skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure Facebook's investors would be happy with $400MM in pre-IPO shares, except in the unlikely event the service is generating significant revenue per user or bigger than all their location-based competitors before Facebook IPOs. I believe that's double Y Combinator's biggest exit, so it's not as if you can't pick up great hackers with great products and actual revenues for a lot less, and with pre-profit location-based startups being not-exactly-unfashionable at the moment Facebook are spoilt for choice if they want to make strategic acquisitions in that space.

I think Color have committed themselves to trying to build something big enough to be considered a Facebook alternative. Taking $41 million in a Series A buys you a lot of premature optimisation or a lot of runway if you don't think you're going to get a better valuation in a series B round. It also more or less rules out the quick exit.
My point is, if it was a publicity stunt, it was very poor.

When you launch a product, tell me why it's awesome and provide me with some minimal friction to get in there and try it. When I'm like "Whoa that's cool." then I'll care more about the creators.

If you're looking for people to help you out then say that outright. If I was a programmer looking to work at a startup, I'd have already glossed over this whole thing and moved on.

I'm not hating on you or anything. I'm trying to help you out. Another word of advice - don't write people off from a basic meeting with them. I didn't even know about HN until I was already working for a startup.
Interactive Timeline: Managing Your Money Through the Ages
Nice intro piece. Especially liked the breakdown of data structures in redis, comparing them to Ruby.
Nice list. Such lists are quite personal and depend on one's values and philosophy. Here's my own triage list:

1. Is it reproducibly making the program crash or corrupting data? If yes, stop everything, fix that right now, today, and issue a hot fix before 24 hrs have passed, preferably before 2 hrs have passed.

2. Things that are obviously annoying the heck out of a lot (a lot as in most that I know of) of customers even though no one has said anything specifically about it, but it's become obvious to me because of the kinds of trouble they are having. This sort of fix will often be subtle workflow issues, or things that are nearly invisible but which take a huge amount of trouble to implement. Few of my competitors address this sort of thing at all.

3. Features I personally want, really need, and have been thinking about for a long time. This includes features that customers have asked for where I have been convinced it is necessary and won't screw up the program by breaking its underlying paradigm or making the interface too complicated.
Okay, I'm confused. I get what the app is about and I get that this is just a product pitch, but what do I actually get if I donate?
Then I don't get the joke - it just sounds like you don't know what a data structure is. (I don't have downvote-superpowers, just offering an explanation)
The previous bubble took 5 years to form and about 2 months to go 'pop'. I'm not sure if that timetable is trustworthy, but we definitely seem to be accelerating along the curve.

Just thinking aloud here, but how on earth would you make a trustworthy timetable out of that observation? What do you measure? Economy was size A in year Y2K, technological faciliation was a level B, there were C people involved directly with the market; now the economy is size X, tech is level Y, and Z people are at the table... like why would you think one previous bubble was in some way proportional to a present one?

One last thing, what to make of Max Andreeson's pet theory that there never was a real dotcom 'bubble' - that a few companies were ridiculously overvalued but overall most were ok and in fact more investment should have happened (in a more diversified manner)?
Tasty CSS3 button with good affordance.
jabberwacky ==> Yes.. Always.

Did anyone else read this mentally in the voice of Orson Welles/The Brain?
Let's admit to ourselves. We don't want duke nukem forever to be released. It's legendary.
It's actually a good alternative to regular physical activity. You can do it anywhere for any length of time and it will dramatically increase the load you can withstand at a given angle.

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

"While dynamic exercises are slightly better than isometric exercises at enhancing the twitch force of a muscle, isometrics are significantly better than dynamic exercises at increasing maximal strength at the joint angle. Flexibility may be increased when isometrics are performed at joint range of motion extremes. These isometric contractions recruit muscle fibers that are often neglected in some dynamic exercises. For example, gymnasts are extremely strong at great ranges of motion through the practice of isometric holds."
Ironically, the Name That Color website reports the name of color #80881E is Trendy Green!

http://chir.ag/projects/name-that-color/#80881E
No, people can invest what they like and I'm sure that some of the investments that look stupid work out at least OK.

My point was more that you can't just assume that because smart people think X, X is true. I think this is especially true in the world on VC investment where the investors don't believe that every bet they make will come off - what they're looking for is enough of them to work out that they make a profit overall rather than that every single one nets them a return.

For the rest of us we can point and laugh for the most part because, hey, that's fun, and by coming on here and running our mouths we, in our own small way, bet in the investors do (though we gain or lose tiny bits of our reputation rather than cash). But we might also want it to inform our decisions when it comes to investments and choosing our next job.
If I were her I would immediately update the website to read I Wanna to Work at Color.
MontBlanc's Direct Mail Spam Campaign
Giga usually means 10^9 (or 2^30); don't you mean kilo-core?
I work in the tree fruit and small fruit industry. I'd like to carry this conversation further--would you send me your email--mine's in my profile.
Zferral.com: lean marketing for your business
Apparently, it has the 'Slashdot effect'. Case in point: this one.
Yey I got downvoted for a link to a test, and a possibly-too-modern but realistic view.
Sure, whatever. I think we're splitting hairs.

