skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Get QuickTime Pro (totally worth the money). Go to File->Export. For the format, select QuickTime Movie. Open the options window. Under video, click settings... and choose H.264 as the compression type. Adjust the quality settings for your taste. For sound, use AAC and select a quality level that you feel comfortable with. IMPORTANT! CHECK PREPARE FOR INTERNET STREAMING and select "Fast Start". This places the MOOV atom at the beginning of the file so the entire thing doesn't have to download before it plays. And viola, you have H.264 video that is playable in Flash. If you want, you can just change the file extension to .mp4. Sometime Flash doesn't like it when you use a relative link to the video file. Use an absolute web link to the video file if you are having issues. If you want a super easy was to play back these files, be sure to check out the open source FLV media player:http://www.jeroenwijering.com/?item=JW_FLV_Player
I really don't see the point of it. Its like horoscopes, and its basing all startups as a neutral idea with the same success rate - Facebook is the same as Techcrunch which is the same as Twitter, even though they are completely different in the size of the target audience.

It looks as if its mainly basing the predicted investments off the founders and what they have worked on in the past, but is that good enough? We all know startups can fail no matter who is behind them - Cuil, its founders had first hand experience with the leader of search, Google, but has still pretty much failed so far.

Plus, apart from a bit of fun, who would use it? I doubt investors would use it over their years of experience in the industry, and it seems like they are in fact the target audience!

I look forward to giving it a go.
My geography grades were never that great, but it does look like Launchbox could really give Y Combinator some competition for that title seeing as it's already leading the race to be the furthest east.
Congrats to sharememe
There's a bit in "The Elegant Universe" about how at this point it's impossible to distinguish between real but weird physics and just crazy.
I'm on a Mac, and I've heard a lot of complaints that Quickbooks can't transfer data back and forth between Mac/Window machines. I imagine a lot of accountants use Windows.
It's a poorly-written article so I'm not certain, but model 1.2 might be getting at the same thing that I'm describing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_loop_logic#Time_loop_logic is a better description.
using harvest for invoicing, probably going to get quickbooks for the rest - seems to be the standard.
I'm on a Mac also, and thankfully haven't had to worry about this for the last few years :) And yeah, I've never met an accountant on Windows.

I'm OS agnostic, I prefer to use what I think is the best solution for the problem. With that in mind, it might be worthwhile to look into a windows machine to run QB. You can rdesktop to it (there is a great rdesktop app for the Mac), and when you get to the point of having a part-time accounting person come in, the PC will already be all set up for their use. This is what I did in the past (dedicated low-end PC for "hosting" QB).
Ah ok thanks for the background information. Arrington sounds like a lot of old school baseball scouts and GMs.
Quickbooks is the only way to go. The fact that you already use Quicken will help you in getting up to speed.

Also, definitely go for the online service Quicken offers (as opposed to the shrink wrapped s/w.
Yeah, yeah Matt... YC is the YC of the East, West, Earth, and Universe. I think it's hard for the press to describe this new model because it's not an incubator and it's not venture capital, and "seed stage mentorship with little capital" is hard to describe.

So since YC helped create it, they're the easiest approximation. In fact, it's flattering.
MyGameMug categorizes and matches gamers
I'm shocked at the price, but good for them.
Awesome! I'm on the waiting list, but I won't get upset if you bump me up the queue.
Qik launches on Installer.app
Monitter: A Different Take on Twitter Search
Inntesting...thanks for this.
Would running a Windows VM work for you? VMware Fusion is a terrific product.
"The man who never made a mistake never made anything"
Well it is a good idea (I guess) if you want to keep taking chances but don't want an IPO or acquisition.
You can't expect employees to keep working for risky stock forever.

They'd have (I assume) a good few employees with $1/2m - $1m or even $50 - $100k worth of stock. For many, it's probably more then everything else they own put together. You wouldn't want to put everything you own on one risky & speculative tech stock. They'd be pretty keen on an IPO.
I guess letting them cash out a bit is a way of releasing some of that pressure so they can keep taking risk.
Try to avoid Intuit (Quicken/Quickbooks). They have a monopoly, and it is unfair.

I tried for a bit to compete with them, but the banks are complicit and it is impossible to provide proper account import functionality with the way things are now.

That said, try Less Accounting (http://lessaccounting.com/) or Harvest.
Memcached has got to be the most critically acclaimed piece of infrastructure in the world of dynamic websites. Any other contenders?
My guess: actually it would take about five minutes.

But the only guy who knows that is an employee of the state of California, so what the hell is his incentive to let them know that? He's probably working right now to obfuscate the code.
No one has mentioned yet the possibility that the IT managers who claim it is impossible believe that it is unethical ever to cut the pay of a government worker (those tireless guardians of the public welfare).
Yeah, I'm running Quickbooks on my Parallels partition. If you ever need to go to the next level - i.e. have someone else take over accounting from you - you should really run a Windows Quickbooks install. It's not worth the headache to try anything else.
True, and neither of those are money-makers. The whole 'we'll make money off it with advertising later' has failed many times. Search is the exception not the rule.

