skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In order to raise money you need to have a personal relationship with the respective funders. This is not a system you just waltz into and get capital all of a sudden.

Obviously, you try to get money from top tier firms and people. However, everyone's personal list of connections is different - resulting in different firms taking precedence.

If you are trying to raise money use your network. See who can refer you and at the same time back up your reputation.
20.000 Unique Visitors From StumbleUpon
I don't really see Google's YouTube play as a pure advertising dollars play. I think that they did if for many reasons:

It took them a while to figure out how to monetize search. They are willing to take the time to figure out how to monetize online video.

If I'm not mistaken, Google is thinking long term with online video. I think that the future of the internet/computing is video. (You have to have something to do with all that extra hard drive space and multicore processors.) Google wants to be a player in the video/computing market.

Google's business model has been to give Phd's access to the world's largest compute cluster, the largest database of text/hypertext and figure out some way to make money off of that. They've been doing pretty well so far. With the YouTube move, they slurped up the world's largest online video database and I'm sure they're throwing a bunch of Phd's at that to see what they come up with.
Why employee mobility doesn't have to be a bad thing
MIT Sloan Management Review has posted a preview article from the upcoming Summer 08 issue. Read the full-text article on rethinking the war for talent at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/issue/2008/summer/02/
Awwww, did you by any chance just take a shotgun and blast away half of your foot? You seem to be forgetting something - it's not the users responsible for the adoption of disqus, it's the blog owners. Disqus may have many users, but your ONLY customers are the hundreds of blogs using the system.

Including me.

What you just did there is that you told your customers - you are not important, we care about your end users. You are running a B2B shop and you suddenly announce that you are doing things to serve the C that comes after the B. You care about the customers of the business you serve, and not your actual customers. That makes me unhappy, disqus. I want you to want to please ME, because I'm sticking your commenting system on MY blog. I don't want you to bother about pleasing all the other people. If you wish to go ahead with pleasing the blog readers and fucking over the blog owners who installed you, then go ahead.

But excluding me.
Moderators, please delete. HN is not Digg or Reddit.
I especially like the part where he trashes speculative and opinionated articles in the media in the midst of an article steeped in the former and speckled with the latter.
"Also, the fact that the responses to this poll skew massively toward INTP/INTJ tells you something doesn't it?"

It does. I voted this up, because finding out about personality traits that correlate with voting in polls on news.YC is at least a little bit interesting.

But it's still not terribly surprising, if you expand the letters: people here tend more than the average person to describe themselves as introverted, interested in theories and abstractions, and reliant on thought for decision making rather than feelings.
ASK HN - Good worksheet for estimating startup costs?
I'm looking for pulling together some numbers for starting a tech startup (technical services at first - not so much a product company yet, but that shouldn't matter much) in the SF Bay Area. I've seen a few worksheets that are "fill in the blanks" but I'm looking for something that would say things like:

Salaries: $500,000
Benefits: (Usually 15% of salary)
Rent: ($15 per square foot is usually a good estimate)

Seems like this is one of those things that should be pretty prevalent since many people have to go through the exercise but I can't really find anything very good.
No, I won't explain this to you.
"Hence, it is common to see INTPs dabbling at many things, achieving competency, just enough to prove to themselves that they could become more proficient if they wished, but rarely actually bothering to refine their skills further. This is a point at which we begin to get a feel for the workings of iNtuition backing up Thinking. The INTP has a whole set of skills which he knows that he would be proficient at, yet other people may know little of this."

Yes, the hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I read this.

There's a great book by Radcliffe Hall called 'A Saturday Life' (Info on Radclyffe Hall http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radclyffe_Hall) that should be of interest, and also some good pulp SciFi Fantasy that I found pretty comforting while I was growing up.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_the_Five_Magics Master of the Five Magics by Lyndon Hardy about a hopeless wizard trainee.
Wow, I am an ([E|I][S|N][F|T][J|P]).
Sure it does. It sorts people into bins based on what they say. So if you would answer these questions the same way now as you did then, it will produce the same answer. The aspects of your personality that it quantizes haven't changed enough to flip the answer on any axis since last time you took the test.

