skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Do VC's really want to build companies to feel good about themselves, or to show off, or to look better? Only if those companies make money."

I think you misunderstand the VC business. They charge a fee for managing money. Therefore, their business is attracting investment. This is exactly how mutual funds operate as well.

Now, they stand to make money when their funds make money through various incentives and so forth. But by far the biggest incentive is that if they have a home run, they get more money invested, which means more management fees.

So aren't they incented to make money for their investors?

Not really: if they have a string of modest investments, averaging out to making money, they will not attract a lot of capital: the money will flow to the VCs that have name brand hits.

Whereas if they have a ton of total and otherwise embarrassing failures but hit one out of the park, they will get a ton of new money when they start another fund.

Or if their portfolio companies are the darlings of the press, they will get a ton of new money when they start another fund

So...

Their strongest incentives are to own companies that get a lot of press and hopefully get a few really press-worthy hits.

That is a lot like patronage to me.
The Papernet
Or: How to freak your visitors out
Was that supposed to be a book review? Because it read like a bad middle-school synopsis.
I've put together a Yahoo Pipes mashup that filters TechCrunch stories. It's accessible at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.info?_id=KCPCxw8t3RGoQM1ML... ; you should be trivially able to look at its source and modify it to filter whatever sites you don't need. Easy and fun.

You should be able to subscribe to the RSS directly at http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=KCPCxw8t3RGoQM1MLe...
http://www.doqs.com/rvethcs.htm,

>At one point a friend, Paul Graham, suggested that the attempt could be used for Robert's dissertation.
not an issue. make it reversible within some small time frame, like 5 minutes.

interesting point about errors being a natural part of the data, though. i didn't think about that.
Share your mobile scripts using paper: Embedding script directly into QR codes
In his book (The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership) Steven Sample (the president of my alma mater, USC) talks about how he doesn't read newspapers, but rather gets his news from his peers.

He figures they're a pretty good filter, and if anything important or interesting happens he'll hear about it through them.

I take a similar approach with Hacker News. You guys are my filter. 90% of TechCrunch articles are uninteresting to me, but the other 10% usually get posted to Hacker News.

Same with a lot of other sites. I prefer lots of niche blogs/news sites to the more mainstream and high traffic sites.
Confessions of an open source free rider
I'd like to see the threshold for the front page raised just a bit. I think there are too many stories making it to the top, and personally I find it hard to assume a TC post is meaningful when it has a score of merely 4.

This is true for news from other sources by the way. I see the problem as an infoglut rather than any sort of predisposition towards one source over another.
Synsepalum dulcificum: A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue
I agree that it sucks, but it makes sense from their perspective. Frankly, they could charge that much, and people and financial institutions would pay for that data.

Find me a business where you have a natural monopoly that isn't regulated, and you don't milk it for all it's worth. They're just too lucrative not to profit from it, and frankly I'm surprised that even now Yahoo has made it free.
i've seen a few articles doing the same thing but none of them have given away any decent ideas.
Netvibes CEO Steps Down; Widget Platform Will Open Up
Is open source really a more disruptive competitor than Google to Microsoft?
i read this post again and again and realized that most of the comment is for you becoming a VC - a VC is someone who invests other people's money, are you sure you want to do that??? because what i understand from your question is you just want to invest along with other like minded people, right?

couple of months a go even i didn't knew that a VC is different than an investor...becoming a VC (or running a VC firm) and becoming an investor, both are different and distinct. Both have pros and cons along with different sets of roles and responsibilities.
Tel Aviv: You should be moving faster. A lot faster.
Dublin: Be wittier then smart.
Melbourne: I agree. Its a confused message that definitely has to do with sports not clothes.
Mysterious Apple Product Arrives in North America
Quotes of the day: Drucker edition
Cleaning Up Detergent
Brightegg Launches FREE Website Builder
Full pdf version of the article "Managing Oneself" from which these quotes are taken is available at http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=h...
If you look carefully, you'll see that the photos (and the design of the laptop) is intended to visually hide how THICK it is.

