skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looking for investors

Java Times Caffe is searching for the best investors candidates, to help expend a very unique coffee shop concept in to every country in the world. Java Times Caffe is an exceptional concept focusing on quality coffee from Mexico and teas from around the world. Java Times Caffé currently has about 43 different types of coffee as well as a wide selection of teas marketed under Javaxotica label.
In addition to coffee and tea, Java Times Caffé offers a hot and cold
menu that includes Paninis, wraps, bagels, salads, pizza, nachos and a variety of
blended fruit frappe drinks. All of Java Times Caffé’s menu items are of the highest quality and will translate very well to the US market or any market. We have four different prototype variations concept, including a drive-thru locations. However, Java Times Caffé is currently expanding with only the full store prototype. The prototype store is between 80 and 150 square meters, and will have some outdoor seating for guests. The kitchen in each location is small, and ranges between 12 and 16 meters. Total seating within a Java Times Caffé location is between 30 and 70.
If you are Interested or your company please follow up by getting more information at http://www.javatimescaffe.com

Support of Mexico’s Coffee Growers
A commitment to supporting Mexican coffee growers is core to Java Times Caffé’s
corporate vision. Tony currently sources 100 percent of his coffee from growers in
Mexico’s twelve coffee state regions. Each of these regions is promoted through the
retail locations, and 1.5 percent of all revenues from Java Times Caffé’s franchisees and
corporate operations are donated to Niños del Café, a charity focused on improving the
lives of children in Mexico’s coffee growing regions. Tony’s goal with Niños del Café is
to reach the $120,000 per month level of support. This would surpass the financial
support to growers currently provided by the Mexican government.
The Mexican government has already recognized the value of Java Times Caffé’s
support of local coffee growers. Java Times Caffé has qualified for a program where the Mexican government will pay up to one-half of the franchise fee for new franchisees in Mexico that join the Java Times Caffé system.
On the contrary, I have zero interest in the oppositions you set up. I said nothing about "lifestyle" vs. "VC-funded" businesses, and neither did the OP (other than gratuitously name-dropping 37 Signals at one point). Approximately, you're telling me that I'm involved in a war between pandas and oranges because I commented on a post about dinner plates.

I spoke so harshly of this post, not because I have any opinion about whether startups ought to seek venture capital, but because it says things like this: YC "hire as many gullible young naive programmers as possible and work them to death", and "Who will end up really getting the spoils out of any of YCombinator’s work? Paul Graham." These statements are demonstrably false. Worse, they are falsehoods which anybody could easily learn are false with just a little research.

Then there's this whole other level of nastiness. Paul Graham thinks that "designing and building is for chumps". He wants to "make the big bucks and sit on [his] ass". He (by implication) "can't wait to screw over the next guy". Are you telling me that I am wrong to call this "personally ugly"?

Clearly, you and I have very different tastes in writing style. More importantly, I object to your reasoning that if I criticize someone who is doing X (combating and casting enemies), I must also be doing X.
That's awful. Did it ever get him in trouble? I'd be surprised if any sane person held it against him, but I know that there was a Canadian psychologist who was turned away at the US border because he wrote an essay about using LSD for research purposes, four decades ago, when it was legal.
It's amusing how many tech entrepreneurs use their fortunes for space exploration.

Paul Allen invested in SpaceShipOne. Charles Simonyi paid millions to go to space. Sergey Brin invested in a space tourism company. Larry Page is on the board of trustees for X PRIZE. John Carmack has a aerospace/space tourism startup. And of course Elon Musk.

Am I forgetting anyone?
In response to Daniel-
DreamIt Ventures funded the web application that Beanstockd is currently building not the blog
What?! Hobbes doesn't actually talk???
Moooooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmm!
Thanks. It's actually much funnier than the one in the OP.
I prefer to think of the motile, living, thinking Hobbes as a real being that most people can't see.
No offence, but the numbers are simply too low to read anything meaningful into them. I'm guessing you never even reached page three of Reddit, with less than 700 hits.

I don't see how you can possibly draw any conclusions from this. For example, if you'd reached close to the top on Reddit, would the figures progress in the same way? I very much doubt it.
Most people in countries that can afford new washing machines don't worry too much about water.

... except if you live in a country that is known to suffer from severe long-lasting droughts as a result of climate change....like us here in Australia.

We're more than able to afford new washing machines - in fact, our government subsidises us (in the form of cashbacks) for getting more efficient machines. The problem is the lack of rainfall combined with increases in population and water requirements as a result.

In fact, we're so water conscious now that there is legislation in place, in the form of water restrictions, to help limit unnecessary water usage.

EDIT - just thought I'd break down some numbers to show why this is a good thing for us.

Household water usage in Australia is just over 11% of the total water usage, the second highest use in Australia behind Agriculture.

