skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
37Signals makes some very general statements without clarifying who should actually listen to them. I've responded below.

http://dmix.ca/2008/07/a-rebels-answer-to-vc-or-bootstrap/
My main point was that eventually the problem will be solved due to economic incentives, not moral ones. Somehow the mention of laws (legal incentives, I suppose?) crept into my post after I started writing it.
Wait, what?

ec2, (I consider them my biggest competitor, they probably don't know I exist, and, well, my product is somewhat different) has lowered the cost of hosting dramatically. and there are places that are even cheaper than that (such as my company) - unless you are doing something like video sharing, hosting costs are simply not a huge deal anymore compared to programmer time. At what I bill out for as a contractor, for every hour of my time, you can run a amazon ec2 small node for a month and have enough left over for a cheap lunch.

At most (USian, at least) startups, pizza for the meetings should cost more than the hosting fees.

Even if you are running an application where hosting is a big cost, there are plenty of people (such as myself) who have hosting resources they'd be happy to trade for some small slice of equity. Actually, yeah. let's make that a standing offer. if you have a startup and need SysAdmin/hosting stuff and are willing to trade a silver of equity for that, let me know.
Try learning to write mobile code in Sleep. Its like Perl with anonymous functions all over the place.

http://sleep.dashnine.org/

Actually, its my language. Couldn't resist the opportunity to plug it.
Just bought one from Dynadot. Seems to have worked fine.
jQuery explained by a 12 year old
...how about reading it before posting, eh?
I honestly never meant for this to be contentious. Apologies all around.
While this all may be a good plan it is not the only way to go. My startup, engineyard.com is only two years old. But we built something people wanted and started selling it to them in September of 2006 with only $120k seed money raised from friends and family. We were profitable by January 2007 and had 50% growth month over month for most of 2007.

We could have just left it at that but we had plans to become an open source company as well as a hosting company. Developing new software projects like Rubinius, Merb and Vertebra take time and money to pay top notch engineers. So we decided to take a gamble on going big and we took some VC money. The thing is, we already had a profitable business and the VC's came to us, we never sought them out.

So we were able to accelerate our strategy by taking the VC money and we got excellent terms since we already had a profitable business. And we took money from Benchmark that was less then other VC's were offering us because Benchmark's contacts and knowledge has been a huge strategic advantage for us.

We have been able to grow our 3 person startup to over 80 employees worldwide, and through our VC's contacts were able to secure a series B from Amazon, NEA and Benchmark.

We would never have been able to accelerate our growth and ideas as fast as we have if we never took money. By taking money we have cemented our place in the Ruby landscape as the 800 pound gorilla ;)

So yes maybe it is the safe play to not take money and try to sell a product that people want and thats great! But sometimes it really is worth taking big risks with big money working toward big goals.

This is not an either or scenario and both ways of doing things are equally viable
Eh, well, it becomes funnier at least... for other people. :D
Well, customer service is bound to be lousy to a decent number of people due to the very nature of it. (I would still rate their customer service much above than most other companies that i've dealt with.)
IPhone App Advertising: Barely There, But Interesting
Maybe they took the first day's worth of submissions and registered them for themselves?
If I had the time, I would pick up C. I've spent a number of years working with higher level languages like Java and Python, and while they're good and fun and all that, I feel knowing a low level language like C is important to be an effective (insert any computer related task/job).

I personally am really interested in learning C and then figuring out how to tie my C code into a Python module - maybe increase the speed of some of my code...

That said, I had used some Scheme back in school to write a parser for a stripped down version of C, and while it wasn't the most fun project ever, working with a functional programming language really opened my eyes (up until then it has been OOP/Java all the way).
I use Planet ( http://www.planetplanet.org/ ), and only update it once a day, because Y HN is distracting enough!
As long as the desire for excellent content outweighs the desire for growth and the users vote down irrelevant stories, then we are good to go.
Just got a 2nd confirmation that mine are gone.
yeah out of those only 1 went through.

After that I tried like 6 times to register, and out of like 70 domains I "got" only 5 went through. I did get a hold placed on my credit card because of suspicious activity because of this.
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6917941.html

I don't blame the patent guys for not reading it. "Man, that sentence said "said" like 487 million times! Pass that thing on, dude."

Stamp of approval here.
The original link doesn't work for me. Here's a fixed link:
http://www.economist.com/science/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1...

Seems like the Economist moved it under science.
I have a lawn because I know in the very near future I will be able to use vats of bacteria in my backyard to convert the clippings into:
1. Oil
2. Steak
Kids are often inefficient and waste a lot of time just figuring stuff out and making mistakes. Use your experience to your benefit and just make sure your idea is something that you can do in the finite amount of time you might have available to yourself.

I'm 34 and starting a new company while in the process of leaving my previous one in capable hands.

