skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If you can make your small dollars large, you can do whatever you want with them, and that includes investing in businesses.

Of course, this is high risk stuff. You'd probably have an easier time talking ten of your friends into pooling savings and finding a decent index fund.
Personally, the whole site works better for me without images. I, like most people, make a conscious effort to ignore things like gender and age when I'm reading someone's opinion (here or on any other site). But the fact that I sometimes have to make a CONSCIOUS effort means that there is at least a bit of a pre-existing bias or stereotype based on different demographics. Things like "young people don't have enough experience" or "you can't teach an old dog new tricks" can creep into your interpretation of someone else's opinion without even realizing it. I'd rather know as little as possible about the person behind the comment and just focus on the comment itself.

Think of some of the more memorable opinions from the past. Would your opinion of those comments be different if you knew before reading them that the poster was a 15-year-old girl, a 23-year-old transgender, a 55-year-old male? For a very small few of us, the answer is no. For the large majority of us -- myself included -- the answer is yes. The less information I have about the person, the more I can stick to what is being said.

I can certainly appreciate the arguments for having the image. I just don't think they outweigh the reasons against. I'm not listing all the reasons here, either. I'm just bringing up the main point for me specifically.
Sure wish I have enough money to spring for all those Cinema Displays and fancy web agencies to contract work out to.
As I understand it, the reason the Dutch speak English so well is that a lot of American television is shown there...still in English, but with Dutch subtitles. So kids grow up essentially in a semi-immersion program of English as a second language, which gets reinforced later in life due to tourism and English being the current effectively most common language.
Ask YC: equity for web design/development
I found a design/development firm that I really like, and they are interested in helping me develop a business idea that I've developed and have spec'ed out. This is a bunch of guys that I'd like to work with long term.

Initially they gave me a bid of roughly $30K of contract work spanning 3 months, from branding study to UX to graphic design to RoR development. But they were so smitten with the business idea that they are proposing that they join as equity partners in lieu for the work, and continuing contribution.

Has anyone been involved in a similar situation? I don't mind sharing the success as Paul talked about, and getting a set of good partners is a bonus. The problem, as always, is valuing what their contribution.

Has anyone gone thru something similar before? Are there any guidance on the range of equity that we should consider?
I'd love to hear more about what you learned from your lawyers. shoot me an email if you get a minute.
"The goal, everyone agrees, is to maximize coverage, heighten competition and cut costs. Good goals, all."

No, the goal is to save lives and provide EVERY American with health care in order to improve the quality of their life. This isn't about being "cost effective," it's about doing what is right,
it's http://www.founderscoop.com/ that you want to lookup

a community of founders with equity interest in companies working with the coop
The title is misleading. Wal-Mart can't fix US healthcare. But Wal-Mart can make big inroads into fixing prescription drug access. But there are so many problems in healthcare that Wal-Mart isn't positioned at all to fix. Tens of millions of Americans need health insurance (though the 47 million number that is thrown around includes many who are young and don't want insurance, and many people in between jobs and temporarily uninsured). If Wal-Mart can't insure it's own employees, I don't think they'll become the health insurance provider for underserved Americans.

That said, here is another problem that Wal-Mart can "fix": It's too hard, and too expensive to see a doctor for a minor illness. CVS' MinuteClinic and related offerings by Wal-Mart are trying to exploit this niche.

But basically, there is too much wrong with healthcare for any one entity (incl the gov't) to "fix" it. As an administration official said (privately): "The great thing about health policy, is that your education & training is still useful. The issues we're facing now are the same ones we were facing 30 years ago!"
if you're really good at sales

any particular reason you need to be good at sales to be an entrepreneur-in-residence?
You either bring to the table the tech aspect of entrepreneurship or the business/sales side.
Sure, but ultimately it just boils down to "some miraculous future technology will fix it", biotech or whatever.

I think I read recently that the plants that were turned into oil actually are from a time when there was no process in nature yet that could process the bound carbon (similar to plastics today). So it was never part of the natural cycle.

I thought more about the proposed "super-carbon-harbouring trees", but really, how should that work? Any plant that does that would have to be more efficient than existing plants, meaning it would replace the natural plants. Dangerous game to play? (Those genetically engineered plants would definitely replace existing plants, if only because humans would plant massive amounts of them).
When he brought up Grameen Bank as the kind of thing that TechCrunch wouldn't bother reporting on I became incredulous and thought "um, Kiva?" So I went to techcrunch.com to find their post on Kiva. Which doesn't exist. Not only have they never written directly about Kiva but when they mention it they characterize it as a p2p-lending site rather than as a microfinance organization.
Monkey feeds itself using its brain to control robotic arm
What amazes me is that progressives simultaneously believe that 1) the U.S. government is controlled by special interests ( insurance companies, the AMA, drug companies ) and 2) we should give the government more power to regulate healthcare. If you believe 1), then doing 2) means giving even more power to the special interests.

