skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh, and how much you'll pay is highly variable. It depends on the job market where you are, and how saturated it is with competent web designers. A ballpark of $5K-$10K is not ridiculous, though, depending on the amount of work.

And what if it fails to impress potential users? Then your web designer wasn't very competent, because that's exactly the sort of thing he's supposed to understand about your audience. A good web designer will bounce ideas off of focus groups and do usability testing, and then when the site goes live will conduct A/B tests.

Finally, the best way to make sure that the site doesn't impress potential users is to micromanage the web designer. You need to ask him or her about the web analytics numbers, but if you insist on wordsmithing on every page and monkeying about with fonts and layout yourself, you might as well just do the site yourself. (This is something I've seen repeatedly: the web site winds up being designed for and by senior management against the advice of the web designer, the potential users stay away in droves, and the web designer is blamed.)
I had a 12" PB for a couple years then sold it to a friend who still uses it daily and it a very mobile environment. Myself, I work fulltime and go to school fulltime and I'm never at home and the only laptop for me was a 15" Macbook Pro.
Startups are screwed? A MS/Yahoo combination is a play by MS to get immediate marketshare in search and other major online services so that it can allow it's MSN monetization engine to compete.

Startups shouldn't be looking to compete with the core businesses of Google and MS/Yahoo. They should (I think):

1. Invent a new service
2. Improve a service that sucks

I doubt PG funded anyone who claims they can build a better search engine.

There are some thing big companies can do and other things they can't (i.e. Justin.TV).
Extensive Interview with Bill Gates (billg knows Lisp!)
Big companies may be slow, but some of them have significant startup-smooshing power. Presumably, the fear is that the MS-Yahoo conglomerate would attempt to smoosh startups by, say, making everything Yahoo work only with things MS, and generally promoting lock-in and anti-open anti-internet-stuff. It might not work, but when such large objects are in play it seems reasonable to worry.
Innovation is force-fed; someone get the lube!
You see, in a similar interview I'd probably mention quantum mechanics but the truth is that [censored] years after I learned it I know nothing about quantum mechanics.
We have some founders, some ideas, and some demo products...hopefully we'll start pitching in the next few weeks. Do we need a lawyer now? Or can we wait until we get a term sheet and go from there?
William Webb on the future of mobile wireless
I'm sure he's an absolute gent. But his webpage is nearly unreadable in my browser. Fonts step all over each other (I'm guessing he's forced line height to be smaller than the font).

First requirement for web designers I hire: I need to be able to read the damned page.
Hehehe...It appears one must be a designer to join. Then why would we need a designer?
Mixed online-offline etail models
The Age/Entrepreneurship Myth
Redirect blog.companyurl.com to companyurl.com/blog. Seems like the most complete solution and, it happens to be what Google does for many of its subdomains.
If MS buys Yahoo, the internet loses a lot of useful applications (as obviously the Yahoo stuff won't be usable anymore in the long run). Hence more opportunities for startups, I would think?
Even if it's true, does this really matter? I might be wrong, but to me it seems that both companies are sliding into irrelevancy anyway.
The redundancy of having five servers isn't helping if I'm always served by server #3, whereas an alternate method where any one of the five can answer my current request allows a machine to fail, or be taken down for upgrading, and the load on the other four just increases by 25% each.
Ah, but quantum mechanics is worth learning for a different reason -- the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That experience will make you a better thinker for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use quantum mechanics itself a lot.
You may benefit from not using "I" in the title of your posts.

For a good read, try "How to Win Friends and Influence People" as Paul Graham has suggested. Make sure you get a 1930's copy though.
Microsoft almost ran out of money back in their Micro-Soft days as language designers for iffy computer kit companies. Gates has been conservative about cash ever since, which is why they avoided paying a dividend for about a decade after they went blue chip.
The Post's business section is surprisingly respectable. The traders I know prefer it to the Times.
in the case of MURDER
It's just a matter of time before all phones have real browsers and plugins, they already have the bandwidth. That's when it will become interesting to me. I'm lazy.
Mac Mini, 1.67Ghz dual core. It's their lowest end model right now, but with 2G of RAM, performance is quite good.
Maybe it just sounds nice.