Starting a company is saying to the world you are ready for a major change in your life. This is a big step, one that shouldn't be taken lightly, especially with a mortgage. But if your losing sleep over this idea at night, then it's one that might be necessary. Even if it's a complete failure, you would have succeeded in changing your life.

Cheers to that!
American companies can try all they want to sue me under US laws. It will be really fun to watch them get squashed by the local legal system reminding them US law has no standing here.

BTW, I live in Brazil where software patents are not considered valid.
The Two V's of the Good Entrepreneur
commodity index, alternative energy index. stick to indexes, just not mutual fund or stock indexes.

commodities go up when the stock market goes down and vice-versa. if the recession gets worse, commodities will soar. wait until stock prices are bottoming out (timing is luck) and then switcharoo, get out of commodities and into stocks. this is what the smart money did in the 70's and 80's and this time around it is our turn.

http://www.zealllc.com/2007/longwave3.htm
I'm proud to contribute my 3 acres to this. I definitely don't water any of it though - I want it to grow as little as possible! More growing = more mowing.
Sony Ericsson G700 Unlocked
Its TFT display of 256K colors proffers a unique feature of touchscreen to have the control under your fingertips.Its embedded camera of 3.15 MP will serve you round-the-clock to shot the embellishing moments of your life in the most convenient way of just pressing the camera key.
Oops... Hit reply too early.

But the above US companies could try to sue US residents for the patent violation.
120K seed money is still quite a lot - I wonder if this is typical for a F&F round.

How did you determine what your funding goal was?

ps - thanks for the post - 'from the trenches' insights like these are really valuable.

pps - members of your founding team also created the BASIC Stamp? Neat!
That probably does not count as service. Service of process is governed by Rule 4 of Civil Procedure (in Mass and at the Federal Level). The overnight likely does not meet requirements of either Mass state or federal rules of civil procedure.

Mass. Rule 4: http://www.lawlib.state.ma.us/mrcp4.html
Federal Rule 4: http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/Rule4.htm

Did you receive a summons or was it just a printout of what we saw in the TC article? Insufficient service is grounds for dismissal. The plaintiff has time to correct, though.

You should see if there are any users in Delaware. If not, I doubt you can be compelled to court there. Even if you do have users in Delaware, it is a stretch.

For everyone on YC News, this is a reason to incorporate in your home state, not Delaware. Incorporate in Delaware if you want VC funding. Otherwise, stay in your home state. If you incorporate in Delaware, or any other state for that matter, courts automatically grant personal jurisdiction in that state. Basically, that means you have to go to court there.

This is also a reason to incorporate. Right now shimon is personally liable for damages, if any.
Indeed. RIM and Desire2Learn (both Canadian) have both been hit in the last few years with seemingly frivolous claims by litigious US companies. Apparently, it cost RIM some $612 million to settle with a patent troll [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NTP,_Inc. (edit: copy and paste, clicking won't work)]. I don't remember what came of the D2L case, but I think it cost them quite a bit as well.
Last.fm’s Buggy, New Design
I second Perl. You can learn enough Perl in a week to write neato sed/grep/awk type programs and shell script tupe stuff to outfit your command line however you like. Also... it's a good investment because your tools will run on any platform. You can soak up a measure of Unix culture as you go and you'll pick up a swiss-army-chainsaw that you can use when your usual dev tools don't cut it.

Going up to the next level in Perl has a larger learning curve than you might expect... but the "low hanging fruit" are very easy to get the hang of.
What wall, out of curiosity, are you hitting with C?
On the surface they may resemble each other, but the effort is always in the little niggly details of error messages, page flow, arrangement of things on the page. Whereas crappy interfaces are just CRUD.
I feel worst for number 1. The quadratic equation? If you're going to have a mathematical tattoo, at least make it some kind of advanced mathematics, not eighth-grade stuff.
On a related note, what's happened to Guy's site? There was a time I treated it as a reference for its useful advice on pitching VC's, public speaking, avoiding stupid mistakes... today it's all short-form, link-heavy posts, at least half of which are explicit self promotion.

I like Guy, but it's sad to see the way things have changed. Where's the meat?
We've funded people older than that. In some types of startups it's the ideal age. E.g. if you want to build a factory or make enterprise software, or do something else that requires lots of capital and/or industry experience.
Intel's Centrino 2
In retrospect, any limitation on potential liability would be nice. But I didn't originally set out to make Voo2do into a business -- the only way I get money for it at present is through donations. Are you saying anyone who wants to build and offer a web application should form an umbrella corporation for that? What about non-web software? Where do you draw the line between "personal experimental project" and "entity that needs a state-sanctioned organization around it"?
As a relative newcomer here, I sincerely hope lolcats are a bannable offense.
I use NewsFire, subscribed to about 50-60 feeds. I skim through them (hit space) and if anything catches my eye I read them. If I'm not in the mood to read it, I flag it for later reading.