In the past 3 years Dell has been producing junk laptops.

I will not buy one again and I caution anyone who thinks of buying one to see it in person first, lift it, and check if it's constructed well before purchasing it. Lately they have cheap keyboards, awful trackpads and buttons, and they are ridiculously thick.
I'm guessing 90% of the active visitors to Hacker News get the TC RSS feed

I'd guess it's much less than that. I used to have TC in my feed, but there were so many articles it was hard to keep up. I've found that, at least relative to my interests, the signal-to-noise ratio at TechCrunch is too low; Hacker News is my filter for picking out the signal.
Cheaper, simpler than alternatives? Check.

Competing against non-consumption? Check.

Success encourages competitors to flee upmarket? Nope.

Reference: The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen.
This is one of PG's more observant and better essays. I was just in Boulder, CO and I tried to figure out if I could move back there from Silicon Valley. Not sure.

One thing I think that PG missed is that some cities have a blend of ambitions that lean on each other. NYC differs from LA or the Bay Area in that it is a power center for many different fields (Finance, Arts, Literature, Media, Political (UN based there)) while the Bay Area is technology, LA is entertainment and Washington DC, political power. That mix leads to better eavesdropping. London is about the only other place where I get the mixed vibe. Cambridge is interesting in that MIT and Harvard shape different spectrums of thought leading to an almost NYC kind of diversity Whereas Stanford and Berkeley compete on the same spectrum of fields, but on different levels of social class.

I wonder if PG forwarded this to Joel Spolsky who is about creating a different kind of start up in a NYC mold instead of SV mold.
Free Sysinternals Windows utilities now available online
Live At D6: Mark Zuckerberg
Ask YC: Feedback on early version of my startup, a digital whiteboard that doesn't suck
> They are the preeminent news source

Except when Mashable writes about something first and TechCrunch refuses to follow.
Ich bin ein Berliner:  eduFire Offers Language Tutoring over Video Chat
That's the point (see the referring link for pg's discussion on why this would be a lot closer to ideal.)
I think newspapers usually use single quotes when paraphrasing someone (e.g., http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/24856034/).

I doubt Arrington has taken Journalism 101.
I was frustrated by how annoying other options for digital whiteboarding were. Most cases I (and others I know) just fell back to using a physical whiteboard, or overusing words when a quick picture would do the job much better. In brief, I felt the existing apps out there didn't do enough to enhance our ability to communicate visually.

So I rethought what the UI should be to make it easier, faster and more natural to use. And here's the result. It's in Flash but is still relatively lightweight. I feel tempted to list out all the unique features, but I'd rather you give it a spin and let me know what you think.

You can see the video at: http://www.dabbleboard.com/main/video
Just think that today, if the same thing had happened and that conversation had occured --- prior to the launch of the worm, that is --- Graham would likely be prosecuted as an accessory.
Ok, that's an awesome collaborative whiteboard. Nice to propose a simple UI for it. Suggestions:

1. Manual save, on the toolbar. For the savaholics!

2. It's somewhat fast at refreshing, but have a dedicated Refresh button on the toolbar, not under the Share panel. If I'm working with some friends and they're all editing, I want to refresh it. Kind of like when you know Twhirl/any other desktop Twitter client is going to fetch new tweets automatically, but you still feel like refreshing.

2.1. Alternatively, let me move the Share Panel around. This could be an option you implement in conjunction with the above.

2.2. Alternatively, have a refresh button only when the document is shared.

3. When you save current document automatically, show it in the documents dock, just to give people reassurance, and to familiarize them with the UI.

4. Anglular (Z, etc) vectors turn into angles, not rectangles.

4.1. Freehand mode by default.

--EDIT--

5. I realize it's hard (with regard to the sharing and synchronization of the whiteboard shared users), and probably something to think about for the future, but uploading of images to use as objects would be extremely useful in, say, mocking up UIs collaboratively, or diagramming.

