skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How do I start investing in startups?
Throwaway account...obviously.

Over the past 6 or so years I have made some decent money doing various Internet consulting, contracting, and salaried jobs. I am very knowledgable about the startup industry and like to think I can determine winners vs. losers with regards to early stage startups. I also know the areas of interest to me very well (local/geo, cloud, and online advertising).

My question is this: how do I get into investing in startups? I will be upfront and say I don't have nearly as many connections as typical angel investors, but I do have money to invest.

What is the best way to begin finding companies to invest in and actually investing in them? I would like to invest between $10k and $20k in a couple startups. What is the process to go about doing that? Are startups looking for someone like me who may not have as many connections? Are there startups that are looking for this amount of investment? Am I crazy to even consider this?

Thanks in advance!
I have pet projects. I also have a life. I have a job that involves putting my knowledge/skill/passion to work to a degree. Even if my employer would allow me to write each project in whatever programming language I was obsessed with that week, I wouldn't, because I don't want to maintain all my whims. Personal projects can be thrown away easily or restarted. All that work can be done without _any_ business concerns. That's just not reasonable for a paying job.

I have a lot of passion for programming and I hack it quite well in a professional environment, thank you very much. My passion requires that I fiddle about with personal projects so I can test out new languages, frameworks, styles, libraries, paradigms, etc. without any business concerns in the least. If there is a place where I could get paid well to just hack on whatever the hell seems fun at the moment, I'd definitely make a concerted effort to work there--I don't think it exists.
Help wanted with UV-Vis spectroscopy and Photolumensence Quantum Yield
Europe In State of Financial Collapse
The UI is something we are focusing on a lot.
With social news there is a big problem to overcome with how to deal with the massive number of articles being submitted. Mainly finding the best way to display all of them articles in a way that the user can find what they want to read about as easy as possible.
Our main focus with Athesyn is 'news you care about'.
> Dude made an MP3 player...

A U2-branded MP3 player that only plays U2 music...
Medicating Ourselves Into Lives Not Worth Living
True, but maybe they think the best way to achieve profit in the long term is by building cool things and not being evil.
All of that sounds good—count me in.

Should we wait a week before starting so people can get their hands on the text?
One small point - I found it quite hard to read. When I first saw it I assumed it was just some type of tag cloud until I realised that the link on the left is the category.

Also any plans for having it so that I can start with a language, get a list of data-stores that can talk to my chosen language, then get a list of web-servers and so on until I've chosen my stack. Then building on this it would be great if I could get all the API's for the chosen stack!

Thanks for the great little tool!
Joel Spolsky Launches Trello - Organize Anything Together
What kind of battery life does Windows 7 SP1 get on tablets?
Minus is currently funded and we plan on implementing sustainable business models in the future. No need to worry :) Your files are safe.
What is the difference between VMWare Server and VMware ESXi Server
There are many proven business models that work for this space and Minus is also currently well funded. We are here to stay and your files are safe, no worries :)
In your opinion, Jeff, was the 2010 Flash Crash the work of HFT, or Algo trading? Maybe both?
How many times have I seen an ad hoc thread that people would just hit reply-all to converted into a mailing list. Instant community killer.
A fun anecdote from the Oakland Crimespotting data was that every couple weeks the cops would just do a "sweep" of San Pablo or other major streets for prostitutes, just start at one end then go to the other. I think Wednesdays are more a mark of police patterns than prostitute / john patterns.
I'd think we'd mostly be saying "I liked this" or "I didn't understand that", not so much quizzing. But I don't know, never done this before.

Can always link pictures to threads if ASCII gets too hard.
I'd say you are correct. The problem I see in this situation is that Hotfile alleges WB has an incentive to remove content: the removed content seems to get replaced with a link of WB's choosing in an effort to sell media.

Keep the automatic "take down" (which should be flipping a bit in your database that hides the content) and flag the replacement content for human review. Without a thumbs up from the human, WB gets no referral link.

