skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A few hours? I've had projects last years that I was eventually forced to scrap due to realized worthlessness...
Apparently linkedin is doing it as well! http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/04/linkedin-like-facebook-is-...

This seems in between an IPO and an acquisition, it would be nice to see more startups taking this route.
AT&T’s Cloud Offering Is Foggy
Impressive candor. What other big co would have the confidence to admit its failures so quickly? Not even Google. Microsoft, meanwhile, is launching a huge ad campaign to convince users they're wrong for disliking their latest OS.
I've encountered C programmers who view the compiler as a kind of magic in the same way that Prof. Dewar fears many Java educated CS students view the JVM. But then again, you also see incompetent mechanics and plumbers.
But completely unrelated ideas don't spawn the kind of creativity that is really useful.

I completely disagree. Intelligent people from differing fields getting together will yield creativity on par or better than when everyone from the same industry gets together. Unless your idea of useful creativity is 500 Bay area companies doing web feed readers from back a few years ago or everyone working on Facebook apps now. Alot of really great tech ideas don't come from the Bay area. You may not hear about them, but they are out there. So maybe your premise should actually be stated as:

"if you want to come up with an idea that everyone in the Bay area will like, than you should move to the Bay area."
Where Are the Cures? How patent gridlock is blocking the development of lifesaving drugs.
You know, starting a successful company is far too easy. This is obviously an attempt to make things a little harder.

Coming soon:

* I want to start a tech start-up without ever touching a keyboard

* I want to start a tech start-up from my bed

* I want to start a tech start-up with only stupid people

* I want to start a tech start-up on an Apple II

* I want to start a tech start-up with a bullet in my head...
You remind me of Orson Scott Card's essay "How Software Companies Die":

You can domesticate programmers the way beekeepers tame bees. You can't exactly communicate with them, but you can get them to swarm in one place and when they're not looking, you can carry off the honey. You keep these bees from stinging by paying them money. More money than they know what to do with. But that's less than you might think. You see, all these programmers keep hearing their parents' voices in their heads saying "When are you going to join the real world?" All you have to pay them is enough money that they can answer (also in their heads) "Geez, Dad, I'm making more than you." On average, this is cheap.

This is not exactly in line with what we're talking about here - the founder type seems less likely to be satisfied in the described situation. But I think there is a parallel.
Rocketboom Inks Seven-Figure Distribution Deal With Sony
(930,000 / 300,000,000) != 1%

This guy has his own special brand of math.
Team Compensation by Mary Poppendieck [pdf]
Oh stop giving the guy a hard time. Its an experiment. Experiments are meant to be wacky. If it doesn't work, he'll try something else.
$4b seems much too high to me as well. facebook has two main values that are only valuable due to high number of users.

1- source of contact -
substitutes include: old aol, aim, email, ichat, ect

2- representation of self to world - substitutes include myspace, most social networks, ect

asian markets have different preferences for representation of self than those facebook emphasizes.

facebook is having troubling scaling globally AND they plan to monetize on only advertising.

those employees made out nicely.
Sounds like the author followed the YC mantra, and managed to make a couple of things which people liked. Then, he couldn't figure out how to market it. I think this is where (something like) YC could have given him a huge boost, with that initial announcement on TechCrunch. Almost sounds like a textbook example of why a marketing-oriented cofounder would have been useful.
About time. .Mac was always glaringly mediocre compared to Apple as a whole.
Interesting Perl Behavior
is the "birthday paradox"-like one there to catch out those that have been training for these questions, spot a birthday question, immediately calculate for 10*9 pairs rather than just 9?
I had the opportunity to work with Smalltalk/Gemstone in 1994. At that time we thought OODBMS was the next big thing. Programming was easier. However, soon it was clear to me that OODBMS was not the way to go. For example versioning is quite simple in an RDBMS compared to an OODBMS.
How will they get financed?

Bankrolled by George Soros et al.

:<
Floating Div
I had not seen that before. It really resonated with me. My current situation is perfect for police. But that's not where my calling is. I want to be a commando.
You're right on the fact it's a stupid question you have to look up, and brings barely any value to the interview (I think in a follow up version he removes the question).

Regarding not recognizing your own ignorance, I think you definitely have to mention in your answer that really you are making up all the numbers and just tackling it in the first logical way you came up with.
It seems like a dangerous route to take, to make some of your key employees rich before there's a proper liquidity event. I can only imagine what it will do to their motivation and to the internal politics of the company.

Of course, very few startups find themselves in this position anyway, being worth billions but with no interest in selling at the moment.
Perhaps add a "lobby" room on the dashboard page with no particular topic? That'd show 'em.