Anybody who wants the US healthcare system to look more like Europe's, must also come up with a realistic way of 1) replacing our Congressional system with a Parliamentary system, and 2) curbing the power of the lobbies. Otherwise, any plan to use government to make healthcare better will be co-opted by the special interests and end up making the healthcare worse.
Living in New York, I completely concur that it sends a message about having more money, and I suppose it significantly shapes my own thinking. I've noticed it even more in other people.

Just two nitpicks about the essay. First, I think that, in the London of Oscar Wilde, you would have seen "hipness" as being important. Plenty of hip dandies of the time, Wilde included, did not descend from the aristocracy of the time. Second, I'm not so sure about the required jackets for men metric. For one thing, some of the nicest restaurants in New York wouldn't bat an eyelash about a patron in jeans, for precisely the reasons you discuss. I would trust what Zagat has to say on the matter. I think a better metric would be how many men choose to wear a jacket and tie, and on that score, I suspect that New York still loses out as a startup hub.
Don't you have to be a "qualified investor" to invest, for equity, in a private company? I think you want to talk to a lawyer before you try this.
Which day job would you choose ?
So about a year ago I took a job at Big Internet Company that was advertised as design of brand new back-end architecture, blah, blah. Reality is mostly support of legacy codebase, operational work and requisite lip service to various "initiatives". ("16 is the minimum, ahkay?")

Startup (had a blast at "school" - thanks PG!) is not an option at the moment due to family situation, but I have an offer to join a different, very technical team within B.I.C. that is working on a new, fairly substantial networking product. No frills, heavy-duty C systems programming in Linux (which I am good at and enjoy).

However: hideously boring job #1 is really only half-time, leaving good chunks of time for hanging out at Chochky's and playing with (and quite possibly sneaking into production) bits Erlang, which I am presently in love with and want to learn inside out.

I suspect job #2 would be pretty much all-consuming, at least for the foreseeable future, leaving no such opportunities to play.

Which would you choose ?
To become an EIR you have to have relevant experience and a successful prior career / first venture
Good point and good question. I'm not entirely sure, but perhaps it's a combination of one feature and one trait.

Single threading (as used by MetaFilter) forces / encourages people to take note of nicknames in order to target specific responses, so nicknames become a lot more relevant.

Secondly, discussions tend to roll on and on on MetaFilter, whereas it's uncommon for two people to respond back and forth more than once on HN stories.
Swastikas aside, I don't personally feel they're a good solution. They can be useful in semi-anonymous situations to determine one person from another (or an impostor posing as someone else), but I don't find them even vaguely recognizable from one another in the most case. They're very easily confusable.
Frankly this type of monitoring (geographically dispersed) is most often requested by pointy haired bosses. Measuring is great if what you're measuring is realistically under your control. If your app is slow in Outer Mongolia, are you going to upgrade the internet backbone there? Or go upgrade the users dialup modem?

Only pay the extra to measure response time from say, china, if you have a target response time in mind, money, and a plausible plan to improve it if it does not meet the target. Otherwise, spend the money on making your app faster by load testing and scaling it locally and paying for a reliable, professional host. This is not to say don't monitor--you need to watch relative response times and downtime, but the services you're describing cost a lot more, and buy you very little.

Edit: Also, I strongly suggest transactional monitoring. If your monitor plays a transactional script (add to cart, checkout, etc) as opposed to a simple page request and you monitor the returned content, you will be able to catch all sorts of errors that are missed by simple page checking. (someone kicked the database ethernet cord out, db lost connection, etc),
If you want to save lives, you are wasting your time with medicine.

http://hanson.gmu.edu/CutMed.htm

To save lives and improve the quality of life, you'd be better off providing EVERY American with access to a gym.

Exercise adds 15 years to your life. It's pretty difficult to show statistically that marginal medical treatments (medical treatments that people purchase if they are cheap, but not if they are expensive) do anything.
What you're really saying is: there's no money. Insurance is basically a means of pooling together money then someone has to assign to fix the people that need it.

That's not what's wrong with healthcare. What's wrong with healthcare is that the lower middle to middle class don't have much money to be taxed with or to contribute to healthcare.

At the end of the day what needs to be done is someone needs to figure out how to get money and spend it wisely. Both the government and businesses do a shitty job with this.
I'd love to do this too. It would be great to have a stock market for very early stage startups. SEC regulations make it tough though.
I guess I wasn't verbose enough in introducing that into my point. Yes, you do need to be successful and really smart with technology or sales in order work as an EIR.
Cities based on ideas are made of straw... and why Paul Graham is wrong about New York City
"OR, the smaller competitor will deliver a much smaller and simpler product for less money and build a solid reputation as a high value low cost provider who's not over pricing their software"

That's only possible if there has been a paradigm shift that the original poster has not identified. He's stated a few times that his company is operating on thin margins. I'm gonna give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he's running an efficient shop.

