skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Red5 has been making some impressive additions to their development staff.

Regarding equity, I doubt most new hires would be getting substantial percentages, and it doesn't help that early employees at most game studios will never get rich from stock holdings. Some of this stems from the way the game business generally operates (milestone system) where developers often don't see royalties until their publishers cover their own costs. Not to mention that the MMO category is severely crowded and extremely high risk...web startups can put out a beta in 1-2 months and user test the heck out of it whereas MMO developers basically don't get any resolution until they sink $10-30 million upfront into a project. Additionally, unless Red5 develops some killer intellectual property, studio acquisitions usually happen at the 30-50 person headcount for $5-15 million.

The Golden Ticket: http://www.red5studios.com/about/goldenticket
Hi,
Does anyone know any good resources on creating offshore companies? I live in japan and want to create a startup targeted at the japanese market but, being a foreigner, creating a company here is too difficult (I would need to invest at least 30 000 dollars and have 2 japanese employees)...

I was thinking about incorporating in hongkong, but I find it rather difficult on getting reliable and non-biased information on the process, what taxes I will need to pay, and so on...

So if anybody knows anything about it, I would be interested.

For a momment, I also considered incorporating in the us, but since I am not an american citizen, I thought it might also be difficult and it seems there would less problem with software patents in a company in hongkong (could anyone confirm this?)
Lisp is compiled, not interpreted, most of the time. No one uses interpreted Lisp in production; it's all compiled. And it's compiled to very fast code, much of the time, particularly when you add type declarations.
However, it is interesting to note that Red5 is backed by Benchmark Capital. I'm guessing Bill Gurley as he seems to be partial to interactive entertainment.
For the freelancers out there: Pricing a Project
What a bunch of morons and whiners! Microsoft was and is a great company that change the way everybody work with computers. All Google have created is web advertisement tax. It provides nothing you did not had before, but you still crawl to their web site to find the page you were watching yesterday, because you was too lazy to bookmark it. Google already is reading your searches, your emails, and your files. One day they will own you and they will tax you all like they are taxing businesses.
Well it really depends on what you need....
Dreamhost is good if you only need cheap bandwidth and disk storage.
But if you need to run a rails application that might suck a bit of resources, it's not the best place to go, same thing it you want reliability...
I'm actually most impressed by the line in the essay, pg's "why not to start a startup" pushed your cofounder over the edge.
I've used http://bluehost.com/ and http://lunarpages.com/.
I wonder how they got the figure and if it has some basis in fact or was completely made up.
I agree and disagree.

You are right in that the people shape the discussion, but saying that the current aggregators have it right because of thus is more like complacency: they can definitely be better. Looking back at how discussion systems evolved over the years, it's easy to see that small steps have been taken to improve the user experience be enforcing an overall higher quality of content.

Since users shape the community, you have two choices in dealing with an evolving site: keep your initial vision by implementing rules and potentially alienating certain user groups; or letting your site adapt to the users. Both are valid approaches. Slashdot takes the former, because it has moderators, and digg takes the latter, so it's userbase keeps growing while the quality keeps dropping. I imagine reddit would take the latter path too. news.yc is also facing the same kind of change. Recalling the bunch of "delete me" posts last week, it seems like quality control is done mostly by self-policing of some sort.

It's an issue of how much control and what tastes the users have, and what mechanisms have been implemented to strengthen or weaken the expression these tastes in the system. Most discussion sites fall into two extremes. Total moderator control, or total user control. A very powerful alternative doesn't simply lie in the middle; it shifts back and forth. This is the logical next step.
Yikes..sorry, didn't realize that you guys were talking about that site! Not my thing. Thx.
Ok - we are diving in: Today my partner and I decided to drop Lispworks (and especially Windows) and go with SBCL and Ubuntu for our first server box which we'll host at our office. We are on schedule to go live in about 2 months. He had been looking into SBCL for a while, and is convinced its the way to go. If we find problems with it, we (or more likely he as he is technically amazing compared to my self-taught lisp hacking) will contribute to the source code.
I read about Google's use of Python here

http://panela.blog-city.com/python_at_google_greg_stein__sdforum.htm

a few weeks ago and saw the part where they mentioned SWIG. This was quite an insight for me since I've been trying to figure out for a years the best way to write binary extensions for Perl, Lisp, etc. To see that Google uses it as a matter of course completely sealed it for me.