Also, showing more tips hides the input box. It prevents people from being sure they're implementing tips right, and adds more complexity to saying things for new users.
Most likely, it involves private internal trading between employees

Where would the money come from? Very few facebook employees are rich in cash.
Photoshop Express Adds New Features, AIR App
The author clearly knows next to nothing about Facebook.
I can't type a capital T in the room I'm in. Some autosuggest thing keeps trying to turn it into the same of someone in the room that starts with lowercase t. Might I suggest a more standard tab-completion system?
That's one way to look at it, and I am sure some employees might leave after this. The other way to look at it is that it re-energizes the workforce and the early employees, makes them stick around longer, and gives some hope to the other employees that have joined later.
Microsoft, Google Play Nice: DoubleClick To Serve Silverlight Ads
ECMAScript 4: Interesting language but poor successor
Facelift Image Replacement; Another look at sIFR type work
Chemical discovery on Mars stumps Phoenix team
Are conversations archived somewhere? Here's my reasoning:

1. Some conversation and/or the site gets dugg

2. Thousands of incoming users waltz in with good karma

3. Everything goes to hell

Wikipedia, Everything2 et al. have some resilience because the audience is more than just who's using the site at the moment. Dunno if you've thought about that in great detail or not. Also,

* Friend system. Encourages people to band together against the trolls

* Bookmarking
Amazon is in Seattle.
Is this the future of the web? Mozilla Labs video of "Aurora" browser concept
but if you are successful doesn't that demonstrate the uselessness of your yet to be developed web app since you were able to accomplish the task without it?
Why haven't you tried putting any ads on it like AdSense? I'm not sure if you'll make decent money that way since most of your users are probably technical oriented, but it's worth a try. If you get enough pageviews, you can also try applying to a CPM network like ValueClick where you get paid based on pageviews.
China venture capitalists concerned about potential bubble
Facelift: Non-flash Alternative to sIFR
Want publicity? Forget TechCrunch and get on Good Morning America
I think the intent of this message was to admit failure internally only. It was a corporate email, not a press release.

Bill Gate's emails were a lot more strongly worded than this email from Jobs. Take the Gates email about Windows Movie Maker that was published everywhere last month as an example.

Also, Microsoft's ad campaign boils down to "despite what you've heard, we think you'd like Windows Vista if you gave it a try. So why don't you?" In other words, it isn't "you are wrong for disliking Vista" but more like "what you've heard about Vista is wrong or outdated."

I agree with you about Google. They rarely say anything, good or bad. If there is a specific widespread problem then they might admit there is a problem and then issue a statement when it is fixed; their commentary is minimal if not non-existent.
YC08 Summer Founders Hosting Hacker Meetup in Cambridge. Come Join Us
Lisa Raye’s husband is cheating her | Daily News Blog
DoubleClick to Serve Silverlight Ads
The restrictions of Shabbat apply to Jews, not utensils owned by Jews; therefore, generally speaking, it's OK to set things up before Shabbat so that things will happen without any intervention. The most common example of this is setting a mechanical timer or an X10 system to turn lights on and off. And one common form of the "Shabbat elevator" is, indeed, to set up the elevator so that it will automatically stop at every floor.

(This is all according to the traditions recognized as authoritative by Orthodox Jews. The Kera'ites, a dissident sect going back at least to medieval times, interprets the Bible differently; they think you're not just allowed to ignite a fire on Shabbat, you're also not allowed to leave a fire burning over Shabbat. If you're a Kera'ite you should probably not live any place where there are cold winters.)
If you're in the Cambridge/Boston area next Monday, come join us for a hacker meetup. PG will be answering some user submitted questions on the YC process and how to increase your odds of getting in.

Check out the invite for more details and RSVP if you're able to make it.
Bootstrap your startup to beta while still at Yahoo. Sure you'll have to put up with not working on what you love 100% of the time but it'll be better than 0% and probably close to 100% seeing how you seem to like Yahoo o.k.

I am in a situation very similar to yours - good employer, o.k. hours and an overdue startup. I am doing this right now. It's long days and busy weekends and try as I may, a couple of days a week I don't get any sleep. But there is both satisfaction and a reduction in risk in doing this for me. For me, it's not the financial risk that matters as much but I just wasn't sure I would be able to maintain my focus and enthusiasm doing just a startup - amongst other reasons because my cofounders are non-technical.

On the other hand the fact that my cofounders have funded the startup, pay me to do this (on top of my salary at bigco) and handle all the boring non-technical tasks while still letting me be an equal part of strategy and fundraising - all these make my situation a bit different from yours.
Unjust Deserts?