I don't believe that leaves room for a "low cost" competitor at the bottom. And, unless it's a commodity, it wouldn't matter anyway. People who do these kinds of acquisitions make a check list...the product that checks off the most items on the list, and brings in a reasonable bid vs. all of the other bidders, gets the contract. It's not like consumer markets.

I still suspect the OP is charging too little, if his product is good, because being the low cost provider in just about any market is not a good place to be. Margins are thin, customer satisfaction is low (think eMachines and Packard Bell vs. Apple and ThinkPad) and you can't make enough to push forward on the projects that'll help you grow and provide better services.
Sizewell nuclear power station out after power returns
An Engineering Update on Powertrain 1.5
Jason Calacanis: Poker ace or problem gambler?
Microsoft demos 'touch Windows'
Try webperform. They were purchased by Gomez, but basic remote testing is free:

http://www.webperform.com/

Most frontend optimizations will help everywhere, so as ericb says, do those first. We turned on a CDN (Panther) and used this service and some others from Gomez to test the results.
I really liked this. Most of my baseline thinking on ambition, social class and the like comes from Veblen and some assorted anthropological reading. From what I understand, it turns out that in every human society (that western anthropologists have studied & documented), there is an overt desire for (and so often competition over) social status. While wealth, power, ladies and fame are some of the most common types of social currency, they aren’t universal – in some cultures, you’re the man if you grow the biggest vegetables in town.

Each of the areas you pointed out each has its own status game rolling already. In my limited experience, San Francisco generally appreciates for “doing good”; my friends and I seem to treasure “creating value,” building things, and being constructive, but we all love our buddy who runs a nonprofit that works with inner city youth. He’s the man. My friends in NYC, on the other hand, don’t even try to justify shaving basis points with talk of serving the greater good by making markets more efficient.

One of the positive perspectives I draw from the status game is that if or when it’s incentivized correctly, things can (could?) get noble in a hurry. Lifeguards in San Diego and Hawaii get respect, as do firefighters and cops in New York and professors in Cambridge. The social esteem that these jobs convey helps to make up for the shitty hard currency they’re worth. Now we just have to translate the social currency of nobility into beachfront property for teachers.
omfg. This is from the CrunchBase description of Kiva:

"Kiva is alone in their business model of online p2p lending to entrepreneurs in developing countries as a nonprofit entity. Other p2p lending sites, like Prosper, Zopa and Lending Club, make lower-risk loans to people in the same country as for-profit entities. Online p2p lending is new and it is hard to maneuver around financial regulations to make higher-risk, international loans as a for-profit entity, which is partly why Kiva formed as a non-profit."

Looks like these "new jounalists" could learn a bit from the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10section4.t-6.ht...
Startup Success Depends on Your Industry?
Nanotech material stops bleeding almost instantly
The Economics of "New Media"
I don't think the title is misleading. The author claims that Wal-Mart can lower health care costs and increase access to more people. Do you have any specific argument against that?

> If Wal-Mart can't insure it's own employees, I don't think they'll become the health insurance provider for underserved Americans.

Nobody said that they would, including the author. However, if Wal-Mart can work their magic on basic health care, then it becomes much easier to get by on a high-deductible catastrophe plan for most people.
Not just that. Healthcare has so many players that all need to be pleased to make anything happen. It's complicated because the payer and customer are different, unlike most other industries.
>This isn't about being "cost effective," it's about doing what is right.

There are a finite number of resources in this world and an infinite number of wants and needs. It is ALWAYS about being "cost effective". Money used on health care cannot be used on other things, such as education, transportation, or investment in a company that provides jobs and useful services.

How much medical care should everybody get? Should we be willing to spend $1 million to extend an elderly citizen's life for a year? Should EVERYONE have access to that quality of medical care? These are important questions. Cost and benefit must be weighed in health care, just like anywhere else.

Life is more complex than leftist soundbites, my friend. If spending $1 trillion extra on medicine would save a thousand lives, I would contest that it would not be worth it. The question is, how much of a reduction in the quality of life in America are you willing to accept for an improvement in the average quality of health care?
No. Please, no.
Well, healthcare != drugs. Yes, better medications are a part of providing better health care, and Wal-Mart can help a lot with that. But there is much more to providing quality healthcare.

