skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
DotCom bubble?  Blinded by fear.
I am following a link from member boh to :
A return to Stupidland: Ten years after the dotcom boom (independent.co.uk)

It's a nice personal account of appreciating lessons from the past. I believe PG has written that there is no bubble. I have to agree on that statement.

The dotcom bubble had totally different characteristics from today's upward shift. One can easily understand this difference from the IPOs of 1999. This was the target back then. Build it, grow it, sell it to the ignorants without any profit in the foreseeable future. Yes I know there were exceptions like Amazon that made it a few years down the line. However most of the entrepreneurs back then and their investors knew that their product/service will have no chance to make it in reality and all they wanted was the easy way out.

So what's the difference now?

Currently evaluations run high. Buyouts, not IPOs. If you don't like “Google” buying XYZ startup, just don't buy "Google" or sell it. However “Google” has a real sense of what they want to achieve and if they miss on a buyout, then they are the first to hit the ground. Hit the ground it is for some biggies, but we are not going to do name-dropping here. Their boards should have known better on who they put as CEO.

So are we seeing a bubble now?

Not by 10 million miles. And the reason is simple. Most of 1999 bubbles were copycats of the kind: Our Super Duper Site is going to be the NEW e-commerce market bla-bla that nobody thought and everyone needs. Give us 1 billion through IPO and we'll make it.

To begin with, the vast majority of Web 2.0 startups, are growing with “peanut” funding compared to 1999. However those that grow deliver good returns for their investors that are professionals (Angel Investors and VCs). So if someone takes a wrong call to invest in a startup, it won't be a pensioner hoping to turn 50$ into vacation in the Caribbean, but rather a professional who took a wrong bet. After all they know the odds and they have agreed to play the game. No tears.

Now not to underestimate the importance of Web 1.0, but Web 2.0 is the real revolution of IT in the cloud. One IT revolution was with the PC in the 1980s and the second one is Web 2.0. What are the reasons? In my opinion 2 main reasons:

1) Bigger bandwidth with popular DSL connections that can handle fairly demanding applications.
2) The explosion of publicly available open software tools from OS, to databases, to frameworks, to everything.

So when are we going to see another bubble?

I asked Nostradamus and he said in 6 years.
RGB is not able to represent all possible colors

Indeed, but it’s not completely an issue of gamut: the hue is always off even if it’s balanced against a card.
Sir, this is the Oscar. The Nobel Prize is in room 6F.
That Skytopia thing is crazy, you definitely need to stare for the full minute to get the effect though.

Also, any time I do these afterimage experiments I notice that my eyes are not very well aligned.
You miss 100% of the shots you don't take - Michael Jordan.

"Am I the only one who can't create a startup at the weekend?" -- your title suggests that you've tried, but your words say you haven't.

Don't disqualify yourself before you try, because until you try, you really never know
I, Lady Coder, will probably never go to a Hackathon.
Excuse me, but calling his position so contrary to "reality" is asinine. The internet has thrived and flourished for the past 20 years specifically because of a lack of government regulation - I don't know why it is so hard to believe that some people want to keep it that way.
Monkey - a new game programming language for the web, iOS and XNA
Investors/entrepreneurs are attracted to businesses that show promise to be profitable, and turn away from making investment in unprofitable businesses.

This is a basic economics principle - I'm not assuming anything. I cited hospitals as an example to illustrate this, because there are many stats, such as what I posted (not an assumption, but a study), which show it's not a very profitable business (relative other businesses) - and btw, neither is health insurance.

If you disagree, then look it up in a basic economics or finance textbook, here are a few explanatons of the relationship of investment, profitability and ROI:

"In other words, profit-seeking businesses operating in the private sector of the economy will be prepared to go ahead with an investment if they believe that the project will over its projected lifetime yield a real rate of return greater than if the money tied up in an investment project had been invested in the next best alternative way."