I think the overall point is that what we're currently engaged in isn't sustainable and the contraction is going to be painful when it hits in 6 months to a year once all the cheap money[0] dries up. There's a bubble within our asset class.

My question is: how does one short this phenomena?

[0] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2363903
That's pure bubble talk - "we don't have to generate profit to justify the investment, we'll just get acquired by someone else"

SOMEONE has to generate a profit based on the technology which justifies the investment or acquisition cost, whether it's color or their eventual acquirer.
same thing here except i would know what to do with 40M: use the software we're writing to launch the consumer-facing location-social google killer armed with AI! (buy servers and bandwidth etc)

isn't it strange? well, as a software devs we seem to have longer and harder path to breakeven.

but consumer startups seem need even more money to serve millions of customers, and the success chances seem a little higher than that of a lottery, as you should predict and check if the inconstant masses would like the app or not.

why we're not in a bubble then?
What makes a programmer
Shame. http://uk.gizmodo.com/5784454/browser-speed-tests-firefox-4-... and other reasons, such as Safari/Chrome/Opera extensions galleries.

I'd appreciate downvotes come with an explanation this time, so I learn.
Once you have access to a local shell, the game is over. Acquiring root is easy, between local exploits

uh, maybe you should work on that.
I think that searching all lg(n) items even if found in the first comparison is a performance killer. Binary search has poor cache locality of reference.

Normally you'd shrug off performance concerns, but the point of a binary search is to be fast.

Having said that, its like C's sort vs std::qsort - you get a big speed-up from the language mechanics and maybe that can swallow it all?
You can get a complete pdf download at http://issuu.com/thinkquarterly/docs/01-data#download

It requires a login though.
http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html
All that stuff could be getting submitted and just not upvoted, because it is boring.

It's not boring if you want to become very wealthy. For reference, see jasonlbaptiste's "How to become a millionaire in 3 years?" post:

http://jasonlbaptiste.com/startups/how-to-become-a-millionai...

These bits in particular:

Charge for something- Building a consumer property dependent upon advertising has easily made many millionaires, but it isn’t the surest path. It takes a lot of time and scale, which due to cashflow issues will require large outside investment probably before you are a millionaire. Build something that you can charge for. That’s how business has worked for thousands of years prior to the 1990s.

Make Sure You’re Robbing A Bank- When Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he said because that’s where the money is (Thanks to edw519 for this phrase). Make sure whatever you’re going after is where the money actually is ie- a customer that will pay you. Consumer markets are tough, especially with web based products. People expect everything to be free. Businesses are usually your best bet.

If you buy into that, then reading about customers (and business customers in particular) is VERY interesting.
Haha - you are so right on several accounts:

1. Any good sales rep should be able to sell self, their best product.

2. When I went for jobs I was mainly interested in commission. However if the sale took long that is not good enough. You can have the commission stagger - matching the sales pipeline stages. This meaning - they get x for number of potentials in that have been qualified, y percentage for that have been demod, z for starting eval, p for finished eval, q for proposal, w for closed, and t for getting referrals. You get the idea.

Selling to big orgs is painful and time consuming. However if you can find something that they already are buying, partner with those folks since their sales reps are already in.

Always look for a personal stake when selling. The best way someone described it is like buying like you would do for yourself except it is someone else's money so even less diligence is needed. You have to work on literature to answer all the thoughts in their head that makes this a near risk free proposition. This means answering concerns from the CFO and how it compares with existing solution, and how to incorporate it so they get the full benefit.

I hate distributors in general. They do very little to make sales. Instead go with a value added reseller. They have the feet on the street. Plus if you treat the valued added resellers are you sales rep clones, they will sell and sell. Go for a reseller that is number 3 or 2 in the industry. They have something to prove. Then train the sales staff yourself. This means real practicing and providing excellent marketing collateral and support for questions. The marketing collateral does always ned to be fancy - remember they will not be fired for not using your product. Most places have inertia and they have more to lose than gain by switching to you no matter how much they save the company or make the company. Always find out how the switch will personally impact them - now they have real motivation.

PS in terms of English, I liked "Niches to Riches" book about benefits pieces. it is more B2C but remember folks are folks. It helped me tremendously. She is PR consultant.

Another sales book recommendation if you in a established market:
The Wedge: How to Stop Selling and Start Winning
It talks how one goes about replacing the existing competition that already has the business.

