skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Editing your post to say something entirely different after I've written a rebuttal to it but before I've posted it is cheating ;)

So there's three main methodologies I see at play in the startup world. There's the go-big-go-home crowd, the facebooks and groupons and squares and so forth. There's the ramen profitable crowd that operate like typical small businesses: the fog creeks and the like. Then there's the flippers.

We all know the story of the Go Big or Go Home guys; they've been a part of the SV psyche for decades. Similarly, the ramen profitables/small businesses are pretty standard. My uncle started a small game development house about a decade ago that makes FPS training programs for service rigs in the oil industry.[1] It's a new take on a very old business model, and while they make a very comfortable living they're under no illusions of a $40MM buyout. They expect to be doing roughly the same thing ten years from now that they were ten years ago.

Compare the above with flippers. We have founders who come up with an idea for a cool, if maybe gimmicky app. They build it; it's flashy and does something interesting. They iterate, pivot, and find a userbase. Then they sell to Google/Apple/Microsoft/whoever. Now, there's nothing wrong with this per se. The issue that the author and I both have is that this appears to have been the plan all along. There appears to be no desire on the part of the founders to build a business, rather they're spending a couple years on a fancy tech demo in the hopes of landing a sweet job with a fat signing bonus. It's almost like a practicum as opposed to a business, something that you do for a few years after college so you can get a better job. The defining question for me is this: how many of the founders would be happy if in 10 years their company had experienced healthy growth and they had 15-30 employees, taking home $300k/year? Alternatively, how many are shooting for an IPO and a company that will still be around in 50 years?

I'm not saying flipping a small startup is a bad idea, just that it feels a bit disingenuous to call these ventures businesses. They feel more like a graduate degree combined with an innovative investment engine. And, while I understand why you took umbrage at the author singling out YC, these ventures are exactly the kinds of startups that YC churns out.

[1]Shout out: http://cooleimmersive.com/
I was cleaning and fixing up a house after its owner had died. One of the first things I did was arrange to get the water turned back on, but it took two tries, because the first time the man who connected it turned it back off because water was running immediately--I had not closed the valve to the water heater which started filling.
Your extension changes the analogy. One person clicking on something relevant to their search is different than one person clicking on X relevant searches.

The "chances" of an e-mail reaching X number of people entirely depends on the e-mail list you've compiled. The company I work for sends an e-mail every week and it reaches over a million people every single time.

Even if you make a 1% conversion on that list each time, you are showing continual and repeatable return, which some call a "business model". A lot of us get caught up in the fact that this model has nothing to do with the actual product.
It seems to me you need to figure out how to actually make/do something rather than keep calling it a dream. From what you've described, I don't really see something you can do based on what you've said. If you're going to start a company, it has to be based around something more actionable than simply a dream about how things should be. Figure out how you think you can get there and where you/your company fit in that process.
I like Console2, but it's had a long running bug for me on multiple machines and Windows versions where the last line of the console won't display any characters after scrolling the window, and it eventually drove me nuts enough to stop using it.
Doodle 4 Google contest showcases young artists
Ah ha. Fun fun! :)
The technology world already has it; We have Wikipedia (Edit history), Advogato (Paths), StackOverflow (Rep), etc that encourage personal profiles. You are more valued as a loyal member than one that just started.

Unlike Reddit, Slashdot and HN that do not encourage personal profiles. Do you even remember my name? What about other HNers besides pg? Why do you read their posts anyway? They work because it's a form of almost pure democracy being applied and have the same problems of it eg tyranny of the majority.

What the scientific model can do is a multitude of above; institution API confirming credentials (Referral), history (paths, did this person do other reviews?), etc. Cheap and still effective peer-review. I'm not sure which kind of government type applies to my suggestion above, but there are many forms of government they can apply.

More: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/List_of_forms...
Regarding KVM locking, this is going to be fixed in the next version of Fedora - Fedora 16 [1].

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/VirtLockManager
Just wondering, can't you just format the server again? Or doesn't GoGrid provide that option at all? Since it's a brand new server, I guess there's no problem in formatting and installing it again.
description of "The Chinese Way of Hacking"