I'm not sure on our specific percentages of washing usage to normal usage, but if we assume that the 13% figure is fairly consistent with the UK (given relatively similar cultural backgrounds) then our washing machines account for about 1.4% of all total water usage in Australia.

Being able to cut this down significantly is good news, when you consider water usage (for us anyway) is measured in gigalitres (potentially saving up to 268 GL a year) - thats a whole heap of h2o
Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Origin
Only 100 months left to avoid irreversible climate change?
This guy seems incredibly bitter, and his animosity toward Paul Graham makes no sense.

I'm one of those "exploited" young people, and here's the contract I follow. I'm willing to work long hours and be paid less than a 1/N share of the company's income, while the "elders" are paid more than 1/N. They have more experience than I do, and the differential in pay is my paying a mentorship fee in order to learn from them at work. If I were ever used as a garbage disposal for bottom-rung work, as happens to young people in places like investment banks, I'd be mighty pissed about not getting my half of the deal; but if I'm getting a top-quality education from the job, it doesn't matter that the boss makes more money than I do. I mean, in college, I paid the bosses.
A Formula for Fame
When talking about Prolog what did he mean by "Then I thought about what it would take to do line input/output, got the shivers..."?
I was storming into the thread to say the same thing. The other fantastic part about it is how YC will become madly rich at the cost of the 'gullible young naive programmers'[sic]. YC takes ~5%, those gullible fools only walk away with 95% which is clearly a horrible ratio compared to traditional VCs.
Except that without scope inheritance, the "closures" created with create_function are kind of useless, and since functions are created in the global scope and thus are not garbage collected, creating new ones each time it is called ends up eating a lot of memory. This makes create_function largely useless, I don't know anyone who uses it; it's often better to just define the function globally yourself anyway and avoid the cost of run-time parser invocation, which is the same cost as using eval. In fact, create_function is implemented in terms of eval.

So you get a bunch of drawbacks and none of the real benefits, plus misrepresentation in the documentation.

Which necessitates this patch, which includes syntax changes, of course. This can only, ahem, be better.
I've experienced this effect numerous times. Sleep is a wonderful thing. One time in high school I was working on an advanced calculus problem for several hours before going to sleep. I woke up in the middle of the night to use the restroom and realized that suddenly I had the key insight needed to find the solution. The problem was to find the solution to \int_{0}^{\infty} t^{- \frac{1}{2}} e^{-t} dt.

If only this worked all the time. Perhaps I should read up on the Riemann Hypothesis and see what happens tonight.
Dozens of words trapped in tiny prison cells, struggling to be free. And a design with so little character that it makes me worry that I've stumbled upon a domain squatter.

No community features, like discussion forums. No Best-of-Craigslist. Perhaps nobody cares enough about this bland site to craft such a thing?

Having said that, for all I know OLX would be crushing Craigslist if only the rip-off/ripped-off relationship were reversed.
A New Wave of Ad Units - Lead by the Video Games and Gossip Verticals
Point well taken for the unjustified personal attacks in the OP. Although exaggeration clearly is a figure of speech in this case, just like the 'cannon fodder'.

Although indeed there is no mention of 'lifestyle business' and 'VC-funded business', I read the OP as a voice for the former, in the context of the current (and interesting) debate between the two. Linking to and siding with Daniel Haran (the author of 'YC is cult', a pro lifestyle business) tend to support this.

I object to your reasoning that if I criticize someone who is doing X (combating and casting enemies), I must also be doing X.

I understand what you mean, and I'm sorry if you meant to criticize as opposed to 'combat'. However, your How can anything manage to be this incoherent, ignorant, dysfunctional did not sound right to me, hence my first reply to your comment.
Anyone know of a fun little webapp that can give you this info at a glance, perhaps over time?
And we continue our march closer to the year 1984.
Google trends is useful here:

http://trends.google.com/websites?q=reddit.com%2Cmetafilter....

I left digg off, because it so high that it pushes all the others down into the noise...
It is that kind of self-policing (is that how it is spelled?) that really sucks.

And it is one of the reasons I make little use of Facebook. I realize that silly stuff or things I'm passionate about now might come back to haunt me.
I'm sure they are covered by insurance and I'm confident Musk clearly clued them in to their current success rate. And I'm guessing the rates were heavily discounted.
NYC Soldering Championship (video)
And it took the Wright Brothers how long to pitch that bucket of sticks and cloth into the sky?

I'm confident the crew will work the kinks out and we'll look back at this phase as "humbled beginnings".
Mixing Memory To Speed Solid-State Drives
Ehh looks like a swing and a miss so far, but I guess that's just the nature of experimenting and risk taking.
I would assume that to be true.

I use a CSS-reset stylesheet which helps a lot with cross-browser compatability. It gets hard if you're looking for pixel-perfect appearance across all major browsers.

