skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
^ When Facebook started, they deployed University by University. They understood that in order for social apps to become popular, they need a critical mass of people to work. If you're the only person in your town that tries it, you're going to have an empty social network and no stickiness.

They should at least think about expanding the 100 ft proximity to town size until it gains some traction.
Yes, I see that some mobile-social-consumer stuff with very good connections to investors may be overvalued (but who knows?) (and they get huge tech-media attention), they may be in a bubble, but for most startups it is still 'business as usual' I think.
Exactly what is being pointed here: http://jacquesmattheij.com/41000006+reasons+why+I+think+we+a...
You can verify some of them algorithmically, but there are plenty of generators available online which will generate fake credit card details that will pass these checks.

Also it's worth noting that you're not allowed to display the Mastercard/Visa logo without specific permission from them (normally you get this automatically when you get a payment gateway, etc.)

If you do have a processor then you can do a pre-authorization credit check (does this person have the money to pay for it?) without actually charging them.
IPv4 addresses are becoming valuable
Currently it has 88 1 star ratings out 107 ratings, then 27 5 star ratings, so I don't really get it. I guess 27 people are right near each other and seeing lots of photos?

I love to see people striking out and building stuff and really going for it, it's something I really want to do. I guess I just don't see the part where this is worth $41M? Not trying to hate though, I think people going out and building stuff is awesome.
Adobe Photoshop – complete digital photo-editing
Adobe Photoshop is best software for graphic design. If you want to change any thing in image like a professionals then use this software.
We might be in a bubble. But that bubble will continue to inflate as long as people are screaming Bubble! Bubble!! The danger moment appears when all those predictions appear false and everyone start to believe, maybe this time, for some reason, exponential growth will continue forever.

The moment when everyone shut up and start to join the bandwagon is when the bubble bursts. <-- That's from my experience.
At least the domain name is worth some dollars.

I actually quite like the concept - makes group photo sharing fun & easy. But worth $41m? Not yet
Hmph. If nothing else, posts like this are terribly offensive to the entrepreneurs that dedicate their lives to products like Color.

Did anyone consider that maybe Sequoia, who have invested in companies that make up over 10% of the NASDAQ know what they are doing?

Companies like Color, AdKeeper and Flipboard have "crazy" valuations based on the founders having ridiculous resumes. They have all created billions of dollars of value for their investors, hell, why wouldn't you invest in that potential again?

Rationalising this metaphorical bubble to domain prices is absurd, since domains have always been traded for eyebrow raising prices. You think that the domain color.com or path.com will be worth $10 in 5 years time? Seriously?

Color almost certainly didn't require $41M to get to the product you see today, did people ever consider the company is - gasp - launching early and has the capital to iterate and scale for the next few years? I can think of lots of startups that raised $10M - $20M at company formation and has then spent the next few years (or more) iterating.

Investors are less interested in where you are today, compared to where you are going
I do the same thing, and then I look like a dummy when I go to someone else's computer and keep typing "git st", "git co", "gphm" (git push heroku master), etc.
Can We Fix the Security Economics of Federated Authentication?
don't focus on the features of the product - focus on the team. it might end up being something completely different (there is a word for that)

from the perspective of 'can these guys spin a $40M investment into something that is worth more?', the answer is probably yes (probably enough to worth investing in)

it isn't a bubble because this is still VC money, not crazy mom and pop shooting at the NASDAQ money. during the bubble this company would have already IPO'd and been worth $5B, and you parents would have called you up to ask about it.
is that so.
I wasn't drawing any analogy. I just wondered if this kind of invigilation is legal. I know thief started the camera and I'm not acusing Mark of planting laptop or wiretapping. I'm just curious if it's legal to spy on people using the scenario I described.
The very fact you wouldn't know what to do with $40M is why you couldn't raise $40M, and they could.
A quick...

require 'fileutils'
include FileUtils

...and you can almost pretend you are writing bash.