I worked in both greenfield and established markets - they both have unique challenges. If you want to talk more let me know, info@bestwhich.com. I am in the middle of product coding so...
I actually like the redis-objects gem, which maps redis structures to ruby objects.

https://github.com/nateware/redis-objects
187 indeed :)
Going to have to call in a 5150 to keep average investors from being burned this time...
I've been asked to write something more complete and more substantial on this topic, so I thought I'd make an earlier short piece available to see what people pick up on, and hence help direct my focus.

Think of this as the first step of "Release Early ..."
rabble rabble Quora!
Hmm, I don't think it was a pure marketing stunt. They simply embraced the situation - and leveraged it for some extra publicity.
Is It Harder to Be a Celebrity Now?
(see above comment) dynamic exercise is only more effective at increasing muscle twitch force. isometrics will be more effective at increasing strength at joint angle. for example, i could do more squats in a minute (up to 90) after i did isometric holds vs before.
If all else were equal, and getting on Hacker News is a benefit and not a liability, then obviously YC should win. x+1>x. (This should be obvious.) That's not an interesting question to ask.

The question worth asking is, how can I disambiguate between scenarios like startups being attracted to YC because of presumably greater access to HN's front page and HN creating startup founders who then go with YC as the path of least resistance? How do I distinguish between various possible correlations and causations?

(I can think of one obvious approach: survey YC-funded projects and see how many founders were on HN before they were founders, and how many got on HN after becoming founders/YC-funded.)
I don't think it is on purpose. I don't really pay attention, either. But the people you naturally find and the people who get read the most are the ones who have been around the longest and therefore get their posts on the front page. It's a virtuous cycle, I think.
Seems more likely. If I'm happy I think I'm less likely to be googling happiness.
I trully believe that no one should use "git reset --hard" unless really know what he is doing (understand for beginer).

This is why, I aliased an "uncommit". You can see the details in this article[1] I had written for my friend who were learning git.

usage:

git uncommit 3

effect: add another point in the history where it is said you get back 3 commit in time. Which is better in most case than modifying the history when you want to push it.

[1]: http://yannesposito.com/Scratch/en/blog/2009-11-12-Git-for-n...
"New Media" companies are at risk of destruction by bandwidth caps
sorry, random reference -- no larry sanders fans on HN?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AdHpQW-pEs
> I think that searching all lg(n) items
> even if found in the first comparison is
> a performance killer.

I hear what you say, and that's an important consideration when translation this to the real world. You can get the same short-cut performance by adding a single line:

int find(int a[], int size, int val) {
if (size<=0) return -1;
int lower = 0, upper=size;
while (upper-lower>1) {
int m = lower+(upper-lower)/2;

-> if (val==a[m]) return m; <- Inserted line

if (val<a[m]) upper = m;
else lower = m;
}
return (val==a[lower]) ? lower : -1;
}

> Binary search has poor cache locality of reference.

Absolutely, and for that reason there are many variants that can be devised, and then tuned for different cache considerations. I remember writing a version that measured the system cache performance every hour or so and adapted its parameters accordingly.
Very good looking product. My question is more business related: What is the benefit to the user of having in online (versus desktop app) and paying monthly (versus one time purchase)?
What is the perfect crime, how can you profit from it, and what does it have to do with this news story? Answers are all here (along with a good laugh, if you have the patience):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfrNfVLWmhw&p=E8D1A7F1929...

(it's a comedic podcast episode. it's pretty much 'safe for work')
I didn't downvote, but I can't tell from the word 'Shame' and that link what your point is. Shame about what?
I really loved the "TL;DR: Redis is fucking awesome."

I started using Redis for a project with Node, and I loved the node_redis library because it's non-blocking :-)
You've been associated with California LE, or similar, me thinks.

Edit: Apparently Van Halen used "5150" for an album title. Shows how out of touch I am.
When a tech bubble pops, how does it affect a funded startup compared to a bootstrapped startup? I'm relatively new to the startup world, but as I understand it, startups that need funding are generally the only one's negatively affected when the bubble pops since funding becomes more scarce. If so, wouldn't that benefit the bootstrappers?
FREE Microsoft Certification Exam Vouchers For Students
Thanks for that 'Neil' :-) Its been my experience that raising money can feel like a cross between prostitution and social work!

What you probably realize however is that by this point you no doubt have a really really good idea of why you think your company and your plan will be successful and you can defend that belief across a wide array of threats to its success. This is really really valuable in itself.

I've talked with CEO's of companies that were funded by a single angel who could not articulate their companies value proposition beyond a few web 2.0 buzzwords. No understanding of what the risks were, how they would know if they were mitigating risk or making it worse, and no clear idea of what 'success' meant for the company.

A bit silver lining-ish I know but true!
Yeah, right, because putting people in jail for pranks will bring you gazillions of votes.
I think the guy who wrote the "I'm Rich" iPhone app is salivating at the thought of this.

