skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sigh. Confusing correlation with causation is exactly the kind of foolish error that I'm talking about.

I think its a very childish response to accuce me of being angry or jealous because I have a different opinion, tht is strongly held.

But its simply dishonest to put words in my mouth like that.

I have not made claims to be great, and I have not said my methods are superior to facebook... nor have I said anything derogatory about YC, especially when YC funds college age students-- I think the college age generation are the perfect candidates for the YC program.

Its really quite sad that you have demonstrated exactly the errors I am pointing out in facebook in your defense of them-- you have reacted in a narrow minded and judgemental way-- attacking me personally, rather than the position I have taken. This kind of political correctness is exactly what Facebook is doing when they don't hire people based on skills, but based on other factors such as age and, well, ideology.

Further irony comes from you attacking my skills when I have not relied on argument based on my "superior" skills, and further, what skills do you have? Not that they would be relevant-- but if you had sufficient skill you should be able to make a counter argument based on the state of the art and advanced techniques. In short, by attacking me, you show you do not understand the technology well enough to make a technological argument, ironic since technical skill is where you criticized me.

Even saying I'm jealous is a childish pathetic personal attack on my skills.

Anyway, for the past 20 days I've been off doing... and you'll notice I have no posts here in that time period. Meanwhile you have made 28 comments here in just the last 3 days.

How's your startup going?
I'm saying you could have (more easily) just let a new page load. Then javascript wouldn't be a requirement, and if I wanted to control the loading of the page I could do it with my browser controls.
Based on your replies to my comments so far, I think you're still missing the point. You've implemented good functionality, but you don't have a product. You need to figure out a way to convey why someone would want to use your site and make it easy for them to do so without being confused.

For example, I now know what the import/export options do, but there's absolutely no reason for those to be on the front page. I'm not even logged in, so they have zero relevance to my experience. Even for a registered user, they should probably be tucked away under "Advanced" or under some options tab. It's functionality only the techiest of techies would care to use; in general we can trust that you'll keep our data safe and we won't need personal backups. And working on your "heuristic import" is not a good idea either. It's your format, no one else is using it, so just make it simple and parse it in and out.

Your users couldn't care less how cool your code is or how many features you've implemented, just make something useful and make it easy to understand.
This slide show seems to be more of an effort to distort common and well-accepted applications of motivational psychology as originating from games. Of the five game mechanics listed, probably only one (points) originated in games: I collect every time I go to the grocery store, receive feedback every time I touch a hot stove, make an exchange (almost) every time I speak, and customize every time I go to a restaurant and ask for chicken instead of turkey. You could probably absorb these lessons as applied to software a lot better by analyzing the reinforcers present in EBay and the other sites mentioned than by thinking of games.

There's probably a lot more to learn from what I expected this article to be: An in depth discussion of how game theory applies to web applications.
I thought it was important to make it really obvious that export is available. Without it, people might not even want to register as they might think that the service may go away at any moment and they would lose their data.
Theres a follow up from GDC 2007 but it doesn't cover anything new. I always like these cross disciplinary views. Theres a lot we can learn from game design, sound design, music industry, etc.
Unless your product requires you to build a factory (and even if you're in the manufacturing business its highly unlikely that you can't profitably outsource even manufacturing) -- then you absolutely shouldn't take VC funding.

YC, Angel, Friends and Family, maybe even a couple million (to last several years)... but not VC funding.

VC funding is for people who would like to spend four years working like a dog for a %1 chance to get $10M in payoff...than the alternative of four years working like a dog for a %400 chance of getting a $1 million payoff.

The value of these two opprotunities are $100k for the VC route and $4M for the independant route.

But, like contestants on "Deal or no Deal" they don't do math and they go for the big score instead of the sure thing. You only hear about the people who get the big score- they go to conferences and they start investment funds. but for each of them there are 100 or mor equally talented people who went the VC route and are now employees somewhere because the VC killed their company.

The big difference is when you get on the VC treadmill, as pointed out, the only options viable to the VC is IPO and acquisition... and you'll be diluted all to hell. Worse, you'll hire too many people spend too much money and lower your chances of success.... because you're spending that money before you know it works. And you pay in equity for the priviledge of lowering your chances.

On the other hand, if you angel fund, you can quickly determine whether the business is viable, and if it isn't, you only spend a few months on it before trying another idea. In four years you should be able to try 16 businesses .... but likely you'll make $1M per year doing it. And at the end of it, if you've failed and you've got a business that's throwing off $400,000 in cash for you for profit (your share) you could stop working and live on that $400k. The 99 out of 100 times that your VC backed venture fails, you've got nothing to show for it. So, even if you "Fail" and have a business worth $4-$8M, you still win.