P.S. The human reviewer really can't put things back up even if they notice it's Linux kernel source code. That puts Hotfile back in the legal hot seat.
Its really nice. I am liking it better than PivotalTracker. Except Pivotal had that whole velocity thing.
This is exactly how it worked for me when my COBRA coverage expired and I lived in WA. Bypassing the SHQ was key to getting reasonable rates for myself.
Works for me. Book acquired.
Those are all ancillary to google's core product: search.
When you search for a destination airport outside of the US, you get a very clear message:

"Sorry, locations outside the U.S. are currently not supported."

They're taking the release-early-iterate-often approach to this new service, which means that they're not going to make everyone happy immediately.

Rather than dismiss this new service just because it doesn't fit your specific use case right now, think about this from a different (i.e. hacker) perspective -- this is a cool new service that will obviously become even cooler as it gets more advanced.
JCPenney maternity clothes tend to be ideal for fun or even do the job
Show HN: GAE/Bingo, A/Bingo split testing for App Engine & Khan Academy
We just open sourced GAE/Bingo, a re-imagining of patio11's A/Bingo for use in App Engine (w/ his approval). The lib was built for Khan Academy, where it's currently serving up A/B tests at a few hundred requests/second w/ minimal page load drag.

It should get anyone on App Engine (python) up and running and A/B testing in minutes -- if you have trouble please let me know. Does its best to maintain identities as users transition from anonymous to logged-in, persists experiment results to the datastore in the background, etc.

http://bjk5.com/post/10171483254/a-bingo-split-testing-now-on-app-engine-built-for-khan

https://github.com/kamens/gae_bingo

Feedback/patches welcome
I didn't even know how to submit to HN! That's how n00b I was.
And charges $2.99 for it.
Are you a high net worth individual? If not, don't bother. Companies can't afford to take your money, as it's way too much trouble to deal with the regulatory hurdles for a few grand.

If you are a high net worth individual, invest in a few YC companies. That'll get you an invite to the next demo day, which will introduce you to the best investors in the valley.
Pies give you an at-a-glance indication of whether something is more or less than a half (obtuse/reflex angle) or a quarter (right angle). This seems to be the sum total of their utility.

Stacked bars may be ugly but at least you can use the segments to make more precise measurements.
When you try to everything you end up doing nothing well. Zero percent of legacy Windows software was designed with touch in mind. The fact that Windows 8 will try and probably fail at letting people run this kind of software on a tablet shows me that the writing is on the wall.
What he's doing is equivalent to making a Webkit wrapper that displays Michael D. Hopkins's Blog (and only that), calling it the Michael D. Hopkins's Blog app and putting it up for sale in the app store. If you're the author of Michael D. Hopkins's Blog, or otherwise own rights to the content contained there, you might be a little peeved.
I guess you can try it yourself (if you have a VM or a partition to spare). Steven Sinofsky says they're going to make Windows 8 Developer Preview ISOs (with and without development tools) available to everyone:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2011/09/13/welcome-to-win...
Really? Try having a 18 month old & a 3.5 year old and single parenting.
Joel Spolsky’s Trello Is A Simple Workflow And List Manager For Groups
Why pay for email that never makes it to the users inbox?
You only pay for email we can deliver to the inbox, Guaranteed.

MiraMax Media offers a unique solution that guarantees your message is delivered to the user’s inbox and opened. Currently, we are the only email marketing company that offers this type of program with such a guarantee. You may ask yourself why? The answer is that we are confident in the extraordinary quality of our optin data and our ability to deliver your message to the recipients inbox. All of our email data is permission based and optin. Our lists consist of business decision makers or consumers who have made a purchase, filled out a lead form or done something online within the last 120 days and are all US based or worldwide, based on your preferences.
I'd have certain doubts of someone who does produce lots of open-source code, insofar as that could be construed as they don't think highly enough of their own code to sell it.

Also, people who do volunteer work are obviously unqualified.

I find such flaws tend not to occur in "closed" software, where someone is paid to polish the corners that nobody wants to.

