skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This again?

Read the comments here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=216723.

YC has a huge amount of media coverage. There is no way it is going to be deleted. The sole standard for an article remaining in Wikipedia is Notability, which is determined entirely by the presence of reliable independent sources.

Anybody can nominate an article for deletion at any time. You could nominate [[Bill Gates]] right now. It would appear, briefly, in the AfD debate log, until someone speedy-kept it. This will get speedied too. Move along, nothing to see here.
I guess there should be a separate page listing all YC funded companies (if you can have pages listing all characters in tv series, why not companies funded by YC?).
Being from San Diego, it appears the writer has more than one thing in common with Ron Burgundy:

"Anyways, I have been quite busy preparing courses for classes I gave to a bunch a great Engineers at one of the Fortune 100 companies based in San Diego. I was also planning my big vacation trip to Europe and wrapping up few projects."

Translates to:

"I don't know how to put this but I'm kind of a big deal. People know me. I'm very important. I have many leather-bound books and my apartment smells of rich mahogany."
The article is actually wrong. :\

The difference between patch queues and git branches is that git branches don't have any temporal context other than the base patch in git branches. There's no ordering or connection between git checkout -b b1 and git checkout -b b2 off a single patch.

This is not the case in hg, although I can't claim to fully understand it. Patch queues are really quite different from git's local cheap branches, and I think that trying to counter them with the pq's is a tough row to hoe.
> Perhaps when submitting the comic it should come with a title in no way obviously related to web comics?

This one did.
It's not even an AfD, just a prod? I just removed the tag. Now it has to go to AfD to be deleted.
I already moved the tag, this article links to a specific revision of the article, not the actual article
He fixed it. You can un-wince.
Things I pay for:

1. ESPN Insider

Things I would pay for (but are free):

1. Hacker News
2. Yodlee
3. Feedburner
4. Google Alerts
It is kind of annoying that an admin prodded a page that has mainstream print pubs on the first page of news.google.com results.
consumer: xbox live, netflix (if you consider that "online")
for business: skype, pingdom.com (lets me know my clients' sites are up!)
Rats! You win. You even beat me to undoing the damage I caused.
Consumer Reports
ACM
iTunes
CovenantEyes
I'll believe it when I see it!
The one piece of the puzzle not solved is how everyone's going to afford this wireless. I'm making decent money, spending 80 dollars on two cell phones worth of coverage, and I'm still wincing about the idea of 30 bucks for a data plan. (Or, more appropriately, 60 dollars a month for two!) It's all well and good this idea about smartphones, but the prices are going to have to come way down before we speak of ubiquitous network computing.

It can't even replace my internet bill because of the cost of multiple people on the plan! Where is the new competitor going to come from in a market this is so difficult to break into due to price and monopoly concerns? Without that competitor, where are the drops in prices coming from?
An essay topic I'd find really interesting: A field guide to VC evaluation

Your last essay was rather apt for where we're at right now (just getting into the fundraising waters), but terms like someone reputable are kind of hard to gauge -- especially in the somewhat inbred world of investment when you don't know who's buddies with whom and as such whose opinions are worthwhile. Here a lot of companies seem to be run by serial entrepreneurs, which often seem to be a little too buddied up with investors to side with first-timers when trying to shake out info about what dealing with them is like.
http://www.typingsoft.com/stamina.htm

Good, free, simple touch typing software I like. I used it to switch from qwerty to dvorak and have gone from a peak of 78 wpm to 100 wpm (5 char = 1 word) over the course of 2 years. I think I was able to regain ~60 wpm after about 2 months, and then I stopped practicing a lot.

An especially useful feature is that you can specify your own text source, so I like to type a book I'm reading. In a way, it is a literature version of Guitar Hero.

On a related note, Dictator is a good piece of software for speed reading.

http://dictator.kieranholland.com/dictator.html

It uses the Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) technique where words/phrases are flashed on the screen, so you don't have to scan a page. If you optimize the chunk size to the size you can take in instantaneously, the software greatly increases your reading speed (caveat, some stuff like tech reading is just inherently slow). It increased my reading speed by 300 wpm.
Are you sure?

I physically hand over money for hardware, and that's about it. Everything else I like is free...

...except that in return for some of that free stuff I give demographic information. Oh, and in return for some of the other free stuff I give coding/testing/bug fixes. And I guess some of the free stuff I pay for via being temped into buying their real-world/physical products. Then some of the rest I suppose I pay for by validating someone's ego through the mechanism of pushing up their numbers.
Rhapsody, and my partner pays for NetFlix. I was paying for Oreilly's Safari but I wasn't using it enough. I pay for Espn.com insider as well.
Advice for finding a lawyer
With the recent attention on getting legal advice from a lawyer (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=287851), I was looking for advice on how to go about searching for a good one.