6. Maybe make the text feature more noticeable by making a text tool button on the toolbar. Most people will learn using the app by trying it, not by watching the video. (I didn't, at least.)

This is impressive. Great work with it, I will be definitely using it!
Monkey's brain controls robot arm
There is a world of difference between cutting 8 $20k checks from 100+ applicants and cutting 1 $160k check on the fly. Yes, it would be awesome if we could just pull $200k out of the sky on a day's notice. But unless the dollar goes somewhere very unpleasant, that isn't going to happen.
Isn't this like saying "the primary skill needed to be a software entrepreneur is the ability to get purchasing managers to write checks, not the ability to write good code"?
iPhone SDK Beta 6 is here
"brought down the Department of Defense Arpanet computer network last week for a day and a half"

So RTM literally brought down the internet?
There seems to be a growing trend of proclamations and conjectures against the quality and quantity of items on this site. However, I'll dissent and say that I'd rather see more activity around those items than items like this discussing how there aren't enough of the right kind of items..
USAMO and IMO problems are about the same difficulty. Try some of the easier ones first - they are in order of difficulty, so the first ones are generally easier. In general geometry is more likely to require specialized knowledge; go for the problems that sound "programmy". Putnam problems are about the same average level of difficulty but there is more of a gradient from A1-A6 and B1-B6.
This is a nice book: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0486647250
This is really cool. If you incorporate collaboration functionality it could also be very useful for presentations or online meetings.
I like it. If I were you, I'd give it Visio features and sell it for $10/50 diagrams/month to small/medium companies.
That's very similar to what I did with some friends. We are a group of 4, one of us is the active project manager. We are in our 4th project already and the current one is even more exciting and profitable than the others. 3rd and 4th projects were in Bulgaria though, we recognized the US bubble pretty early.

I'd be really interested to participate in small scale tech investments as well. In a year or two I'd like to start something like that if it's not yet available. Again, it is my feeling that there are interesting opportunities in the countries with rapidly growing economies.
not a title with no supporting arguments.
I often ask myself the same question, BUT I am glad they do because it opens up the conversation here and the techcrunch comments are filled with 'firsts' and 'fake someone famous'.
Wow that was amazingly fast feedback! Thanks!

1. Good idea, was considering that anyway as a way to reduce my database load, as opposed to saving every 4 seconds (if you change the drawing) which is what I'm currently doing. (I'm a hardware engineer and this is my first webapp: I just found out writes to the database are really really slow. Will explore memcached optimizations too.)

2. The intent of the refresh button is for when you're sharing the drawing with others (I initially wanted realtime refresh, but got worried about performance). Hence I put the button under the share panel. But I guess you're right, you would need to refresh more often than you'd need to see who else you're sharing with or to add people for sharing...

2.1 This should be trivial. Will do :).

3. (Not sure if you saw the video or already know this.) The pane on the left is the library pane (or "documents dock") that shows all your saved drawings. The idea is the current drawing is just like any other drawing in the library, just that it's got the focus for now. Or is this idea non-intuitive?

4. The issue is how often would you want to draw angular vectors, compared to rectangles. As an "optimization" for the UI, I allow users to draw a rectangle with just 2 sides rather than all 4 sides (which also works), because I expect them to be very common.

Thanks so much for the feedback! And I'm elated that you'd actually use it!

EDIT

5. You're the third person that asked for this feature, so now it's on my near-term to-do list. I don't think it's hard; just to eat the cost of the bandwidth and storage (which currently is very low).

6. Hmmm... I personally hate revisiting the toolbar each time I have to enter text, so I don't (yet) agree. This is on my "wait for more users to ask for this feature" list :).
That's why Google would have failed completely if it required a monthly subscription (actually Google's a bad example since it was already a crowded market full of free search engines, but whatever).
There is collaboration functionality already. Click the "Share" button on the top-right. It's not truly real-time yet though. (You either share offline, or if working online together, you have to hit the annoying refresh button).