Fast, Cheap & Out of Control

(not an insult, it's very effective)
Police charge mother in Nashville airport altercation
How Effective Was The 2009 Stimulus Program?
I'd focus on fixing bugs in the beginning.
'Last dinosaur' supports asteroid extinction theory
The Challenges — and Dangers — of Amateur Astronomy in Afghanistan
Anyone who has dedicated enough time to master the lost art of modem whistling should be able to name their own salary.
Stick to C. Have you read K&R, yet?
Go to the movie to find some funny things
Well said and don't worry about feeling like you "didn't get it" as neither do I. I doubt we are the only ones.
Me too. But the organization doesn't have to be a "firm" in the usual sense...
An arbitrage trade is a risk free transaction that involves buying something at one price and then immediately selling it at a higher price. How does creating a Groupon clone fit into that model? How do you get from imitation to arbitrage?
How does one go 7 years without negotiation experience? In any case, my experience suggests that you won't be happy working there, even if they pay you your 70k - it's clear they are after a junior (3 year exp) and value the role commensurate with that. Unless you are getting desperate / it's urgent (in which case you've already lost the negotiation game) I'd recommend looking for a position more in-line with your experience if you want a salary matching your experience - a world-class chef shouldn't expect world-class dollars if he works at a fast-food outlet.
Four Days vacation in 2011 is actually not totally unreasonable (it would eight days for a full year, as opposed to more standard 10, or two weeks). But I agree with everything said above, it's a negotiation: negotiate.
Ask HN: Localized HN-like Websites?
Does anyone know of hacker news-like websites in other languages? I'm particularly interested in a Japanese hacker community, but I'd like to open this discussion for any foreign languages.
Yup, the fact that he didn't share anything about how the server was hacked is a bit suspicious.
Very good post. It is very easy for people who do not know you from Adam to sit tell you when/if/how you should exit.5 10,20,30 millions can make a huge difference. Always remember the most important person to make happy is yourself. No apologies needed.
If you're looking for a job, you should definitely check them out. I know Lenny and he's an awesome smart and nice guy. I'm sure the other founders are just as nice.
Yes, just go to http://far.to/. My explanation on the page could use some more work--suggestions welcome--I had a hard time coming up with concise instructions.
Why would you say that? Do believe yourself to be above sports or the people who enjoy sports?

If I were to fault that metaphor for anything it would be that it has become cliche at this point.
AirBnb seems like a startup is getting significantly more success. Why this person considers them to be more innovative than many other startups however shows I think a bias towards selecting a winner after its already won. There are plenty of amazing, innovative startups in terms of their vision and technology that will ultimately fail. That's the nature of the business.

I think her problem is she just doesnt have the right deal flow, and doubt she has been part of or witnessed up close a game changer.

There are startups in the Valley that are working on microbial fuel cells, flow batteries, microwave radar, tumour selective drugs, computational photography, nano-controlled membranes for unprecedented efficient water purification, stream processing algorithms, optical computing, immersive UIs, gasification, robust computer vision, RF plasma lighting sources, novel financial transactions, high efficiency combustion engines, compressed air storage, green plastics, ML for genetic applications, next gen EDA for <25nm structures, and of course shoedazzle.

I think the issue is her dealflow and perspective. coming to SV for 6 months assuming you're going to see game changers when most VCs for 10 years dont is poor judgement.
Of course we do. And so do the french, germans, russians, brits, koreans, australians - well, you get the point.

And it's far from just against traditional enemies. Did you catch the incident where the Americans informed the Australians that the Chinese were in their federal minister's computer systems? [1] Wait, how did US intelligence know what what was going on in .au computers better than they did?

[1] http://www.news.com.au/technology/federal-ministers-emails-s...
Maybe they weren't sending truly random one-time-use passwords.
Counter with 80k and tell them you expected standard vacation time when you offered 70k.
Could this be the next weedmaps?
Is this the next weedmaps? http://www.mmjkush.com offering Groupon services for free.
Why did you low ball yourself from the start?
If 76 is the average in your area, you should have asked for 79.
State that the average is 76 (site your source) and ask for 70 again.
also, hate to rain on their newly-launched projects parade, but http://i.imgur.com/A1tsV.png #fail
It can be flaky, sometimes the bar doesn't appear, but usually it does. I have the page bookmarked to I can check it easily. It sorta feels like I'm living in the 1990s and checking on my dial up modem.
Post Google+ I'm still engaged with Twitter, but I've pretty much "jumped ship" from Facebook. One big reason why is that I love my Twitter client (Plume), but I haven't found a Facebook client I consider acceptable (let alone one I'm happy with).

I'll admit to being only one data point, but I think it speaks to the impact external developers can have.
I am from Minneapolis and we have at least two Groupon clones. I think this says more about the abundance of Groupon clones than it does about startups in Minneapolis.
Extra Credits to fund startups with excess donations
Anyone else think the entire process has been awe-inspiring?

Short of it: they asked the game community to help with medical costs; overpaid before 24hrs. They immediately went into planning mode for what to do with the cash. Personally, I'm thrilled with the outcome.
Thank you for the explanation. That was entirely reasonable.
ASP.NET MVC is comparable to both Rails and Django in terms of speed, but you have to know what you're doing. Competency is required. But that shouldn't be a problem for a "real" developer such as yourself. ;)
lower on the language scale

Ah, climbing metaphors ;-)

scale: "to climb," late 14c., from L. scala, from scandere "to climb". This is also the source (perhaps via It. scala) of the noun in the musical sense.