http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib/libdoc/fileutils/rdoc/index.html
I wonder how much they paid for the @color Twitter account.
I subscribe to the theory that people who assume everyone's a potential child rapist are generalizing from a single example; either someone close to them, or themselves.
Developers are not cheap.
Advertising. People are already bemoaning the network effect in the lack of content on color - I think maybe the plan is to buy their way into users.
Nitric Oxide
Nitric Oxide supplements, when blended with simple proteins like L arginine and other natural proteins like globulin proteins or soy protein. These are the best ways to gain muscles if you are regular with a light exercise regime.
Yeah, I grew up with second-hand everything. The school only had ICON machines (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisys_ICON). It wouldn't be until 93 or so when I'd finally set eyes on a 286 and it was 94 before I got my own 386. I still had that Apple II up until then (but the school had gotten rid of the ICON machines around 91 or so and acquired decent PCs... the school had better computers than I did!). I "programmed" then, but it was really just "punch it in and mess around with the values."
They should probably pick up Bingi.ng too.
1. Is there anywhere on the site you say where you're based? It's a big world. If you're based in China, I find it unlikely you'll be serving customers in Brazil.

2. The plans on the "Register" page make no sense. See:

"Value 2
Two game rentals per month
You will be allowed to rent two games each month time.
You can not hold more than one games at a time"

Huh?

3. You need to hire a native English speaker to fix the text on the site.
EXACTLY my response too.
What's the difference between proof of it being a bubble and these guys just making a ridiculous investment based on hype?
Just because there might be a bubble doesn't mean that all startups will autofail. However, if I ran a startup with ads as my main source of revenue, I would be worried as advertising budgets are the first thing to be axed in a crisis.

For entrepreneurs crashes are the best times to innovate and launch new ventures because while everyone else is angsting about cutbacks and surviving just another day, the entrepreneur can launch lean businesses and products AND usually get great deals on people, equipment, office space, services, etc.
Mac OS X turns X years old today
They even hired Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie! http://oi51.tinypic.com/o8xo53.jpg
This is a good point. If I'm sitting in a very densely populated area the odds that some couple within 100' are exhibitionists must be pretty high.
Penises, because I don't want to see anyone else's.
I think the only thing I'd generally agree on is that "in general it is agreed upon" are weasel words of the highest order.
It's not doing so great when reviewers are already making comments like "I really failed to see the idea of Color.". $41 million? Maybe there is something about this software or concept that isn't been seen yet by reviewers.
Your last sentence is very astute, and resonates with me personally. I thought valuations were insane in the late 90s but ultimately gave in. I think that was less than 6 months before the crash!

Regarding exponential growth. We need to think carefully what kind of efficiency improvements can SUSTAIN exponential growth. The adoption of the Internet to the mainstream was a major event. I guess people might be betting that mobile/tablet is another one. I thought this was already priced in about 2 years ago. I can't think of what has changed in fundamentals that justifies the current situation (except for inflation perhaps).
Agreed. I'm a fairly strong minded atheist and I find creationism offensive. At the same time I would defend to the death the right for creationists to have free speech.
Do you really care at 1AM what the party in a club was an hour or two ago?
Why not? My servers have no passwords at all -- they either use SSH keys or kerberos.

Once you have access to a local shell, the game is over. Acquiring root is easy, between local exploits or simply piggybacking on (or sniffing) a valid, passworded sudo login.
41 million for growth for an app before it launches?
Garkov- Garfield + Markov chains
Waitrose experiences major problems on new £10m website
From everything I read, Color has a fantastic team and the Techcrunch article is actually pretty positive on the idea. I'm sure that the company will succeed.

But saying a company will likely succeed and deserves an investment does not mean VCs shouldn't be making rational valuations based on real business metrics. And as the OP remarked, this is probably funding at a $80m+ valuation for a company with no product (when funded), no revenue, and plenty of competition.
This strikes me as a novel approach of getting around the difficulty of setting up large numbers of little scripts and dependencies on a server.