Every month or so I go through my feeds and only keep the ones that consistently have posts that catch my attention.
in a settting like 37s is talking about, funding probably means seed/angel funding. How much control/influence do you think these types of investors have? They have a minority stake, rarely have a board seat, etc.

It's easy/popular to blame bad products on investors, but usually that's pretty unfair. I think (at the seed stage) it's usually due to the founders.

I think better advice might be "don't take so much money that you have to give up early control."

It seems to me that a well-run angel funded startup will get to market quicker and have a slightly bigger (and potentially quicker) exit if the founders play their cards right. So you trade a small minority stake for getting "there" (wherever there is) months or years sooner as well as having a slightly better shot at a win due to investor influence.

This all assumes a goal of eventual liquidity, of course.
Is it sufficient to simply not target growth as a goal?

HN, if I'm not mistaken, has kept a general upward trend in number of users; presumably, this is accompanied by an ever-increasing variance in quality of those users and what they consider to be interesting news and good etiquette.

Don't get me wrong; I certainly agree that it is easier to make changes with an eye towards quality when you're not concerned about growth. However, I do wonder if there it a point where the dark side of network effects, which are primarily sociological in nature, will simply overwhelm any technological aspects or other moves on the part of a community's stewards / leaders.
Extreme censorship.
Thanks for the suggestion. Could you be more specific as to why this book is so great?
Thanks. I added dates, not sure how those got lost. I don't know how long it takes to get accepted, but I know people were starting to get accepted quicker since the App Store opened. It took a little over a month for me. Plenty of time to write an application. :)
I had trouble logging in as well. But I'm definitely not the type whose averse to new things.

I'm looking forward to digging deeper since I use last.fm almost everyday while I work (usually: ambient and post-rock tags).
Dry runs aren't terribly useful, unless you're backtesting
- investing well means dealing with fear and greed, and you can't simulate that. You need skin in the game.
Some domains carry a crowd that will eat the naive alive. I cannot imagine someone starting a financial tech company being younger than their 30's.
"Personal experimental project" is just that. Only you use it. Once you let an outside person use it you have distributed in the eyes of the law. You are open to suit and are no longer within safe harbors of personal use.

If you are making something for others to use, incorporate. It will cost you a few hundred dollars per year in filing fees, but that is just a type of insurance against times like this.
On a side note, its ironic that customers like doing business with a corporation more than just a guy. They think if you're a corporation, well then they know where to find you when things go down the tubes. Of course, when they finally do find you, they'll be limited in how much they can get from you because of your incorporated status.
Understanding the development cycle of an application. I can fire up vi and complete exercises, or build an artificial tool, but that only takes one so far.
Just to throw my two cents into the mix, some of the best computer fun I've had in recent weeks has involved playing with Processing.

http://processing.org/

As somebody who normally does a lot of Ruby, PHP, Javascript web consulting working dealing mostly with data and database stuff, it's been fun to stretch my mind and play around with a much more visual programming environment.
Did Rescuetime take angel funding?
I'm subscribed to only about 15 feeds through Google Reader, which I refine every season according to signal/noise ratio. I'm also a big fan of Google Alerts, which I've found is a good way to find great articles that you wouldn't find in the echo chamber of most blogs, particularly those about programming.

Otherwise, I check HN and a couple other news sites. Most of the good stuff tends to rise to the top, and Google Alerts catches the good articles that don't get on the front page.
I was looking for football-related names and saw that this site is already live. Not what I expected though:
http://www.tackle.me/
Unless you are going to use them, I am actually against this. This is already enough cyber-squatting, domainer/domaining, domain tasting/kiting etc. going around.

Personally, I think there should be a system where acquired domains that are not used should be sold at cost/reasonable prices.

Sadly, free market economics (and the generalised nature of people who do this) means this will never happen.
Seagate announce 1.5-Terabyte 3.5" and Half-Terabyte 2.5" Drives
Congratulations, you're smarter than NASA. Well done.

Now please solve this problem too: making NASA competent.

(To be clear: no sarcasm intended.)
While water is renewable, there is a limited supply of cheap water for crops, and some areas are using it at a higher rate than it is being replenished. Wikipedia mentions that the Ogallala Aquifer, which is used to irrigate a significant portion of Midwest farmland, may run dry in 25 years:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogallala_Aquifer

For the people in that area, the aquifer is their "local dam" and it is getting low.
Productivity, Like Water, Finds its Level
Ask HN: What application would you create around "digital printing"?
If you had access to the NYT printing facility what application would you create around it?
Special Effects Software Firm gets Big Name CEO
Katherine Hays
To Trust or Not to Trust: Ask Oxytocin
Not really because usually that behavior is followed by "Clear History" in a browser your wife does not know is installed but may stumble upon some day. :)

(Or you work at a corporate job.)
That's true. My comments don't apply if you're in an area which uses underground water.
You should stop talking in public about this case. Anything you say can be used against you by them. Talk to other defendants but most importantly, find a lawyer and talk to them first.