I admit, I'm stretching a point here, but when in Rome..
Amazon Takes Sales Tax War to California
Make it, then do a Show HN. :)
Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed
I looked at this, but they want to charge a high installation fee and have a 1-year contract. Can you avoid the installation fee if you already have residential service? What about the contract?
I fully agree that I need to figure out how to make it actionable. I feel that there is an problem of education with regards to data-driven customer acquisition.

The first step is to start informing companies of the benefits that data analytics can bring, and how they're going to get tromped when companies that are doing deep analytics come into their market-space. Especially foreign companies that have been doing it for years, and make it their number one priority. cough cough Zynga cough cough

I think that is a perfectly actionable goal, but it involves mostly consulting. Consulting is something that I know I will need to do, but it's not something that can be sustainable forever.
Nước hoa hồng mát da Tonic Extra Mild
Chiết xuất từ cây Mai tơ, D–Panthenol có tác dụng làm se khít lỗ chân lông, tăng cường đàn hồi, giữ ẩm và làm dịu da.
The other side of that is that in the hands of someone with good knowledge of HTML and CSS, you can accomplish quite a bit with GWT.

Prior to starting a project with GWT, I had only done client-side development in vanilla Javascript, HTML, and CSS. I was pretty skeptical about the prospect of writing in Java and having it compiled to Javascript being a viable way to create a web app.

Fast forward almost a year, and I've built a complex user-facing app for my company using custom CSS styled components and HTML5. I was worried about GWT being a leaky abstraction, but thus far it has, for the most part, just worked.

The biggest win for me isn't even the Java to JavaScript compiled. UiBinder has ended up being a great way to design custom widgets using html and css, and having them be easily reusable throughout the app.

So, while GWT can be used by Java devs to avoid having to learn much about HTML and CSS, using it this way results in missing out on a ton of its potential. In the hands of the right developers, it can be quite a good tool for creating great looking, complex client-side apps.

I realize some people hate Java with a passion, but I've found that the non-enterprisy style of Java I use when writing GWT apps isn't painful at all.
Most VCs don’t care how long your company takes to show a return – they don’t get to re-invest proceeds of their deals, so if you exit early, the money sits in a bank account earning interest for years instead of contributing to their returns.

Can anyone explain why this is the case?
Yeah - the first half comes easier. Too easy - I do it myself far too often.
>What they actually did was drop a customer because their profit margins weren't as high as the wanted them to be.

So what else is new. Greyhound fucked over a lot of small cities 5 to 6 years ago by cutting service to them. I'm now a $80 cab ride to any public transport except Amtrack; and Amtrack is really limited both in times and where it goes.
Do not budge. Stick with your asking price. You already made the mistake of not aiming high and negotiating down to 70k so now that you have no room to budge you need to enforce the asking price. Then when they come up to 60 maybe then you can consider going down but I wouldnt until they get to 60k.
Ask HN: Review the idea about hungry athlete/entrepreneur
First of all - I'm learning english (don't bite me) and think that talking about interesting themes going to be more productive to improve it.

I go to gym workout with free-weight and also ride my bike. As a sportsmen I think about my diet, because without diet you can't gain muscle or fight with body fat. In the same time I can’t cook, of course I can make scrambled eggs or sandwich, but nothing special. Athlete or healthy diet can not consist of scrambled egg and sandwiches, that’s why I always wait when my wife comes and cooks something delicious and healthy for me.

That is the problem that I sit without food hours with hunger and wait. I can find a lot of recipes online, but usually if you want to cook it you need to go to the store and buy ingredients. I fantasize just clean and simple website where you use check boxes with food that you have in your refrigerator and get a suggestion of health meal that you can cook at home from these ingredients.

Pick and get suggestions with few options:
- gain muscle; or - lose weight;
- cooking time;

The choice will depend on time of day. Breakfast, lunch and dinner will different.

Also this startup can make a mobile app and notice in the store what should you buy if you want cook chicken breast or grilled salmon for example. As an interesting option you can mount iPad on your refrigerator and use as synchronizer between family devices with FOODlist (if somebody are going to store - they will know what they should buy)

What do you think? Maybe you know startups/websites like that and I will happy to use it!
My sincere apologies, that was a big and incorrect assumption on my part.
I had a "friend" who hounded me about 35 cents once. And I'm not exaggerating, unfortunately.
Do you actually want to stay in your town? It sounds like that's hurting your job prospects, with only one job offer there.
Stallman, who effectively think it's immoral to make money off selling the software itself

This is just lazy. Stallman's position has literally nothing to do with money.

Also I don't really understand the rest of your post:

Linux and the GNU tools are clones, especially the GNU tools. And free software commoditizing certain classes of software is a good thing since we don't have to reinvent the wheel a billion times. Without free software "clones" it would have been massively difficult for products like OSX to even exist.

