skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Usually institutionalized investors have agreements in the term sheet specifying under what conditions the founder can sell. Someone else will have to tell you what those terms are exactly, though.
F# does look cool, and .net integration is definitely a killer feature. I haven't tried it yet, but I plan to once I am a bit better at OCaml.
A Startup Hits Reality TV (New startup based show to debut)
The up-and-coming MOJO Network - which is available on a number of cable TV systems - today announced plans for a new high-definition show called "Startup Junkies." Scheduled to premiere in January, the eight-episode series will focus around entrepreneur Ron Wiener, who founded a company called Earth Class Mail.
Not yet.

If you define user as someone that life-casts, then yes, it takes more.
Just don't forget the users who could care less about the community and just want a place to put save bookmarks. Google Bookmarks is good for this, but I like to categorize my bookmarks in bulk and Google does not work well for this.
The last thing we need is ytmnd getting bigger.
So I'm the guy behind Hit Forge.

It's changed - that PR is obsolete (Thanks PG, for helping with the strategy shift).

We're a straight early stage seed-investment fund. We invest in social-media early-stage web startups, putting in between $100-$500k. We maintain specialist resources to help with SEO and Viral Marketing. We provide free office space to our companies, if they want them. We have a one-page no-hassle termsheet, where we buy something that looks a lot like common stock. We don't try to control the company. We help with future fundraising (see my blog at http://www.venturehacks.com). And we decide very quickly.

PG pointed this out to me as a gap in the market for early stage web companies, and he is absolutely right.

See you all at Y-Combinator D-Day.
On a per-user basis it certainly could be. I don't think we have numbers on average stream duration for Justin or the number of videos the average YouTuber watches though.

Most of the YC companies don't do anything bandwidth-intensive so it's a pretty meaningless thing to compare.
how do you reset your pass on YC.News?
I couldnt find this information anywhere!
What agreements have been made with the employer? Hire an intellectual property lawyer to read and discuss the implications of any written contracts and agreements made with the employer.
"Most of the YC companies don't do anything bandwidth-intensive so it's a pretty meaningless thing to compare."

That was my initial point. You don't really need to worry about scaling like YouTube. Scaling like Flickr and Facebook makes a bit more sense.
That's not even the right number of digits, incidentally.
Co-worker friends might be as popular as school friends. Bbig tech organization spawn new companies when some of the employees break off to do their own thing.
Their offer probably won't be based on your estimates of revenues and expenses. For most startups those are mere guesses, and usually very hopeful ones. For a typical early stage startup, their offer will be based on things like whether you seem smart and driven, and whether the project seems like it could be really big.
"Old age and treachery will overcome youth and skill."

-- someone, no doubt old and treacherous
At the moment you can't. It has been requested (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363) a few times though.
A million users for Facebook Sticky Notes app (TechStars company)
Why the Facebook Outage Matters
wow, that's the best thing i've ever read on his blog. and it wasn't written by him.
Wait! Wait! Everybody stop innovating, innovation brings change and change might be BAD! The sky is falling, aaaahhhh....

Give me a break, or at least some evidence of a second IPO craze and examples of growth before profit companies you think are doomed. This is mostly sensationalism, little fact.
its not about legalities.
I don't understand this MySQL FUD. Google has done some amazing things with it. Google core, YouTube for example. I wish you would explain MySQL over PostgresSQL with mention of MySQL version,etc.
Actual trolls we'd ban. Merely dumb posts slide harmlessly into oblivion because they don't get any upvotes.

We'll never get the onslaught of 14 year olds they got at digg and reddit because most of them aren't interested in startups. You don't get idiots in your comment threads till you have this on your frontpage

http://power-robot.blogspot.com/2007/08/when-in-rome.html

so as long as we kill offtopic submissions, we should be safe.
Though this was over 20 years ago, it's an example of a founder who was an expert in business. Now what I wonder is how the two found each other. Was Cook the one generating the ideas and product vision? Then along the way he found Proulx?
Sure enough. It was the same guy. I'm not going to out him, because he has contributed significantly to the site, and I think this was just a lapse of judgement but please do not do this anymore.
email pg and ask nicely?
Waleed asked something similar recently.

