skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To cut that pain in half you can start to treat your startup/idea as if it were a well established business. Think of all the items one company will go through during diligence and make it a habit to implement the proper process accordingly.

If your investor walks in and see that you have well run back end they will be impressed and they will not fool around with you. That will also give them some relief.

So from the get-go make sure you incorporate properly, hire an accountant firm, or use software and make sure someone records and categorizes every single expense (yeah add 25c for that Koolaid too), develop a great business relationship with your customers (mostly for startups that charge), document your technology ( I do not know much about this one), write short bi-weekly or monthly report about your traffic, write short reports about your sales etc....

You do not have millions in revenue to treat your business like it is, and if you do treat it as if, it is very likely to end up making that much.
I prefer SWFUpload [http://swfupload.org].

Flash is great about reporting back how much has uploaded, and the Javascript API means you can still use jQuery (or your favorite framework) to do all of the status display.
#lisp, #emacs @ freenode
I thought it had to do with lightning...
Can you explain why Coca Cola is evil? They make things that people want (I know I do) at a very reasonable price.
> So the only way a robot would feel something is if it is programmed to "feel something".

The topic is a bit more subtle.

Defining and understanding subjective experience is a topic that currently totally evades scientific understanding. Try to explain in a non ad hoc way what it is to see the color red (it's the canonical example).

Can a robot ever experience human-like emotions? and, assuming robots experience somthing, or come to experience something one day, could a human experience robot-like feelings?

Robert French and David Chalmers (who both studied under Douglas Hofdstater btw) have lot's of interesting insights about these topics.
Rackspace Trades Down In Debut
If you're on Windows there's also MaxiVista
I was all in up in it. Working for a company that eventually got acquired by Lucent. Through the rise and fall of the stock market at the time I was selling my options and investing the money in other things while most of my friends/coworkers were tracking their paper worth.

In the end, I pulled 7 figures from my options while most people I knew just sat there and let the world happen to them and were left with nothing the day Lucent dropped from about $70 to $50 then kept falling.

The morale: don't be greedy and don't be afraid to exercise some of your stock and diversify should you find yourself in a scenario where your options become worth something.

I also started a company of my own through those years and had a couple of other side interests going on. All in all it was a fun time. I recall spotting some trends, like Fore Systems oscillating between $8 and $10 a share for a while. I would buy 1 or 2 thousand shares on margin, then sell a few days later and cash the check. The stock market at the time was like a giant ATM if you knew how to play it and didn't get too greedy (there's that theme again).
The very last sentence of the last footnote caught my eye:

Oddly enough, the best VCs tend to be the least VC-like.

I suspect that rather than being odd this is nearly tautological for any profession -- "the best X tend to be the least X-like". Professional stereotypes are set by the multitudes in the middle, not the highest-performing outliers.

Further, atypical behavior can be both a cause and effect of excellence. Being 'different' helps them be 'better', but also by being 'better' they gain freedom and confidence to deviate from norms.

(Of course, "the worst X tend to be not very X-like" is also true. But they're more likely to at least try to emulate the average X.)
If this is a problem, wouldn't it be better to turn up the gravity on the scoring algo so that fresher stories were on the front page? That plus the /active link seems like a nice combo.

I.E. making the front page fresher could dilute the amount of conversation on a piece, but that could be balanced via the active link.
That would be a horrible idea. It would no longer be Wikipedia. It would become more like 4chan for encyclopedia articles. Stopping spammers and vandals would become exponentially harder with that, and to be honest I think that's a bigger problem than Wikipedia editors deleting some guy's webcomic article.
I have a problem that I've seen mentioned on HN before, but I've never seen anyone with a good, "Here's what I did..." solution. I'm pretty certain that I'm not the only HN reader with this particular issue.