If you go to his website and look for Art of the Start presentations, you will see this as a major point.
to clarify:

A Turing machine can simulate a deterministic finite automaton and a non-deterministic finite automaton.

All systems are arguably either of these two. Perhaps that's why we can simulate weather, and lots of other things.

Unless you look at human consciousness - Nobelist Roger Penrose has a theory that the mind is not a computer. That it has quantum states. (his book: The Emperor's New Mind - I didnt finish it - long and hard).
Do you use CVS with your web project? How exactly?
Sam, why did you not post this to YC news yourself?
These are the options that come to my mind:

(1) Your htdocs directory is a CVS directory and you sync your site (cvs up) right there, under htdocs. Development/testing can be done elsewhere.

(2) CVS+FTP: you upload your files to htdocs manually; your local copy of the site is in sync with CVS. How about concurrent development? There should be only one "uploader" operator then.

(3) You don't have a local copy, everything is on the server (is this possible? where is the testing site?).
Paul Buchheit: Beliefs, intelligence, and failure
Not sure what is best for SEO and such. Doing the redirect mentioned by ed sounds like a good solution. We currently run blog.company.com but I might set up the redirect as that sounds like a good idea.
Facebook is quickly becoming popular in Norway without local translations. Other services like Youtube and Flickr is also very popular. We have local alternatives too of course.

What I would like is if US companies would hire a Norwegian lawyer to write the Terms of Service. It's pointless to agree to some terms that have no base in Norwegian law.

You could also try to support a more free form registration form. Not all countries use the same types of zip-code and phone number...

And support UTF-8 (or at least ISO-8859-1). Most European languages use characters not found in the English alphabet (Norway has an additional three characters: Æ, Ø and Å, let's see if this form supports them. Should be displayed as Æ, Ø and Å)
I use subversion. Way easier than CVS. It was created by the guys that created CVS, but they realized the limitations of CVS, so they build something better and easier to use.
Use subversion.
UK Mobile startup Flirtomatic gets 44 million page views/month, average 8.5 mobile logins per user per day
Not familiar with Subversion yet, but ok, how about the 3 schemes I mentioned here?
Does Subversion solve the problem I'm talking about? (see my other comment nearby)
I have the 20in. iMac, maxed out on RAM and HD. It's absolutely killer - the best machine I've ever owned. Next purchase will be a MacBook Pro.
re: submission title, Are you validating Lisp or are you validating Bill Gates?

I'd be surprised if he didn't know Lisp. It's not exactly an obscure language nor is he nontechnical.
OK, this is a good example. The site does not support Æ, Ø or Å :-) It was only displayed correctly when I entered their HTML entities.

If this page were meant for Europe, it would fail. When you are building a social site it is important that people can use their own language.
What do you mean your host only allows the blog as a subdomain?
Great topic. Does anyone have any recommendations for affordable but competent (heh) lawyers in the Bay Area?

Also, since forming a C Corp is considered to be the Right Thing to Do, what about accounting? Can you just get QuickBooks and be ok, or do you really need a CPA?
Isn't the same true for LISP?
Just keep a repository as your production directory and update that to the preferred tag (say, your latest stable release). You can work off a branch of the trunk for development and testing.
Has anyone got a dopplr invite please?
I just checked out the iilwy mobile interface and its slick. It's perfectly designed for "I'm bored now" momments.

I'm interested in bth 'pure' mobile startups and those who have mobile as just a feature in a bigger service (dopplr for example).
Raising money for your startup
Ignition Partners:  10 steps to launching an early stage company
The big winner in this deal would of course be Google. MS/Yahoo will spend years on integrating and infighting.
I've been running Ubuntu on a Dell Inspiron for over a year with no trouble. Given recent events, I would say Dell is a pretty safe choice for Linux users. Definitely go for the nVidia graphics though.
http://www.seomoz.org/blog/subdomains-subfolders-and-toplevel-domains
(these guys are the best and most-open SEO resource I am aware of- their ranking factors article is simply awesome)