See this thread for some ideas : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31244

I think he posted a summary of sorts here http://selfdebugging.com/

Perhaps you should ping him and see if you can join up ;-)
Wow, I have younger cousins who spend every moment they get on Club Penguin. Not thinking much of the site and the games they provide at the time, I thought it was just another virtual kid's playground like Nick Jr. This does indicate a an interesting user population though. How young can we start embedding a brand into the minds of children (www.askforkids.com) ?
Believe it or not, most billionaires are experts in business. Most startup billionaires don't found companies like Microsoft, they found companies like U-Haul and Grey Goose.

(Although I think there are a disproportionate number of CEOs with engineering backgrounds.)
I feel blog discovery needs improvements, any ideas?
I think the main difference between us then, is that I don't have a great interest in reading lots and lots of books. I generally don't have the patience to finish a book once, unless it's a book that I'd read several times. I wind up reading far fewer books than yourself.

So for me, the comments I made apply to novels as well as reference material. Second reads give me another chance to observe things like structure, or enjoy knowing what's going to happen.

Actually though, the biggest factor for me was recognition of my own mortality. When I was a kid, I'd keep books and reread them 5 times. When I was a teenager, I'd reread them twice, and keep them expecting to read them more. Now, I realize there's a limit to how much reading I'll be able to fit into the rest of my life.
Are you an early-stage, pre-VC startup? If so then the only people crazy enough to join you are the people who trust you. Friends might end up working with you and friends will vouch for you.
For me, a guaranteed paycheck is definitely a distraction. We've been formed our whole lives to believe that going to school and getting a job was the path to go. Slowly, I'm beginning to realize how to break free from that. If I go for a period of time without a steady income, so what?
Current blog discovery mechanisms like technorati and google search are not much helpful in that. Consuming blog feeds has more to do with personalization. Keyword based search is a bit callow for this. ideas use case should be when u r reading a blog entry, your reader should throw recommendations for it. I am planning to build this infrastructure. Any suggestions/critics for this?
well it is certainly illegal ... ethics are fudged... using the source code or work derived from the code is certainly unethical (i think) because your code was paid by the employer..

but the actual idea? well where would you guys classify this? i think the actual idea unless protected by a patent is open.. also a lot of companies put a no-compete clause forbidding working for another company in the same domain ... (even though in some countries thats against the law)
regardign the "idea being protected by a patent", i meant if worded carefully with the necessary legal mumbo jumbo... (eg in australia, software patents are usually titled - a way using a COMPUTER to do steps explained in algorithm X)
Jane St. is also doing the OCaml Summer Project: http://osp2007.janestcapital.com/
Mm.. There's some truly hilarious stuff on there. You just have to look for it, which takes some patience. For example, http://shockingcats.ytmnd.com/ ... C'mon, you'd have to be dead to not be slightly amused. :)

Some just make you think. http://atinyglimpse.ytmnd.com/ and http://thefutureofourworld.ytmnd.com/ are two examples. They may not be 100% accurate, but they do make you stop and think about things.

Others present issues in an unbiased way, letting you be the judge. http://timbalandtempest.ytmnd.com/ is one.

Like it or not, the guys composing YTMND's community are our youth. Their opinion matters, and they create things they care about.
I work with .NET by day and after spending quite a bit of time learning Lisp, I can tell you that even with a killer feature like that, it's not even close.
So how do I write an intellegent freelancing contract so I can keep a roof over my head?
I have been wary of businessmen since I read Catch-22 in middle school, but it is a bit difficult to avoid them and eat for any extended period of time.

I want to know what to look for in a freelance contract for programming work and what to include if I have the opportunity to write one myself. I imagine many of you have been in my situation; I appreciate your help.