Nothing like a typo in 48-point font.
> Credit card consolidation: Use a credit card consolidation service to free up your existing credit so that you can use it again.

WTF? No. If you're in debt, you need to be focused on getting out of debt, not starting a startup.

And even if you're not in debt, you shouldn't be financing a startup from credit card debt.

Two bad ideas combined: superfail.
When One Deal Returns the Fund; an Update to Venture Fund Economics
Looking For Good Resources to Create a Tree Data Structure in Java
In Java, I can make a binary tree, a doubly or singly linked list, and store in values through recursion.

I'm looking for a way to create a tree with an unlimited amount of children for each node (as opposed to 1, with the Linked List, or 2, with the binary tree).

I'm going to use the ArrayList class to store the children of each parent, but am having trouble understanding how to code it up.

Does anybody have an example of such a tree that I could look at?

Thanks.
Dying baby saved when doc designed & built dialysis machine from scratch in garage
I've come to the conclusion that there is no good way to solve the compensation problem -- of how to reward outstanding performers and teams without the unintended consequences that the article talks about -- inside standard corporate structures. Besides, the compensation offered under these schemes is almost always so tiny as to be nearly a joke. I think many people here would agree, though, that there is a simple solution: if you want greater compensation, make something and let the market decide. Markets don't have the limiting beliefs that middle managers do.
I Didn’t Do It | ServiceLive Blog
Will these tools protect you on the internet?
I believe you need the best anonymous and end user website creation tools for this, so that's why I am implementing them myself and open sourcing them for scrutiny. And crowdsource the anonymous verification process, so you can trust the sites.
Looking for comfortable men’s shoes?
We always look for shoes that are comfortable even if it should be expensive. Men’s comfort shoes often come at a high price, but they do bring the extra bit of comfort that we are looking for. There are many brands that offer men’s comfort shoes and countless number of websites that sell these brands.
http://www.windycitizen.com is really interesting. Someone will figure out how to make local work online, and this looks promising. Good luck!
You don't need ruder friends, you need a partner or two who are equally enthusiastic, nay who are BANKING on that project succeeding. Hopefully they are banking on it because they are really passionate about the idea and really want to get out of the boring day job.

Like you, I spent almost 3 years trying to start one project after another that fizzled out. For some I even had a partner. Unfortunately it was always a "side project" for one or both of us. Till I reached a point of desperation and frustration with not doing my own thing, and till I found partners passionate about the project just because, I found it pretty hard to get up at 5 to code too. Now I know I'll let not just myself but also them down if I show up without getting my stuff done.

Seriously, the formula to finally starting a startup is simple

a) Get desperate (passionate)
b) Find similarly desperate (passionate) folks.
This is going to be a ton of fun. It'll be a great way to network and really just hang out. Can't wait to meet all of you.

-Garry, cofounder, posterous.com
AT&T joins the cloud computing game
Microsoft launching two security initiatives at Black Hat conference
This is a very good point. Also, the mistakes you make at a big company tend to be very specialized to the product you are working on. When you start up on your own the range of mistakes you can make blows up by an order of magnitude. You start learning a lot, fast, but this also means you have to be able to take failure in your stride.

A startup will fish out and highlight every single hole in your knowledge, skills and personality. You better have the optimism, the enthusiasm and the friends (partners) who'll help you deal with that. I think this might be one of the major reasons single person startups often fail.
What copyright costs us
Her message is results based compensation doesn't work in the domain of software creation. I wonder if it applies to other areas, where it's widely used (e.g. sales or waitressing)?
My complaint was having all of these in the core language. If I want to use property lists, why can't I just load the "plist" library? If I want association lists, why can't I just load the "alist" library? And so on... the core programming language is not the place to dump every algorithm ever created.
Markets, on the other hand, have a nasty habit of paying people nothing at all for failures. It's hard to feed a family in that kind of risk environment. I'm all for startup fever, but we have to be realistic here. The libertarian ideal of paying people the precise market value of their labor would lead to an awful lot of starving IT workers...
with that redesign, you should work on making the site look like there's an actual product. It looks 100% like a generic-template blog right now.
37signals Live debuting tomorrow (Tues) at 3pm CDT
I think the intent of this message was to admit failure internally only. It was a corporate email, not a press release.

There's a fertile grey area between the top-secret internal email and the press release, ranging from deliberately dropping a copy of your "top-secret" email on the floor of a journalist's office to deliberately sending the email to a bunch of people who are known to be bad at keeping secrets.

