused to debate with me any longer on the subject and then "click". She hung up on me! I think I'm going to need Michael Moore. Since SiCKO came out, he has been contacted by so many people who have been screwed by insurance companies that he came out with his own Health Care Card. Here's the PDF.
Interesting...at the places I've worked (as an employee), it was considered a dealbreaker if a contractor wanted to own the source code they produced. We passed up some really, really good contractors because they wanted to own the product.
A better comparison would be with Fresh Direct, not Webvan.

It looks like Amazon is focusing on a large yet concentrated local market (Seattle).

As FD has demonstrated here in NYC, an efficient, local service can work.
If you're pre-revenue, offer them convertible debt.
Is it hot or not? Ranking of user modded content.
Reddit and News.YC share a feature: hotness. Users mod up and down -- but hotness is more than total points.

How should I do it?

Positive correlation with number of votes.
Negative correlation with submit time.
Perhaps negative correlation with time since mean or median time of mods.
Perhaps adjust for rates -- a surge implies extra hotness.

How do you make the front page efficiently? I hope not to recalculate hotness for each page view -- but a naive approach might think it necessary given the continuous time decay.

A parallel service could periodically troll through the entries from the past N days and calculate their hotness -- which serves the front page. That could be updated and chached in memory inependent of front pageview count.
I can't believe people thought WebVan would make money because computer scientists know how to solve a travelling salesman problem.

The asynchronous delivery is important -- cold storage for goods. I don't want to wait for a delivery.
I think this should really be called "How to write a nonfiction book", or even more specifically, "How to write an instructional/informational book". In reading about the writing methods of several great authors (e.g. Kurt Vonnegut, Douglas Adams), they tend to have an idea of where they are going but write linearly, hammering things out line-by-line. This makes a book much more narrative, gives it a better flow, adds a natural sort of suspense, and ensures overall coherence. Even a nonfiction book which is giving a narrative-like account on some topic would benefit from this linear approach.

So while the article is good for certain applications, I feel the title should have been clarified. To me, the methods laid out seem to take a lot of the fun and spontaneity out of writing. Personally, even for something as brief as an essay, I don't use an approach nearly as thorough as what he laid out, and I regularly get good marks on my essays. Just my 2 cents.
web apps and social sites are the main thing for now and in the coming years. Desktop apps are so,so outdated, so we shall see most applications being ported to the web. thereby making the web the new operating system, finally putting the last nail into microsoft's coffin.
VCs: Startups Are Too Reliant on the M&A Market
It's true, but what are the alternatives to getting acquired?

You need a solid track record of revenue to go public (it's not like the bad ole bubble days).

Even if you're determined to stay private, where will your sustaining revenue come from, especially if you're running a consumer-oriented web service?
In Defense Of Stuff
You're right about the probability of .net coders using F# over lisp. That said, F# is still a very big conceptual leap even if it does compile down to IL and run alongside all the other CLR compliant languages. The leap is having to shift your thinking from object-oriented programming to value-oriented programming.

The number of language users is not a function of how good that language is (ask PG or any lisp advocate!).

I will almost certainly learn F#, for some of the reasons above, but I don't think it'll ever match the elegance and succinctness you get with Lisp.
Valuable and powerful things can survive any bubble, and they did in the past. Only those who are making money on viral/pyramidal schemes or otherwise just bloated ideas born in VP of Marketing office have to worry about all these apocalyptic predistions. Wasn't it obvious?
Right, the subscription/freemium model.

But is it sustainable?

Most of their users stick with the free service level, and as more and more startups enter the fray, they'll be pressured to offer the same (premium) services for free.

Remember what Gmail did to Yahoo's plan to charge web mail users for more storage space?
Damn Spam
What's the best advice you actually use?
For me it was in a Paul Graham essay, the title of which escapes me now. The advice was simple: if you have a hard time deciding whether to do one thing or the other, always choose the harder thing. That way, you rule out being lazy.

I can't tell you how many times I've used that piece of advice and seen the benefits.
This is the point where great content recommendation comes into play. Read the information about the NetFlix prize that has been on the front page or just go over to http://netflixprize.com for more info.

This is one of the aspects I've been looking into using Content Recommendation for, but I'm looking at it from a larger information overload perspective.

Even a site like Digg can only really do popularity because of the binary nature of the thumbs up/thumbs down system, but once you move past the binary scale into a 5 star rating system and take your algorithms from a slope one into a latent semantic indexing, or something similar, instead of popularity you end up with personalization.

Of course this all depends on the quality of the data and the size of you user base, plus the cross section of the users that have voted on similar items, in this case blogs.