However, for those of you who don't want to both renting out an EC2 instance or launching a VMWare image, the GitHub account for the code is here:

https://github.com/petewarden/dstk

In particular, there are instructions for setting up an Ubuntu server from scratch here:

https://github.com/petewarden/dstk/blob/master/docs/serverse...

Very thorough line-by-line instructions. Just skimming it it looks like it boils down to: apache, Apache Portable Runtimes, etc., PostgreSQL, Ruby, and then all the scripts.
Recognizing patterns: Steve Blank on entrepreneurship
If there is a bubble, then it's balancing stuff like this that will keep things in check. I've been noticing it too, and I think that's a sign that things are getting crazier as the months go by.
It is not necessarily a bubble yet. I think investors think the mobile-social-local market will be owned by very few companies. (Only a few can survive because of the network effect). They invest into one company and hope that with a lot of advertisement money they can win. There would be a bubble if they would invest the same money into 10-20 or more similar companies randomly.
- If it is going to take them a few years to get to their eventual, profitable, goal, why invest $41M now? Why not invest $20M now and another $21M when they're on the track that will be truly profitable, once they've demonstrated where they are going?

- Is calling the investment "crazy" really offensive to the entrepreneurs? It is more a compliment to them than anything else. The investment may be crazy, but the entrepreneurs managed to get people to shell out $41M. That takes serious talent.

- Getting $41M for color is insulting to a lot of other entrepreneurs that have dedicated their lives to products like color and received nothing. Give half of that $41M in $250,000 chunks to 80 other startups and Color would still have $20M to play with.

If you know how these large investments work, $41M in Color may seem very sane, but to a large percentage of the population, it does appear crazy, particularly in light of the dot com bubble.

Perhaps you could point us to a good article showing why this is a sound investment?
It could be worse. If you go military/industrial complex instead, even if all your friends also have TS/SCI clearances you can't talk about what you do unless they need to know; and even then only in a SCIF and over an encrypted line.
Chinese government dropping phone calls if forbidden words are said
Do you mean crashes are the best time? During bubbles everything gets more expensive.

I agree that a bubble doesn't mean all startups with autofail. I would like to learn from the past and understand what worked.
Color has launched on both iOS and Android. In addition, they didn't spend 41 million, they received funding in the amount of 41 million.
Batman would be proud
You could try Windows Azure .
http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/mix/10/mp4/SVC12.mp4

http://ecn.channel9.msdn.com/o9/mix/10/mp4/EX23.mp4
Drive 5000 km Across Australia on Wind Power
What's worrying is that these guys are Bain Capital, Sequoia Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank - some of the most influential tech investors in the world. They should know better. That or they have some incredible inside info on the Color team and their product.
I'm not sure I understand you. You can't just start typing and getting instant feedback in Java simply because Java is not interpreted (well, actually, it is, but you have to compile to bytecode first). So, what you're saying about Java goes for just about any compiled language.

No, you also have to think about various command-line tools invocation (java and javac for starters)

Use "javac" to compile to byte code. Use "java" to run your compiled program. This is all you need to know about these tools to start programming. There are various options for using java and javac, of course, but it's not like you can't compile and run a simple program without these options.

As for this part of your comment:

create a file, name it correctly, put the same name inside with a `class` statement whatever that means, then put braces everywhere and a `main` and a `String[]` which you don't know jack about

Yeah. You have to know a bit of Java before you actually start programming in it. If that's one of Java's shortcomings, well then, there are a lot of languages with the same shortcoming.
Ultra-light insect robots take flight
Twitter doesn't allow selling twitter accounts.
Free UK Google Magazine - Think Quarterly
I use bash aliases for the same thing:

alias gs='git status'

alias gc='git commit -m'

alias gca='git commit -a -m'

alias gd='git diff'

I spend most of my time with gs and gd, then usually gca my changes all at once, or add those I want and use gc.
I don't know about the rest of the world, but we sure are in a bubble here at Hacker News. There seems to be a real disconnect between what people want to build/invest in and what people in the real world actually need and want to pay for. Just as sample of what I've witnessed in the past few years:

Ask HN: How do you like my file sharing app?
Ask HN: How do you like my social app for niche <x>?
Ask HN: How do you like my twitter app?
Ask HN: How do you like my facebook app?
Ask HN: How do you like my iphone app?
Ask HN: How do you like my facebook app that writes twitter apps?
Ask HN: How do you like my game?
Ask HN: How do you like my photo sharing app?
Ask HN: How do you like my video sharing app?
Ask HN: How do I monetize my free flashcard app?
Ask HN: How do you like my app that helps other hackers to do <x>?
Ask HN: How do I get traffic to my freemium app?
Ask HN: How do I get angels/VCs interested?
Ask HN: Look what I wrote this weekend!
Ask HN: Look what I wrote in one night!
Ask HN: Look what I wrote in 7 seconds!

Customer 1: How can we sell through Amazon.com?
Customer 2: How can we reduce inventory by $300 million?
Customer 3: How can we increase conversion from 2% to 4%?
Customer 4: How can we use software to reduce energy costs?
Customer 5: How can we migrate one app into another?
Customer 6: How can we get our phones to talk to our legacy apps?
Customer 7: How can we take orders through the internet?
Customer 8: How can we get our software package to do <x>?
Customer 9: How can we reduce credit card fraud?
Customer 10: How can we increase SEO effectiveness?
Customer 11: How can we connect fulfillment and ecommerce?
Customer 12: How can we increase revenue?
Customers 13-200: How can we increase profitability?
Mr Fails
We would like to introduce you to a good friend of the Cartoon Tester, Mr Fails.

He is an excellent tester but he’s gone through a rough time of late. With Mr Fails’ permission, Andy has written a short biography. You can download it using the big red ‘Download Mr Fails’ button below.
Do you really think whoever owned @color just gave it to them though? ;)
Jersey Shore Season 3 Episode 13 - MOONLIGHT
Yes but knowing what you'd do with it and that being a good thing to do with it are different things.

I don't see what they need $40m for that's going to deliver real value.
I'd be interested to see the potential military and espionage applications of this sort of research.
No, I think you're right, but I wonder how they did it. Must have been under the table.
Why would you see what they need $40m from when you are on the outside looking in on a single product? Seriously.
I'm on 10.6.7, perhaps that's why. It is consistent on two Mac Pro's I tried with dual screens, so it should be easy to replicate.
I understand that. My comment was why invest in scaling when the need to scale hasn't been established?
"Did anyone consider that maybe Sequoia, who have invested in companies that make up over 10% of the NASDAQ know what they are doing?"

Neither Merril Lynch nor Lehman Brother knew what they were doing.

"Investors are less interested in where you are today, compared to where you are going"

Yes the future is important, but there's the risk-reward trade-off. If a company looks badly risky today, a rational investor will steer away from it.

"If nothing else, posts like this are terribly offensive to the entrepreneurs that dedicate their lives to products like Color."

And for your first point, a well functioning entrepreneurs ecosystem require both dedicated entrepreneurs AND rational investors. This is not to demean the entrepreneur.
We're still just starting a watershed moment for ways of finding productivity gains, forms of entertainment, ways to connect and share. We haven't scratched the surface yet. There are huge leaps being worked on in the foundation technology.

Give us a bubble! Spread it out, so that such 41mm deals go instead to a thousand teams. And we will give you the future.
Right, this puts their valuation above those of already very successful companies.
Useful Internet Explorer 9 keyboard shortcuts.
Plea HN: Please use the HN bookmarklet
When submitting external links, please could you start using the bookmarklet tool available here http://ycombinator.com/bookmarklet.html because if you're submitting a URL that has been submitted before, it will redirect you instead of posting a duplicate.

*I know there have been many discussions about the bookmarklet, but the more we drill it into the community, the better posting etiquette will get.
Cuil had Googlers behind it. The people behind it can make a difference if the other fundamentals (market viability especially) are in place.