Imagine (I'm not saying that I actually HAVE any of these things, but imagine!) that I have a product, a beta with a community of active users, and a good team of co-founders who are developing the product on nights and weekends. Say I've even got some guesses about a marketing strategy and a revenue stream. Overall, a good collection of stuff to present to a potential investor of "seed" capital.

The only problem is, I have a day job. And (for now) I need a day job to eat.

If dealing with investors is really a full-time job as this article suggests, and should only be done in a startup city, as other PG articles suggest, how do I POSSIBLY afford to hunt down and meet with potential investors without starving to death? I suspect that "Can we meet after I get off work?" isn't a great confidence boost for a potential investor.
Anti-union violence in Latin America.
I almost did not post it because of that but you can read most of the article without a login.
In a way it's kind of like dating

You mean, if you're not careful about how you do it, you might end up screwed and coming home with something that you didn't want? :)

(sorry, had to be said)
$5.
Good call it would have to be optional
there is probably a startup idea here. Everyone probably emails all VCs at the same time, so why not speed up the process?

Can have Entrepreneurs sign up, upload their business plan/youtube presentation. Then VCs will be able to login using a special verified VC account(that way Entrepreneurs will know that only VCs will see their presentations). And then be able to see the uploaded presentations and contact entrepreneurs for an in person interview.

Throw in a bunch of filter options for each party. A few web2.0 mashups for maps/scribd pdfs etc and bam instant millions.

To make money can charge either Entrepreneurs by telling them you are charging them in order to filter out the weak startups: "If you don't believe in your idea to pay $___ in promoting it to investors, what makes you think its good enough for investors to put in real money?" Or you can charge the VCs($____ to see each business plan or a monthly payment) or make it a non-profit organization and have a bunch of VCs donate to it.
That is interesting... I guess I don't really feel like the front page is to stale. I do feel like interesting pieces sometimes are overlooked or fail to make the front page. This can often happen if a bunch of bigger news stories are submitted. They rise up quickly and then a smaller but interesting story just passes away unnoticed.
Brilliant, absolutely brilliant. Mostly because it attacks me personally though ;)

I must admit that I just can't help but enjoy the sensation that rushes through my body when one of my co-workers enthusiastically extols the virtues of a new concept he's discovered and whose beauty I have not only already understood but whose weaknesses I have analysed to the point where it is yet another feeble attempt at realising the elusive beauty only my mind can grasp.

Now if only I didn't need to do this in order to compensate for the fact that as the breadth and depth of my aesthetic judgements expanded I seem to have lost my ability to synthesize the beauty I perceive so vividly ... ;)
It also means we can do more with less. =)
playing starcraft and diablo 2. The only web site that i visited was pokemon.com and google.
Finished my CS undergrad in 2001.

I think the boom was a great lesson for techies to remember the business model :-)
Sandisk Sansa Fuze 4GB Portable Media Player Pink
Sandisk Sansa Fuze 4GB Pink is a super slim portable media player that is easy and fun to use. The View can handle the following music formats such as MP3, WAV, WMA, secure WMA, and Audible formats. The 1.9" TFT screen has 220 x 176.
Founded an internet software company in SF that went down when the bubble burst. Was a great experience and several of the team are back together again, this time doing much better.
What version control system are you using?
I disagree with one point:

"They do seem to expect an answer to the [question of how much money you are trying to raise]. But I don't think you should just tell them a number."

It's very useful to have a number in mind, and it's very helpful for an investor to know what that number is. If I only have $50k to invest and you're trying to raise $10M then talking to you is probably wasting both of our time. (The reverse is true too. If I'm running a $100M fund and you only need $25k to get to your next milestone it's not a good match no matter how promising your company is.)

It's helpful to think of the question as, "How much money can you make effective use of at the moment" or "How much do you want to raise before you stop putting immediate effort into raising money" or "How much do you need to get you to your next significant milestone (and what is that milestone)?"
It's pretty stupid to think the accuracy rate of the degree is 100%. Or that the only way to get that degree is by being smart.
Basically, non-compete agreements allow corporations to become complacent and lazy. They don't have to worry about their competition getting their employees and the knowledge they hold so they don't have to be as vigilant about improving their product. It also means that employers don't have to compensate their employees (monetary or otherwise) as nicely since the employees don't have another option.