Macroeconomics - Capital Investment
http://tutor2u.net/economics/revision-notes/a2-macro-capital...

"The owners of a company and the company’s creditors share a similar goal: to increase wealth. They are thus very concerned about profitability in all phases of operations.

Creditors are specifically concerned that the company use its resources profitably so that it can pay interest and principal on its debt. Owners are concerned that the company be profitable so that stock values will increase. Company managers must show they can manage the owners’ investment and produce the profits that owners and creditors demand. Because top management must meet the profit expectations of company owners, it passes down to the lower levels of management those profitability goals, which are then spread throughout the company. All managers, therefore, are expected to meet profitability goals, which are often increased and tightened as each level of management seeks a margin of safety."

PDF - The Importance of Return on Investment: ROI
http://media.wiley.com/product_data/excerpt/50/04712037/0471...
Decentralization depends on standards, infrastructure and property rights. That's all. Bureaucrats and corporations not required. If you want to hook up your network to mine, so your users can share data with mine and vice versa, all we need is power, hardware, ethernet and good 'ol TCP/IP.

Net "Neutrality" advocates would make better use of their time starting their own networks, where anything neutral goes, including equal prioritization of XXX porn and 911 VOIP packets. On my network, if you freely agree to the terms, your porn packets would not be neutral. If you don't like that, you don't have to use my network. Don't like it? Tough. It's called freedom.
1) How are they responsible for the holes? 2) How would this make them money?
Long shot, but has it got anything to do with real estate? Intel and McAfee HQs are located within a mile of each other...
again, its a crazy angle, just putting it out there.
You realize that your Gym, not Groupon, decided to issue too many coupons that resulted in the hypothetical crowding situation? That is your Gym's fault.
I've read Slash's autobiography. It describes his life exactly as one, that is not in the know, would imagine it. That was in the eighties & nineties. Maybe times are different now.
I would most definitely use a version of this that pulled random photos from Flickr. That's a brilliant idea. Would also give clients a much better view of a mockup than just the gray boxes, by seeing what a mixture of different coloured photos look like.
Why do people generalize stuff about third world countries?

I live in Brazil, and electricity is as reliable as in the US and Europe.
Are you familiar with Whuffie, which was a fictional reputational currency?

I'm pretty sure that with the advent of decentralized currencies like BitCoin, we could probably implement Whuffie now.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Whuffie
I've seen Chrome plugins and I know there are Greasemonkey scripts for automatically LaTeXing plain text on web pages.

I don't think this is a viable solution for W|A, however.
I would go through the numbers with a fine tooth comb

For the number of accounts find out the number of actual active paying accounts if applicable. Some other numbers if they have them like advertising dollars spent per customer gained would give you an idea of the business viability.

The main thing you will get out of buying this is customers. I would also check though whether you are just getting a reseller account or are you getting rack space along with some servers that the customers are hosted on.

Web hosting companies usually come with some history. Do a search for the company on sites like www.webhostingtalk.com to see what people are saying.

Also I would ask them about their payment gateway and there current standing with their payment processor. Do they have 1000's of charge backs and are in poor standing or do they have measures in place to prevent this and all is rosy with the processor.

From a legal point of view get someone (depending on local laws) to trawl though all there accounts to make sure there is nothing illegal i.e. pornography, file sharing etc as you don't want to be buying into something that could get you into serious trouble. Also make sure they have legit software licenses for any non free software that is in use.

As staunch mentioned getting an accountant to go through their books is a no brainer.