Of course, the browser that is the biggest pain requiring the most non-valid CSS to render correctly is IE.

I personally view the time it would take me to evaluate and learn enough CSS frameworks to make a good choice about which ones to use where is worth less than the fairly trivial amount of time it takes to write CSS rules.

My opinion may change if I ever need to do something really amazing with CSS.
its because people are nationalistic, they think to themselves: "why should I support american greed when I can get the same experience from a native site"
I'm not a video expert, but why aren't we focusing on the h.264 standard?

We will start to see h.264 decoding chipsets ("anytime now") so we can watch 1080p, why revert to a standard that makes it an additional transcoding step and not supported in hardware?
GIT as a versioned data store in Python (+ links to some GIT tips)
Conversion rate (browsers / buyers) is a function of the level of interest from the browsers.

In markets that I deal with, we can prime a mailing list ahead of a purchase and scale the conversion rate 5%, 10%, 15%.

A useful bit to think about: going from 1% to 2% conversion rate on your site is the same as double your traffic. To many people focus on traffic and not on improving their site.
I do.

I want to pay.

I like paying for software apps that small independent software creators make a living with. I know it isn't alot of money, but I know that it makes a real impact on them and their families.

And that makes me feel good.

And that's why I pay.
Serves me right for reading most of it. I actually thought writing was for communication so he might have a point buried in there.
Ask HN: Recommendation services?
Can anyone suggest recommendation services?

What I'd like is a service to which I can send a simple query like "I like Jack Johnson" and it will tell me "You should also listen to Madeleine Peyroux, Indigo Girls and John Coltrane."

Or whatever, in some machine-queryable form.

I'm not interested in code. Or building up the corpus of data. I'm interesting in someone (Amazon? Pandora? Last.FM?) that already has a large, rich database from which it can generate results.
One of the beautiful things about craigslist is that it is a holdover from the early days of the web. It is a snapshot of what we all once were.

I hope they never give in to the temptation to redesign.

(And it doesn't hurt that it is blazing fast.)
The one I have found is http://the.echonest.com/recommend/
The article they're linking to was posted on here a while ago.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=190432
I use something similar, dnsmadeeasy.com. API, fail-over, redundancy, crappy UI. I can't ask for more from a DNS host!
We are _not_ built to flip. There won't be a talent acquisition for us either.

We already have revenue and hopefully we'll have profits soon.

These blanket statements bug me - everyone else forgets about or chooses to ignore Wufoo.
Cheers Bluelu,

It's definitely something that's in the cards, pun indended :)
i spy a referral link
Yup exactly, and since only one member of the group was familiar with rails when we started we thought it would be best to stick with at least a version control system that we all knew.
Yes, realistically neither subscription nor advertisement is likely to bring in a lot of money. My guess is that they want to do things the "37 signals" way, and that means acting as though advertising isn't "realistic".
US Border Agency Says It Can Seize Laptops and Hold Them Indefinitely
This illustrates why RSS is a failure. Almost all of the people with the most subscribers are the ones who churn out mindless crap on a regular schedule. So much for the theory that RSS would give those who publish great stuff intermittently an equal shot at the limelight.
Mobile operators just can't treat their customers well
10 Cool Open Source Easter Eggs
More Vim: Save Time With Macros
Two must-read followups to this event:

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/01/anthrax/in...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/08/03/journalism...

As Greenwald notes, mainstream media coverage of these events has been atrocious.
Scanning that article was a waste of a minute of my life...
He makes the mistake of assuming that the lack of a world changing YC company is strong evidence that the YC process is biased away from this result.
"necessary" is always in relation to a preferred outcome. In your usage, this happens to be optimal economic performance when it comes to ISP. Now, first of, note that government interference int the ISP business does not in any way guarantee that there will actually be any improvement after all, how many times have we seen the government screw up even the simplest of maneuvers. Regardless, let us set aside that point for now. Consider what we are getting and what we are giving up for it. We are getting a marginal improvement in the efficiency of bandwidth providers, an improvement that future technologies (ie. WiMAX, etc...) may give us in time anyway, and in exchange for it, we are giving the government (specifically the FCC) permission to interfere and pass arbitrary mandates on IT companies. How long before the FCC uses this newfound authority to pass a patently idiotic proposition. Is the gain in efficiency worth this risk? In the case of BT throttling (and indeed for mast cases), I think the answer is, by a very large margin, no.
the traffic problem is worse than you think, I believe they don't remove any old listings. So you may see 80,000 items, but only a dozen were posted in the last week
A bad salesman can also get stuff done, but leave a time bomb of bad perceptions or promises, which can be hard for a non-salesman to detect.
Mark Shuttleworth, second space tourist.
A friend of mine has been living in his van for the past five or six years when he's not on the road (he's a trucker). He's managed to save over $100K in that period.
Ask YC: How do we announce the alpha launch?
It's a PNG. There's a small version on the linked page, and the text of the article gives you an overview already.
I think blanket statements about YCombinator companies are a little unfair to the diversity of YC startups. As fallentimes points out, Wufoo has been profitable from the start and continues to build on a vision they believe in. Hardly built to flip.