A test like "which Harry Potter character are you?" probably has the same kind of consistency.
I could absolutely use such a feature.
The problem with this model is the barrier of set-up. The mom who craves simplicity can't be the one setting up the device.

Any product with the promise of 'simplifying complexity" has to overcome this problem, and no one has solved it as of yet.
I know Samsung is working with Google to make a Google branded phone to run android; that will certainly end up being what people hold up to the iPhone.
Not needing to change modes is a fantastic feature. Hang on to it.
we have again the OS wars.

It was Mac vs. Windows, the platform that was open to different hardware manufactors won. Mac was closed, and lost. Now it is making a comeback, but still windows outsells by an order of magnitude.

Now we have the same thing: Android, and semi-open platform, customisable, and open to OEMs to use it and customise it, while iPhone, a pretty good working device, but tied to only one form factor so far.

Same battle all over again. The only added complexity is the carriers, which in the US have too much power.

Now, of course there is Winmo, Symbian, Blackberry OS, etc... but even then on the PC wars we had Amiga, O/S2, Atari OS, BeOS...etc. and of course Unix.

PalmOS seems to be the first victim. Very similiar to Amiga on the 80s. Pretty OS, it was very good for it's time (2003), but with lack of inovation it is left behind by others.
On the AppStore...has anyone attempted to find widgets for your iGoogle page as of late? It's a clusterf* of content, most of which is unusable.

Do you really think they'll avoid this problem on a phone, which has MUCH less forgiveness for bad content organization?
Your mistake was not including the fashion tip "Wear a Guy Fawkes mask".
I really really want to be able to use this without signing up. I just need a link to give a friend so they can spontaneously collaborate with me. The diagram doesn't need to persist past that session, so long as we can both save a png. The spontaneity and ease of use is a killer feature for me.
I'm not sure it really can help you gain valuable insight into your personality. Has anyone measured that value? Do people who have seen their Meyers-Briggs results do better in some measurable way from people who haven't?
$3 for a site really isn't that bad, all things considered. It's less than many image downloads on istockphoto.
asvora on AIM, avinashvora@gmail.com on MSN, avinashsvora@yahoo.com for Yahoo IM, http://twitter.com/avinashv, http://avinashv.net, or, just email me. Good luck!
I'm an ENFP now, but the funny thing is I was an ISTJ in high school (about 7 years ago). Funny how a few years can change you.
If you upvote merely to agree, everyone else gets a boring reading list.
Yet this is part of the conversation about that post but it's happening outside the blog. People will discuss a blog post wherever they want, and every conversation will be different. I'd rather discuss a Techcrunch post here than on Techcrunch, for example.

Someone posted an article about this yesterday:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203575
We had a very positive experience with 99designs. We offered $200 awards to the top 2 entries for logo design and got 140 or so submissions/revisions from 36 different designers. We had a very difficult time narrowing it down from the top 10 or so because the quality was so great and the designers were quite responsive.

We'll definitely be doing more there. There's a lot of talented people doing this work for fun and/or on the side to build up their portfolio. Not sure how long this will last for these low prices, but I definitely recommend taking advantage of it while it lasts.

We paid for logo work at about the same price from an online company and got something passable, but had worries the whole time that we wouldn't get anything good at all.

In the end the 99designer winner even sent us the raw Adobe illustrator files, etc. The pro firms I saw were only sending the SVG for artwork, but the raw source is even more useful if we need to transform things down the line (and helps confirm it's an original work).

Not sure what the quality will be for website design, but the logo design side seemed to "crowdsource" amazingly well. YMMV.
Here's an entry in my to-do list:

"Make a database of questions I've asked and other info.
And make it easy to find the answers again.
Look at: YCombinator, StumbleUpon, Google, Tomboy, thinklinkr, CreateDebate, Delicious, Experts Exchange, DabbleBoard, Wikipedia"

Piece of cake, right? :)
Enterprise Adoption of Web 2.0: It's Happening
In particular, Microsoft cancelled what was going to be their answer to Google Book Search.
It's like any other spam: you go by the numbers.