So, to anyone who has looked for/found a good corporate attorney:
How do you know if you have a good lawyer, and what did you do to find your (current) lawyer?
Is there anything that a first time lawyer hunter should ask?
Exactly. That's what Sed Gothin wrote in his article The New Rules Of Naming:

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/10/the_new_rule...
You just described basically any place at any point in history.
Working in financial models all day in Excel, I can't imagine having to use the mouse for any more than 10% of my work. Keyboard shortcuts are so much faster that they basically render a mouse useless.

It takes some getting used to and a bit of practice, but once you get comfortable with the keyboard, there's no turning back. I really only use the mouse for casual web browsing and solitaire.
Another lame argument I hear is that all IP is essentially some number, and since you can't copyright a number, there is no such thing as IP.
no, silly, piracy is not theft. piracy is piracy, its not a theft or not theft issue, its a different animal.

the rebuttal makes the assumption that pirates will actually pay for the item if they can't get it for free. 90% (i made this number up) of pirates would not pay for the item that they're pirating. hypothetically, if i were unable to pirate photoshop, i'd use gimp instead. i wouldn't go buy photoshop.

so, piracy does not steal income.
Consumer: netflix, amazon prime, ACM, cook's illustrated

Business: shoeboxed, earthclassmail, MSDN
Ford Spends $75 Million to Retool Michigan Truck Plant for Small Car Production
Below the fold is completely relative.

On a 640x480 screen almost all of the ads are below the fold.

On a 30" monitor they are above the fold.

Advertisers know this.
I think you're right that we're on the cusp of another huge game-changing event, but I think you're wrong about it being the iPhone, or any other cell-phone-like device.

Does anyone remember 1992? There were basically two huge "next big things" that were supposed to revolutionize everything. WebTV, and CD-ROM drives. Both had massive backing from the major players of the day - Microsoft, Apple, the big TV networks, hardware manufacturers.

Instead, it was the WWW that took off, and over the next 10 years, the WWW subsumed both of them. I don't think that was an accident of history. Huge game-changing innovations rarely come from big-company platforms (though they often come from hobbyists who were inspired by big-company research labs). They just have too much entrenched baggage. Instead, they come from small startups and hobby projects that have the flexibility to become what the market is demanding. The web succeeded, in a large part, because Marc Andreesen didn't listen to Tim Berners-Lee and added support for inline images even though it was totally not the way anchors and resources were supposed to work.

I've got two ideas for what that next big disruptive innovation might be. One, as Mitch Kapor suggests, might be virtual worlds. The other is microblogging, a la Twitter. Any other ideas?
No, the old article was pretty weak, just a couple of lines and a link to the TechCrunch launch post.
That's a good argument
Consumer:

Cook's Illustrated (for access to Solid Tested Recipes)

NetFlix

Consumer Reports (big purchases)

Mozy (Online Back Up)

used to pay for WSJ but dropped that due to News Corp content degradation.

Work pays several Online Journal and Library Access fees for me.

This was actually harder to come up with than I imagined because several of these only bill yearly or every two years and so the pain of paying virtually disappears...
How does this happen?!? Also, how did information about this get leaked out?
Heh, I like the first absolute rule. It's obviously in response to the ID/'evolution' debate, and consequently says absolutely nothing since neither side argues evolution (broadly defined as change of species over time) doesn't happen.

The only argument is about what mechanisms can be considered scientific explanations. If you don't believe me, read what the key ID thinkers actually say, instead of what the media says they say. The ID people explicitly make this point in Expelled.

So, even though Matt picks out this position to show his clear thinking skills in a controversial matter, it doesn't really pick out a controversial position. Matt's position on evolution is just empty rhetoric for those who don't know the debate. Alternatively, Matt doesn't get it either.
People need to stop thinking of piracy as theft or not theft. It's a digitally reproducible item which makes traditional concepts of property obsolete and it's about time the law and the record industry started coming up with terms which match this status.

Piracy does not take money away from sellers. It reduces how much they get. This is not the same thing.

The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and you sell bread. One day it starts raining bread, and people pick up their bread from the street rather than pay for yours. It sucks for you that you aren't getting money from your bread, but how can you blame people for what they're doing?

Price is dictated by supply and demand, and there's now a supply which is infinite and therefore, by traditional economics, surely it should be free?

I don't agree that you should be able to get stuff from artists etc for free. I make a point of paying for the albums I download if I like them, and I pay for movies and TV I like. But it's not a question of ethics, it's a question of what exactly it is you're paying or not paying for.

Why exactly do so many newspapers publish content for free? Surely it's the same idea - they're publishers after all…?
Getting European Startups Together
http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/01/Jun/pi.html
I forgot, I too pay for Jungledisk
about all the input i can give you: http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
I can understand not wanting to have an ARTICLE on each YC companies... But it seems that any page that is primarily about a VC firm would benefit from an up to date listing of investments (and status of those companies).