One of the commentators had an excellent and underrated point:
"And thats the rub. Every lawyer, finance, and admin guy you run into at a VC firm will think they know your idea better than you, and worse yet, better than your intended customer.

Sure, they will give you funding, but along with that funding comes their screwed up way of thinking that no matter how much you, because they have money, or an mba, or a bar number, that qualifies them to tell you how much more they know than you."

Never met anyone associated with a VC (including Seqoia) who wasn't dumb money but thought they were smart money. (except Guy Kawasaki, who is smart enough to realize he's dumb. If you think you're smart, you aren't, if you think you're dumb, you're smart.)
If a term sheet isn't horrible, then the lawyer you're using is the one the VC firm hooked you up with!

Sounds like you believe you need to spend it all before you make anything.. I think you've got it backwards. If someone wants to charge you $10k a month, find their competition and get the same service from them at a higher unit rate but paid for out of actual usage. Negotiate.

"Not to mention the market might be radically different by the time you even launch."

you're making an erronous assumption-- the VC treadmill has you betting the farm on the state of the market at some point in the future.

Building a viable business means that you are less dependant on the state of the market, not more.

One company I worked for was profitably doing consulting when we took VC funding. They insisted that we close that business to "focus" on the product... the result was, when all was said and done th company ended up selling for less than the consultancy was worth and the founders got a fraction of it -- because the VC business took most of the money due to their preferences. Venture Capital killed that business. Now a decade later, the market that company was in is a huge multi-billion dollar market... if they'd kept the consulting business and kept at it for another three years-- they would have been in it when it finally did take off.

Bottom line-- you can't be frugal when taking venture capital. Keeping a viable consultancy was percieved as a threat to the business-- even though it would have allowed us to hire more engineers on the commercial side. ITs almost as if VCs want you completely dependant on further funding from them. (Or they are just totaly incompetant at business.)
Paul Kedrosky: Shut Up About the Age Thing
Best SEO is Useful Content (Seth's Blog)
Really, its backwards. Speed to market is a factor of team size-- the more engineers you hire the slower you are to get to market. So, VC funding slows down the rate of feature development.

A small tightly focused and really motivated team will out compete a group of employees funded by VC everytime.

And, if you look at it from the perspective of the opportunity value-- you will get more massive going it alone than going with VCs. Both because of the massive dilution of venture capital, and because of the significantly decreased chances of success.

Scaling should never be a problem-- you should outsource everyting but engineering and scalability should be the problem of your hosting provider. (or manufacturer, etc.) At the time that you really need to scale you will have plenty of money to pay for it. And because you outsourced this (something that is often harder to do in a VC backed business) you have people who are more capable working on it.

Course, I'm presuming we're talking about businesses that make something people want to pay for.

If you're building a youtube like business, then VC is the onyl way to go-- you're just gambling on some mebulous chance of profitability or getting acquired for having massive pageviews... and when gambling its always better to do so with someone elses money.
Thanks for this. Sounds like you guys have some great reasons. Legacy's always a good answer, and productivity's a close second. I was mostly concerned with the web app frontend stuff with the "really?" tag. I didn't/don't really know your product well enough to know how much of it's in scripts and how much of it's officially part of the web app.
I would've probably picked Python, mostly because you get all of that stuff with (almost) uniformly better syntax. But I certainly don't blame you, especially in light of the details from above.
Well, part of your job is to convince users that you're trustworthy (assuming that you are). Only the hardcore skeptics should have any doubt.
Aston's right. Boost (the carrier that offers Loopt) would be a competitor, but Loopt wouldn't.
still not faster than fortran :/
Hey founder: shut up?
http://powazek.com/posts/534
http://jpdefillippo.com/blog/2007/05/16/the-blog-post-i-never-wanted-to-make/
Above and beyond you have to have advanced common sense. If a VC wants X, but you're not a moron, and you want to do Y, don't go with the firm that is selling you bad advice. If it's too late then you didn't do enough due diligence before it was too late. That's not anyones fault but those who signed the papers.

Time to market is deeply important. Not to find a herring to point at but go create another Youtube or Twitter today and tell me how the post market absorbs it. If a market grabs enough momentum to get to a kool-aid point getting the weight of the market is going to be difficult.

While I don't believe our product is so important, I believe some of the deals and ideas we have are. If delivered properly placement has concrete potential which locks a company in for a good term, not to mention a good vector for growth. They don't say strike the iron when it's cold.

Like you've said in your other funding YC talk, cases may be different. There are thousands of variants that can effect ones viability, needs, realities, and needs.

As well I'm not making any assumptions on VC's talking points. They are our own from our own market research, trends, and skull sessions. We're seeking more angels than VC's anyhow since VC's play a game we're not really interested in. Not that good VC firm's don't exist. The funded is showing us that the cloth isn't always equal.