I hope this helps it was a bit of a brain dump. I can go into more info about different topics if need be.
A Federal Shutdown Could Derail the Recovery
This is absolutely gorgeous. The only thing the standard RGui has on it is basic emacs/bash-ish keybindings (C-e, C-a, etc.) for navigation.
Google Revamps to Fight Cheaters
"Bringing security down to the hardware level only means you'll be enabling virus-access to the hardware level"

How does that follow? We've had "security" at the hardware level for years. The hardware is as accessible as it'll ever be -- it's only going to get more locked down from here.
Maybe someone should start selling software to scan for such hard-to-dislodge software and remove it. An anti-anti-virus scanner.
Myself, and my circle of friends, use Groupon and none of us could be accurately described as "coupon chasers". Frankly, articles like this come off sounding angry, jealous, and ignorant.
Sun went for less. Oracle sure got a great deal.
It's strange and awesome how the linux world always works out these collisions even though there's no governing body or group.
Webhostingtalk.com will give you plenty of discussions on that.

Depending on the quality, you should be paying from 1x on up; there are many factors.

They should have statistics, copies of bills from their upstream provider, bank statements showing X amount being deposited each month, etc. Try to get access to their ticketing system to get a feel for how much support (expensive) is needed each day/week/month.

Who does their accounting or taxes? If a CPA, they should be able to pull together plenty of verifiable info. No CPA worth his salt is going to lie to you on something he puts on paper.

For smaller operations, often you look at their online billing system (which can be checked out remotely as they are web-enabled) as well.

Involve a lawyer to draft documents concerning the sale, have some hold-back or money placed in escrow which they don't receive until 90 days later.
Yes but they are also cleaner and I can track clicks, for example if you go to http://bit.ly/ikAlLF you will see how many people clicked each link. What can I say, I love stats.
I think it's more startup founders who also have to have a foot in the business side of things. Sure people who just program don't need to know that stuff.
> You break the rules, you pay the consequences. Ignorance is NOT an excuse.

While this is technically true, I feel that it has slipped to the level of a polite fiction rather than a core civic principle. People pretty much never read contracts anymore because they've gotten so long and dense, and the contract writers know this and make them longer and denser anyway. Apple, among others, presumes you won't actually read their agreement before clicking through---they don't bother to sync up the printable version, don't provide a diff, and their system times out before you could possibly have read even a small part of the document. (I've written about this before, at some length: http://www.blahedo.org/blog/archives/001060.html .)
AWESOME book. My dad gave it to me when I was 12 or so and it made a huge impression on me.
For one thing, you should take phrases like "weekend project" with a grain of salt. People who share their projects on HN know they're facing a tough crowd, and understating their time investment is one way to deflect the inevitable nitpicks. Add to that the typical hacker bravado factor, and you can assume the real figure is well more than whatever you read.

That's not to say that anyone is being deliberately dishonest. Most "weekend" projects borrow code from weekday jobs, layouts from ThemeForest, and ideas from weeks of idle brainstorming. It's easy to forget in retrospect all of the time that went into laying that groundwork.
Succinct, excellent advice.
Yes. This should work: http://www.wepay.com/blog/2010/03/11/5-things-i-%E2%80%9Ckne...
I can only comment based on my own observations, but I see two explanations:

1) Slash is an outlier. I'm sure there are rockstars and actors that spend most of their time doing drugs and chatting up models. There are probably people like this in all fields of life.

2) His public persona is greatly enhanced by writing an autobiography that portrays him as true rock'n roll. It's great marketing.

The truth is probaly somewhere in between.
I feel building a project from scratch with nothing in a weekend is no hugely likely. Most people I figure have all there ducks lined up so they are ready to hit the ground running 6pm Friday night.

An idea, maybe a rough wireframe all IDE's and tools ready to go.
I once read that colour-blind synaesthetes (or color-blind synesthetes, for you furriners) were able to perceive colours through synaesthesia that they were physiologically incapable of perceiving with their eyes. Thus they abnormally associated concepts with normal colours that were abnormal to them.
Pavel Cherenkov, Lewis Mumford, Aaron Copeland, Sammy Davis Jr, Jim Henson, Leonard Bernstein, BF Skinner, Greta Garbo, Roald Dahl ...