This list would provide a better understanding of YC. Given that there is no SEO juice with links from Wikipedia and given that being on the list resulted in 2-10 vists per day for RescueTime (when we were on it), I see lots of benefit (in term of being accurate/complete), no harm, and no real significant benefit to the companies lists.
I'm always nervous before I give a speech. But being confident while actually giving it make huge improvements, and focusing on one person at a time definitely helps.

There's an interesting public speaking class that I've heard about, where the only feedback listeners give is about what the speaker did well. The point is to make the speakers more comfortable with speaking, which naturally fixes a lot of the faults that find their way into your presenting skills.

Anyone up for a pitch/speech-practicing group in Boston?
It's lame because the number is irrelevant, so it is not the core of the IP.

The important thing is whether a certain number maps to a mechanism. The mapping is the thing people are really copyrighting when they copyright IP, and that is not a number.
That's a nod to The Register, me thinks.
http://pokermining.wordpress.com/2007/12/20/cheating-graph/ is a graph from the 2+2 post showing how much of an outlier the cheating play was. It is the little red dot in the far upper right.
Cliff notes are useless for college-level classes. Does your analogy hold in the real world of entrepreneurship?
How to save money in your startup company
But it's not a question of ethics

EXACTLY what someone with an ethical dilemma says.

Situational logic if there ever was any.
You should be as dilutable as your partners in a fair arrangement.
Don't overdo it with HTML. Sure make it look nice but you need to be sure you have content in there. Use complete sentences and avoid the spamwords, even in gest.

There's no one way to avoid spam filters, even big corporations have issues getting emails into inboxes. There are some ISPs who block emails based on many they receive from an address in a period of time, but that's just something you have to deal with and figure out when it comes to sending out bulk emails.
Sometimes column stores are really the way to go. For massive RDF storage, they offer orders of magnitude improvement in query speeds when compared to the best row-store DBs.

The C-Store project at MIT is cool. Here's a good summary:
http://patricklogan.blogspot.com/2007/12/column-oriented-rdf...
Should I incorporate and if so, what type of entity is obviously one.

Well, yes, once you've decided to ask that question it's obviously a question for a lawyer. But who should ask the question?

Should your personal blog be incorporated? Is that question worth asking a lawyer about? What if your personal blog is Boing Boing? What if you're Michael Arrington? What if you're Craig Newmark?

The point where you decide to seek investors is a pretty clear boundary: You need to talk to a lawyer. But if you're self-funding, and you're planning on releasing a free iPhone app for kicks, do you need a lawyer or not? I don't think it's all that obvious.
> A much better analogy for digital piracy is sneaking into a theater to watch a movie. You are not stealing a copy of that movie, and the theater is free to show the movie to others. But you are stealing revenue that the theater would have earned had you rightfully purchased a ticket.

Last I heard, you don't get sued/fined thousands of dollars for sneaking into a movie theater....
For what it's worth: we're .net with loads of traffic (15MM+ per month), been around for 4 years now, and never had any problem with the fact that the .com isn't ours.
I find this advice very valuable:

"You aren’t talking to 1130 people- you’re conversing with just one person."
The source of the money that I am referring to is iPhone users buying apps, not VC money.
Before 1980, equities were considered risky (and were so, compared to bonds and annuities) and were seen as a "rich person's game", but this changed once people became educated about the "equity premium", which may no longer exist, and diversification.

That also happened in the 60's -- mutual funds, in particular the 'performance' funds, grew pretty fast. In the 20's, diversification wasn't popular, but stocks sure were. And even earlier than that, there were investment crazes that were fairly democratic. The widespread adoption of treasury bonds for individual investors in the 1860's was nothing like the mania for stocks in the late 1990's -- except to the extent that it was a larger mania than anyone up to that point had experienced.

So I don't think looking at the 80's and 90's as new and original is all that useful. It's a cycle.
Subscriptions I have

Business: Basecamp, Zoho

Consumer: O'Reilly safari - safari.oreilly.com - browse their entire library (including books in pre-publication) for $42.99/mo
but slow burning fires burn the hottest

But if it burns to slow (ie if your product does not generate the minimum amount of buzz to keep it alive) it will die. Entrepreneurs should make the difference between a slow burning fire and a slowly dying fire.

EDIT:

Thinking we had to spend more than we did

Too much resources handicaps more than not having enough. Give 3 coders a few thousand and they create Omnisio, which sells for millions. Give coders 15 millions and Omnisio will show up half as good and one year too late.

