skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In my experience, Rome isn't one of those places.
Sounds similar to http://psyco.sourceforge.net/
Well it had to peak sometime...
Having been on the other side of this, while you do sometimes "get the opportunity", these things generally go against the merchant in the vast majority of cases, especially for electronic goods.
I haven't noticed any change in the rate at which posers mention Derrida.

That's only because you live in Cambridge, MA.
What were you doing during the first dot boom?
Just curious what other people were doing pre-2001, besides founding Viaweb.
If you haven't read this already, "DNA seen through the eyes of a coder-- of -- If you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail" http://ds9a.nl/amazing-dna/
I worked at CKS Partners, in Portland, Oregon and then at Linuxcare in San Francisco and subsequently the office in Padova, Italy, where I landed when things fell apart.
I was going to 8th grade.
Hurting? We're gonna critique you on it :) Ok, I won't be too harsh. But its really a great test case for you. People are asking each other what works the best, and people are explaining, sometimes fighting over their different needs and requirements. I think its a great opportunity to present yourself in a positive light and encourage people to try your product. But be aware of the environment, its a forum, where people expect objective advice. So you need to explain who you are, (no "You should try this, I have and it's great!"), and how your product can help them. You need to sell without looking like you're trying to sell something. Marketing sounds like its hard, confusing, and this huge deal, but here its just a few simple sentences you'll write that will get the job done.
In 2001 I was in bootcamp. Prior to that I was working for a small music store chain writing an E-Commerce package. Spent my high school years (pre-2000) as a system administrator at a local ISP. In 2005 I gave a presentation to a high school "e-commerce business" class. It was a lot of fun reflecting on the field when it was so new that even a high school student could be on an even playing field.
Google is just publicly acknowledging what they and everyone else has known for a while.
18 Smaller Olympic Countries to Root For
An Artificial Pancreas: device that reads glucose levels and delivers insulin
When I am struggling with something, I sometimes think "Damn, this is hard. I wonder if I am stupid". And then I remember I have a PhD in solid-state theoretical physics, and I think "Man, I used to be smart -- how did I manage to become so stupid since then?"
That's very well done. I see room for improvement, but you didn't make any huge mistakes. I can think of a few things that might increase the response rate, but I don't see anything getting a negative response, so you really did a good job there.
Artificial eyeball does away with distorted images
Salesforce.com offers a 30 day free trial and it works for them. If you are offering a Wiki I believe it would be a good idea but in doing so you should be sure to engage the customer with daily emails over the 30 day trial.

When I tried offering my first web application in 2001-2002 with a 30 day free trial I has 1,200 trial sign up and 3 conversions. I didn't follow up with those who signed up, I didn't collect phone numbers to make any phone calls, I failed in that partly because I just didn't engage the consumer. I got them in the door but left them hanging to figure things out themselves and sell themselves.
I think pg nails it when he says that talking to tons of investors takes up lots of time, and given the extremely low probability of a deal going through it comes out as extremely hard.

One of the reasons that exacerbate this problem is the presence of 'wannabe' angels in the investing community. These will typically be folks who worked long and hard in a big company or possibly got rich as an early employee and now fantasize about doing angel investments. Obviously the ambiguity of the whole process is too much for them to ever go through an investment.

IMHO the fund raising process is all about waisting as less time on the folks who will not invest and figuring out the potential investors.

Possibly pg should elaborate more about how founders can predict the 'successful' investors and skip the bad ones.
Next gen battery maker A123Systems files for IPO
I know this is not hacker news, but I thought it was a wonderful idea of something positive to do in the spirit of Olympic brotherhood, as opposed to competition.

Also ran an extra mile this morning.

Very few times when the world can set aside their differences for a while and enjoy what is probably one of the few traditions of global human culture.
If you have been in sales, some portion of the fundraising process wouldn't sound as intimidating.
Wow, what an overstated headline. What the article actually suggests is that Google may need to write down some portion of the value of their investment in AOL...
My /. joke was written in jest. I read funny comments here now and then, but you have to admit that template jokes get old really fast, and the lack of thought involved adds a displeasing element to them.

I do agree that -17 is unnecessary though, and I don't understand why it happens.
Sorry for delay in response. Just saw this. We resolved what we needed to by other means, but thank you for the offer. :)
It has to have happened already. The universe is too big; we need bigger telescopes.
Has anyone ever seen a truly smart person struggle?

Yes. When I was getting a math degree, people who were really good in one area, like analysis, often struggled in another area, like abstract algebra.

Likewise, when I lived in Boston I worked with PhDs in microbiology and biochemistry who had a hard time with computer programming.
"If you factor out the "bootstrapped" companies that were actually funded by their founders through savings or a day job, the remainder either (a) got really lucky, which is hard to do on demand, or (b) began life as consulting companies and gradually transformed themselves into product companies."