Certain niches can be extremely lucrative, the classic ones being porn, gambling (especially poker), and pharmaceuticals.
Between the Forer Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forer_effect), confirmation bias (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias), and the fact that people routinely retest into different categories (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs#Study_of_scoring_c...), I don't place much stock in Myers-Briggs. Add to that the dubious way in which the theory was developed, and I'm completely mystified by the appeal of this system to so-called hackers.

It just seems like you could take any 4 either/or categories and have a test that's equally valid. Do you like apples or bananas? Wear corrective lenses or not? Like dogs or cats? Rent your home or own your home? (I'm ACDR, for the record. My type is particularly rare, yet makes up a majority of CEOs and start-up founders. Yay, me!)

Can we please put a stop to this nonsense?
and don't charge for it :~)
I prefer "changing" to "evolving" to describe this phenomenon.
It is certainly interesting to observe two unrelated words with similar spelling become synonyms in less than 20 years.
I'm scared of what happens when preparation doesn't meet opportunity.
ASK HN - Good worksheet for estimating startup costs?
I'm looking for pulling together some numbers for starting a tech startup (technical services at first - not so much a product company yet, but that shouldn't matter much) in the SF Bay Area. I've seen a few worksheets that are "fill in the blanks" but I'm looking for something that would say things like:

Salaries: $500,000
Benefits: (Usually 15% of salary)
Rent: ($15 per square foot is usually a good estimate)

Seems like this is one of those things that should be pretty prevalent since many people have to go through the exercise but I can't really find anything very good.I'm looking for pulling together some numbers for starting a tech startup (technical services at first - not so much a product company yet, but that shouldn't matter much) in the SF Bay Area. I've seen a few worksheets that are "fill in the blanks" but I'm looking for something that would say things like:

Salaries: $500,000
Benefits: (Usually 15% of salary)
Rent: ($15 per square foot is usually a good estimate)

Seems like this is one of those things that should be pretty prevalent since many people have to go through the exercise but I can't really find anything very good.
IPhone developers find "The Social" the Zune failed to create
It works under X as well.

$ xrandr -o inverted

To get back to normal,

$ xrandr -o normal
8 Frugal Tips for Legal Matters
I've just learned that Java uses 64bit signed integer with ms units and uses the 1970 epoch. It covers +/-290 million year time span. The interesting thing with this format is that you don't need any special library to do time operations. For time stamps nanoseconds is in my case preferable.

Thanks for taking the time to comment on this issue. It has been very useful.
It may not be solely a Lisp thing, but I think it is much more prevalent in the communications betweem Lisp devotees and folks used to procedural programming. People tend to see solutions in terms of what they are comfortable with, and functional programming approaches are different, not merely translations of procedural notions into a different syntax.
Who says the mom would be setting up the device? It would be easy enough for your cell phone carrier to setup and customize their own interface/variant of Android phone.
Once you hit a certain level of preparedness you realize that once-in-a-lifetime opportunities don't really exist.
Simon Slade on How To Tell If Your Business Idea Is Any Good
Exactly right. And remember the other advantage Windows had over over Mac: price. Just like you can't get a supercheap Mac laptop, you can't get a <$100 iPhone, but you almost certainly will be able to get an Android at that price. Sure it will be missing stuff like touch-screen functionality, but with all the apps it will almost assuredly be a better experience than current low-end cell phones.
It might be a Dell thing. I've only tried it on Dells and I've seen it work on a couple laptops and an older desktop. Haven't really tested this extensively though. YMMV.
ENTJ ...amazed at how accurate the profile is
Bitterness.
The New iPhone’s New Winner
Canadian group: Facebook "a minefield of privacy invasion"
Google Gears as the Next Flash
Hi-Tech CEOs Offer Yahoo, Microsoft Merger Advice
It's not a lisp thing. It's the smart way to approach the problem of helping folks in trouble. Start from goals.