I'd do a bit of reading on this and see if you can find some consensus. I don't think you'll find a ton of SEO experts here (though I might be wrong). Lots of opinions to be had at http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+subdomains&btnG=Search

For the record, I think the /blog option is the way to go (and I've had SEO somewhere in my job description for about a decade).
They have a one click installer that blows up if the url is not in the format: blog.myurl.com. I put in a support request and told them that I want myurl.com/blog and they said its not supported (by the one click installer I guess)
11:30 AM- Amazon.com and S3 are down!
I wasn't validating either. Gates is a smart man, so I'm sure he appreciates the power of Lisp. It's interesting that he knows a great language and and built a company that used a weaker language to create an even weaker result. It's like finding out that in his spare time, John Grisham pores over Bleak House.
Umm...it's working just fine for me.

Update: Still working fine 2:48 eastern. My s3 files and amazon.com.
It's 11:33 PDT. Amazon is up. Can't speak for S3.
The ThinkPad T Series are my favorite, next is the X Series. The only issues I have had running linux on then is getting fingerprint reader going... I honestly didn't even bother trying.

I have a friend who used to work on the ThinkPad line and she used to go on and on about how their line went above any other she had ever seen - In terms of cleanliness and concerns for static, loose items, hair etc.

When ever I am setting up a new client I invariably suggest ThinkPads, unless, of course, I know they are willing to give Macs a shot.
There are some sleazy false "experts" in SEO, but that doesn't mean that all of it is bunk.
Drudge Report is down (11:30 AM)
well, 'ping amazon.com' is not returning from two different locations for me. 'ping google.com' on the other hand is just as reliable as always. smugmug.com is also down, for me, which i seem to recall heavily uses the amazon services. maybe its some local routing issues.
All the recommendations Amazon is showing me are from things I was looking at years ago.
Agreed, and yes, it's probably true for Lisp too.

The problem is that there's nothing in Microsoft's technologies and APIs that would be in any way related to Lisp, or Lisp thinking if you wish. So what's so lispy about Bill Gates? :)
I wanted to spend some more time on the numbers before passing it around.

Also, I think users here consider posting your own blog to be bad form; and I don't really need the points :)
Great insight
http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/fsharp.aspx is close.
I picked it up by chance on Tecnorati. I was not sure about posting your own stuff.
12:00 Pacific - all up
I recall PG saying somewhere that they took a loss on either Kiko or Reddit. Probably Kiko.

Also, funding numbers used to be different. The earlier startups got $6k times N, rather than $5k + $5k times N.
I don't know if I buy "posting your own blog is bad form". You still only get one vote.
GI, GO
Bye Yahoo Photos - Hello Flickr (and SmuggLr)!
Yeah, I remember that too. Something like Kiko took ~100k in angel money and the angels got preferred stock so YC ended up with about $0.38 on the dollar.
dupe - delete
Well, it's not like Google was keeping it, either. Deja should get most of the props here, I think.
dvorak.org/blog has a nice ring to it
I think Yahoo rewrote Viaweb in C++. The only thing that's still remotely Lispy about it is that they kept RTML.
Everyone should read Mindset by Carol Dweck http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Psychology-Success-Carol-Dweck/dp/1400062756

I think that it is a very important book. It is like a self-help book -- without the fluff and with science behind it. It talks about "growth-oriented mindset" (who focus on learning) versus "fixed mindset" (who think that intelligence is a fixed thing). And most people have both mindsets in different areas. And main point is you can change your mindset and what a difference that makes: you aren't afraid of looking bad (for a fixed mindset person, looking bad will amount to "i'm stupid", "i don't have it"). But for a growth minded person, looking bad simply means that they haven't put in the necessary time/effort to get better.

This is why you should never praise a child's intelligence. Eventually the child will think that "I was born with this talent" and will stop putting in the effort, and will become stuck -- that is, they were prodigies while growing up. But now, as an adult, they haven't progressed any further.