I had to read the paragraph a few times, so I may be misunderstanding it, but why do we factor out bootstrapping through savings or a day job? Is that not 'real' bootstrapping?
Too long, and lacking any sort of self-deprecating humor.
This article is a good example that for agile to be successful, having the support of management is crucial.
I like the idea also; it gives more exposure to new submissions without having to explicitly browse the "new pages" section.
I joined a market-leading publicly traded company in Sept/99 just in time to see the existing employees become wealthy at the peak of the bubble while my options which vested after the bubble gave very modest returns.

Luck and timing... luck and timing...

Cheers
I was battling with my finance professors about whether AMZ was going to fail or be huge.

I was short AMZ and long B&N in my 19 year old wisdom ;-)
I do wish wikipedia had a notion of sub-wikis so that all the fictional domain pages (the comicbook universes, Star Wars, etc) would be subsumed into one place.
Download The Barack Obama Do It Yourself Hawaiian (COLB) Birth Certificate Kit
I still find this quite hard to grasp. If it's declarative (book) knowledge, then it makes sense to ask immediately. Does that count as struggling?

If it is insight though, for even those armed with all the crucial facts, they may still be unable to make certain connections and mental leaps. I guess this is the kind of struggle I'm talking about. Given the same data, two researchers can come up with interpretations of different strength and quality. Across all the brilliant people I have met before, whenever this happens I can only ask "how the hell?" And they would say something like, "oh, it's just this and that."

"It is different with the magicians. Even after we understand what they have done it is completely dark." -- Kac on Feynman.

Is there a similarity? I have to wonder what caused Rock to struggle...
I don't buy that at all.

I can see that lucky things have happened to us and that the degree of success (especially the part about being able to afford more people than just myself) has been greatly influenced by luck. But I also think you're guaranteed to have some good fortune along the way.

If we weren't doing what we're doing we would be doing something else. In our case we're doing conferences but we could be doing intranets or adding integrations with other websites or building custom social networks.

I got an interesting take from one of the founders of Apperceptive, a just acquired Movable Type services company. He said that they intended to build a product company but that once they got started with services they found that the "world has an insatiable appetite for services."

That was my experience, once we'd built something that could be valuable we had a number of excellent service options.

I'll agree with anyone who says that bootstrapping to this stage is hard but I'd argue that it's quite repeatable. I'd like to take the company one stage further, to a point where we have stable non-services revenue and I won't make any claims about the repeatability or luck factor involved in doing that.
I live in NYC and have never heard of Derrida. I have, however, heard of cash-money.

PG, coincidence..??

edit: i forgot the sarcasm tags...
Well, citations are pretty important.
I've documented mine on Gentoo forums: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-692590-highlight-dwm.ht...
As was I. Y'know, I didn't even realize there was a bubble until after it had burst.

I spent my time teaching myself HTML and toying around with Photoshop 6. I also did an insignificant amount of PHP around 2001 -- mostly tweaking existing scripts to try and get them to do what I wanted (I used to get grounded for spending too much time on the computer and slacking at school; now I get paid a nice salary for "playing on the computer" :).

It was another year or two until I really started programming.
I can't IRC from my phone; even mibbit.com doesn't work right.
Ted Dziuba - Remember When An API Actually Meant Something?
Well put. I'm appalled that people keep promulgating this FUD about git documentation. Git's User Manual (http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/user-manual....) is the first hit on Google for "git manual". From my reading, it's roughly equivalent to the much-lauded Mercurial book.

The author then writes: "I installed git through MacPorts, only the main git tool comes with a man page, leaving me to consult the Web to find out exactly how to format revision specifiers." He did not seem to realize that the git-core port has a nifty variant "+doc", which installs full documentation, including the aforementioned manual.
The XBox Live version was better.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfkDxF2kn1I
I can understand the PhD part: the programming involves a different mindset than bio and chem: "It's more of a craft, than an art" -- a neurobio PhD. To paraphrase, it is more dependent on wisdom than cleverness.

The math tidbit is interesting though. What other examples have you seen of good mathematicians being lopsidedly talented in one area? What kinds of areas were these? I can somehow see real analysis involving a different ability than that of discrete math.
It seems like the basic argument is that we now assign social status based on the third places a person inhabits on the Internet, whereas in the past we assigned social status based on the cultural objects a person was familiar with. Ignoring the fact that the two are essentially equivalent, how is this different than the concept of discourse groups from the past? Perhaps one could argue that one's discourse group has been merged one's social circle in a way that is qualitatively different and meaningful, but if so I'm not really seeing it.

/pseudo-intellectual
I don't think anyone has done this math... PG said to be prepared for 6-9 months for Series A. Angel seems to be 1-3 months and Series A seems to be closer to 4-6 for YC companies. I talk to plenty of non-YC founders who raise money for 6-12 months. Blech.