I need to figure out long-polling/Comet and see if I can make true real-time work.
1. I was surprised when all my drawings turned into squares. Freehand mode should probably be the default since that's what most people will expect from a whiteboard.

2. You don't recognize triangles.

3. Instead of having two modes, could you just have freehand mode with shape buttons in the toolbar? I say this because the shape recognition didn't work that well and I ended up needing to customize the shapes anyway.

4. You should mark where the last click was. I moved my mouse after clicking and had no idea where the text would show up.
1. I'd also expect that database writes are ridiculously slow when you're talking realish-time collaboration.

3. Got your point. I noticed that it was only pushing the current document to the documents pane when I was creating a new document. I'm used to the Google Docs approach - that is, if you make a new document and change it, it'll be in your documents, saved. Maybe, though, your approach may work better in this aspect.

4. Yeah, that makes sense. I think it's only a problem if you're a new user and are just messing around with it, the real usage of angular vectors is probably very little :)

No problem - best of luck!

EDIT -

6. That's true - definitely agree with you there.
I agree. I have a dell (supplied by my employer), which while powerful, it is very heavy, the screen sucks, the battery went dead after one year and a little bit, and it came preloaded with lots of crap, and it is fugly dark grey color.

Their monitors are decent and cheap, (I have had few, with no problems), but their laptops seems to have suffered a lot in the cost cutting department.
Thanks! I was thinking of a similar pricing plan. I worried that companies wouldn't be comfortable with the security issues of having their drawings on my servers though. Any tips on what I could do to make the service secure, and to make them trust me?

Btw, just like Basecamp is the anti-Project, I'd like to think of Dabbleboard as the anti-Visio (or anti-Netmeeting-whiteboard) :).
Or allow diagram creation and saving on the site for free and charge a fee for downloading a PDF/visio format of the diagram.

EDIT: PS Very cool.
This is awesome, wii fit just dropped and someone has already taken it to the next level. Very cool manipulation of the wii, interested to see whats next.
This is pretty neat. A few feature suggestions:

1) Constrain aspect ratio on resize when holding down a control key.

2) I really like the way it guesses that you're trying to draw a circle when your freehand is sufficiently curved. A neat addition to this would be bezier spline interpolation for smooth curves if it's clear that the user isn't drawing a closed loop.

3) Import existing image as shape.

4) Shapes library (for things like ER diagrams, UML, etc...)
Not defending it so much as pointing out that it is a bogeyman. Bringing up George Bush is a pretty sad straw man, so please skip it. I'm just glad to've had my hunch confirmed. I know Canada is all-too-willing to imprison people for speech violations, and I'm quite happy it hasn't come to that here yet. Of course, it will eventually.
Make sure the logo is professional looking! I am only half kidding.

But apart from that, why not just go ahead and try pitching it to them as it is? There's tons of value in here even without adding security. If you later figure out that security issues make or break the deal, then you can revisit this issue (or keep working on it in parallel.)
This is good, you should submit to Techcrunch after iterating based on feedback.
Not bad.
Why everything I draw must be a circle, square or line. Sometimes i need a curvy line, or a angled one. Don't force everything.
Need shapes. More of them.
Visio is a pretty decent tool, (Omnigraffe for macs is good too), try to copy some features they have, but make them a simpler as possible.

Then allow me to export it in different formats, Visio being one of them, as it seems it is the tool used the most.
this is incredibly slick. i love how easy it feels. one major problem i faced -- once an object is selected, i thought dragging would move it, but of course it doesn't. That created a bunch of unneeded shapes for me.
Thanks! Btw, you can currently download a .png format for free, which I hope you'll be able to print with any program on your computer, or convert to pdf. Do you think there's value in doing a direct conversion to pdf?