On the flip side, it breeds an environment where employees do just the minimum to get by because they aren't likely to be rewarded by their own firm and proof of good work won't help them get another job because of the non-compete.
hey, i do that .... :)
Building an online exchange for technical personnel (plumbers, technicians etc.) with a designer who nested tables so deep that when I turned on auto-indent all lines went blank.
I bet the poor guy we made it for never earned a penny from it. It's a good thing I was still cheap back then.
I worked for Corvis and watched my paper millions disappear.
This is cool, but why not link directly to the site:

http://us.onionmap.com/web/us/

All the linked blog post tells us is that the author enjoyed playing Sim City 2000. Not Hacker News :)
YooPlace.com - looking for feedback
Good evening, I was looking for the feedback on the small web-app I have put together over the past month or so.

YooPlace lists most recent and active links published on the twitter public timeline organising them in threads. Threads and single posts can be voted promoting most interesting. If authenticated with twitter username and password further posts and replies can be published both on YooPlace and Twitter.

Initial inspiration (and layout) are obviously from YC News, data from twitter API and search feeds.

http://www.yooplace.com

All feedback is welcome!
Why the lucky stiff: when you don't create things...
Upvoted for non-ignorance. ;)
It was more from a meta perspective, I would like more HN folks to know about the excellent flowingdata.com website.
Internet Meme Timeline
freenode: ##c++, #csharp, #lisp, #linpeople

#osdev used to be good, but trolls have made it a very inactive channel.
Huh? When has a hardware vendor ever been liable for actions caused by third-party software installed by the end user?
I was in Middle School
When I am struggling with something, I just give up.
#python, #ruby-lang, #ruby, #postgresql, #c, #php, #rubyonrails, and #haskell, all on freenode.

If I used Django I'm sure I'd be in #django too.
I discovered HN in spring and Reddit to and I have found the quality of HN going down in the last month, it could of course be the novelty wearing off but I think it is the quality.
But that is unfortunately to expect as the community grows.

HN has been around a lot longer than that though but perhaps it is growing fast lately?
Yes, that's why I still read the Britannica article for those topics which have entries.
> I can't think of a single real-world situation that would be improved by having non-competes enforced. Can you?

One that comes to mind for me is hiring inside and outside of the state of California. If I'm in a state outside of California and I have two candidates that otherwise are identical I might lean towards the one who will sign a non compete over the one who legally can't.

In this scenario, the California law has disadvantaged the worker.

I'll willingly grant there is alot of "if" statements there, so I'm not sure how likely this will be in practice:)
They make people want poison and sell it to them?
I prefer git because my work uses SVN, and nobody needs to know I'm using git-svn.

Add git rebase -i into the mix, and I can wrap up all my externally-uncommitted changes into one perfect changeset.
Is it fair to say that you think coca cola is evil because they do business with corrupt latin america bottlers?

That's cool if that is your belief, but where do you draw the line? Coca Cola is evil because they do business with evil people. Yahoo is evil because they accept advertising from Coca Cola. Companies that get acquired by Yahoo are evil because a part of the $$ they get is blood money?
http://book.git-scm.com/
Never thought of that, thanks for the comment!
All this hg vs git, but no one remembers monotone (which had some influence on git's development)

www.monotone.ca

Its a single file binary

Its supported on windows, linux, solaris and mac

has an interface for both scripts and users

Great documentation (and an easy to follow tutorial)

Interface is Stable

Single file to store the repo. I enjoy this b/c it makes backups extremely easy.

Negatives are:

It may not be as fast as Git, but the difference is barely noticeable.

Pulling an initial repo from the master is slow when there are tens of thousands of commits in the tree. After the initial pull, sync's between repos are quick.