I think only 20ish of the 80 "graduating" companies have gotten Series A, and most of the rest (who are alive) got angel.
High school. Making web pages for local businesses and fixing computers for neighbors. In hindsight, I wish I had met other programmers and learned programming instead of how to write HTML and use Photoshop.

I was surrounded by blue collar people, and politicians, lawyers, and businessmen growing up(and their families), and can't think of one engineering type or programmer I met before college.

Not that I regret one thing about my life, it's been plenty of fun, it just seems that starting a successful net company would have been easier had I gotten into it earlier.
Depends on the economics of what you're doing:

- Winner take all markets with strong positive network externalities have bit first mover advantages: eBay.

- Products requiring large investments probably require investments: if you trade time for money, you might be really late to market compared with a firm that got money.

- Products where it's easy to start competing and carve out a nice probably don't require much in terms of investments.
Only .5% of customers though, according to them.
Considering they took an already pretty funny video that relied completely on the captions and rejiggled the text to read twitter.. I'm just going to give them a C for effort.
I wasn't able to take a job at a startup in Cambridge a few years ago because of fear that a lawsuit from a non-compete I'd signed could stall a product launch at some ambiguous point in the future.

I was really pissed about it at the time.
I was in High School, trying to figure out whether I wanted to major in Computer Science or Bassoon Performance.
I was in junior high at the epicenter of the dot-com boom. I came home every day to watch CNBC report on the newest IPO. I remember watching VAlinux debuting and it reaching several hundreds of dollar on opening day. As a b-roll they interviewed the CEO and watched him drop his credit card bills into the mail box. He's finally able to pay off his bills now that he's worth millions on paper.

Oh how I wish I was just a bit older back then..
Is that kinda killing with faint praise?
It’s Like Google Maps with Sim City 2000 - OnionMap
Internet Matchmaking
The short writeup is like a preemptive surrender to Godwin's law!
This part at least is correct:

The old hierarchy of the arts was dismissed as hopelessly reactionary. Instead, any cultural artifact produced by a member of a colonially oppressed out-group was deemed artistically and intellectually superior.
I was working at at a large research institute in Menlo Park (which is located a stones' throw from Google's first office). My first paycheck there has almost the same date as the first ($0) Google paycheck that Paul Buchheit posted to his blog.

(Sigh.)
That is what the whole Wikia federation is about, isn't it?
What model phone is it?
Most of the comments here are coulda/shoulda/woulda/if-only. We all make mistakes and fail, but it is the learning from them that is important. Failure is good. You are not making progress until you are failing.
Case in point: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Mine:_Adam_Freeland

Within a day, two requests to delete filed for different reasons, equally bullshit - probably because both requests were filed by bots. The burden of proof should NOT be 100% on the writer. When an article can be "speedy deleted" with no evidence of a good reason, there's something seriously wrong.

And it does make you wonder: "why do I waste my time?"
i don't think so no. you may have to go with a wrapper script or an alias.

do you know if it's possible to do bundles in git?
I can't think of a single real-world situation that would be improved by having noncompetes enforced. Can you?

XCo. is about two years ahead of the rest of the world in their widget technology research. They'd like to hire a new product designer, but they know that the information this designer would need to do his job is worth millions to any XCo. competitor. They would like to hire someone they already know and trust, but they've pretty much tapped out their immediate social network. So they stipulate that if you work for XCo, you can't work for Y LLC or Z LP over the next two years.

Or they could not hire someone.
started a dot-com of course...

unfortunately it crashed and burned - but at least i tried.
I was finishing my undergraduate degree (end of 2000), computing the quadrillionth bit of Pi (it's a zero), and laughing when I was cold-called by VCs who read about me in the new york times and had heard that "distributed computing" was the latest hot thing.

I'm probably not unique in this respect, but I'm sure there aren't many people who write to VCs saying "thanks for the offer, but I find doing a D.Phil. at Oxford University to be far more interesting than getting $5M of funding for my work".
I could be doing a lot more creating at my company if I wasn't shackled to our out-of-date version control system.

This is actually a serious issue which is finally getting traction to fix at the management level.
You've had someone reply to you, but they seem mistaken about how your product works. Its like a marketing gold mine you've got here. I assume you can use the native app without connecting to the web? Is the web just an added bonus?
Didn't realize that there was a bubble either.

Going into 3rd grade or so, didn't really start programming either, unfortunately. I think I was just messing around with a copy of Visual Basic 6 I received from a book.
Wikia and Wikipedia are separated. Feels like there's a lot of duplication as well.
I must say I haven't used Balsamiq because you irritated me by twittering an advert at me based on a keyword I'd said. Injecting yourself into conversations is risky.
why do we factor out bootstrapping through savings or a day job? Is that not 'real' bootstrapping?