I have integrated it into my project over the last couple of weeks and I've got to say it is the bee's knees. It took some thrashing to get started and there are still some dark corners (e.g., typemap voodo) but I will never go back. My first project is a high performance sockets IPC module patterned after memcached/libevent and it works like a charm.

I highly recommend SWIG.
If Scheme will do, Chicken, Bigloo, and Gambit all compile to C code as an intermediate step (which you then run through gcc or whatever to generate the binary). Bigloo will also generate JVM and .NET output (.NET is still experimental).

I haven't worked much with Gambit, but have fooled around with both Chicken and Bigloo. Of the two, I found Chicken to be the friendliest (it also seems to have a somewhat more active community). Another possible advantage of Chicken is that it's directly supported by SWIG. There was some activity on the Chicken mailing list a few months back about porting some game libraries. I don't know what the current status of that might be.
Uncov is the FOX News of the tech world.
I think it's actually not a bad review of us if you filter the anger out. The only part of their post that actually stung was the bit about spellcheck, because it's not done. I wanted to have it finished for launch, but we felt it wasn't worth delaying for. But, we've rolled out two new versions so far today and we're gonna keep iterating fast.

The post also reminds me of this classic Kathy Sierra graphic: http://headrush.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/loveandhate_1.jpg
These guys are talking about how much we suck, and around the world a blogger in France said "je dois dire que je suis seduis par la legerete du systeme." My French is poor, but I'm pretty sure that's "I must say I was seduced by the system's simplicity." This beats a collective shrug any day.
igorsyl@gmail.com
You're half right. Tuned Lisp code can be as fast as C, but you have to know the compiler so intimately that you can tell what kind of machine insturctions it is generating; you'll use "disassemble" a lot ("disassemble" is a part of CommonLisp standard---you may get a sense how Lispers are performance freak). Usually the bottleneck part is tuned to the point that it won't do any allocation and run-time type dispatch at all.

There's one big advantage of using Lisp over C for performance: Macros. During optimization it is typical that you have to write several versions of code, changing bits and pieces, and run benchmarks to see what is optimal. Macros allow you to generate different versions of code from simple changes of parameters, without incurring overhead of function call/variable reference etc. (You can do similar thing in C++ templates, but Lisp macros allows much more). If you can easily parameterize your code, you can try more ideas and run more benchmarks, so it is more likely that you'll find better optimization.

AN example: Allegro CL version 7 and later has Perl-compatible regular expression library, purely written in Lisp, that runs faster than Perl (at least at the moment I wrote it, using benchmark suite came with PCRE).
This is partly why I can't understand my rejection. Google is looking for Crazy ideas.
Old news...

2005? Man you HAVE been under a rock haven't you? Hacker? Sigh...ok here's some coaching for you the next time you want to front.

1. - "Hackers" don't call themselves hackers, poseurs call themselves hackers. (and anyone reading this saying "but I'M a hacker.." guess wha? YOU r a poseur.)

2. - Web 2.0 is just another BUZZWORD. Like AJAX, LAMP and (gasp) blog. Duh, it's the web dummy, it's made of ALL KINDS OF TECHNOLOGIES.

3. - PHOTOSHOP over the web? Not for a LONG time buddy, IF EVER. Oh wait, lemme guess: "The network IS the computer" right? When will you hypemasters get the drift that not EVERY app is right for a BROWSER? Let me put this nice and easy for you, SOME APPS WILL GO TOTALLY WEB, MOST WON'T. You can't whittle every peg to fit your web-hole...you webhole.

4. - Google became BMOC BEFORE their IPO. If you were any good as a venture capitalist you would have seen that.