Until I actually saw some innovative advertising method making advertisers money and getting an excited response in that community, I'd be sceptical that they can do more with a pageview then NYT.com or About.com or any other 'site.'

At banner ad monetisation rates, that would probably put them at around the $50m - $500m p/y mark.
It's just been kicking around in my head. Serving targetted 'ads' that link to interesting websites might work considering the numbers of people who go to digg/reddit etc. Arranging it chronologically as everyone does is horrible. I'm sure I've missed a lot on HN because I wasn't here.

But there's a branding problem & I don't see anyone spending months on something that google/stumble/delicious can duplicate with a small script.
Same as websites - but you track number of people subscribed and the key metric is how many people open it. CPMs are a little higher for newsletters than for websites with the same number of readers I've found (as an advertiser, not a content producer).
I think there's a lot more mileage in running Windows under VMWare Fusion or Parallels, than in having an entire machine dedicated to doing nothing but running Quickbooks.

Might help the balance sheet out... :)
Hi guys, I am one of the founders of MyGameMug. We would love your most critical feedback and suggestions!

Thanks in advance!
SEO explained in 3 minutes.
I think all this predictor thing is a hype they are using to gain traction.

I used YouNoodle and I felt all this prediction thing is spoof - The real crux - This IS going to be a startup directory (crunchbase + social aspect.)

Imagine a niche area for linkedin to concentrate on - high powered entrepreneurs all connected and talking about their ventures even stealth startups.
Just because the LaunchBox advisors dont have public personas doesn't mean they are bad advisors. In fact they are all extremely sharp, well connected and have quite a lot of experience in the space.

You can see their bios here, although a short paragraph doesn't do them justice.
http://www.launchboxdigital.com/about-us-new.html

I will agree that without the public personas its much harder to build a culture and community like HackerNews around the program. But I dont think thats the goal of LaunchBox. In fact I think all the LaunchBox companies hang out on HN because its the best community of its kind out there.
I had to read that twice but I think I got it. However, I don't see why it takes 99 days for them to all be killed.

If all 100 men have cheated then there's no "asymmetry", so which wife kills her husband first? Wouldn't they have to kill all the husbands at the same time or not at all?
California is awful big and has a ton of people in it. I'm not entirely convinced that California considers itself a country but just hasn't told anyone yet. They do everything different here and even check you at the state borders.

177 million does seem like a lot though.
> and even check you at the state borders.

What are you talking about? I live in California, have been in and out a great number of times, and have never encountered anything of the sort. Besides, it would be unconstitutional.
I guess a sort of important related question is: "Is money really much of a bottleneck here"

If there was much more money from investors or the partners, would YC fund any more startups then it does? I have to admit, I know virtually nothing about how YC works, but it doesn't sound like it's all that capital intensive. And the cycle shouldn't be that long either.
Umm, but aren't most people hired through a labor market? What reasons do you have to believe its not an efficient market?
You've got to hand it to him, the publicity is working. He has another $5 app that would probably never get noticed otherwise.
Gary's Guide -- An events calendar for tech & new media folks
The LaunchBox Digital program was excellent - the advisors are fantastic, the DC office space has a great "start-up feel" to it, and the whole summer was filled with fun (when we had time to take some breaks).

As one of the co-founders of Koofers.com, I think we would be staying in the Washington DC area. There is a large education based presence here in DC - including the Department of Education, Blackboard, Chronicle of Higher Education, Intelliworks, SmartThinking, etc....
I wasn't suggesting that they would be bad advisors; and, maybe even public personas are non-essential. However, I am looking at their bios, and one thing stands out: none of them have any hacker cred. The have JDs, MBAs, they were CEOs, CTOs, government officials, advisors, partners in large corporations, etc, etc. Please do not interpret me as saying that somehow I consider these positions to be unimportant - that's not what I am trying to say. What I am trying to say is that they give off a qualitatively different impression than YC does.
To me it looks like a mix of Apple's Time Machine, widgets, instant messaging, voice chat, PersonalBrain, Apple's dock, Skitch's screen capture and random interface ideas from a few other programs all thrown into one giant mess of cognitive overload.
quick math: $25m in revenues, 2.5m subscribers, which makes it $50 annual revenue per subscriber.