I'd say that those have more in common with angel funding -- the money is coming from an external source which has lots of it. Bootstrapping, in contrast, suggests that the company is being funded out of the company's revenues.

But it's a rather blurry line: What do you call a company which operates for N months out of the founders' savings and is self-funding beyond that point? The answer has to depend on N -- at T=0 a "bootstrapped" company has nothing to sell, so there must always be some initial period when a company if funded by external sources.
Going to 9th grade. Didn't know of Paypal, Excite, or even eBay. Yahoo is the only pre-bubble company I know. Hotmail was not a startup to me, it was a product of Microsoft.
Junior in high school, working as a UNIX Systems Administrator - got hired (at 17) by a .com company. Ended up learning Perl and MySQL out of it. Very fortunate that the boom ended and I lost my job (and ended up going to college), as staying as a Systems Administrator wasn't where my heart lay.
Ask PG: What are your thoughts on current YC News community?
I am curious what you think of the quality of submissions, comments and attitudes found here as of late.
12th grade, reading Business 2.0 with windowside envy, wishing I was doing something cool, like starting a game company.
Might also be worth ensuring that the users have support or at least howtos to set and use your app, ensuring that they're actually using it during the trial (maybe auto-extend their trial if they never got around to using it -- you don't want to lose them instantly if they finally go to the app and the trial is over).
I know that my previous company did get more customers when they were advertising a free 30 day trial than whey they were not. I am certain that enough of the customers stuck around after 30 days to make it worthwhile.

The business was very much customer-service oriented. Every new customer got a phone call to ensure that they were properly set up, give them a 5 minute or so introduction to the product, and personally invite the customer to a weekly live training webinar.

They catered to less computer-savy people mostly, but even the technical folks seemed to appreciate the personal touch.
in college, getting a co-op job at a software company
I was in middle school, enjoying living in the valley. Then it started to crash and we moved away ;)
Fragmentation, and Chanserv is a steaming pile of shit. That's all I can think of. (But Jabber solves those problems better.)
Another copy-edit near the end of point 2 (halfway through the page):

"Investors rarely grasp this, but a much of what they're responding to"

(there shouldn't be an 'a' before 'much')
For the last month or so the quantity went up and the quality posts got harder to find. For some reason I get the feeling that the last week has been a bit better, but I can't say why for any reason.
A lot of people never get any their entire lives. Sure, there are other ways of doing it, maybe cheaper or easier ones -- but nearly any price is worth paying.
I was a computer science college student. I thought that the web was a great way to share information, but that "web applications" were boring compared to "real computer science" like programming language design and natural language processing.

In some ways, I regret focusing so much on traditional computer science and ignoring the web -- I probably could have made significantly more money circa 2000 than I did. But on the other hand, I just read an interview with Don Knuth in this month's Communications of the ACM, in which Don encouraged readers to do the work that they personally find interesting, not what they think others think to be interesting.

I've done some web work since 2000, and that can be fun, but when it gets down to it, my joy in computing really is found more in language processing than in web applications. Finding an income-optimizing way to merge the two would be most grand, I suppose. :-)
The Victorians' discovery of deep geological time was unsettling.

To them. Eastern religions already had, and used, words to describe billion- and trillion-year time spans. For example, time spent in even the worst of Buddhism's narakas (hells) is not eternal, but is posited to stretch beyond 10^19 years. Somehow, 10^19 years of agony sounds more frightening than "eternal hell".

Only one author, Dougal Dixon, thinks it probable that humans will be extinct within a million years.

Unless humanity evolves dramatically, as a collective, the odds do not favor a million-year lifespan for the species. I don't envision a war or environmental disaster rendering the whole species extinct, but I could see one leading to a genetic bottleneck that opens the species up to disease. Also, fully modern humans are rather like the (now extinct) passenger pigeon in terms of being requiring a huge flock to survive.

Personally, I think there will be dramatic improvements in artificial intelligence, and I expect technological progress to continue throughout my entire lifetime, but I tend to doubt that we'll ever reach the Singularity. I think the greatest discovery-- disappointing from a Singularitarian's point of view-- of the 22nd century will be a strong evidential argument, as close as humanly possible to proof, that consciousness is, in part, nonphysical, ruling out the possibility of a full-on Singularity.
Why feel shame at reading a book which improves your skills? Would you feel shame after reading a startup self-help book such as "Getting Real"?
As a map dev, I'd like to see a lot more competition to Google/MS/Yahoo from hand-painted maps. It's an under-explored niche. Another example: hand-painted, interactive road intersections at Yandex Maps - http://maps.yandex.ru/map.xml?mapID=2000&mapX=4159769...
Huge Thanks to Mashable