"A" bug in gcc proves that open source stinks? Have you used IE6?
Show HN - Improve conversions by integrating a cause into your offering
You should also get Launchy http://www.launchy.net/

It's the best thing since sliced bread for Windows, I've been using it for a couple of years now and can't go back. Just hit alt-space, enter few letters and launch. Just like Awesomebar but for launching apps. It indexes all files if you want and it's quick as snap.

Apparently it's also available for Mac and Linux.
Driven by outcomes, not hours

A lot of people know what this really means.

People Who Aren't A-holes It's a "No Douchebag" zone. Life is simply too short to be working with jerks. We're looking for people who are fun to be around.

Loud office.

Oh and this...

Aside from Jersey Shore/Frat types, Ballmer is the archetypal douchebag.

All in all, good luck, but I'm getting mixed messages here.
You could load it into Neo4j and generate some connectivity visualizations.
Andrica's conjecture
Can you give a little more insight into what you mean by dealing with regulatory hurdles? How does taking the same amount of money from one person vs. another change the cost to take that money? What's the minimum amount of investment that would make it worthwhile to take money?
JQuery 1.6.4 released...
http://docs.jquery.com/Downloading_jQuery#Current_Release
by the way, the original article (now) opens with "Algorithmic trading, including high frequency trading (HFT)" and not "Algorithmic trading, also known as high frequency trading (HFT)"
Gowalla CEO: We Never Aimed to Be Like Foursquare
They just showed a machine running core i5 with 4 GB ram. You think it won't run on a PC with that spec?
Google now it's your personal assistant for flights too | Front Side Bus
Online Dental Assistant Programs
My Favorite Tools for a Simple Development Environment
Download Windows 8 Developer Preview tonight
I don't necessarily agree, but the buried lede is, "...people are often successful not despite their dysfunctions but because of them."
I remember back in the day when web browsers actually cost money, my ISP would sell you Netscape preconfigured to use their website as the browser's homepage. Being a Canadian ISP, they provided helpful links to the CBC website on their default homepage.

From a legal standpoint, how is that any different at all? Would you say that my ISP was also exploiting CBC's content at the time?
Uh... those are for the party making the infringement claim. Point #2 was about Hotfile, the party receiving the claim. I was saying that it doesn't seem surprising that they didn't bother to check the incoming claims very carefully before pulling the content down.
You don't. That's the best thing about it. We'll agree on this thread what book we're using and when the first study thread will happen; then, a couple weeks from now when it's time, someone will just post STUDY HN: Linear Algebra Chapter 1, and I will ask some dumb question and Colin Percival will jump on me for being dumb and we'll be off to the races.

I'm psyched.
Launchy - the best thing since sliced bread
What if everything ran on fuel?
Same here, 32, two kids, wife, mortgage, foodie (although that's not my occupation. Strange. There's a lot of foodies round here...).

I code in the nighttime when the kids (and wife) are asleep. For some reason, the progress I see actually gives me energy, it's the drag of going to work everyday that saps it. I'm lucky to have a wife that supports me in my ideas, I think it's paramount to discuss everything you do to her.

As of October 1, I lost my job due to the economy. This creates a lot of stress, but fortunately I get a reasonable severance pay from the government (I'm dutch). Although money is goint to be a bit tighter than we're used to, it could actually prove to be a blessing since I'll have a lot more time on my hands.
I'm in. Though I don't think HN is the place to run the study group.
I cannot vouch for the other sites, but at Skyscanner we looked at the aggregated search history (12 million users a month) to make a best guess at the default dates to set.Interestingly the defaults we use are different for the mobile platforms. (We use our own backend technology)
The Apple II
VC’s Say Your Startup’s Location Still Matters
Ask HN: Selling an unfinished or unwanted project?
I currently own two domain names, ios5guide.com and ios5developerguide.com . Frankly I don't have the time to sit down and develop these domains to their full potential. I've had multiple colleagues and developers tell me that they feel the domain value alone is in the 4+ digit range with the upcoming launch of ios5.