So I am wondering is $50/year/user a high or low figure in web advertising? I am suspecting it's a high one because of the audience (hip, young and rich urban women)
I'm also in Seattle.
Going Back to School: Picking Up Where Facebook Left Off
+1 for Harvest. I'm very fond of their service. I'm using them despite the fact that I also have Quickbooks for accounting.
Rails's view helpers for linking to css, js, and imgs tag ?<timestamp> onto the URL so that the URL changes when you push your app.
14 Design Retrospectives
Designers blog about their designs and the reasoning behind what they did.
The site doesn't show me anything about how it works when I visit the homepage. There's some vague promises, but not even a screenshot of a profile or a forum. What do I get for trusting you with personal info?
This is actually very handy for us. Thanks, Alexis!
Let's not forget this gem: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=477454
+1 for less accounting, it's amazing.
I love this kind of idea, but it never works.

TechCrunch tested predictions of success - but what of failure? (maybe it says they all succeed...?)

Anyone care to enter a past learning-experience startup, to test this out?
Anyone care to enter a past "learning-experience" startup (i.e. failure), to test this out?
I would wholeheartedly agree. None of the Launchbox advisors are/were hackers and they all tend towards business end of the spectrum. There are pro's and con's to each type of advisor. YC is lucky because PG is good on both sides. Only time will tell how the business side leaning will fair for LaunchBox.
Normally that's a sign that you're heading in the wrong direction...
I saw the ad and the first thing I thought was "Sodium polyacrylate!!!"

They use it in all sorts of consumer goods, but I guess not here.
The first facebook app that could be semi-useful! Finally.
Without sounding like a broken record... Quickbooks.

It's also easy to just give your accountant the qb file for taxes. I'd advise to stay with the non-online version. When I was looking at it awhile ago it didn't have everything I needed, also you always want access to your books.
This site does not use Markdown.
The technical difficulty is almost a side thing I guess. The box is the limitations of the medical profession.

What I think is the interesting part of this is that he did not say: 'not my job' or (more likely) 'I wish that this was someone's job' or ' 'I wish we could do something.' He said 'what needs to be done.
There are very standard ways of validating a predictor. Using test & training sets, and tuning the output to be optimized even on unseen data.

If they did this, they should be open about the numbers. Hell, I'd be open about the data too, and make a challenge to make a better predictor. If the algorithms still run on their machines, they can only gain by being open.
There are already a lot of firms researching the public company market, like Renaissance Technologies.

To make a counterpart for startups seems interesting, and worthy. With the growing market of successful startups, the industry that supplies them with services such as this one should become viable.
This is a social-based startup, not a technology-based startup.

It sounds like technology, because cool-sounding mathematical prediction is the selling point... But it isn't that hard to do (though with data, and time, you can surely incrementally improve it). The story here is a community-known credential. Its value comes from other people relying on it as a baseline. Like any other credential, it doesn't guarantee you'll be any good - but it is a better-than-random predictor.

Because there isn't anything like this available already, and it would be a useful thing to have, they have a good chance. For it to be used as a reference point, it doesn't need to be great - it just needs to be betterer- enough -than random (and get adopted).

A "good predictor" just means "5% better than totally random". If you have a strong team, and good connections... your chances are surely better than if you had a weak team and no connections (though exceptions occur in both ways). If you can formalize a bunch of these factors, and find what they weigh... you have a baseline predictor that's better than totally random.
SFO laptop security breach: what a way to start Black Hat
Beijing's Balancing Act: China's Summer of Living Dangerously
Yeah, that's another solution. Problem is, it's unwieldy for news sites, since usually you're not submitting your own content.
Officially, MSFT will pay as little as it can (ethically/legally/effectively) get away with.
Sorry, we have not included a tour of the site yet... we were rushing to get the product out the door (we are big fans of release early, release often), so we haven't had the chance to.

We do have a "screencast" that hopefully answers some of your concerns:
http://www.vimeo.com/1448309/
I think it is a PR gimmick rather than an expected useful product -- their main product is a social network for investors and entrepreneurs.
How many people are working on it now? You say "we" in your comments. Is there a team involved, or is this a solo project. Either way, it looks great.
NASA says internet rumors about Presidential brief regarding life on Mars are false
The problem with this is that SSL certificates can become nonverifiable through innocuous circumstances --- for instance, by expiring, or by moving. Most providers and most users would not accept a hard failure in this case.

And there you have one of the biggest problems with DNSSEC --- without a massive software revamp, there's no "soft" failure mode. gethostbyname() doesn't have a warning channel.
College details
Pitching for your life
Sweet, my job got on techcrunch!
Switch on to Google Analytics
Causes is pretty useful. :)
Want to get an internship position and fun?
Hey,

I am looking for some talented student programmer guy or girl to hire as an intern (* not necessarily student de jure).

First project is pretty simple and could be fun to work with — though there are some chances to face with scalability issues, funny tricks, non-mainstream technologies. Though the most important aspect is that that project is about people's (hopefully positive :) wellbeing.

For those who don't me, you can pay a vist to my blog at http://rashkovskii.com/. I am also one of the guys behind StrokeDB project.