In the absence of experience, idle speculation will do.

(edit: Let me recommend middle schoolers avoid Catch-22)
I am a founder and may never find founders...
Have you ever made it rain?

Perhaps you could start small with a fat stack of change.
I've worked on over 20 software contracts and never once did the contract contain a clause that forced me to assign copyright agreement to the person paying for the software. Note that this only applies to contractors, not exempt employees.

http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/daniels_softwar...
Doubly damning is that the post is a fake, at least in the context everyone thinks it's in. It's a screenshot from a porn movie, not a random picture.

(Thinking out loud, just skip the rest of this.)

Posts like that do attract fourteen year olds, and once you do you can never, ever get rid of them. It's self-reinforcing.. Fourteen year olds attract other fourteen year olds, who create submissions like the one above, which attracts more fourteen year olds. One way to fight it is to implement a harsh banning system, the way Facepunch Studios did. Check out their ban list: http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/showbans.php ... I count 93 bans today alone. Most for a week or longer, complete with reasons and viewable to the public.

And yet, a brute-force approach like that only sorta works. What's needed are strong community values combined with a strong punishment system. But not so much as to stifle conversation innovation - just enough to filter the noise.

Karma works, but some people need to be made more equal than others in that case; someone that's been with a community from the beginning is a hundred times as valuable than a newcomer (not an exaggeration), because they help enforce community values. It follows that they should get a karma vote weight proportional to their contributions. This means karma points with a decimal value instead of an integer.

To decide how much vote weight someone gets, you could use a simple factor like 10% of total karma. But much more interesting would be: If you upvote foo's comment, you boost foo's vote weight by 5% of your vote weight. If you downvote their comment in the future, that 5% becomes negative to their vote weight. What that does is ensure that at any given instant, foo only has as much power as he should have. Time with the community only gives foo a small power bonus, since his power is mostly determined by current public perception. And it forces people to really back up what they say. If they say something horrible, they may be rendered powerless tomorrow.

If everyone's karma starts at zero, and everyone's contributing 5% of it, then how does anyone gain karma? Ahh, well.. That's where being with the community from the beginning plays a part. For each day you make a comment that is upvoted, you get one karma point which can never be taken away.

If you're a part of something small, you feel like you're a part of something special. So one way to fight noise is to stay small, or divide your community into sub-communities (almost imopssible).

But I think most important is a goal, the kind Startup News has (you better be submitting stuff related to startups). With a community goal, it's at least an order of magnitude easier to filter out the noise.
The sharding approach seems to be gaining popularity. It seems like a good datapoint in favor of the anti-database crowd. Why even bother using an RDBMS when you end up having to take this approach in the end, anyway?
It's not FUD. Most of us just like to use a database whose developers didn't have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age. Remember when MySQL claimed foreign keys and relational integrity were useless?

Sure, they now support referential integrity and transactions in InnoDB, but MyISAM is still the default, because it's faster. I have no idea why you're claiming that 'Google core' (whatever that's supposed to mean) uses MySQL; the only homegrown Google project known to use MySQL is AdWords.

Anyhow, jamongkad wanted an alternative to MySQL, so I gave him one.
Max Goldberg, the creator of YTMND, has this to say:

"I'm straying off topic, but the point is, the users are what make YTMND. Crappy users make the site crappy, and rather than trying to delete crappy content, it would be far easier to just keep users who create crappy content off YTMND. The hard part is figuring out who to let in and who will add value to the community and the site as a whole. "
Where exactly am I wrong? Point the sentence. Of course you have to assign them IP! That's what they're paying you for! Ever contracted for the government?! Look at their 20 page assignment agreement.

http://www.developerdotstar.com/mag/articles/daniels_softwar...
What is the point of the bookmark/digg/reddit-icons?
I don't know if that's the right attitude, although it 'sounds good'. I've seen a lot of people do pretty well with less than perfect stuff. Perhaps it's better to get out there and try, and fail, rather than aim for perfection and never even really try.
Wouldn't users of those services have the respective plugins installed anyway?