5. - SURPRISED to see lamers running windows? What, did you think they would be running Linux (sorry, GNU)? Not everyone wants to spend the $$ for a Mac. (Disclaimer: I do.)

C'mon man, smarten up. Oh, and yeah, IBM lost it's monopoly WAAAAY B4 2005. I think it was called OS2...maybe they should have hired a rock band...anyone have one of those Win95 discs with Weezer on it?

You were right about one thing. This is OLD NEWS. Dumbass.
Serverbeach has 2TB bandwidth and varying amounts of disk up to 500GB. They don't manage the server for you, though, after setup.
Note that they didn't write their engine IN Allegro CL---they developed a Lisp-like language which compiled into native code, and the compiler was written in CL. If you're developing for console you won't want to drag all the runtimes comes from the implementation.

I was at a session in GDC where a guy from NaughtyDog talked about how they tuned memory access on PS2 for Jak and Dexter and that was cool; since they had full control over the compiler, they could place memory access instructions to the optimal places that would interfere least to other bus activities.
Does anyone know what Stealth mode startup Fotoroll is and if it is a Y Combinator Company?
Y Combinator, the incubator with buzz
No offense intended, but if you want to start a startup, the first thing you should do is get the hell out of Alabama. In Silicon Valley, you can raise 15K by just asking for it.
I'm half asleep right now..

The word on the street is that adventure games are the next big thing in casual games. Not sudoku, or bejeweled. Casual gamers expect more these days. Adventure games are also much harder and take much more time to clone. Finally, you could sell level packs to your customers once your actual product is done, something that you can't do for games with random levels. I think between your web site and the main portals (RealArcade, BigFishGames, Oberon) and your own web site you can start your own niche. Just make sure you can partner with somebody who can create great art, quickly. However, the kind of companies PG wants for YC are ones that can have a reasonable demo after just three months of work, and also those that he knows enough about that he can actually contribute to. In other words, there are millions of things in the digital world one could make money off, but PG (like everybody else) is interested in a subset of them, and no investor who wants to be involved with a project will choose one where you'll be in the corner working on your own thing and he will only play a small role in the fun. (I wouldn't be surprised if helping startups from scratch IS like an adventure game to PG.)

And, actually, Yahoo! could actually buy you considering they are one of the top places for selling casual games. BigFishGames bought a developer in Europe after he came out with 2 or 3 hit games within 1 year, and called it BigFishGames Europe. In other words, the portals are buying developers who can actually create a quality game on a low budget, quickly and repeatedly. When they own the developer, they can put it on the front page and make a lot more profit, such as BigFishGames is doing with their Mystery series of games. But, some people have made a decent living (not millionaires, but livable).

If you want to create adventure games that use the mouse that are easy to get into and want to make about $8-$10 per sale on the portals and about $18 on your web site, go for it. Those are the kinds of games that people want which are also hard to clone, and hard to find a free flash game online to replace. You also have the advantage of creating some IP (character, names, trademarks) to use later, which is hard to do if you're just creating Bejeweled (and for which games will easily find flash games if they don't want to pay for the real versions.)

So, go for it, as long as you are focusing on creating an actual game as soon as possible, and not spending the next 10 months developing a framework for your future game, because that is pointless. Aveyond is not an adventure game but more like an RPG, but it was a good seller (supposedly) and made in Game Maker (which also supports old-school one-screen-at-a-time adventure games.) Just create some kind of an adventure game where you own the IP using Game Maker, then after you are a big success you can port it to XBOX 360 or the Mac. The key is to create a game, not a game framework.
Random Rant On Stealth-Mode Startups (no hard feelings)
Hmm.. any recommendations as far as wildcard DNS goes? I thought that was something that could be done easily if you just have control over DNS settings
Off topic, but gosh do I dislike the whole "stealth mode" classification. Now, I completely understand if some details need to stay under the rug for the time being, but the terminology makes everything seem so important, like when people "promise" that their social network will be "different" because it's got the "secret sauce."

