skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moved to Somerville, MA a few months ago. It's right next to Cambridge, MA but the message I read is "Learn Brazilian Portuguese" and "Learn to play Capoeira."
I will say that the larger Boston area mumbles the message of Cambridge, 'be smart' and 'have good ideas'.
Print on demand doesn't necessarily mean not taken seriously: academic/university publishing houses are increasingly using print on demand to make low-run books viable, and to keep back catalogue titles available.
Ask YC: Story for Forbes - What really happens when your startup fails?
The last few inquiries I did on HN for Forbes stories had great results. Would love to hear from you guys on this one...

I'm writing a story for Forbes about what really happens when your startup company fails. I need to hear from entrepreneurs who have had failing startup companies with an honest explanation of how they were affected financially and emotionally.

The story looks to explore the difference between what potential entrepreneurs expect to go wrong and what really happens. This isn't a postmortem on why your startup failed - it's a short summary of what was lost in the process and how you dealt with that loss.

Some basic questions -

- How did you expect the first few years of your startup company to go?

- What did you risk to launch your startup?

- What do you felt you lost when your startup company failed?

- How did you recoup from this loss?

- What advice would you give aspiring entrepreneurs launching their own startups?

Please respond to - wschroter <at yahoo

About the Author

Wil Schroter is a serial entrepreneur and startup columnist. His columns appear in Forbes and are syndicated in newspapers nationally through American City Business Journals.
Many writers are very good at making already extremely complicated subjects (like social mores, conflicts, depression) even more impenetrable.
There are very few writers indeed willing to explain complex subjects (like relativity or quantum physics) in simpler terms. If they did, it wouldn't be 'literature'.
Yeah I understand for the people who are physically present at the presentation to twitter, but what about the others? I don't think the attendees of the presentation could account for 10 fold traffic increase?
WWDC is only a couple of hours away now, could we refrain from posting Apple rumours as they usually turn out to be false?
I don't know, using "Fusion" to market a product that runs multiple OSs via Boot Camp seems like asking for trademark trouble about VMWare Fusion.
Ars will be posting on this page:
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080609-ars-at-wwdc-08...

and ars has the following irc channel [irc.arstechnica.com channel #wwdc ]

Download the keynote through iTunes once they publish it.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-launche...
Meebo Launches Multi-Tiered Meebo Marketing Platform
I dont know if the thought ever entered your block head that the writer of this post wanted to know the type of music other hackers listen to and not to declare a particular type of music as being "hacker music". Although you stated that the question has been posted before, you also made a presumption that everybody joined hacker news at the same time and every body keeps tabs on what is being posted and makes sure that he doesnt do a repeat of a post.
that isnt so, new people join hacker news everyday and ask questions, so it is inevitable that the same questions may be repeated, giving the fact that YC news doesnt have search natively. downmod me for all i care but i have stated my points clearly. thanks.
I prefer to read physical books, for anything I care about. At this point the web is more of a replacement for low-engagement mediums like newspapers than books.
A few years ago I heard a great lecture on this topic given by John Nesheim. He was talking about how three times he's stood next to entrepreneurs while they were on the phone calling their parents to tell them that they'd just lost the family's retirement savings. He might have a couple of good stories if you were to contact him.
I think there is one thing still missing. Most people go to ATM to get cash. After entering my PIN, I don't want to press OK and see another menu to withdraw money. I want "Get $20" button right next to "OK" button for an option to withdraw money even quicker right after I entered my PIN.
Wil - Recovery from failure is the most important survival skill for an entrepreneur. I tried to summarize my own experience in the following. It is really tough but it must be done. Hope it helps.

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/riding-a-bike.html
Blekko's Crawler: Have you seen ScoutJet yet?
Like there is not already enough infiltration of politics on various web forums. Please, leave it off of HN. Yes, I'm aware that almost any candidates views and potential impacts on society can be interpreted in a way that passes for on-topic here, but I don't think HN is anyone's sole source of news and information, so it is not vital that this stuff gets submitted here.

Additionally, I've never seen a political thread that actually changed the viewpoint of someone who had their mind made up, but I have seen friendship and respect deteriorate in the face of heated political "debates".
Seems to me no matter how much food production is raised, population growth will eventually catch up.

How do you reconcile this assertion with the negligible population growth in many of the developed countries?
They used to cope just fine.
Looks like a big Nintendo DS.
simple answer: goto exists on the assembly level as jump commands (and others). when you write a c program, it gets, eventually, translated down into the level where jump commands (gotos) do exist. they do still, in a way, exist.

higher level languages used to have gotos, but as software engineering practices developed, they were tossed out because they cause more problems than they solve. they don't mix well with the practices being developed.

don't use goto. make good use of conditional structures, looping, functions/methods, and/or recursion.
Women write more expressive, sensitive code
'Women write more expressive, sensitive code'
Flash/Actionscript does have good gradient support, and I know that Actionscipr allows for expressing the details in code, but, what I'm thinking of is something more compact and portable. For example, you come up with a gradient, and can then easily use it in Flash, Photoshop, Illustrator, or another program.