One thing that just came to mind: preparing title, description and tags for bookmarking, but that could be taken from the HTML meta tags as well?

How many users click on those icons?
This is copied wholesale from http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture. It even cites it at the end.

Note to the author: Citing the source doesn't make copying the entire article okay.
There are good days and there are bad days. And with each day, there are good moments and there are bad moments.

Today has been a bad day, with very few good moments. I just sat down with a beta tester and watched him go through the joining process. Part of the problem is that joining is, in fact, a "process". Watching him use the site also revealed a plethora of glitches that are going to keep me up all night and well into tomorrow.

Days like today force me to think about each and every mistake I've made so far, where I went wrong in each instance, and how easily each mistake could have been avoided had I done X - whatever X may be.

Ugh.
I can never really agree to such a clause, though. In the most extreme case it would mean I could never take on another contract, because I already used up all my programming tricks in the first one. For example I might have employed the MVC pattern, will I be able to ever use it again?
Ah, I didn't even notice that the original article was on news.yc as well. How did this one get up to three points?
Yay, progress! :)
The product does not have to be perfect, for this would assure a missed market. The creator should, however, have a great deal of pride in the products or services produced. This will lead to more conviction when it comes time to raise money and get costumers, which will further the chances of success.
hi, thanks for the reply - sorry, i interpreted your joking bits to mean that you had been around for a lot longer.
Diseconomies of scale: Startup advantage over big companies
Reasons why large companies are slow moving targets
You are right in the case of a full time employee. You are wrong in the general case of contract software engineering. Most software development contracts DO NOT have a 20 page assignment agreement that assigns copyright to the person/company paying for the work. It sounds counterintuitive and false, but that really is the case. You, the contractor, own the IP unless you sign your rights away. And even if you do, it probably won't hold up in court.

In regards to the government, I admit I don't know, I've never contracted for the government.

Also, I find it strange that the link you provided argues directly against your position.
You could implement the recommendation backend so that it can be accessed from feed readers, server-side frameworks, client-side widgets, and browser extensions. This way you can also gather data from all these sources to base the recommendations on. Perhaps there's a revenue-sharing scheme to motivate third parties.

I guess finding similar blogs would take more long-term data whereas finding similar posts should react very quickly. I'm specifically thinking of the case where two blog posts are both linked to by a third post: those two could then be considered similar. Comparing the frequency of some key words mentioned in the posts would be another way to get started, as would be looking at the audiences.

Whatever the method, it should provide results that users find meaningful in meeting the need they have.
Your question is too broad and vague, but I think you want to read this:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1413300871/sr=8-1/qid=11543...
Enterprise software? That surprises me based on my limited experiences, but all the better for you I imagine you own a sizable amount of useful code by now.

Great article btw, thanks.
if the code is a crystallisation of their business idea then using it again is equivalent to re-using their business idea and i think that is highly un-ethical. if you are talking about reusing some CSS templates and changing the colors - meh.
personally, i err on the side of caution and never take work with me from one company to another - often i can condense 6 months of learn-by-doing into a couple of weeks of do-over since it is the overall direction and knowing what is definitely wrong that saves time.
/note: i'm a scientist not a programmer but i think the same situations apply
As mentioned in the presentation, using any LFSP provides a huge advantage when hiring: most of the people who aren't smart enough have already been weeded out.
Coders at Work
Is Jessica Livingston going to write a second book?
no problem. I've never worked on enterprise software. mostly weird, short term stuff for startups, researchers and artistes. the code was sometimes fun, but sadly, almost never useful outside of the specific contract.
Peter Seibel: How to write a book
Peter's sites are paced with info check them out.

Coders at Work Question List
http://www.codersatwork.com/questions.html

List of Interviewees - Name Sorter
http://www.codersatwork.com/shuffle.fhtml

Peter's Blog
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/blog/
Peter's sites are paced with info check them out.