"It's Facebook, but with the Secret Sauce!" they proclaim. Who knows, this could be similar to saying, "It's Fillet Mignon, but with the Secret Sauce!"

Did it ever occur to you that I may not want my Fillet Mignon with "Secret Sauce?"
I think the best way to pull off stealth mode is to create something that makes money right away but has a secondary goal that will be hard for somebody else to guess, that you're already developing behind the scenes. That way, you have something to show people and take credit for, while also working on new features. I think that's the best way to have a cake and eat it, too.

Of course, it's good that people don't talk about their services because of course I'm going to drop what I'm doing and start doing their idea from scratch. ;) But the most annoying thing is when one person asked me what I did and then said "Stealth mode" and walked away. I thought, why the heck are you asking people if you don't tell them what you're doing! Unless, maybe it was something very similar to what I was doing. :)
I think we created a great new game show--"Guess The Startup."

Maybe it's a java applet that twists your photos into a tube shape? And, you can put it in your MySpace profile!
I'm not actually arguing against secrecy, I just dislike the name "stealth-mode." The cheese factor in my book is on par with dolling out names like "CEO" and "CFO" in a startup before you have a product (or idea of a problem you want to solve) and money to even count. What does a CFO do when there's no revenue? Do you really need to call the guy who gets you blog coverage the "Chief Marketing Officer?" I have no idea, but I keep bumping into startups around the valley that epitomize this.

What's annoying is that too many people take themselves way too seriously.
Ah ha! Now we know it is either less than 19,999,999.99 or greater than 12,000,000.01. If Paul Graham, well known essayist, cooperates, we shall uncover the purchase price before the millennium is out. Huzzah!
Scaling: How Grid-Server's scaling might be setup
Sure.
This is a good idea. I am launching http://www.onista.com in June time-frame and would be nice to have other folks look at it and give valuable feedback.

Our team will also help out others to test their apps.
Any suggestions on having PR before launch? About to launch Onista.com in early June and want to prepare the PR before the launch.
This is the exact same article as "Y Combinator a new twist on finding hot companies," just with a different title. Weird.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=12524
Heh not looking for Karma. Just thought everyone would enjoy it.

Although my wife (mcollins027) apparently thought I wanted some Karma :S
Cool. You can read about RTML here:

http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/edit/advanced/advanced-22.html
Why should we have eight hours' sleep?
This was an accidental submission but it's a good read anyway. I know I rarely get eight hours; productivity ramps up at night for me.
This ability comes in handy occasionally (rarely) for me, but I just use Verizon's email-to-SMS service and procmail. What would get me to switch to this, though, would be if you offered a command-line of sorts that lets me control it by sending it SMS messages. For example, let me tell it to start forwarding or ignoring emails that match certain rules.
What about those Delaware incroporation sites? (Google for it). Are those scams? I don't really want to incorporate in Europe because the paperwork just drives me nuts.
Kyle Shank is launching a startup called Persai right now, it should be interesting to see where that goes...

"Persai is a startup that seeks to apply advanced machine learning techniques to content and advertising. We are using Amazon's web services to build a scalable architecture that will learn from consumer interests over time and match them with content crawled from around the web. The idea behind Persai is that you will have an active agent crawling the web looking for content that is relevant to you and only you. Every link we recommend will be something you want to read. We are zigging to social news' zag where popularity trumps relevance to the individual."
If you need better tech articles in a Reddit like display...
How is a recurrent neural network a "Lisp parse tree"?
http://scrapbook.akkartik.name/post/904713
instantdomainsearch.com's FAQ promises not to share your searching with anybody. But, pcnames.com makes no such promise. I don't trust pcnames.com
Twitter: Service vs. Platform
Paul Buchheit: Webserver written in bash - under 20 lines of code
Cat Herders == Blog Herders?
Most Un-Impressive Recruiting Pitch I've Ever Seen :(
Wow, what a contrast to:

http://senzee.blogspot.com/2007/02/red-5s-pitch.html
At the other end of the spectrum:

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/372-dear-no-first-name
Actually, the summary should be:

"Tease investors (cough, in this definition all investors) suck the life out of WEAK startups."