Placing my faith in consultants

Dude. I am not even going to talk about this one. Nowadays everybody claims to be a consultant.
I knew we could count on you, asif
OK, accepting your made-up figure of 90%, what about the other 10% who would pay for the item they're pirating?
I agree...but the color scheme reminds me of The Onion.
As a consumer?
* Flickr
* Amazon Prime
* NOD32 subscription
* S3
* NewsDemon

As a business?
* JIRA
* Confluence
* Fisheye
* vBulletin
* JungleDisk
* S3
Another option:

I recently embarked on this same task for the first time. We found a terrific lawyer who has worked at some big name firms but started his own small practice. Apparently, more than a handful of folks at the big firms do this for various reasons (e.g., lifestyle, more time w/fewer clients).

We found him through a friend who works at a big firm. BTW, the rates these lawyers charge are typically half of the big firms, and you can be assured that they will personally do the work as opposed to a entry-level associate.

Email me at 1isnotprime at gmail for names. If these guys have full plates, they can refer you to their colleagues.
Ubiquity tutorial: Command-line web plugin for Firefox
i'm not sitting here defending anything. the other 10% doesn't factor into any valuation judgment or right/wrong analysis, since i didn't make one. i'm just pointing out facts and pointing out that the concept of digital piracy does not directly equate to the legal definition of theft. maybe they're in the same order or family, but they're not the same genus or species.

and i'm also, apparently, making up statistics.
The 1950s were boom years with lousy return

I don't know about globally, but it looks like prices tripled during the 1950's in the US. And that's not counting dividends, which were a bit higher at the time. Or did you mean something else?

http://leduc998.wordpress.com/2008/05/20/dow-jones-1950-1959...

In fact, I seem to remember a William O'Neill book claiming that the 50's were more speculative than the 60's. He argued that if you just treat prices as earnings and some multiple, you can demonstrate that returns in the 1950's were mostly multiple expansion, and in the 60's they were mostly earnings growth.
"The best example I heard was this: say you're a baker and you sell bread. One day it starts raining bread, and people pick up their bread from the street rather than pay for yours. It sucks for you that you aren't getting money from your bread, but how can you blame people for what they're doing?"

Inaccurate analogy. The baker played no part in making it rain bread. Software developers and other producers of content invest their time, money, and life into creating the product that gets disseminated. If they see that the product of their labor will get pirated, they will be less inclined to innovate and produce more in the future.

"Price is dictated by supply and demand, and there's now a supply which is infinite and therefore, by traditional economics, surely it should be free?"

No. You are committing the fallacy of confusing descriptive economics with normative economics. Saying what will be is not the same as saying what should be. As an example: if I hack into your server, steal your startup's source code, and release it on BitTorrent, your startup's product will become free. That doesn't mean it should be free.
"These arguments apply to a for-profit competitor - but what about a non-profit competitor? i.e. open source?"

An open-source competitor would likely find lots of potential contributors for what's fun to do and none for what's boring.
I just went through the tutorial and I really like the interface. I think it's really well done and I will likely use it heavily. The interface is very hacker-intuitive, especially if you are used to using shell commands.

In fact, I think that this sort of interface applied to shell commands (and vim) would be a really useful improvement.
I like the information entropy argument. Always makes me chuckle.
Is he? From his biography (http://bigpicture.typepad.com/cv/2006/02/curriculum_vita.htm...) it looks like he's mostly a manager. He might be really good at economics, but I've read his site before, and I haven't seen a single insight there that could be published in a reputable economics journal.
Rather than just complaining about Wikipedia, I would love to see 2 smart guys in a garage create a competitor.
Drugs Are Cool-Mmmkay | A Mom's Life
I'm challenging your assertion that "piracy does not steal income".
Somehow, I'm guessing they're not running a JVM on an TI MSP4xx microcontroller. It's actually not damn easy to get encryption working on controller boards.

What's more, for many of these kinds of systems, encryption that is anything more than a speed bump is very hard to get right, because of key management and round trip limits.
There have been a lot of posts about failed startups. This is about a successful startup and the problems it survived. Doing a diff between this and the other posts might prove useful.

One thing I notice is the failure stories always include problems with their toolset. This could-have-failed-but-didn't story does not. I think the "programming languages don't matter" crowd should pay attention.
"The Art of the Open House"?

Nice play on words, Guy, altering your own "The Art of the Start" to describe yc.

Make a blog people want to read.
Now I feel old.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anonymous_Coward
What do I have to roll to make my saving throw?
Piracy is a strange beast, but it is definitely NOT theft.

If I download a song - it does not directly negatively impact the artist. They aren't out anything.

The indirect impact on the artist is another matter. They are potentially out of a sale that could have otherwise happened without the piracy. However, they are also potentially gaining a sale from a user who would have not normally purchased their music, but downloaded and decided to buy. Just like listening to a song on the radio isn't theft - yet if you are only listening to the radio and not buying music are you stealing?

It most certainly should not carry harsher penalties than physical theft. Downloading a song should not result in a 1000$ penalty while a physical theft of a CD results in a lesser penalty.