I'm personally taking the bet that this approach is one of the next great ways to organize information and is worth the next few years of my life to work on .
A badly titled article. What the guy actually says is that VCs are too reliant on the M&A market.
Massive LAMP scalability on a startup budget
Amazon 's web services have been around for a while. EC2 provides incredibly cheap Xen based virtualization, and S3 provides terabytes of storage for around the cost of a cinema candy (and not the expensive cinema candy either). But they haven't been able to run a full LAMP server - until now.
How to lose half your subscribers in 28 days or less
The way I do it is points divided by age in hours
(plus two) to the 1.25th power. This is probably not optimal, but it's simple.

(= gravity* 1.25 timebase* 120)

(def hotness (s (o gravity gravity*))
(/ (- (realscore s) 1)
(expt (/ (+ (story-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity)))

I avoid reranking all the stories by keeping them in
sorted order, and whenever I generate a frontpage for
someone logged in, reinserting one randomly
chosen story near the top (where all the change is).
I also reinsert any story that gets voted on.
Why a startup's initial business plan is important
In his Guide to Startups Part 7 Marc Andreessen argues that a startup's business plan doesn't matter that much. I am not so sure that is the right way to think about things. For sure every plan will change, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't think about it thoroughly.
I agree that the number of users is not a function of how good the language is. And you are right about the conceptual difference between C# and F#. OCaml from the beginning prioritized practicality instead of elegance, so you are surely right that F# will never match the elegance of lisp. That isn't the goal though.
Probably to avoid premature optimization. Getting a version 1 done quickly and then iterating works in so many fields besides hacking.
As s_baar says

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38560

the short answer is no, because funding deals almost invariably include a veto over acquisitions, regardless of who has what percent of the stock. There may also be a liquidation preference that says the investors get n times their money back first in any sale.

The slightly longer answer is that it's not that simple, because if you really want to sell and you're essential to the company, you can in effect threaten to go on strike if they exercise their veto, and then you'll all end up with less. As long as founders are essential to the company, they have a lot of power. So in practice they may be able to talk investors out of exercising their veto (though not their liquidation preference).
Can it do homestarrunner.com? I'd love to get an RSS feed of that. Well I guess I'll try it.
There is a lot of good advice I use constantly that has produced great benefits for me over the years. Here is probably the best:

Get enough sleep.

Get enough sunlight.

Maintain a positive attitude.

Know a little about a lot.

Do not pigeonhole people.

Anger is counterproductive.

Keep stress to a minimum.

Exercise regularly.

Eat healthy.

Persistence overcomes a lot.

You can't control everything.

People don't remember much.
This doesn't contradict the article. It boils down to "I like stuff, because I buy good stuff and ditch the rest."
Again, I respect your sense of ethics and I think the world would be a better place if everyone paid half as much attention to ethics as you do.

That said, I still think that there are occasions where referring to past code is entirely ethical.

Say for example I forgot the mod_rewrite flag to do what I need, but I used the same flag for a client in the past and I still have a copy on my server. Instead of Googling around for it, which might take a couple minutes, I could look at the copy from before in a matter of seconds. That is the kind of thing I would do, and I certainly am not violating anyone's IP or copying any code. Would you still say this is unethical?
The popularity list is very top-heavy with language dudes. Also, 'created' is a better term for language creators, except for perhaps a really select few who can claim to have truly invented something completely new, and even then... I'd still say creator.
What is the value of a formal business education? [Pics]
please also comment on A) since the person is likely to become an investor in my product in the near term.
I write software as the largest part of my business, and I don't think I've ever been asked to assign copyright to the purchaser. I go out of my way to point out in written materials that I use licenses like GPL, BSD, and put stuff in the public domain when that's compatible with library licenses and such, but no client has ever actually asked me about that.

In my experience, people who are buying custom software don't even think about copyrights and licenses; it just never occurs to them.
always wear clean underwear. always.
No, it didn't work.
Heh. That's not really advice samb, that's something you just do.
MS Live Search adds face filtering
I'm not actually commenting on either A) or B), just on menloparkbum's comment that it's common for contractors to retain ownership.

I don't really want to get into the ethics of it, because I don't think ethical debates are particularly fruitful. (I took a course in meta-ethics in college, which makes me particularly suspicious in attempts to ground ethical judgments in factual statements or logical debate.) I'll tell you that I wouldn't do it; it sounds dodgy enough that I wouldn't really want to get involved with it. Ultimately, most ethical judgments come down to gut feelings about right or wrong.

I will say that right or wrong, I think it's stupid. You're opening yourself up to big legal liability. If acquirers or investors find out about it (and they will - that's what due diligence is for), they will nix the deal. Heck, I'm spending about $1K to have a lawyer draw up a release to make sure all IP I developed for my startup while employed belongs to me, and I didn't take any source code from my employer (I'm using a completely different technology platform and am in a completely different area of business.) It's just something I don't want to fuck around with.
Interesting. Right now, I have no data, making testing difficult -- especially for anything that will change hotness depending on distribution of mods in a given time.