A really great book!!
Is the YC News Karma formula this simple?
i'm also in the market - any idea if apple is planning to do a 15" MacBook? Thats what I'm have been holding out for.
KPn = Karma for nth submission

KCm = Karma for mth comment

Karma = [SUM(KP1,KP2,..KPn) - n] + ROUND[0.5x(SUM(KC1,KC2...KCm) - m)]
We use a build machine. ;)

Really, it's the best way to deal with releases. People develop in their own branches of the code, and them when features are ready, we merge back into the Trunk.

We have a machine (actually a VM) check the code for revisions, and when there is a checkin, it downloads it from svn (cvs should be similar), and then builds, and uploads.

You could do jUnit tests, etc at the same point, to ensure that everything is in sync.

It's not exactly identical, but take a look at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000023.html

Joel points out some good reasons why build machines can really help.

-Colin
Does Anyone Have a Spare EC2 Account?
Hello,

I'm a game developer, and I've been designing some test code around the EC2 platform. I've been waiting patiently for months, but I've been unable to get an EC2 account. If anyone has a spare, I'd really appreciate it - I can be contacted at palish@gmail.com. I'd be happy to give whatever you'd like in exchange for one.

Thanks a lot friends, I really appreciate it.
Shawn
He's fond of women.
another article that supports this idea:

http://nymag.com/news/features/27840/

"...a growing body of research - and a new study from the trenches of the New York public-school system - strongly suggests it might be the other way around. Giving kids the label of "smart" does not prevent them from underperforming. It might actually be causing it."
I went from a 12" ibook g4 to a 15" macbook pro. (The student price knocked off a couple hundred dollars)

I really liked the 12", but the 15" widescreen real estate is very handy. I'll never get another PC for personal use.
There are 10 MBAs from Stanford alone [out of a graduating class of ~300] going to work at Google.

Google definitely wants to hire MBAs.
There are several people here who I would gladly mark most of their posts as spam because they submit each and every thing they write on their blogs.

How about an adsense like blog spam sidebar where the crappy submissions have to sit in shame?
150,000 US layoffs for IBM in 07?
That's currently where I work, thankfully I'm already on my way out.
New Y Combinator startup: overhear.us
I tend to agree, but my point is: Spam is spam and good posts are good posts, your own or otherwise. We shouldn't define "good form" based on how we want the morons to behave.
xx xxx xxxxxx xxx xxx xxxxxx?

so the arrows are for rating?

I guessed it, haha!
Look out when the bosses pretend to be coworkers.
10% as verbose as Perl, 3X faster: K is the best language you've never heard of
Source for the speed/verbosity benchmarks: http://www.kx.com/a/k/examples/bell.k
I remember CuriousOffice. They were actually the first people to plagiarize our site, not Techstars, way back in 2005.

You can still see remnants of it: "We're doing this because we want to help developers make that hardest step - getting started." vs YC's "We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea to company."
+1 all the Subversion comments - I would never use CVS for new development nowadays.

Anyways, your question is really about directory layouts, so here's what I do:

I have everything in SVN, under a relatively standard webapp directory structure (eg. /src for dynamic code, /static for static content, /i18n for localization files). My webroot is set to /home/www, with one directory per virtual host. Inside these directories are symlinks only. So I have /home/www/www.bootstrapacitor.com/static/images symlinked to /home/bootstrapacitor/svn/static/images, etc. For uploaded data, I have directories in /var/, so /home/www/www.bootstrapacitor.com/static/logos is symlinked to /var/bootstrapacitor/logos.

When I bring new code over, I just do a subversion checkout, and everything is automatically in its proper place. Eventually I'm planning to write a webscript that'll auto-deploy to staging and production, ensure that any necessary symlinks are in place, and check for database compatibility, but I haven't gotten around to that yet. I guess in the real long term I'll be ditching all webserver filestorage for a distributed filesystem like Mogile or Akamai, but that's way off in the future.
A boss is a coworker. It's all anonymous, anyhow.
The Dell 24" monitors have quality control issues that the Apple displays don't seem to have. They're enough less expensive though that it may be worth it to you to risk the occasional banding or backlight failures.