Posterous, our YC-funded startup, is 100% committed to changing the world by bringing publishing online to the other 90% of people out there who know how to use email but don't know how to use complicated blog software. And we're pretty sure we'll be able to do it well enough that people will be willing to pay for the right features.

Finally, regarding the quote from Austin Wiltshire: "Who will end up really getting the spoils out of any of YCombinator’s work? Paul Graham." This quote strikes me as absurd on its face. YC takes an average of 6% but speaking from personal experience the value of the mentorship and connections far outstrip that slice of the pie. This isn't even including the access and network you get from the hundreds of other founders who have passed through YC doors now.

It's completely misguided to think that YC has some sort of strange or malicious goal of taking advantage of unassuming hard-working startup founders. Paul didn't HAVE to create YC, but he did it to serve a need he identified -- to help smart hackers like himself 'solve the money problem.' The business world rewards owners, and YC / PG is giving smart hackers a push in the right direction towards owning their creations and their destiny.

As for deciding whether to flip or not-- Google, Facebook, and every other world-changing tech firm you can think of had the chance to flip a thousand times. They said no. Making that decision is a part of a founder owning their own destiny. YC is there to help startups get to that point. What you do when you're on the threshold is your choice.
The "hits" number is the number of hits in that hour. Move your mouse left and right, and you'll see he got 376 in the first hour, 565 in the second, 721 in the next, and so on.
Are there any Internet companies at all that have done an IPO in the past 24 months? Or are planning to in the next 24? The answer is very few.

"In the past quarter, for the first time in 30 years, not a single tech company went public." (http://www.wired.com/techbiz/startups/news/2008/07/portfolio...)
Great article, this is the type of interesting stuff that keeps me coming back. The author suggests an interesting hypothesis in the end:

"Memory processing seems to be the only function of sleep that actually requires an organism to truly sleep--that is, to become unaware of its surroundings and stop processing incoming sensory signals. This unconscious cognition appears to demand the same brain resources used for processing incoming signals when awake. The brain, therefore, might have to shut off external inputs to get this job done. In contrast, although other functions such as immune system regulation might be more readily performed when an organism is inactive, there does not seem to be any reason why the organism would need to lose awareness. Thus, it may be these other functions that have been added to take advantage of the sleep that had already evolved for memory."
Bill Gates's record:

http://criminalsearches.com/details.aspx?id=5778713
How about starting by getting some target users using it and seeing whether they spread the word and recommend it to their friends?

The rest is all very nice, but a bit OTT for an alpha launch. Not putting down your work at all, but anything that hasn't got real users yet is probably still a long way from being worthy of being officially "launched".

If you media-blitz and overhype it and it's not ready, you'll end up pulling a Cuil and losing most of your target audience on day 1.

Once you have a few hundred normal users who are telling you your product kicks ass, then think about marketing. Until then, focus on getting your product right.
The personal attacks are obviously pretty off-base, given that companies like YCombinator actually help young hackers to actually retain more of what they create by taking a smaller initial percentage than traditional VCs would. I really don't see how you could possibly argue the founders are being taken advantage of.

But . . . I think there's a point worth noting here, which is that the whole "work hard and cash out" mentality really only benefits people with a lot of equity, yet many of those companies need to eventually rely on non-founder employees in order to get to the point that they cash out, and those employees are often expected to work just as hard (or close to it) as the founders or the first few employees that have 10 or 100 times more equity than them, all while generally accepting below-market wages and benefits.

That, to me, is what bothers me about the flip-it mentality: it's fine if it's you and your co-founders and that's it, but as soon as you grow past 10-15 people and have to start hiring on people who really have no chance of hitting it big, it becomes a little less noble to me to basically abandon those people once you're able to cash out, rewarding their years of hard work and low pay with a chance to go work with a bunch of people and in an organization that they didn't originally sign up for. I, at least, wouldn't want to work as an employee with startup founders that had that mentality.
Say Hello to JavaScript’s Native getElementsByClassName
When learning to play a new piece of music on an instrument, one of the recommendations I heard was this:

Focus first on playing all the notes in the right order. Don't worry about the timing at all, even if it takes several seconds to move from one note to the next. Once you can play all the notes, then you start to work on the timing, playing gradually faster and faster until you have both the melody and the rhythm mastered.

The idea is that once you have memorized the correct movements, it's much easier to work on the timing. If you start playing too fast and make mistakes, you'll start to memorize the mistakes.