Coders at Work Question List http://www.codersatwork.com/questions.html

List of Interviewees - Name Sorter http://www.codersatwork.com/shuffle.fhtml

Peter's Blog http://www.gigamonkeys.com/blog/
Maybe that's an argument for offloading that kind of work to a marketing guy who is somewhat in awe of the technology, rather than engineers, who are more likely to be thinking about ways it could be improved, rather than sitting around being proud of it;-)
Is Jessica Livingston going to write a second book?
Head, shoulder, foot!
Jeff Bazos would give an old Nike shoe as "Just do it" award to those who innovated.

Uh...huh. And to the loser, a stinky dead half-eaten seal, as a "swim faster when you see a Walrus" award.

Get big fast.

Another tip: Make big revenue. Another: Put money in bank. Another: Left shoe on left foot; right shoe on right.

Hire a Bob.

"Sorry, Sal, we were looking for a 'Bob'. Orders from the top. But tell me, what do you think of marine life?"
CoReap is one service that I've started using more frequently off-late. It combines social search and social bookmarking with a no-frills browser sidebar for bookmarks management and a browser extension for social search integration. See: http://www.coreap.com
Pay-as-you-go Web Hosting
A new breed of web hosting services (plans start at 25 cents / month) emerge, where you only pay for resources that you use, and their load-adaptive clustered technology is ideal for handling demand surges.
Google Mashup Editor vs Yahoo Pipes
The article explores the differences between Google Mashup Editor and Yahoo Pipes, two data mashup services. And the winner is ...
Create RSS from ANY web page
Feedity is an RSS generator for web pages without a web syndication format. A true web service (Web 3.0 / SaaS)
I will watch that with interest. I have played with Netflix dataset, although not as much as I'd like. You can do a lot of useful things just with it, but in real world it is very useful to use different definition of the problem from the Netflix one. "Similar items" are useful because customers can understand what it means, besides having some abstract "we think you would rate this X".

Also it makes a lot of sense to integrate the other data you have about your items (genre, director). It is actually pretty easy to do.
always wondered how that was working out for the owners.
correlation/causation?

It seems to me that the answer is always "find someone from your school or else you're doomed." I give up on that.
Thanks for the alternative. I was looking at Postgres a few months back, didn't quite understand the documentation at first(although I didn't devote much time to understanding it back then) but it's worth a 2nd try.
"Or PlentyOfFish - 1 machine for billions of pageviews. Social sites with lots of user-created content need to shard much earlier"

Is that really true? I find it hard to imagine...but something deep down inside of me says "Yes it's possible". Oh my...
Youtube probably uses more than all but the top 0.0001% of sites combined (or some very very small percentage).

"All by itself, YouTube comprises 20 percent of all HTTP traffic, or nearly 10 percent of all traffic on the Net. Let's repeat that: one site takes up 10 percent of the bandwidth on the entire Net."

[http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2007/06/19/youtube-compris...]
Bookmark: if I find a post that's interesting and I think I might use it later then I'll bookmark it.
digg/reddit: If you find a post thats interesting then you can "digg it" so that others can view it and either agree (digg) or disagree(bury) with you.
Boingo Offers Free Wi-Fi to iPhone Owners: Here is How Everyone Can Get It Free
"How I built my family a windmill"
InterNetwork - Soclal network portability
Eminem, Customer Sue Apple
Is it just me or FitzBlog's website design is all over the place. I'm using FF btw.
"... Is Jessica Livingston going to write a second book? ..."

In a podcast interview (microISV show #16, 45min) JL mentioned a second book was in the planning. You can listen to the Interview here ~ http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=296058
According to [some dumbass]..."The reality is that Facebook ... has moved up the food chain and is no longer competing with anyone who is a social network."

Note to wired: Just because you're quoting someone doesn't mean you can print blatant falsehoods as truth.