This is also not why lisp users tend to be smug.

Lisp users tend to be smug because they know they are smarter than most people. And, to be fair, on the basis of IQ, they probably are.

They are smug because they prefer the "correct" to the "effective" and will make extended academic arguments to support this point.

They advance "worse is better" as if it were a criticism of the technologies that are successful in the marketplace.

Perhaps this is even true in a strict academico-logical sense.

But this is also why Lisp has had such limited success in that marketplace which they love to criticise.

If you want to mostly live in a cloister, then being the Confucian master of correctness is fine.

If you want to make it in the hurly-burly, you must adopt a different attitude.
These kinds of sites are ruining all creative industries.

It's working for spec on the off-chance your designs might get chosen. THe odds are stacked against you and the competition devalues your work. It's the type of thing that is historically rampant with IP theft, abuse, underhanded tactics etc.

Designers should not be working on spec; ever, especially college educated designers. It's tempting to get these projects under your belt for the experience and the portfolio but once you go down that path, it can be hard to raise your rates up to a liveable wage when everyone else is working for free or cheap.
Anyone read Crichton's novel 'State of Fear'? There is a lot of ridiculousness in those pages (along with a pretty weak plot), but his comments about Fearmongering in the media for profit made a lot of sense.

I just get tired of being told I need to be terrified about everything. I'm much more worried about being killed by heart disease rather than terrorists, but terrorism is sexier on the 6:00 news.
The Ecology of a Corporate IT Workplace (humor)
Mixing Matter (Offline) and Antimattter (Online)
I think that not working in an industry often gives you a unique perspective that might as well make you more likely to spot a particular gap its regulars are taking for granted.

Of course you will need some insider knowledge, but oftentimes not all that much - a lot of industries develop similar approaches to solving similar or analogous problems, but with varying access to the underlying knowledge/skill needed to making it effective.

You will need to be a bit of an anthropologist and a good communicator to get the relevant information from people whose working days you plan to optimize/improve with software.

I'd say observation with an unspoiled eye can work wonders :).
fromedome appears to just be linkspamming alleyinsider. He has yet to make a single comment here.

So, good job turning HN into your own personal linkfarm.
Justin.tv Scaling Engineer
Justin.tv is the biggest live video site online. We serve hundreds of thousands of video streams a day, and have supported up to 60,000+ live concurrent viewers. Our site is growing every week, and we just added another two 10 gbps lines to our colo. Our unique visitors are up 900% since January.

There are a lot of pieces that fit together to make Justin.tv work: our video cluster, IRC server, our web app, and our monitoring and search services, to name a few. We're looking for a talented engineer with a strong linux background to help scale all of these services; planning future hardware infrastructure, building monitoring to keep our Quality of Service up, and helping design and optimize our application architecture.

Responsibilities

* Plan our future hardware expansion and network topologies for the web, video and chat clusters
* Build monitoring and alerting systems to maintain uptime as we grow
* Install hardware, buy bandwidth, and automate bringing up new systems
* Work with application engineers to identify and fix bottlenecks in the app code

Qualifications

* Extremely strong linux background (we use ubuntu and debian, what do you like?)
* Experience scaling web applications
* Programming background (this job will require building many things, and digging into the application code)
* Experience hacking video streams, python, Twisted or rails all a plus.

While we're growing rapidly, Justin.tv is still a small, technology focused company, built by hackers for hackers. Seven of our ten person team are engineers or designers. We believe in rapid development, and push out new code releases every week. We're based in a beautiful office in the SOMA district of SF, one block from the caltrain station. If you want a fun job hacking on code that will touch a lot of people, JTV is for you.