Good contemplative stuff though, none the less!
This:

"Digg is developing a smart suggestion system that will consider the type of stories a user has dugg previously then suggest similar stories based on that history."
Paul Kedrosky: Favorite Three Questions for Early-Stage Companies
"YC, Angel, Friends and Family, maybe even a couple million (to last several years)... but not VC funding.

VC funding is for people who would like to spend four years working like a dog for a %1 chance to get $10M in payoff...than the alternative of four years working like a dog for a %400 chance of getting a $1 million payoff."

Ahh! I understand you better. This type of VC deal is something I would probably be pretty scared of.
And according to his comment on this post, he wasn't really "exposed." He's just a bit slow at getting back to the organizers he cancels on.
Marc Andreessen is blogging...
Glad to see candor and transparency.
Amazon's unseemly tags
It's faster now.
The State of the Online Advertising Market
Long player
Some nice historical stuff I hadn't seen before:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5046297730700144952#29m52s
Yes, but the Java code is shorter than the Lisp code. I'll take the slight performance hit to avoid the boilerplate.

I wonder if his test doesn't have one obvious flaw though. I ran it three times and got:

.46, .28, .28

...I took out the System.out.println statements and got:

.032, .047, .032

So I think he might have been testing the wrong thing.
I don't want the masses to use Linux. My servers all run Linux. Super. But it doesn't bother me at all that mom and pop are funnelling billions of dollars into the pockets of my professional cohorts, RMS be damned.
When loading the flash demo, the loading bar does not convey any information. It just keeps growing with no indication of when it will complete.

Also, during pageloads your little "loading" popup seems to have horizontal and vertical scrollbars.
just curious, how is stumbleupon "significant promotion"?
In Silicon Valley, the Crash Seems Like Just Yesterday
This is just a single example. The CL code might be a few lines longer in this example, but in the vast majority of code, Java will be the one with boilerplate and a lot more code. Lisp more than any other language removes boilerplate.
True, if anything else this could mean more research should be done to test the frameworks in question. And findings can be built upon or disproved.
If we were starting Webmin, Virtualmin and Usermin today, it could very well be in Python. We both like it as a language, and have worked in it on pretty large projects. And the syntax is certainly cleaner and simpler. I'm also quite fond of Ruby, though its standard implementation leaves a lot to be desired (performance, Unicode, lack of libraries).

But, we'd have to spend some time with it to know for sure...as I mentioned in the longer explanation in this thread, I've done quite a bit of sysadmin tasks in Python (modifying others code, generally), and in every single case I've felt like the implementation was longer than it needed to be, and more complex. In a couple of cases, I even talked it over with seriously good Python guys and did comparative implementations to try and improve my own grasp of Python, and the response was generally something like: "Sure, the Python implementation is twice as long, and runs slower, but I can't read the Perl implementation!" Which is a valid response, of course, but I think just showed that they had never worked in Perl and had little comprehension of its idioms.

But, to be fair, I've been pleasantly surprised by some of the Python code I've had to modify. Perhaps the single most satisfying patch I ever wrote for someone else's code was to add authentication support back into yum after they moved from urllib to urllib2. It was the first Python code I'd ever touched, and it was a very pleasant learning experience. Really nice code.
I don't want to sound like an asshole.

But, I have visited your site on different accounts in the past , say about 10 times. Every time I visit your site I:

a) haven't a clue of what your site is about,
b) haven't a clue of where to begin to find out what it's about,
c) find the design very unpleasant and frustrating.
From his latest entry:

"In closing, I'd be the last person to say that I never roll my eyes at the next startup that's doing online wiki-based popularity-ranked video-podcast mobile social dating widgets for the dog and cat owner market.

But a bubble?

I doubt it."

What a great snippet.
The fact that you can't control something doesn't mean you shouldn't think about it. Basketball players can't control their height, but it affects the techniques they can use.
YooRL Tracks your Link Around the World
People from both the Merc and the Chronicle talked to me about doing work for them; I've heard both are laying off a good chunk of the staff. The inevitability of this was one of the reasons I didn't pursue either. (I hope I can do enough online video to make the same thing happen with TV networks.)
Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine
Donating to the institute you mention triggers the same reaction in me as the article's plea for funding: if anyone has a good idea for making AI, he should have no problem convincing other hackers to join in and form a startup. Computer ressources are probably not the limiting factor.

I'm sure that a lot of researchers in academia have pet theories about how to make it happen, but they need grants. The NSF has funded enough failed AI projects, it's hard for them to justify funding more given the current lack of money in science.

There are probably a lot of people working on AGI on their own, or in startups. I am. But you won't hear much about people like me unless we succeed to some level.