Diffs in MS Windows takes substantially longer than in linux.

Monotone may not be a perfect choice for the linux kernel, but its a great DVS that's easy to use, stable and lets linux/mac/windows guys work together.
I remember having the same opinion. At one point I refused to learn HTML because I didn't consider it a real language.
There's a similar problem with making sales calls, or with any other activity that requires synchronous communication/interaction (i.e. not email).

I have the same problem.
I started undergrad in Fall '99. Summer of 2000 and Winter of 2000-2001, I had a summer job at a startup in Reston, VA (think mymp3.com). Great experience, both technically and professionally. Unlike most startups, this was mostly old guys: people from my parents generation. They were wicked smart, experienced, and they worked a desk away from me.

The company eventually went under, which I saw coming. My first project was creating a daily reports system, so I was intimately familiar with site usage statistics, and they were not good.

The Summer of 2001, I called my old boss and asked if I had a job. "I don't have a job," he said. So it goes.
The Wrong Way to Get Noticed by YC
Boom! That's a great site. Thanks for sharing.
So the inefficient market you get because there are so few players is exacerbated by the fact that they act less than independently. The result is a system like some kind of primitive, multi-celled sea creature, where you irritate one extremity and the whole thing contracts violently.

Eerily similar to the high school dating scene I remember.
I like that auto-extend idea. "We noticed you didn't get a chance to use your trial period, we wanted to give you a second chance trial and help you get started".
On Freenode only,
##mac ##php #defocus #facebook #jquery #kohana #mysql #olympics08 #opensocial #ping.fm #randomshapes #startups
Most Mac users need to read this. Choosing to use something is different from creating that thing.
I was in high school, basking in the myth that we programmers would simply pick from among our countless job offers, deigning to work at the cushiest one, spending all day playing foosball, nerf darts, Quake, spinning around in our Aeron chairs, drinking free soda, and watching our stock options make us millionaires while we occasionally sauntered over to the keyboard to peck out a few (godlike) lines of Perl.

I graduated high school in 2000, and it was a rude awakening.
How did pg find your e-mail? IP address from web log -> user account -> profile?
Most iPhone users will not understand the responsibility divide between hardware vendor and third-party software.
Yes, it is bad in large quantities over an extended period of time. Is that all it takes to be evil? If so almost everything qualifies.
I started to submit a lot (a TON) when I was really addicted to HN a few months ago. Received a similar message but on the topic of submitting a lot of articles from PG. Reaction was also similar, something along the lines of shitshitshitshit there goes my chance.
Do you have any recommendations for other resources for getting high-quality maps?
Maybe he had his indexer log into the site?
Have to confess, I've got "please stop" email too (for my comments). First thing that came to mind was "there goes my chance to get funded by YC"
I really needed to hear this today. Thanks!
Sure.

Site is http://www.gmathacks.com

Relevant page is: http://www.gmathacks.com/main/new-york-city-gmat-tutoring.ht...
When I'm looking to purchase something, I try to research the products and the corresponding prices. I've found that if a price isn't available without contacting the company, it's probably more than I want to spend and move on. I suppose it might be different from a company's perspective, though.
I was skateboarding and video editing.

Messing about with HTML whenever I was hurt from skateboarding.
Karma on HN
So I went from like a 15 karma to a minus 5 in a day here. I would like the ability to vote down a comment or article, this generally helps me sort through junk I don't like, but someone who designed this site decided that you have to have a minimum karma score to do that.
I don't like it on reddit, as 98% of the time it is not something that would ever have had a chance to get noticed (but I guess that is the point isn't it !).
The answer is called Sleep(3000);
How to Leverage Current Web Technologies to Enhance Marketing - Part 1
Here's what i did. I was a consultant before I started raising money, so I could carve out a chunk of my time for fundraising before any money came in. When the money came in, I jumped over full-time. If you're not independent yet, maybe you could shift towards contract work for the next 2+ months?