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=who+died+in+1990%3F
Given that the government exists first to protect the interests of the people, and given that many of these carriers operate with government granted monopolies, I find it hard to shed any tears for these corporations.

Please remember, network neutrality isn't springing out of a vacuum. This net neutrality movement comes in response to real world events and corporate mergers.
On the other hand, there is Charlie Sheen
For one book, it's The Mythical Man-Month.

Widely read, far beyond programming. Quoted everywhere. The inspiration for agile development. Beautifully, incisively written. Nails everything.

The author not only was a programmer, but headed up the largest commercial project ever taken of any kind, that bet the company (the most influential computer company, IBM).
Clickable: http://www.workola.com
Yeah, that's a rather important feature, given that airlines often run certain flights only on certain days. I don't personally do much business travel, so when I fly, my dates are extremely flexible.

It also seems to completely lack EasyJet, which makes it nearly useless for intra-Europe flights.

I've seen quite a lot of Hipmunk hype, and it does have a nice UI that presents information well. But in terms of actually finding the cheapest flight in a given time window, I'll stick with Kayak.
I wish we had s-node (s for synchronous) so we do:

session.start()
data.load()
template.render()

instead of the cretan labyrinth it becomes coding for a-node
Taken from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2270834, here are a few previous HN threads about this question:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2073239 Guide to Finding a Technical Co-Founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2056630 Can't Find a Technical Co-Founder? Do It Yourself

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2018618 Non-programmer founders: learn code first, find tech co-founder(s) after?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1983569 Finding co-founders, where and how

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1882090 How to Find a Technical Co-Founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1872960 Finding a Technical Co-Founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1866516 Dont look for a co-founder. Find a Right Hand Man

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1823724 Find Co-Founders, Don't Get Screwed

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1820875 Not in the Valley? How do you find co-founders?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779750 How To REALLY Find A Technical Co-Founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1779092 How find co-founder online?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1778191 Ask HN: Finding a Co-Founder at a Hackerspace

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1689751 Can't Find a Technical Co-Founder? Do It Yourself

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1677066 Network Launches to Help Entrepreneurs Find Co-founders

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576186 Last Call: Pitch to find a Co-Founder at The Founder Conference

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1575105 Does "finding co-founders" ever work?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1567469 Ask HN: Where is the best place to find a co-founder?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1512715 How to find a co-founder

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1511965 Ask HN: How do you find/meet tech co-founders outside of the hotspots?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1509775 Finding the Right Co-Founder for Your Startup

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1373858 Strategies for Finding the Co-Founder of Your Dreams

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1367637 FoodSpotting founder on finding co-founder, marketing & female entrepreneurs

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1347723 Ask HN: How do I find the right co-founder?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1307167 Help a Startup Out - Get feedback, find co-founders, find advisors, etc.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1297382 Ask HN: Where To Find Design Founders

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1294713 Vokle founder: how to find great programmers & making the most from events

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1238947 Ask HN: I'd like to find Co-Founder(s) / Developers

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1086852 How to Find the Ideal Co-founder: A Seattle Startup Experiment

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=912667 Find a co-founder with this new MeetUp

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=876010 Finding Your Co-Founders

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=849737 Ask HN: Finding Developer/Engineer Co-Founder?
I think this post has a very smart idea in it. In essence, the author proposes that Groupon readers design 'deal templates' and businesses fulfill them. This way, Groupon is creating true customers, not deal chasers.

The idea of 'demand-driven' Groupon is an instance of a larger trend: demand-driven marketplaces. Before the Web almost all markets were supply-driven. Suppliers bring the products and customers can only choose from the list. With technologies like Google AdWords and Alibaba, customers get more power and pull the right products/content from producers. Idea of demand-driven marketplace can be applied to any market.