IMO, the field is waiting for its Einstein to come up.
I haven't checked the other examples, but the Python one doesn't use scipy, which makes a huge difference (50X for one example, see below). So I'm skeptical of the whole exercise.

http://www.scipy.org/PerformancePython
What is a "400% chance"?
LoopNet Case Study: Partnerships build data asset - Startup Review
Search 150 blogs in the VC industry
Unfortunately I can't b/c of some reasons I'd be happy to share later. I know it sounds like a copout, but really, I'd be in trouble if I mentioned it now.

Upper mgmt is making us rewrite it in java. (shoot self). It has more to do with what they are comfortable with long term and what the company runs and has the know-how to support.

If I had to do it over again, I'd look at Python more carefully. Django was barely out when we started so we were a bit leery of it. In addition, I didn't have a great impression of Python from doing some toy programs in it. I really liked Ruby's elegance.

Overall, I don't think we would've chosen Java above what we have, warts and all. Java is too verbose and RoR let us be extremely flexible and fast when it mattered.

Outside of upper management intervention, we'd probably have continued down the ruby path and gambled on the fact that things would be fixed/better in a few years.

I feel for twitter, but they're really doing a service for the rest of the RoR community by being the pioneer for extreme scaling issues.
Google keeps tweaking its seach engine
What you think, what can be price of national (second level) openid domain? Say openid.fr ?
$1500? but it seems openid becomes popular.
How Guy Kawasaki Launched Truemors for $12,107.09
aaargh :) ... I apologize PG, I overlooked previous post. however is it so hard to check if suggested address is already in database and throw some warning to sender?
Ivan, next time read the feature request thread!
Looking for co-founder/co-worker to build a hybrid of ebay and craigslist
so something like olx.com?
There are two things to consider. Young people mind is still malleable and they are generaly free or duties and in a healthy condition. They can thus easily adapt, reconsider classic models and be totally commited to the startup with ne reasons to fear failure.

Older people tend to have a less malleable mind. They are slower to change direction and take decisions, but when they do, it is wiser and better thought than young people. They have to find compromise between the various external duties they have and can take less risk. They have less energy resources and endurance than young people.

From this perspective, it is clear that young people are more sexy for VC, because they are looking for innovative mercenaries ready to give their life and health for their company.

But not beeing sexy to a VC doesn't mean the project is rotten. The success depends on the project and the context. Beside there are many older people out there with a 20 year old innovative mercenary spirit and there are many young people out there with a 30 old guy's maturity.

So claiming there is a kind of use-by day for entrepreneurs doesn't indeed make sense.
Main thing to avoid with C++ is virtual methods. Once you understand how they're implemented, you will understand why (hint: vtables).

Why? Are you concerned by the additional pointer dereference? In a tight loop (or other performance critical repetetive code), the vtables for all the derived types and the target piece of code would be sitting in cache already, and the code pointed to by the vtable entry would also be in cache. You have to fetch the object/class/struct instance that you're operating on regardless of whether or not it has a vtable, so that's an unavoidable cost. So I don't see how it's all that expensive. It's just a freaking pointer dereference. I do agree that it can matter in some instances, but I generally have a long list of things to improve before I would try to minimize pointer dereferences on vtables. If you really are having to optimize on such a low level, you'd probably do better to worry about cache hits/misses and data layout in-memory first.
A pointer dereference can make all the difference in an inner loop. As usual, the answer is to profile, then to optimize.

No other dogma really applies.
The sw already does this; nyt links just have a lot of
different forms.
Videoguide For Hotels: Trivop.com
:) yes something like that
You missed his point. What he is saying is that age should not be a matter of significance.
When is it time to take the plunge?
Amazon Comes to Twitter
I'm with kyro here. Your site's design is about ten times more complicated than it needs to be, and the 'Please wait...' loading textbox is arse ugly. Have a look at sites like Wufoo or Thinkature. They have complex concepts too, but they know how to present them in a way that draws users in.

You don't need to have import data and export data as links on the front page, especially when I can't even seem to do anything with your site without logging in. Just have "Data import/export" as a bullet point in your feature list; people will get the point.

Speaking of being able to do something with your site without logging in: this is vital. If you want me to make an account, you need to give me a reason to do it. Again, see Thinkature's site, or Adobe's kuler. If you can provide even a subset of the site's functionality to people who aren't logged in, you'll get more signups. Even if you can't do that, it helps if you can explain why the heck I'd want to use your service, like Wufoo does.
Nice list, but.... "uh oh, another rails TODO list". There are too many out there, and I speak from experience:

http://stufftodo.dedasys.com
reddit never had any export button, even though members have spent a lot of time creating content for it.

People don't worry about exporting/importing until they are significantly invested in the product. And even then...