Startups that really have any potential will not be phased by a trivial 'setback' like this.

From my notes on pg's talk the other day:

Some founders approach investors as if they are asking for permission to start a company. That is very much the wrong approach. You need to make it clear that the train is leaving and if they want to be on it, they better get on. That being said, you have to mean it 100%, because if you don't, they'll be able to tell. A good way to mean it 100% is to have a solid backup plan. What also helps is to start cheap and avoid doing the expensive things till later so you don't need the investment, but can get real momentum going for your company.

You're startup needs to be like a cockroach - hard to kill, even after a nuclear war. Don't be a delicate beautiful flower, be a cockroach.
What bothers me is that people think their ideas are so goddamn important that they need to be stealthy. Hell, the fact that you're doing it is usually reason enough not to start (N+1 companies vs N companies)
Well from what I read, taxes regulation are about the same for any state in the us (so you could incorporate in delaware or nevade...)

As for those incorporation sites, I did see them but the problem is that they are hardly a really non biased resource on the matter... I would love to find a book telling me the different implications (tax, legal, ...) of incorporating in one country or another...
It seems like Arrington did defame Terry. As a commenter on the linked post observed, the post in question seemed like nothing more than an attempt to ruin a strategically timed business deal. It was unnecessary and irresponsible.

I don't think Arrington had a financial motive behind this, but he knew something interesting and wanted to cause trouble. Kind of like trolling.
Dismay or joy?
Or a hierarchy a Lisp parse tree? Its great to see people thinking beyond procedural languages but there is a lot more to computer science than Lisp.
For my dns servers, I like to use dnsmadeeasy.com, it's cheap and I like their fallback system
Well, I haven't read everything on their site, so I don't understand all the details and I may have misconceptions, but my understanding is this: In the physical world, to prove that you have a driver's license or a valid credit card or that you are over 13 years old, you need to show a credential that also gives away additional information about you. In their system, the government or bank can issue a cryptographic credential to the user which tells the service provider only the information they actually need to know, and does this through a zero-knowledge proof, so that the provider can't link multiple uses of the same credential to the same user.

The "incomprehensible marketing speak" line was aimed at the non-research IBM web pages I've seen, btw, not at Ars Technica :-) ("Delivers a rich, relevant customer and partner experience by extending a common set of business services across every point of interaction" and such.)
At least they do "crisis communication" http://schwartz-pr.com/services_l2.php?id=63
Startup Financing:  Q&A from a recent MIT panel
Microsoft made a mistake!!! They better buy Yahoo NOW!
I think its .9 cents per impression ... and about 5 cents per click.
Spotplex - a better Digg?
Facebook's active users. Very Impressive data
I find it hard to believe that more then 40% of internet users (39% ie, 51% firefox) make more then $75k a year - that is considered a _very_ high salary outside of the US (and even in the US it isn't small change).
I would even find it hard to believe that 40% of all programmers in the world (a much more affluent demographic then all Internet users in the world) make that much.
stealth mode is synomymous with "we haven't quite figured out what we are doing yet". I've been there and seen others too - thats what it means!
What VC's or YC say is not the ultimate ...if you have a great idea, it will succeed if you execute it right! If you are that into YC, you should apply again... Obviously, these guys cannot accept everyone, so they had to find some reason here and there to eliminate people ...
So do I :)
LOL ... so I am based in Seattle ... does it make sense for me to move to the bay area ?
the eyeball...
Palm Announces New Linux Based Mobile Platform
Besides, the code is in C++, not lisp (unfortunately).
Present company excluded, I presume! ;
Vote: -1. It would just clutter the normal display. I'm not interested in your web site unless I'm interested in you based on your comments in which case I'm more than happy to click on your username to find out more about you. Next it'll be avatars. ;-)