Converting to Visio though probably will be a nightmare coz of MS's ugly proprietary format. Just coz of the complexity of doing this, in spite of its value, it'll probably be lower on my priority list.

Btw, currently this goes a little more head-to-head with whiteboarding apps like Netmeeting or Webex's whiteboards (or even MSN messenger's built in whiteboard), and less with tools like Visio/Omnigraffle, that have to be much more sophisticated and give users much more control to make pretty diagrams.
Or on the other hand ... "once you've been a student, please stick around and join a high tech firm".

One of the most distinctive things about Cambridge MA is the concentration of large numbers of people stay in the area who are intellectuals but are not working closely with the colleges -- instead they're at IT startups and biotechs & pharmas of all sizes.

In a New York their numbers would be swamped - and there are loads of intellectuals in Manhattan & Brooklyn, just less than financiers, fashionistas, and hipsters -- but greater Boston is just not that big.

On the other hand, Cambridge, England is, despite being arguably a better place to study (quieter, and more supportive institutionally) just too small for this -- almost everyone moves away from the city once they are not formally a member of the university, most commonly to London.

Of course I could be biased by seeing the job ads in Lisp on the Red Line :)
Here's a feature request: allow users to embed a given drawing into blogs, etc. That would be a killer feature, imo.
Thanks! Other shapes are planned: diamonds and triangles for sure. I want curved lines but haven't figured out the UI for them yet (I'd need an additional handle compared to straight lines, to allow the user to change the control point and hence the curvature.)

Yep Visio and Omnigraffle are definitely the heavyweights of drawing. They have lots more features; which in particular do you think are most important? (I think even stuff like solid/gradient shapes & shadows are superfluous, but I'm just one user :)).
Excellent! I've been looking for one of those for ages.

Only problem I found so far:

I started a drawing, clicked sign up to share it and it was gone.
Shame on you Paul. You discriminate against startups because of where they setup!

Seriously. In an Internet age it's less important.

I know many people depend on others to give them ideas, encourage their thinking and drive them in whatever direction. There are other kinds of people in the world. You may not hear of them but they're there. Maslow's self actualisers, the prophet in his desert cave... Often times their thoughts and interests are so different from those around them that they are in an intellectual wilderness with no option to escape. For them Cambridge or LaLa land are pretty irrelevent, no place is going to help them.

Now in that case the net may ultimately have a real impact.

If they can get a filtered group devoid of trolls, newbies and all the things that destroy and dilute real thinking they might be better off in a virtual community.

Your message is meaningful for many but it ignores an important sub set.
I suggest something light and something out of the ordinary to counterbalance. You'll never know for what type you are in the mood. Here are two that I love:

How to Solve It -- by G. Polya

http://www.amazon.com/How-Solve-Aspect-Mathematical-Method/dp/0691023565

Alice in Puzzleland -- by Raymond Smullyan

http://www.amazon.com/Alice-Puzzle-Land-Raymond-Smullyan/dp/0140070567
Request granted :).

You can already do that, altho I need to make it more obvious. Click Share -> Make Public. Now you have a public webpage you can link to, and you can directly embed the image in blogs too. (The latter part is non-obvious but you'll discover if you check source :)... tonite I'll fix this so that the public link reflects this option explicitly).
Good point. I should fix that. Thanks!
Zuckerberg and Sandberg On The State Of Facebook
D6 Highlights: Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker
Thanks everyone, I really wasn't criticizing anyone, just trying to get different view points. Lots of great feedback.
Yahoo BrowserPlus Challenges Adobe Air, Google Gears
This is pretty awesome! Very usable, not too many features but the ones you really need and they work really well. I can totally see this maximized on a virtual whiteboard too.

It would be pretty cool to have access to apps like this for integration with 3rd party sites. Even if they left the original site and went to yours but saved back to where they came from, that would be very useful. I know www.snipshot.com does exactly that for image editing and it works well. Perhaps that could be a paid service idea... :)