Scope of technologies to be experienced (or not): Ruby, Merb, Javascript, Erlang, AMQP, Io, Lisp, ...

You might be also involved into open source development, like StrokeDB or related project(s).

I can't pay much but I can promise fun and experience. If things will go fine with commercial projects (i.e. they will be launched), I will be able promise some stock options/bonus or something like that.

If interested, please drop me an email at yrashk@gmail.com

Thanks, can't wait to talk to you.

P.S. Sorry for this duplicate post. I posted it 22 days before but haven't got much responses. I am trying to improve it and post again :)
Are there any "empirically proven best practices" for hiring? In the end it comes down to a personal decision more than any statistical resume analysis can give you.
Some people care much more about efficiency than your perception of fairness. For them, Quickbooks is a pretty clear answer.

Ability to just hand it over to your accountant is a must.
It seems the Prevayler or HAppS style of data storage & retrieval is what you and I want (and perhaps in their hearts, every other non-db-specialist as well)

Basically, you just define data structures in your language like you would any other piece of data, and it is silently in the background serialized into an efficient (I would hope) ACID datastore.

http://www.prevayler.org

http://happs.org
I wish people would stop using economy as just a smart-sounding metaphor
When I first came to California I was driving west on I-80 and I was stopped at the Nevada border. But they just asked if I had any plants or animals in the car and when I said no they left me alone. Apparently they are very concerned about invasive species. Hawaii is similar.
In fact, today John Chiang (the controller in charge of these paychecks) is blaming COBOL, but in the past week Chiang has been saying he thought it was illegal, unethical, et cetera to enact these pay cuts. Not that Schwarzenegger's maneuvers are morally defensible, I really don't know, but it seems pretty unlikely that Chiang discovered this programming problem by coincidence the day after his other excuses failed to stop the executive order.
Very, very high
> Technically skilled people live in fear of being laid off.

I don't know. The folks I know without a solid education of some sort live in much more fear of losing their jobs than I do. And with good reason it would seem. Most of them go through 2-3 jobs a year.
Exploring the Limits of Indirect Branch Prediction [pdf]
Well, he _did_ just get married.
See also: Facebook.
What's to keep someone from making a free competitor?
The First $1000 iPhone Application
Quit hating; this is awesome. Statistical analysis can tell upstarts what's important and what isn't in a way a blog post can't. It might reveal statistical surprises a la Freakonomics. I'm just saying, I'm happy someone is bothering to do the math on what works and what doesn't. This is something I want. If my startup were taking off, I'd pay to access this information.
Considering the complexity of the system, it doesn't seem like that much. Remember that staff at the UCal systems (7 schools now?) are all state employees. A single college would probably be paying in the tens of millions for a new payment system created from scratch at market rates.
Killer feature for FriendFeed, Twitter, and Facebook.
I know two couples with kids that will enter school in one year and have in-laws with a one-year old. All are looking elsewhere (south bay/penninsula mostly) for places to live once it is time for the kids to go to school. San Francisco may be gaining in families with small children, but this is probably a side-effect of the last wave of hipster migrants getting married and having kids; it is still losing a torrent of families with school-age kids. The general pattern is to move to SF, enjoy the city life, hook up and get married, have kids, then leave for the bay area suburbs.
The DC startup and it's Social Media scene is extremely vibrant; recent events Scoble/Vaynerchuk, Mashable DC, TechCocktail

Summize, Odeo, Mixx and many others all hail from the DC area!
Glad to see that even the smart folks at HN are subject to the temptation of mindless diversions.
Not sure I follow your math. Wouldn't that be $10 in annual revenue per subscriber ($10 * 2.5mil = $25mil)?
well, in many sports, the difference between a gold medalist, and silver one tend to be really minor. So, ability wise, a silver medalist is doing pretty well, and can consider to be a top athlete of the world in that given discipline.

So, maybe a 10 points for a gold, 8, for silver, and 6 for bronze might make more sense.

Formula One used to have this scoring mechanism (which I thought was fair), first 10, second place 8, third 6, then 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1. Usually in a car race there are about 20-22 cars, so only the first 8 cars would get any points.
People complain when bad apps get let into the app store. Then other people complain that Apple is controlling who gets into the app store.

Can't we have both?
A startup based in Hyderabad, India is attempting to do something similar as you mention. (Collection of bookmarks on wide variety of topics)

http://www.httpfuse.com/index.jsp
Also,

"Back in 2003, the National Science Board issued a report that noted steep declines in "graduate enrollments of U.S. citizens and permanent residents" in the sciences. The explanation? "Declining federal support for research sends negative signals to interested students." That seems unlikely, in that the alleged decline hasn't dampened the enthusiasm of students from all around the world for our country's graduate programs."

Almost stopped reading there. I can think of 10 reasons why that's stupid reasoning.