I'm not criticising Wal-Mart - they're doing a great job lowering barriers to access. I'm just saying we should recognize the limitations and not call it a panacea for American healthcare.
I tend to agree with those who believe that your immediate community of associates to have a much larger effect on your personal outlook than the defining characteristic of the your city of residence as a whole (although certainly each major city has one).

For example, I went to college at the University of Virginia, where the career prospects of most graduates reside in DC. As a programmer destined for DC, the message was loud and clear: "Be a defense contractor." For my friends who were not in engineering, the message was equally clear to them: "Be a lawyer."

But personally I never really cared much for success as defined through local conventions, mostly because I got bored too easily, so I spent half my college years as a cartoonist. Around the drawing board, the message I got was : "Be funny." Granted, our school is mostly known for successful lawyers and politicians, but we do have Tina Fey as well.

When I did hang out with the CS kids, it was almost exclusively with the computer graphics guys, and from them the message was: "Make photorealistic real-time applications." (As opposed to "Be a defense contractor.")

After graduation I moved to New York as a software engineer at a very large financial firm, and again I mostly managed to avoid the "Get rich" attitude prevalent in NYC by working with a small group of engaged CS folks some of whom were also start-up founders.

In none of the above situations was my local sub-group larger than a dozen individuals tops. Majority ambition can rarely ever suffocate sub-communities. The real danger is that a small community is vulnerable from disintegrating at any time. For example, all the previously mentioned clusters eventually dispersed, from graduation and corporate turnover and they are never immediately replaceable. In a place like Cambridge or Palo Alto, I suspect this would not be such a major risk.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: if your city's message as listed by pg is incompatible with what you want in life, don't freak out.
I apologise... It's your blog, and you didn't submit it. They're your opinions and you're certainly entitled to them.

However, I'd say if you want them to be taken seriously sticking to the facts is a better tactic rather than accusing everyone else of being biased.
Building Vibrant Communities
i'm lazy. I'd rather get paid the same for 1/2 the work and leave the creative stuff for my own time.
It depends on what you mean by app performance.

The company I work for (www.alertsite.com) provides basic site/service monitoring that is great for measuring basic infrastucture performance like: DNS, TCP conn, First byte, and HTML content.

We also offer measurement from the web browser that shows an incredible amount of detail about every aspect and object on the page. We call this service DejaClick and it is available for free on the desktop (www.dejaclick.com).

DejaClick is great for transactional monitoring that can visit your site, run a search, view information, login, etc.

DejaClick monitoring for a web application provides the most authentic view possible of website performance as it is measurement from the web browser.

Ken Godskind
www.alertsite.com
Early healthcare tends to reap huge benefits. AKA prevent someone dieing at birth and you add ~70 years. Older patents and random accidents reduce the possible gains. The second cheapest group to save is emergency room patents where minimal treatment can have dramatic effects. Exercise falls into the next group where huge investments in time reap huge long term benefits. (Someone making 50$/hour * 3 hours a week * 50 weeks a year = 7500$ / year.)

A 5$ per month medicine is a lot cheaper than exercise so it's long term benefits don't need to be on the same magnitude to be vary worthwhile.
Service to determine site platform
Does anyone know of a website which will accept a URI and return a description of the platform and applications used to host, deliver and build the site. I thought I had one in my del.icio.us saves...but seems to be mia.

Thanks,
Tom
My professor's view was also that D and F were pretty much the same also, you can't get very many Ds and stay in school. D is kind of like a "high fail." I believe we were limited in the number of Ds on our transcript for graduation, although I don't remember anymore.
Well, we'd like to curb the influence of special interests before giving the government more power. And while I'm at it, a moon base would be pretty cool, too.
collectivists are always cheerful until they meet people who don't agree with them. why do you think socialism works so well for several small european countries? homogeneity.
Yes. All institutions are governed by incentives. The Government is not run by angels, but men. Furthermore, being the largest organization of any sort in the entire world, it has a particularly byzantine, inefficient, and wasteful web of contradictory incentives that govern it.

It amazes me that people use such sloppy thinking when it comes to politics. "We'll should use the government to do X" is not the end of the conversation. We must ask how likely it is to carry out the goals given it, how much it will cost to do so compared to alternative solutions, etc.

Edit: In Economics this line of reasoning is called "Public Choice Theory"
So you're saying it's not poison to potential investors? ;)
Job #2. With incredibly boring work, you burn out, your quality becomes sloppy, you lose your edge.

Luckily for you the boring job is only 1/2 time, but what if the politics change and you are forced to work there 60-80 hours a week?
If you do start your own VC firm, take these considerations into account:

_____________________________

So far, the "design spec" for the next-generation vc seems to be:

1. Invests $250-500k

2. Gets back to the applicants with a yes/no decision in 24 hours (can't find the pg essay).

_____________________________

Taken from here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163717