So I ask you HN, who/where should I goto handle the sale of these domains and what's the best way to maximize the value?
If you're charging day rates, you're charging enough to not sweat the small stuff. My standard language is "Such hours as are standard and customary at $CLIENT." I've never had anyone abuse it.
Traffic lights in the cloud (and other ways to speed up SF buses)
The interesting thing is that consumer surveys still show more people want to buy iPhones. But they walk out of stores with considerably more Android phones than iPhones.
From the article and other sources I've seen before, it seems that algorithmic trading is not necessarily high frequency, but that high frequency trading is necessarily algorithmic.

In which case is this not a rather thin hair to split?
This is somehow backwards. Every time I see someone supporting a cause, I know they do it just to increase their profits.
Does your email list have spam seeds & bad emails in it? Would you like to know?
As long as we don’t need to use MathML. I can’t spare an hour and a half to construct each post.
you don't report anything to the user other than you're issue has been logged, when cust service looks up the user account they'll be able to pick out incidents themselves and verify with the user.

"Hello Bob, I see you have 4 incidents today that we've logged, are you calling about the issue with the Dashboard page?"
Money Competitions - Online Competitions South Africa
It only streams content from a public stream. It is no different from iTunes, WinAmp, RealPlayer, or a web browser. The fact that it only streams one URL makes it less suitable to the user, but legally no different than the other players.
Link title is too narrow in scope; prostitution and alcohol make everything better.
Joel's never-fails-to-be-amusing blog post about it, here: http://blog.trello.com/launch/
No, it doesn't if you're using GitHub Pages. Only if you're using your own repository.
Could you have this as a two stage process? Make changes to files, push to my repo, repo hook runs jeckyll, commits new static assets, and pushes to github? This does require using a central server other than github I guess, though...
Agreed. Alcohol & Chicago-extendsion - I'm in for that.
How often did humans and Neanderthals have carnal relations?
Ask HN: Does anyone provide ads for web apps?
I'm trying to put ads in a web app. The site's main page has no content when it is loaded, and the user (along with other users) generate textual content after the page is loaded. Thus far, all of the web ad networks I have looked into require that all the content be on the page when it is loaded. The mobile ad networks I've seen have no such requirement, but won't do ads for web apps at all.

Does anyone provide ads for web apps with content that cannot be statically processed?
Add cherokee under webserver. Lovely configuration, fast, flexible.
Please build this: domain name search w/ connotation comments
As a non native English speaker whenever I research domain names I come up with ideas for words that sound good but I wonder if they might have an unwanted meaning or connotation.

So I research these words in numerous online dictionaries including the indispensable Urban Dictionary.

This involves a lot of manual research, clicking, note taking and in the end I'm still not quite sure if something like "blong" or "schnipp" or "gnurb" (I made those up) might be slang words or are phonologically equal to flatulence or sexual activity - if you know what I mean ;-)

So please build a service that helps me and others solve this problem!

Monetize with affiliate links to domain registrars and offer a premium manual research certificate - I would have definitely paid for this in the past!

Thank you!

PS: start by coming up with a domain name for this service that has no unwanted connotations :-D
What do you mean by backwards? Our product is based upon the belief that integrating with a cause will increase conversion and yes, profits. Profits aren't bad, we're trying to make it win-win.
Frink, a programming language for calculating with units. All of them.
I was pointing out the obvious typo. It should read "5 unknown prices."
They have the same first name. Steven Sinofsky/Steve Jobs.
Tom the tortoise
PG &amp; E Has Nearly $ 1 Billion In Insurance
I maintain something like this personally, in the form of private structured notes, and I know other engineers that do as well. Except we go beyond listing all possible things that can fit into a given category, into instead making quality and suitability judgments about them. What's "best" or the no-brainer/default for a given role, either in the general case or in various special cases. It's a very useful professional technique.

To wit, I generated the following page from my structured notes, and added it to my public website, a few weeks ago:

http://synisma.com/comp_dump/gototech.html
> Time to trade in a few hours of internet
> downtime and actually learn something.

Amen!