It's been something I've been thinking about for a bit, and want to get it out of my head to focus on building something that people use so I can actually get the data.
Want to Start a Virtual World? Be Sure to Play Hockey
How does your client feel about their IP being "still...on my server"?
I don't think that's all that bad - you're looking for stuff that's public information anyway, and it just so happens that your employer made use of that public information as well. It's like Apple and Microsoft both ripping off Xerox's GUI - Microsoft didn't take anything from Apple, it's just that they both originally took from the same source.

I'd draw the line at using the result of previous problem-solving that you've done for your employer. For example, in the course of my employment, I wrote a slider widget for my employer's product. I need a slider widget for my startup. Rather than using the code I wrote for my employer, I'm grabbing another open-source slider widget and modifying it as necessary. Same with utility classes - my employer wrote an OrderedDict class in Python, I need an ordered dictionary, rather than using my employer's I grabbed a third-party class off the net.
Anyone looking for a couple hours html/css work?
hi, i'm looking to update my companies website. it's small (<10 pages) and i have mocked up something using a free CSS template i found on the web, i just don't have the time to tinker with it (i'm their scientist, not a web guru ;-). i'm looking for someone to help tweak the CSS layout, change the color scheme etc and provide me with some pointers. Simple and Robust is good. I would be surprised if there was more than a couple of hours in it if you know what you're doing but it's beer money for a poor student ;-)
if you're interested, email me and i'll give you some more details (current website location for the 'before' shot and a copy of what i've got to hand and a brief spec) and then if you could estimate the time/cost (maybe an example of something you've done in the wild) I'll get some budget authorised and we can take it from there. if it is as easy as i think, should be done in a week or so. Prefer UK based but not a deal breaker, just easier to move the payment.
Social Bookmarking + Social Search
With this nifty tool, you can not only manage your bookmarks online, but since it integrates with Google and Yahoo search, bookmarks shared in your social search network are displayed alongside the web search results.
New details on Google's mobile plans
I couldn't see any of the pictures - Yahoo wanted me to sign in.
And that's how regular people become Pointy-Haired Bosses.
It's helpful when they accidentally delete their copy multiple times (Yeah, this has actually happened to me. The client blamed it on a hard drive crash, but what are the changes of that happening twice in a row?). I am not exactly working with high-end clients, just doing a few jobs here and there to help cover my tuition.

Edit: I don't know why someone modded down the parent comment, you did make a valid point.
I did log in, and then they wanted me to do some other stupid thing. Ugh. Now there's a multi-step process to see a jpeg?
Coolie Valley, the Silicon Valley of India?
IT professionals in India have yet to diversify and progress from being "code monkeys" to "independent IT managers & small-business owners", written by an Indian.
National 700MHZ Wireless Broadband Auction
The whole story's at http://ytmnd.com/news/?news_id=69 .. it's pretty interesting.
Save electricity by "hoarding" it
One company decided to create a device that cuts your electricity bill by 10-15%. How do they do it?
There's this:

http://www.losanjealous.com/nfc/perm.php?c=101&q=40
Thanks for sharing that Paul. Most people guard that knowledge like it's the lost grail.

Kudo to you for being open about it.
Do they realize that Coolie...............................

is a racial slur?

Also the article mentions "50% Silicon Valley firms are run by Indians",

Any of you valley people know if this is true?
Aussie Startup's Survey
A survey (with results) centered around Australian Internet-startup's. Is it very hard for non-US startup's to reach mainstream? If so, why?
IETF: Everyone needs to be on IPv6 by 2011
zombies?
I think the problem here is textbooks, not the subject: in a Java course I took, students were required to discuss the moral implications of writing software for judging people's credit (apparently, the problem was that creditworthiness correlates with race).

But perhaps business courses are so content-free because so much of business is, too.
Wow, what a useless blog post that was.

A MUCH better, less flame-worthy title would have been: "What is the value of reading a 101 level business textbook from 2005?"

A formal, GOOD, business education is invaluable, in combination with some domain-specific skill

(I do think the pseudo-advertising in the book is appalling)

It's not very useful to know about how "business works" without knowing and experiencing a real living value chain [whether it be retail, financial services, web software, or film making, etc].

(disclosure, I have a B.S. in finance from the University of Virginia...and an MFA in percussion performance from CalArts...all we did at UVA was read HBR and other intellectually stimulating material and then get grilled on it in full-class discussions...not to mention courses in C++ [viva the 1990's], statistics, and Black-Scholes ;-)