Colors are very portable when in hex notation. This is along the same lines. Something that you can email to someone and they can just paste it into their editor and use it.

Thanks for the question!
Maybe the YC user has his programming community needs filled up, but also has a love for music which this forum does not slake. In which case we should refer YC user to OCRemix forums and come back when he is satisfied.
my sentiments exactly jamongkad.

I think the key verbiage in the article is "and has done marketing campaigns for other companies like....."

If you write a great app then you wrote a great app and if you're lucky you might talk some funding source into paying or lending you $50k for it. If you hire a bunch of great marketing people and give them a crummy app they go out and get some funding source to fork out $35 million for some form of ownership right.

This fact of life has to be the greatest frustration there is in being an accomplished developer.
Great Lakes Brewery has several really good beers, though the best comes out only around Christmas time. If you are ever in the North Ohio region around Christmas time, I recommend picking up some of their Christmas Ale.
Go get some Indian food and some beers, come back in 2 hours and you'll get the gist of it in a few minutes.
I probably haven't bought a CD since maybe 2005.
Please post a link when this article is finished.
I've been in this business a long time and have yet to meet any women who write code.
Isn't alphabetically sorting a document containing (potentially) tens of thousands of words going to be pretty slow on a machine of this vintage? Isn't it a bit perverse to have a spellcheck which scales worse than O(N)?
The Way We Read - Amazon.com's Jeffrey Bezos on why books are like horses
Upmodded for the the humor that is almost true.
I assume this is a parody, and as such, it is very well done.

If not, I can only assume that women has never met Steve Yegge.
It's called a sunset industry. Why not switch industry instead of trying to stop the sun from setting?
I find the acceptance of failure quite interesting. I'm curious if people are more likely to abandon a venture because they want to handle failure properly and positively.
How to Promote Startups
The Popsicle Problem
Well if you assume that population stops growing, there is no need to raise the food production. Of course in theory population growth can be stopped. I just meant that ever growing food production can not be the solution. Instead, it would probably make more sense to focus on stopping population growth.
I thought about trying Pandora. What was your opinion of it?
Y Combinator's Versionate is Dead
Beware, the social safety net can be a 2 edged sword.

Sure, more people would start small businesses.

But more people would give up earlier because the landing would be less painful.

The social safety net would decrease the importance of perseverance, one of the most critical ingredients of success.
Google engineering exec spotted at WWDC
>While there's much less of a culture of entrepreneurship and only 15% of Europeans think about starting their own company, nearly all (14.7%) of them actually go ahead and do it.

I wonder what the average payoff is though. When the going gets tough, I can easily imagine that the reduced costs of failure cause more founders to bail out.

(This is ignoring that any comparison between the USA and Europe will probably have so much baggage attached as to be meaningless.)
A new package management system for Lisp, developed by ITA
Ask PG - would you fund a java startup?
Paul, I know you really dislike Java (or seem to). Would you fund a Java startup? How would it affect your decision?
engadget: http://www.engadget.com/2008/06/09/steve-jobs-keynote-live-f...

macworld: http://www.macworld.com/article/133798/2008/06/wwdckeynote.h...

iphone alley live audio stream: http://www.iphonealley.com/news/wwdc-2008-keynote-live-audio...

tuaw irc: http://www.tuaw.com/2008/06/09/join-tuaw-on-irc/

tuaw live coverage: http://www.tuaw.com/wwdc08

live video stream from 'viru': http://live.yahoo.com/viru
Google raised like $24 million, and that was 10 years ago. And, um, they actually needed tons of machines for what they were doing, so they actually could put millions of dollars to use.

This is just ridiculous.

Enjoy the silliness while it lasts, I guess.
Most Threatening Domains | Tech Jaws
I can't say much, but I think this is not so much of a problem for the summize guys.
It is not a parody. If you follow the link to the original article, you can see that she is just claiming that women are better at documenting code, which is a reasonable hypothesis. The Inquirer on their own account added the slant about womens code being more "sensitive" and so on, probably to make here look like an idiot. (Also fun to see how "user-friendly and gender-neutral" coding standards in WSJ becomes "womanish" coding standards in the Inquirer :-)

Sine there are far fewer women programmers, I would expect the average female programmer to be better than the average male - including being better at documenting code.

However the article sounds like she is only basing it on anecdotal evidence. It would be quite interesting to see a more scientific study.
Ask YC: Bug tracking software?
What is everyone using for bug/issue tracking software these days? I'm looking for something to run on my own dev server, not a hosted solution. Bonus points for being lightning fast, IRC & SVN integration, and easy to install.