PS: Ask pg to delete your post.
Never heard of it.

Anybody else try oDesk?

I wonder how it compares to rent-a-coder?
There was VC funding for Facebook apps?
Spy Shots: Honda's Upcoming Hybrid Looks Like... a Prius
In one word: focus.
It still doesn't make sense. To extend my example, the interface into all search engines, google or otherwise, is naturally simple. The more complicated interfaces, like that of clusty.com or a9.com, are surely not easier to create.
One question, has anyone used the "expert guarantee" feature there where they have to pay up if they miss the deadline?

Seems like a jerky thing that I would never agree to, but on the other hand, it would certainly be motivational.
Agreed. I deleted all my RSS subscriptions a few months back and haven't looked back. I don't get how people can follow hundreds or even dozens of RSS subscriptions and still have time to work on their startup.
> The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted.

That is scientism. They are pretending to be doing science (with all the respect due science) but are giving conclusions about moral issues like whether people should plant grass in a way that makes them happy, or not.
There is some ... flawed arguments here.

Specifically the article extorts that you should always use mysql_pconnect because "unique connections simply don't scale". This will provide performance improvements in certain situations, but once you scale to higher levels, persistent connections hamstring you. (High Scalability - http://highscalability.com has plenty of articles talking about many of the big, scaled sites not using persistent connections).

When you pass a certain number of connections you end up not only wasting RAM on your web server, but resources on the MySQL database that could be better used. Building and tearing down connections in MySQL is incredibly fast.

The best option is to use UNIQUE connections, and tune certain parameters in mysql - specifically wait_timeout. By default, MySQL leaves connections open for EIGHT HOURS. Set it to 5 - 30 seconds, and it will scale nicely for you. You'll need a lot less RAM on both the DB and the webserver end and you won't likely hit any "too many open connections issues".
I think your next step should be a couple of static languages.
Try C first (and object-c) and create a iPhone app, perhaps. Then try Java. I know, it is not popular around here, but it is good knowing one of the most used languages in the world.

With Java you can do server side programming, or even better do some mobile programmin (J2ME app for a phone, or an Android app).
It is not difficult to build a database-based webapp using Common Lisp. Hunchentoot, CLSQL and something to generate HTML (CL-WHO and HTML Template are both good).

Clojure is really interesting, and may be my new favorite language. Parallelism is one of those things in programming that is rarely trivial in most languages. Clojure makes a lot of parallel problems easy and it has access to all of Java's libraries.
I read all the answers, and I'm now convinced that there's nothing keeping this site from eventually going down that same path.

Death. Taxes. Gentrification.
The original link works for me.

Articles from The Economist seem to be accessible in 2 ways:

- www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=[story_id]

- www.economist.com/[category]/displayStory.cfm?story_id=[story_id]

In addition to that, it seems to be case-insensitive, e.g. this will work too:

http://www.economist.com/disPlayStOrY.cfm?story_id=11745528

Hrm. The Economist does not get my SEO blessing.
Note that following, rather than ignoring, economic incentives is the more moral way of life (other things being equal).
Agree and a standard project to do in Erlang seems to be a webserver which will also increase your understanding of webprogramming in general.
A Candy Store for the iPhone
Age doesn't matter as long as you have a product, solves a problem, it's growing and profitable.
You know, people talk about "angel" and mean a bunch of different things. Maybe you're right, but maybe not.

There are "angel rounds" like YC that just get things started. I'm not worried that Paul Graham is going to exert undue influence over your company. Once the 20k is spent, what's he going to do? Write a nasty essay?

But there are also a lot of "angel rounds" that provide runway. They're much smaller than "A Rounds" --- mid-low hundred thousands --- but it's just like an A-round, for 2-4 people. Those investors control the agenda.

And in both cases, the real issue isn't what happens after you get funded. It's what they make you do prior to funding you.
YC.
In enterprise IT, the buyer isn't the user, and purchasing decisions are based on many factors besides quality of the software. It's unrealistic to blame all of that on VC funding.
I didn't really how new-agey Steve was back when I used to read his stuff more often, but lately it all seems kind of hokey. Hopefully his ad revenue will go down a little bit and force him to come back to the real world.
You realize that psychic is his wife, right? Makes the whole thing even weirder.
so what were the numbers?
The deeper realization may be that simply plugging holes in Facebook's existing functionality is a short term place to be.

But I think that there's probably more sustainability in bringing things to Facebook that they won't themselves.
I don't think he was saying that NASA was incompetent, but that the task at hand was infeasible, particularly using the means that NASA typically has a hand (ie. using satellite images instead of of county records.)