(to be fair, the Color service will certainly be more useful)
Parallax and other Interesting CSS Techniques
Thanks, manishm - some useful resources there.
I meant more in the scenario of: "our startup got into 4 different incubators, one of which is YC. They all have strengths and weaknesses, which roughly balance each other out. Is Hacker News the trump card?"
It's almost definitely 2.0 since all of the other GF110-based chips are.

My question is, does it look like 1 device or 2 to the CUDA driver? If the memory was shared across 1 virtual device with 3GB, that'd be sweet.
Post emails / insider info on the founding of now super successful startups. In my case Twitter. Worked wonders. I also found that it's pretty easy to get posts about YC itself, and how it relates to startups and fundraising.
Zferral is pretty great. I found them when I was looking for Rails-friendly affiliate software. Most of the popular affiliate tracking software out there is either really expensive or requires PHP/Smarty. There are a few UI snags, but it's still light-years ahead of NATS's UI.
I've always heard ClamAV on Windows is dog slow. Anyone have any numbers?
This damn thing reads like a Better Off Ted Veridian Dynamics intro.

edit: Or the Jabberywocky presentation:
The Rails default route is not your friend
And I'm saying, the acquisition is already planned and these investors aren't investing in Color, they're essentially investing in Facebook pre-IPO without going through Goldman's special investment vehicle.

None of the investors mentioned (Sequoia, Bain Capital, SV Bank) are Facebook investors yet.
Well, it might, at least in Russia
No - a secret cabal of big-IP companies will conspire to prevent it, like they do with the electric car
Thanks Jarin. We are actually launching a new UI based on feedback from our customers - it's been great chatting with so many of you!
I'm curious - how does this have a non-zero value in 1900?
Sweat Equitees, t-shirts for entrepreneurs
They do not only have money. They have a strong influence (and almost always the last word) in most of end-consumer buying decisions.

It's strange so little companies focus on them
I noticed the possibility of that semantic ambiguity, that is why I switched to noting static/dynamic typing instead of retaining your distinction on compiled/intepretated.
7.0 Earthquake Hits Myanmar/Thailand
Since we have so many chatbots around and I am pretty sure lots of them adjust and update their databases (perhaps algorithms as well?) based on human inputs. Suppose we keep doing this and let them continue talking for hours, days and even weeks, one of them should gain a unique conversation style and maybe it will surprise we humans in a bizarre way.

As I see it, the goal of AI should not be limited to mimicking human ways of thinking, instead it should aim at blessing the program the ability to learn and evolve. In the latter case, it is reasonable to expect the internal generated intelligence could go beyond the expectations of its human creator. Again, I don't know if anybody has done it before; but it seems a good idea to me.

This was the motivation for my original experiment, glad so many people liked it.
Lady Gaga sólo tatúa la parte izquierda de su cuerpo
This is very true. I can give another example(maybe bit-offtopic for HN).

A very good friend of mine worked in IT for like 10 yrs. He was quite good programmer, CTO etc.
One day he decided to radically change his carrer and opened... 5 Subways in Eastern Europe (he is originally from there). FFW 2 yrs => his restaurants making him $400-500k/yr, he spends zero time managing them and just focused on opening new ones.

His lesson: IT industry has one of the hardest competition rates cause all super-smart geeks are competing on relatively small marktets. Other industries competition (esp in emerging markets) is seriously overrated.

Another example - my very stupid app for selling video files just crossed $1000/day mark in sales. Ppl just need simple tools to get things done.
Joomla showing heavy growth in 2011
huge point. Nothing like seeing someone hand-implement (poorly) a balanced tree.. and usually be very proud of it.
Inflation helps the proletariat, you know. Most of them are net debtors, so inflation makes it easier to pay off their debts.
Those professions are characterized by the value of replicating previous work. The "problem space" involved in removing an appendix or flying a Cessna on a specific route is just much, much smaller and simpler than the problem spaces software developers are expected to navigate. When you have larger problem spaces -- Boston's "Big Dig", experimental surgery, etc., that certification and rigor becomes less relevant, and the results less predictable, just like in software.
Google's former ad man joins Twitter
Great to hear! I'm just glad I didn't have to build a whole affiliate thing myself (was getting frustrated with what was out there).
Diary of a dying man: Goodbye Chemo, Hello Hospice
b2b startup here! We got our idea b/c 2 of my cofounders worked in the industry, and spent 3 years noting the problems with their field.

That's a very difficult thing for a 23 year old hacker to get exposure to. In order to get that job in the first place, you'd need a mechanical engineering degree, then spend several years at the plant.

On the flip side, we've just started to place ads on our sites via google's adsense, and we're getting > $15 RPM already.

B2B is where the easier money is, in my opinion. (That also applies to women-focused companies).