Any links to previous discussions about this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Later caliphs f.ex. among the Ottomans were quite progressive particularly politically. But you are right. I just note that there have been different standards, and for a time the prevalent standard was not opposed to science, learning and culture.
Is “finally” the answer to all IE6 memory leak issues?
I'm not sure I understand this argument. When startup founders bail out, they typically go and find a normal job instead. Why would a social safety net make this any easier?
And men write more code, period.
Agreed. Much writing which is self-consciously 'literary' in nature seems knowing and deliberately obscure.

There's a problem too with long-winded SF authors: they leave too little to the imagination. Most of my fave authors write fairly succintly, with gaps for my imagination to fill. This makes their stories seem more real and exciting.
I've hired several. Maybe I just got all of them?
Explain the statistical reasoning behind "since there are fewer, you expect them to be better".
# $(”div”).draggable() creates a draggable

# $(”div”).draggable(”destroy”) destroys it

Am I missing something here, or is that an extremely ugly design choice? Passing strings into functions to specify what function you want? eugh
Top Ten Things that Math Probability Says about the Real World
What fun is that?
My Wild Journey into the United States, and a Few Tips for Future Canadian YC’ers
That's not consistent with Apple's style guide. The copywriting is also too wordy.
My reasoning is: because of male dominance and stereotypes in IT, women will think twice about entering the field. Therefore the ones who choose it, will be more passionate and determined than the average male colleague.

It is just my theory, I have never seen any statistical evidence one way or the other.
Let me take a stab at it.

I think the lack of scientific innovation is due to the culture of memorization/book smarts that seems to be still ingrained in China. In the past, a lot of people were aiming to become officials but in order to do so they had to take these standardized tests that required years of preparation and memorization where you would have to read and memorize text from old thinkers.

But by going through this entire process of memorization/studying one would start to think like them and not come up with any original ideas. Maybe parts of this are still around today and are focusing more on memorization rather than on creativity.

As an aside, another reason I thought of would be the Communist state would hinder thinking for oneself and stifle creativity that way. Why I dismissed it was that the Soviet Union had an equally oppressive regime yet they were able to compete with the US during the Cold War just fine for a few decades.

I'll glady take criticism of my ideas; very curious as to what others think.
No. Maybe afterwards in a few hours or tomorrow.
The whale is being lifted again...
The Seed Conference In Quotes
I follow it here: http://tinyurl.com/5skzhc and http://tinyurl.com/4hnmjf
Download the keynote through iTunes once they publish it.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-launche...
I do agree, but I often find new sources for music I like in these threads. I get some value from that.

True, I can get that value countless other ways, and it's not all that hacker-specific, but it's not as bad as you suggest.

If nothing else, someone down the road will be able to use these threads for their Master's thesis on how hackers' taste in music changes over time. :p
Nokia did that on one of their new phones (unreleased?). Apparently they nailed it and it feels just like typing on keys.
I haven't been in this business that long, but I have met women who write code.

Conclusion: we live in parallel universes. That, or single points of data aren't all that useful to a discussion.
news.yc is the new reddit (is the new digg is the new...)
The founder(s) have moved on to Zecter.
I've been in this "business" for a short time, and I've met several. Which goes to show you, your personal experience is generally a bad foundation for making sweeping generalizations.

I just consider dev-shops that are female dominated to be Black Swans. They haven't happened, and they are unlikely to exist right now, but they certainly could have occurred if some social factors were different, and they certainly might in the future...
We use BugZilla here at work but I'm not a huge fan. There must be a better way to do this.
The problem is that, in the real world, monolithic polling network servers have to manage all the transaction-specific context for your application in a single binary.

I'm not challenging the fact that the C10K architecture wins if we're talking about static content. Real webapps don't live and die by their static content performance, though: the critical path is through the dynamic content generation, which means that select()/poll()/et. al. don't buy you much, unless you can hook your database client events and application thread scheduling inside that loop as well.

Green (a.k.a. userspace) threads are one good solution, but fork() isn't the performance-killer that people seem to think it is, either.
It's called message passing. It used to be part of the commonly accepted definition of OO.
news.yc poll on JS libs:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=211630
I mean $35 mil could have been easily distributed amongst the little startups that are actually doing something of value. But that's VC's for yah.
I've read a whole bunch of postmortems on TC and FoundRead that were great case studies on the biz side, but I wanted to get more info about how the entreps personally dealt with the companies. My experience is that failure is never nearly as bad as you would think, but I would imagine others have had very different experiences.
I am not doing that intentionally. I am pretty bad in English articles as a non native speaker.
Ever heard of Grace Murray Hopper?
Any Hackers in the San Antonio, TX area?
I have been running my web app company for seven years now and am loving it. However, being a solo founder, I sometimes feel isolated from other hackers, especially since I'm not in the Silcon Valley area. Sometimes, I feel there's nobody I can talk to who understands the challenges I face (PG is right, having a co-founder would have been a huge plus)

I'm wondering are there any other Hacker News readers out there in or near the San Antonio area? Maybe we can arrange an offline get together.
> Why wouldn't you be able to virtually always do a better job of scheduling events (when you control all the code competing for resources) than a generic OS scheduler?