Or you may just want/need analog inputs that the Apple display can't give you.
That's pretty Lispy, because RTML is stored on disk as s-expressions. So rewriting Viaweb in C++ literally meant writing a Lisp interpreter.
You're right. I do occasionally visit the site, but I normally don't, because it's all in my reader.

Even so, you get these benefits:

> An expanded audience.

As a blogger, I think this is your most important asset. Vastly more important than any money you might get from it. An audience is actual power, and besides: It's not who you know--it's who knows you.

> Word of mouth, because of the first point.

Even if this portion of your audience isn't looking at your ads, if they like what you have to say, some of them are bound to tell other people. These are extra referrals you would not have had otherwise.

This is important because growth by word of mouth is naturally compounded. Over a few years, I bet the difference really builds up.

Now, I don't have any numbers to back this up, but my gut says this stuff will end up earning you more AdSense dollars in the long run than trying to maneuver your audience into captivity.
That's the point. I think.
It's actually a lot of fun to use. I'd like to see a web chat client that works the same way.
Except for some reason 90% of the time when I wake up the laptop when it's connected to the big monitor, it either doesn't recognize the wireless mouse and I have to rediscover it with bluetooth setup, or it doesn't draw the cursor. Only rebooting seems to fix the latter.

Anyone know how to solve either of these problems?
Well there are a couple solutions. One, you could tabulate votes based on the karma of the users. So someone with higher Karma gets bigger weight. That will probably focus the discussionsa and submissions a lot.

Two, you could have interesting comments, based on people voting them up or down, and their replies.

Also you could do some kind of geomtric progression instead of linear, or combine that with the voter's own karma.
I heard that in addition to the archives they bought from Deja News, there was also a guy within Google who did a lot of work to reconstruct posts from old tapes accumulated by individual people.
I like yousendit.com for transferring files from one place to another.
I'd heard of K. Unfortunately, "APL derivative" disqualifies it for me: I don't like programming in line noise.

(For that matter, I try to avoid Perl too.)
13" MacBook
That's what I figured it was, except I always thought of it in these terms:

You get one point every time someone votes up your submission. You get half a point every time someone votes up your comment. You lose half a point every time someone votes down your comment.
Good memory. Here's the actual quote: http://news.ycombinator.com/comments?id=5036
Really? I got 2 classes on QM. I got no enlightenment, and it mostly made me feel that we had reached the limits of what one can reasonably attempt with pen-and-paper mathematics. Seriously, how many "corrections" do they need to make in order to get a "good enough" hydrogen atom? Not to mention all of the dubious math.

Learning the basics was interesting. The postulates, and all. But that was what, 5 classes? I strongly discourage anyone from going any further. Not worth it. Go study algebra instead, at least, no leap-of-faith approximations are involved.
This thing will be a victim of its own success. If it ever takes off, it will be blacklisted by every web-content filtering program. If gmail and vault.com are blocked, you'd better believe this will be, too.
He's not alone. The co-author of Scheme went on to co-create Java
and gmail is hardly a success at all.
Ideas are Worthless? Wrong! Ideas can solve problems
Five questions to ask before you join a startup
Thanks for the insight, I never thought of symlinks on the production server.

My question though was whether my entire webroot should be a CVS check-out directory or it should be uploaded from, say, a build machine. Both ways look Ok, but there may be some advantages of one of these methods that I'm not aware of. That was my question.

I always used the upload scheme, which worked fine when I was alone or with an ultra-small team. For the upload method though there should be only one "uploader", and with small teams it's usually the team leader.
http://www.bugbear.com/arc.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/indylangs.html

"The individual tokens should be short as well. Perl and Common Lisp occupy opposite poles on this question. Perl programs can be almost cryptically dense, while the names of built-in Common Lisp operators are comically long. The designers of Common Lisp probably expected users to have text editors that would type these long names for them. But the cost of a long name is not just the cost of typing it. There is also the cost of reading it, and the cost of the space it takes up on your screen."

I'd guess that if you want to be better at Arc than all the Arc-philes who know Lisp, K would be worth studying.
I hardly think Gmail can be called a victim. Blocked? Use it elsewhere -- gossip doesn't run dry outside the workplace.
What does news dot YC do with posts that are obsolete?