Note: You must be physically present in SF to work for JTV. Completing the technical problem at http://www.justin.tv/problems/spellcheck will go a long way with us. Email justin [at] justin.tv to apply. Cheers!
How to Win Friends (and Investors and Partners) and Influence People
The Product Guy’s Weekend Reading (May 30, 2008)
Genkii: Tokyo's Open Source Metaverse Strategists
Genkii is not only one of the coolest new companies on the planet, headed up by CEO, Ken Brady, formerly Director of International Strategies at Centric, a science fiction writer, and award winning film producer. But I think Genkii is one of the first Metaverse consulting companies in the world to put “a strong focus on leveraging Open Source platforms.”
That's an intel video chipset utility. More recent ones support Ctl-Alt(left|right) as well.
I think this theory somehow breaks down when it comes to sex and sexual attraction. Datapoint: the exaggerated proportions of photoshopped models in magazines and female video game characters.
So far, only the first two chapters and introduction are available.
I'm fairly certain that INTP is more the norm when looking at the set of people who would be interested in HN. (Well, obviously. I mean that the stereotypical programmer / hacker-in-the-classical-sense seems like they'd fall close to INTP)
It seems standard for cube-dwellers to move from programming to project management.

Not that I think the grass is at all greener there; but who knows what tickles your pickle.
That's why horoscopes and fortune cookies work.
Cocaine found on 99.9% of UK banknotes
But you get what you pay for.

I'm not even sure TechCrunch deserves that generous evaluation. Typically I feel dumber after reading a TC link.
older advert by the same folks: http://programmermeetdesigner.com/listing/view/2490
Don't you think Arrington could give you an op-ed opinion without misrepresenting the subject?

Judging by recent events, I'm going to have to say "No".
Broken Koans and other Zen debris
So I guess this means that most smart, ambitious people are INT
Search Less, Understand More: evri Demo
this will crush the iPhone the same way that opensource music players crushed the iPod.

Oh, wait, no it won't.
Walmart Launches Classified Listings
Ask YC: Feedback on an alternative to TinyURL
I'm most interested in whether the idea is easy to understand, any feedback is very much appreciated!
DB test with Mniessa, 64 bit Erlang and a 16 GB table
I just downloaded the SVG. Worked fine for me. They must have fixed it.
The company has been anything but agile of late. Maybe shedding a few pounds will help them start building better products?
He's on Microsoft's payroll but he's a Mac guy?

Say what you want about the man but, but I think he does a good job balancing his opinion with the facts.
If at all possible, it's also a good idea to let the other person in the negotiation be the first to propose a number/terms.
Each idea becomes a project, even if it is a potential project.

Projects are under a year (2008) directory under a 'work' directory (where work refers to something I'm working on, as in in-progress, not work as in job). But job stuff can go under work/{year}/projname too.

So then I have:

~/work/2006/proj1
~/work/2006/proj2
~/work/2006/projn
~/work/2007/proj1
~/work/2007/projn
~/work/2008/proj1
~/work/2008/projn

etc.

Then when something is really finished and polished, I move it to a ~/proj/projname directory. That happens only rarely. I've been reconsidering this and might start keeping everything in its original place under ~/work/{year}/projname

The other systems I've tried suffer from not being scalable as the years go by.

Periodically I back up each year (zipped and gpged) to Amazon S3 with a script.

Sometimes a project will span years, of course. When that happens I decide on a case-by-case basis whether to do a symbolic link back to one original project directory, or whether to start fresh at some point with a clean set of files for that project, leaving the cruft behind but still intact in a previous year.

Inside each project I can still use version control for the project.

Some projects are just repositories for ideas. Projects can be my own, or they can be me playing with third party tools I've downloaded. Even just a new open source package I'm installing might get its own project, with all files, if it's tricky and I want to make my own installation notes for future reference.

All project directories have a notes.txt file (or can have, at least). I have a 'tagthis' script that takes text tags as argument and adds the new tags to header lines in notes.txt in the current directory. Then later I can grep for these tags.

Works pretty well so far. It gives me the freedom to call anything, even an idea I don't have time to work on right now, a project and make a starting place for it. So-called projects in this scheme are very, very informal, so it's a very light weight system that doesn't get in my way, yet it keeps everything organized forever.