Simply put, I would say that "you" (where "you" is an average webapp developer) probably don't understand scheduling, event-driven programming, or memory management as well as the average kernel developer. I of course don't mean this to extend to anyone in this thread. Imagine, though, giving your average PHP or ASP developer, who may struggle to implement a basic sort algorithm, the problem of implementing cooperative multitasking in a scalable way.

> Do you know of any examples of ultra highly scalable fork()ing servers?

Under real-world workloads, I still consider Apache to be "highly scalable." In my experience, given 1:1 investment in hardware for front-end and database servers, the RDBMS craps out long before the webapp, so being able to accept another 5000 incoming connections is only going to hurt you.
YouTube Monetization: Let Users Sell Ads
Jobs expected to ring in Apple's new iPhone
Does anybody still care about the editor wars?

Personally, I use vi, but would like to also learn Emacs at some point. I don't see why you can't use both (there is this "Viper" vi emulation for Emacs, but last time I tried it, it was a little slow).

When working on vim/Windows, I noticed that I rely on the Unix tools for some editing tasks (I run the "fmt" command a lot, for example). I guess this isn't the case with Emacs?
US Percent of Income Spent on Gas Map
Anticipation.... I heard one of their supplier's warehouses was overflowing with mysterious unmarked shipping boxes.

and...if the purchase price is as heavily subsidized by at&t as everyone thinks it will be, apple will sell a boatload of them...;D
What is the field in which you are employing Java?

Just curious. I realize you want to keep your idea to yourself, I'm just wondering in general terms. For instance, are you thinking of a social network, a social messaging system like IM, email or twitter, or 3D web gaming. You see, I think if what you are thinking of is easier done in other lingos I would say save yourself the java headaches and use php or python or <insert dynamic lingo here>. If, however, you are thinking about say... 3D gaming, it can ONLY be done in java right now and you should use it regardless of who would invest in it.
Roundup - http://roundup.sourceforge.net/
Forive the reductio ad absurdum, but it seems that by your argument, we'd all be better off simply implementing our webapps within the init daemon, and handling all scheduling and resource-protection within our application logic.

Personally, I like having my orthogonal processes running in isolation from each other, mediated through a tested, scalable kernel.

Obviously, there's a balance to be found between needless context switches and dangerous coupling of function, but I've found that, as often as not, a process context per user is actually a pretty good point to come down on within that continuum.
Reverse auctions let banks bid for customers at latest Ray Stata venture, MoneyAisle
Thanks for the article, I figured it would be to difficult to get into y-cominator as a Canadian. It's a shame I didn't think this through earlier.
What a load of sexist bullshit. I've worked with several women coders. Some were better than others. It's only possible to make this kind of ridiculous blanket statement because so few women coders exist in the first place. Small sample size, nada mas.

(Yes, I accused a woman of being sexist. If that doesn't make sense to you please Google sexism instead of bothering me.)
What reduced cost of failure? Failing with a start up is when you get some stability back as you go and get a regular job.

The US is where there is more incentive to quit early as it will restore your health insurance and other benefits. In the EU the difference between failing startup/government support and regular job is smaller, so the incentive to fold is lower.

If anything the Euopean system could cause you to hang on to a no hope case for too long as you can make ends meet more easilly.
talking with someone (as many have suggested) is great if you feel like talking. A recent study shows what I've long suspected: not everyone benefits from talking it out, and in fact those who don't want to talk about it and manage toavoid talking about it do even better long term than those who prefer to talk and do.
It's not as big a deal anymore, but people still have the discussion. I know that I got involved in one not long ago.

As a Vim guy who went and learned Emacs, the best advice I can give you is to try to use vimpulse.el. It's an extension to Viper-Mode and does a really good job of emulating Vim. I never would have gotten used to Emacs without it. It's not slow in my experience but then, maybe you're just more sensitive to that than I am.

And no, that would happen with Emacs. Emacs is more of an environment than an editor per-se. You can almost use it as a replacement for bash; certainly as a replacement for screen at any rate.
We use JIRA
YC has funded a startup that uses Microsoft .NET, so I don't see why they would rule out funding one that uses Java.

http://www.splashup.com/
Steve Jobs keynote live from WWDC 2008 (Engadget's live updates, refresh often)
I wouldn't worry too much about it -- most every foreign-national other than me has had no problems getting in for the program. I think I just ran into a couple bad border officials. Perhaps I was even over-transparent the first time. By having so much documentation prepared, maybe I made myself look suspicious.