Some tools I can recommend are
dokuwiki with jsMath plugin
and etherpad for live collaboration/note-taking

http://piratepad.net/sj8l1FIUIK --> I started one pad for this project.

If someone is willing to setup a public dokuwiki on their server, I can provide examples of latex code for matrices and vectors.
This is really great, I like that the board is basically set to a kanban when you start. A api would be really cool so I could sync my github issues.
Don't know. A quick search brought up this page where the tablet gets a 7 for battery life. So I am guessing its ok.

http://reviews.cnet.com/tablets/acer-iconia-tab-w500p/4505-3...
Geee yeah, I'm hearing what you are saying but does it really matter?

whatever the intentions at least the cause are getting something out of it when they otherwise wouldn't. No?
I especially like the part where he implies that all mental illnesses are like that one time when he was a teenager and had some teenage angst.

"...ignoring lot of people who told me I was too young, too inexperienced and too naive..."

Guess what? You still are.
Would love to see it as a map/graph, where parts that "go together" (or are often used together) being linked. It'd probably be tricky to find the right threshold, but the result would be really useful (and fun to see).
All His Life Has He Looked Away, to the Future...
Bandwidth costs money. Hosting costs money. They can't just let hundreds of thousands of people download gigabytes at a time at >5Mbps for free. Peer to peer networks don't have huge resource drains on anything but the bandwidth of ISPs.
Skein Hash implimented in Bash
You can read a judgement in there if you want to, it is actually the opposite. I think having/not having pet projects or other life choices you make outside of your professional hours should not have such a direct impact on being hired or not.

Of course you are free to make your choices any way you see fit and if you choose work over personal relationships that does not make you a lesser person.

So you can have your pet projects and another person could have their family (or both, or none!) and I think the only thing that should matter during the job interview is what they intend to do during their shifts and whether or not they are capable of doing that to the best of their abilities. Your free time is yours, not your employers and is non of your employers business.
I completely agree with your second point. CBC should surely let people use their content (legal stuff aside, it's the right thing to do), but letting parasites make money off of it isn't right.
The idea of "flipping" the card over so you can see lots of details fixes my main beef with Pivotal Tracker: everything is so tiny (seriously, attach a screen shot and try to look at it) and you only get a certain amount of space for comments.

This looks like you could have a real discussion on the back of the card.
Intel and Google partner on Android
Interesting theory! Do they have more crimes to deal with on the first Wednesday of every month? Is that why they aren't "sweeping"?
> Apple doesn't sell Web sites through Safari. It does sell apps through the App Store.

> There's quite a bit of difference in responsibility when money changes hands.

So if apps are free, it should be OK, right? Because there's no implied responsibility.
Great use of node.js for a realtime app. :P We currently use interstateapp, but will give trello a whirl.
Thanks for the tip. I did not know about this.
My eyes dilated when using the auto price feature. Also the speed and ease of adjusting the dates by a day is impressive.
Yahoo, Flickr can go to hell
Seems to be powered by Express / Node.js
Had some long discussions with colleagues about this and it just makes you wonder how "sophisticated" the algorithms behind health insurers are when the basic inputs are: postcode, smoker, age and gender.
Damn this is pretty similar to the direction my app Wallboardr is taking, except status columns aren't customisable yet.

Any thoughts on comparison folks? http://wallboardr.com
gotcha, will add that to the todos.
A new virus targeting computer BIOS
What I Learned from Watching Notch Code
> if you stick to only installing software through the App Store you will have a much safer computing environment.

I don't think the safety has ever been an issue with Mac apps. And there are plenty of ways to attack an iPhone, including via the App Store - just look at this story. All Apple's policies do are allow it to ban apps that aren't in its best interest and give its users a false sense of security.
we have some of that.

eg:

http://stackparts.com/pymongo

connects python to mongo?

we're not sure what to tag these as. bindings?
Important and Non-Obvious iPhone Tips
Using python yes. But for building apps with heavy traffic? Most of the SWE jobs on google.com/jobs have a Java/C/C++ requirement, not Python.