Is there a $40m+ market for a group photo album app? This app is free, so they'll need a great monetization model even if the market is there.
I'm pretty sure Dropbox paid a lot more than $7.95 for "dropbox.com" It's actually somewhat difficult to find an unregistered, pronounceable domain that's under 6 or 7 characters.
True and false, assuming color has one tech cofounder. What they need at this point is an Android and IOS client that can take pictures and record the current position of the user then you need a backend system that can handle the massive concurrent upload of pictures and do concurrent geo-spacial lookups. This is by far the most difficult part but MongoDB has a filesystem component and there is a plugin for Nginx that allows you to serve files directly from it.

The geospacial indexing can be accomplished by creating a 2-dimentional index of picture buckets where each bucket contains the pictures taken within a small geographical area (say 2000x2000 meters) then all you only have to iterate over the pictures in the buckets that are within the current distance from your location. The clients can easily sort their images before their are uploaded.

It may sound complicated but games do that kind of thing all the time, and often with bigger constraints (skipping a picture or two isn't going to be a big deal).

So yeah devs are not cheap, but a technical co-founder should be able to develop this.
That's really unfair. Whilst I agree there's a disconnect, I wouldn't say it's specific to HN, but rather to the entire industry. The reason why you see those Ask HN posts is because people are looking around and realizing that those types of services have been getting tons of funding and attention.

There's a disconnect, but it's in the social web world, not just HN. And I would say HNers are trying to capitalize on the hype.
To clear up the ambiguity in the title: this is an app that measures that amount of radiation from your phone specifically, not ambient radiation in the environment.
The $41m injection might well kill the company. I've never seen startups with too much capital early on to become the next Google/Facebook/Twitter - you lose your chance to become "relentlessly resourceful"!
I love this concept, and I can see my business using it. We have three team members, so I'm surprised you consider us an Enterprise. I'd be more comfortable if you called us a "Business" or an "Agency". And should a true enterprise be capped at five users and pay just $69 per month? If I were to sign up, I'd get an Advanced plan and deal with just having two users.

As a business owner, this product solves two needs: 1) saves lots of time and 2) ensures that salespeople can assemble good looking proposals.

Do you have example proposals on the website? I want to see what this generates without creating a free account and doing a bunch of work myself.
If the $40m is mostly for marketing / advertising then this is definitely reminiscent of the last tech bubble.
So now whenever someone with a successful past history does something moderately contrarian, people are just going to recite the banking collapse?

"Rebecca Black signed onto the same record label as Miley Cyrus, I think the label knows what they are doing" ... "We all though Lehman Bros knew what they were doing, dude"

Anyway, I like people that stray from the field and do contrarian things that other people think are crazy, if nothing else in 10 years it'll be exceedingly satisfying for these kinds of investors to point at all the haters (and if they fail, well, everyone was right blah blah serves them right for taking risks)
It's a pity that git doesn't also accept unique prefixes for each command like Subversion does. Is that by design?
"We are hoping the required API's will be added to the iPhone SDK"

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding, but doesn't this line make it sound like they rely on private API's, which Apple hasn't allowed for a while?
Python, open source, and fast web application stacks in the mainstream news.
Previously on HN at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2358237. Official disclosure at http://www.comodo.com/Comodo-Fraud-Incident-2011-03-23.html.
It also redirects you using the regular submission form; i've submitted many a site or news item only to be redirected to an existing thread.

Methinks there's something wrong with the filter.
> Give us a bubble! Spread it out, so that such 41mm deals go instead to a thousand teams. And we will give you the future.

That happens eventually, it seems, in a somewhat roundabout way, to some degree. Look at where the money from Viaweb ended up, as one example. Lots of successful people's money ends up as angel funding: Paypal, Delicious, and so on.
I actually find it much more frightening that many public prosecutors (at least in the US, where they are elected) may not hold that view, but think it'll get them elected.
but could you make Color.com in a weekend?