Also consider raising from friends and family first. This money can has the potential to come quickly if it's going to come at all. BUT don't do this unless your relationships won't be affected by the worst-case scenario (100% loss due to your obvious incompetence).

And I know your second paragraph is hypothetical, but if you have a product, active users, and co-founders, then you probably have time to talk to investors. Answer emails at night, and schedule meetings around lunch or personal days. Saying that fundraising is a full-time job is a bit exaggerated, at least for angel investment; I've been raising for 6 months now with some success, and it's maybe been a 20% of my time.
Sketchy, Fitful Why
I agree with you in that the state should not go overboard in preventing people from entering into contracts.

Some things however may be overall beneficial to regulate. For example, you can't to sell yourself into slavery or sell your own organs. I think the overall principle is to prevent people from painting themselves into the corner without seeing what's coming to them. Non-compete for non-executive level employees is one such example.

To put my money where my mouth is I have removed all non-compete clauses from incorporation papers in my startup.
11 points?
11 points!!!!

man I'm really thinking about leaving this site. people ask questions on here and sometimes they don't get past 1... (when they are legit) and things like this... get 11!!
99% of your users will be hitting youplace by mistake, I'd look for a better name

Design wise I would spend a few hours getting it to look good. Right now its just meh, the colors don't work at all. Take a screen cap of your site, then open it in photoshop, then use the color patterns from http://kuler.adobe.com/ to see what looks good.

Functionality wise, I don't think you are going to find many people willing to give their twitter logon info to a new site.
Use RSS to Market Your Business
You are not allowed to sell yourself into slavery. Do you feel oppressed yet?
This is going to be voted down into oblivion, but he's pretty much right; too many people treat being "creative" as a lifestyle. Having vague artistic or musical aspirations doesn't make you creative, creating something does.
Haha I had the same problem the first time I set my Ruby crawler loose. Within 5 minutes I had crashed a "large electronics retailer's site". I'm omitting the name to protect the guilty.
"A few weeks ago I emailed Paul Graham asking whether I could create a searchable database of Hacker News."

PG had the email address from that first message. How he made the link between the server load and Matt's index is the real question.
> "They must either hide it very well, or never really hit those roadblocks"

To struggle is human. Smart people sometimes try to hide their stuggles. But the truly smart people recognize that struggling is human, and accept it. So you should see them struggle. If you haven't seen them struggle, you aren't looking. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, these guys have all had very public failures. They admit it, learn from it, move on, and are stronger for it.
Cool idea. I would have someone fix some of the writing(the about page).
Bloomberg.com: Worldwide
The second part, the obsession with indie culture, began back in the '90s. The transmission vs. the message later, but long before the iPhone as well.
Reference Types: Names and Objects--a simple description of how object types work in Java
Flickr looks forward to new challenges
That's about the silliest thing I've read.

Everyone struggles. The difference with the smart people is how they respond to those struggles.
Me neither, but some people at parties I go to quote Flo Rida.
CVS. It just doesn't fit well with our workflow.
Where is the programmable web
Hello, what do you think of the following:

There's seems a lack of web api's being created on a pay for use basis. Most web companies I see are creating end user applications. The api's available are mostly for newfeeds or databases (ebay/amazon/google apps).

Why aren't there more developers quickly turning out micropayment api's. There's a whole lot of people on the net - affiliates - who are scrambling to make some money off of lousy ebooks or adsense etc., give them real products they can earn commissions on.

Sort of break things competely into one man companies earning small commissions on multiple products in a free flowing market.

An area where this type of thing is really lacking is in image recognition. Someone could put a service where for one tenth of cent it will locate a cat in a picture, someone else puts out a dog recognizer (see opencv or torchvision haar recognizer). Or in speech recognization, someone works to create a really good "hello" recognizer, someone else puts out a "bye" recognizer etc.