There are still "commercial" programming languages being created (off the top of my head: F# and Q) and I'm having a hard time coming up with any commercial language whose success was damaged by free software clones.

Can you give any concrete examples here? LibreOffice is still crap compared to (also kind of crappy) the MS Office Suite. If we all had to pay for IIS and SQL server the web would be much much smaller. Where is the damage being done?
Not always. I know many people whose "confidence" was predicated on success -- such as being accepted to Harvard, Y Combinator, medical school, whatever. As a result they felt compelled to be successful -- and ended up doing things like becoming a lawyer or selling their company for $1 million because they were too afraid of being "failures."
I don't know what happened in this case, but it doesn't seem very difficult:

1. Configure server to use password authentication and allow logins from anywhere.

2. Send password to user via unencrypted email.

There's a reason that people are uncomfortable receiving passwords via email.
Sounds like you should start your own incubator or consulting firm on how you think things should be down. Do you have any money to help a few good startups?
Good luck installing Cygwin on an internet cafe.

(I used to use Putty to check my email using mutt remotely when on vacation).
Is there any successful YC company that doesn't have bosses and employees? There is even a feature on HN designed specifically for bosses to find employees.
I don't think they will hit their 50M in the next 12 months.

Most of the 18-25 yr olds I know use GroveShark at home or are happy with Pandora while on the move (if they are not listening to music they have downloaded.)

I just don't see the value added over other existing services.
Lego still make creator sets, and I'd say they're better now than ever (although the price seems to be always increasing)

Here's some creator sets I've bought for my kids that I'd recommend

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/4993_Cool_Convertible

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/5763_Buggy

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/5892_Sonic_Boom

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/6753_Highway_Transport

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/6752_Fire_Rescue

http://lego.wikia.com/wiki/5762_Mini_Plane (the orange/white kit the article is based on)
I agree with this article. What I find strange, however, is how he implies silicon valley is the normal way for humans to act, and yet the default way to do business there is to take huge amounts of venture capital. VC results in all sorts of restrictions employees and an impetus for the company to radically grow into the kind of large, unnatural company he's writing about. "Come to y-combinator to act more human so you can build a less human company if you're really successful!" The 37signals style relaxation bootstrapped business, however, well that seems to fit much better.
That's what I was thinking. When you rent a server you're renting hardware and a connection. If you screw up the software side (like getting hacked) you can always wipe the drive and reinstall. Why would you want to cancel a year long contract because you're set back an hour to reimage?
Call me cynical, but I think health care reforms will never happen because it gives big business an edge over the little guys.
Whenever chef deploys a new revision the site is broken until bundler has finished running. Lesson: don't deploy so frequently :)
All these systems are incredibly vulnerable to capture. Despite their many drawbacks, the best thing peer reviewed journals have going for them is their relative independence.
In reply to your first point, you should really consider using ViewModels. It a) makes views cleaner because it gives you a place to put formatting, and b) provides for some element of decoupling your views and models.

If you're passing models directly to views with Django, don't you have exactly the same problem?
Actually, they're all asses. Sorry Lenny, Beau... The truth has gotta get out. :P

Naw, they're awesome dudes and they'll be missed in Montréal. Who else but Lenny can we put all of out name tags onto by the end of every Startup Drinks ?
In San Francisco, where I live, they have basically a monopoly on high speed internet. Here are the options and speeds I have tested:

1) DSL (through ATT or Sonic.net, I got Sonic's ADSL2 service) ~$60 a month, 3.4/0.86 Mbps

2) Monkeybrains local wireless rooftop ISP: $35 a month, ~10/10Mbps, depending on location (large building to the north blocks service to my building)

3) Webpass, same as Monkeybrains, but only handles buildings with like 10+ apartment units, $45 a month, 100/100 or 45/45 Mbps, basically has to already be available where you live, so not me

4) Comcast residential service, ~$60 a month, 22.3/4.34 Mbps, this is what I went with

5) Find someone with a fast internet connection and set up some sort of wireless directional antenna or free space optics to use their connection from the roof - expensive and I don't know anyone with a connection that fast within sight of my building.

Nobody can run fiber because of ATT and Comcast having basically monopolies on running cables anywhere. I mean, the city isn't too proactive anyway in that area, but ATT and Comcast are clearly slowing it down a lot
<joke> Of course, a hash bang is a hash functor orgy. </joke>

Yes, I think they meant #-tag

Hash bang (#!) is used to specify to the operating system where to find the binary to execute a script.
Ask and ye shall receive: https://github.com/bumptech/stud/pull/6

stunnel DH code inserted into stud.
True, but that leaves 4 hours a day to sleep, let alone have a worthwhile life. But who am I to judge, I suppose.