Apple's pretty good at keeping secrets. When something leaks out of Apple within 24 hours I tend to assume that it had some assistance.

I think the diplomatic wording is another clue that Jobs, at the very least, doesn't care that this email got out.
Defeat by answer permutation from a pool of IP addresses.
The libertarian ideal of paying people the precise market value of their labor would lead to an awful lot of starving IT workers

You could leave out the word "IT" and still have a good point.
YouTube Ditching High Profile Users In Fear of Copyright Enforcers (Google Scared?)
What's interesting about this? There's a big, bold note in the documentation that says the result of this usage of a statement modifier is undefined, and that's exactly what happened.

I guess it's nice that the blog author is giving everyone a heads up, but this shouldn't be news to anyone who actually reads the documentation for the tools they use.
reddit, well-known for being written in Python, also uses markdown. So does this site, written in Arc.

What's your point?
Thanks for the feedback. That has been the driving force so far, to keep things dead simple, and just have the rich feature set there if people want to delve further.

My own usage is mainly to go ask questions etc - one of the great strengths of IRC is getting help, so any features that help people get there are always on my mind - integrated pastebin etc...

Feel free to mail me if you have any ideas/gripes.
I just found it interesting because when I wrote the initial code I assumed it would work they way that seemed more intuitive to me. After I encountered that I went into the documentation to investigate but I don't think that one should be expected to read every single piece of documentation, least of all in a seemingly trivial case like this.
I don't think any of YC fundees really need YC funding. Most of their friends and families would be able to sponsor a summer's worth of living expenses. I think YC's true value lies in the community of cofounders, connections of PG and Co and the visibility that being a YC startup generates. So, a being funded b YC would be useful to anyone who needs help in these three areas even if the have money. I have enough money to live comfortably for a year saved up but if the US immigration system was more lenient I would have applied to YC in a heartbeat.
The Inside Story of the Hubble Telescope
It actually has advertising which is now also matched to the chat.

Go in a channel and talk about apple or iphones etc, and the infobar above the chat will likely change to show an advert about apple.

The challenge at the moment is getting enough volume of adverts and keeping them current. I may end up dealing directly with advertiser like stumbleupon for instance do.
Great visualization of olympic medals won by year
Apple Admits MobileMe Mess... To Itself
Ain't that a good thing for human race? In history when kings hired incompetent generals, disloyal subordinates, bullying common people, they paid the price with their own lives. Farmers who failed to tend their crop and bad luck due to harsh climates died of famine. Vikings, pirates who pillaged wrong targets got annihilated. Why should we put ourselves as a special caste?
Your response does not address the passage you quoted. First of all, the author didn't ask them what made them successful. The quote has facts about their lives, not their thoughts on what made them successful. Second of all, the author doesn't claim that these traits are a sufficient condition for becoming rich; only that they'll help.

And what the article says is closer to: "Google and Yahoo and most other successful internet companies have being in Silicon Valley in common, hence if you want to be a successful internet company, being in SV will help." Which is absolutely true.
I was just playing with this. Boy I wish I had it when I was trying to learn Japanese!

Thanks for the pointer.
While the DMCA issue is clearly a joke:

"The United States, as [a] sovereign, 'is immune from suit save as it consents to be sued . . . and the terms of its consent to be sued in any court define that court’s jurisdiction to entertain the suit.'"

Which as far as I can read it means 'The government can only be sued if it WANTS to be sued'...

He developed this code as part of his employment with the Air Force. Then he sold it to someone else, who claimed proper ownership.

I don't know exactly what kind of 'IP' contracts you get with the air force, but I sure as hell know that if I write code that's "relevant" to my current employer, they can claim ownership. Sounds like the reality of the issue si a bit diff. from the suit.
John Napiorkowski’s Perl Development Blog - Vox
This is a textbook example of an orchestrated PR leak. They admit they have problems, but on other hand they really don't since it's an "internal email".
Generally, if you make things people want and value, monetisation often occurs naturally, and the rewards derived from being excellent on the open market often out weights that of being excellent within a company environment.
That doctor deserves some serious kudos. I cannot even fathom how grateful those parents must have been for his work after being told by all other doctors that the baby was too small for dialysis. That kind of fuck-you-I-can-make-it-smaller ballsiness is why I am proud to call myself a hacker.
That all sounds excellent. I've never actually had the chance to use Erlang, but I do have experience with concurrent applications in general.

I think concurrency will be the norm in the future, so I'm excited by things like Erlang, even if I've never had the chance to use them. I just want to make point out that a language like Erlang makes solving a hard problem easier, but it's not the solution itself.