The real question is how much share demand-driven approach can get? Many customers still prefer the supply-centric world.
Just a note, I've switched from "Art of the Start" to "Reality Check" from Guy Kawasaki as my favorite, practical starting a business book. I think RC covers most everything in Art of the Start plus more.
I live next door to a celebrity chef. When I met him, he comes up to me, introduces himself like he's running for office, then there's this pause because he's waiting for the typical "regular guy meets celebrity" reaction. "Haven't you heard of me?"

Nope sorry. As far as I'm concerned you're just my neighbor who doesn't walk his dog and lets the yard fill up with dog poop.

I much prefer attitudes like Annie Lennox, who once said something about how it's nice to do your own laundry for a change.
Sounds like he doesn't know how to present himself. "So what do you do?" "Have you heard of linux?" I'm SURE they'd say yes, it's in wallmart, even. so, "yeah, that's for computers!" "yeah. i made that. most of the web runs on it too."
Mar 3 Deadline: Demo Your Android App for Free in Austin
The event you'd demo at is in Austin, TX and on Mar 13, 2 blocks from the Austin Convention Center http://androidsxsw.eventbrite.com/.

In addition to getting your app infront of pubs like AndroidandMe, Intomobile and NetbookNews, you get to demo for than 500 Android enthusiast attendees and big brands like Motorola, Samsung and NVIDIA. For free entry, take the 5min to fill out this form by Thursday Mar 3: http://bit.ly/androidappshowcase

*Special Preference will be given to those of you who can prove demo-ability to large crowds. Video links official and otherwise welcome.
Oh, no wonder no one has heard of it. Oh well, RMS has it harder "I made Ga neeew plus lin ex?"
I remember some article about the band Elastica. They were on top of the charts, on the covers of magazines, they were "it." In contrast to the popstar image, they stayed in the hotel room, played Scrabble, went to bed early.
On the other hand, it is great for companies that are falsely accused, and the false accusation sticks. I've seen people make the most ridiculous false claims on forums, then others find these when Googling and repeat them any time the company gets mentioned. Several years later, someone will mention that company in passing, and then someone pops up saying they plant child porn on your computer or steal your credit card.

It's nice when going into a new line of business to be able to do it under a new name and not have to deal with that crap.
You could always provide the option to scrape them via giving a username and password, obviously not everyone would go for this but if you committed to deleting them after it or even noting when your done so people can change pass I would be fine with it.

Just looking at saved some of the most interesting questions would be, at what rate do people upvote/save and how some analysis on the group think I guess by seeing how much of a persons upvoted stories were exceptionally high upvoted stories or something.
The world runs on bad software
> Being able to view the site by making a temporary copy in your computer's cache is not clearly non-infringing. Someone aiding the creation of an infringing work can be acting tortuously in "contributory infringement" and hence linking to a website could, strictly, be tortuous.

Hmm, I hadn't thought about it from that point of view, but I think you're right. It seems like clear evidence that your copyright law (I assume you're in the US) has gone mad and needs to be put to sleep.
Meet The Newest Founders Den Tenant: Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom
... Keith Richard is another outlier, based on his book. Though he does mention the hard work, he also describes lots of debauchery.
Unless you tend towards exaggeration when describing things, you only need to re-read your own post to know the answer to this. You don't consider the leadership to have a blind spot that might be remedied, you consider them "shockingly incompetent". Unlike clumsily managed larger enterprises, they don't pay well, don't sound like they have any defensible advantages and are painted as being on the verge of shutdown. You're crediting the niche rather than the product itself for being able to generate revenue despite a lack of effort directed at winning and retaining clients.

If a job's sole saving grace is solving interesting problems and you've been the driving force behind finding a solution, surely there are better options open?
Hey shouldn't it be Linus's blog? You would only write Linus' blog if you were indicating plural possessive such as indicating that it is the Linus family's blog. Not sure about this one. Could it possibly be that Linus Torvalds made a mistake? I think so.
Note to Venture Capitalists: I Don't Need Your Money
Here it is with the CSS and images:

http://replay.waybackmachine.org/20080708195924/http://www.b...