skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I want whatever drugs you are on.

Read your post. You said it's time to be fearful. That we should be really afraid. That a lot of people are panicking and maybe it's time to join them. I'm paraphrasing, but it's in black and white (well, gray and other gray).

Then you come back with this. Essentially, "I'm making less money, so I need to spend less money." So, either you don't believe your own words ("rational, non-panicky response" != "we should be really afraid") or you really believe that a slight decrease in your income warrants advocating dangerous responses like mass-fear and panic.

Presumably, you live in America. This means that by the mere fact of where you were birthed you have been given, free of charge, essentially all the opportunities that this life holds for a human being. I know first hand how horrible life can be for people not handed what we have been. Your inability to financially continue eating steak dinners every night is so far removed from the constant suffering and strife that you could be experiencing that your entire current view is laughable. If you were living on the streets you'd have it better than hundreds of millions of people in this world.

So, no, it's not time to panic. It's not time to be afraid. It's time to survey the landscape, take in the changes, and roll with them. It's time to stop talking about this bullshit. Weather the storm, take advantage of other peoples' fears, and come out on top. It's time to do the same thing any smart, rational, successful person with the right perspective would do.

And, no, I will not bookmark this thread. I don't want to be further reminded of just how much people like you take for granted and what you think we should do when life throws us a little curveball.
Just in case there are any angels or venture investors out there, we are working on a startup that competes directly with this technology. My co-founder, easily the smartest engineer I have ever known, has been developing LED drivers and controllers for the past 3 years. This evening he called me to let me know he had passed the 4 Mbit/sec threshold. His goal is to transmit full HD video over optical. This is significant because there is no other method for transmitting Hi-def video wirelessly.

It is incredible what can be done with low cost micro-controllers and a little low-level assembly know-how.
Ex-hedge quant here. Here's my semi-informed take.

Quants didn't write most of these toxic derivatives, and they weren't conceived by computers, at least not as far as I know. Though technological modeling was necessary to value many of these securities (Monte Carlo methods, etc.) I really doubt that any serious financial company would allow a computer to conceive of derivatives to any meaningful extent. But I could be wrong.

These contracts, in many cases, were designed to be complex beyond comprehension, but AI methods don't help make them comprehensible to machines. I think of these 500-page derivatives contracts as similar to long software EULAs (which are intended to be so long and dry that 95% "TL;DR" and click "Accept", while even the diligent 5% miss details)... or to the packets in which health insurance companies detail exclusions. The things are intended to be virtually incomprehensible, making it easy for the writer to fool not only his customers, but also his bosses, by sweeping low probability risks (e.g. an "unprecedented" nationwide drop in real estate during a strong economy such as that which existed in mid-2007) under the rug.

Quant funds were not hammered because (loosely speaking) the computers emergently "tricked" them. They got whacked because all the models were trained on the past, and 8/2007 - Pres. has been unprecedented. Also, the fact that a large number of seemingly independent agents (funds) have piled into the same few strategies means that an unwind from one will lead to losses for many.
I can agree from personal experience. Premature networking can kill a startup.

Edit: What I mean by this is networking at the expense of product/technology building.
news.arc stores all information in flat files as lists.
What?! Okay, now it's time to panic.
Quants had almost nothing to do with this crisis. The problem wasn't that the computers knew too much, it was that they knew too little. They were fed best-case-scenario risk analyses. Of course the loans looked good if you assumed the housing market was going to keep going up.
280 Slides is a brilliant technological feat and I would never be bold enough to attempt something like Objective J, but I have to say, I don't see the point of 280 Slides and Google Presentation. Perhaps it's because I'm a PowerPoint fan boy, but why would anyone use 280 Slides instead of PowerPoint or Keynote?

I can only see 3 reasons why you would:

- Cost, though most people pirate PPT/Keynote anyway and big companies can afford it.

- For people who don't use Mac or Windows or who switch to random computers a lot.

- Multi-user editing at the same time on the same presentation.

That seems to be a real minority of users though, and for just about every other reason, PowerPoint and Keynote trouce these web-based implementations. Even basic presentations are faster and easier to make and look nicer in a native app. For power users, it's no contest.

Is there something I'm not getting?
Hey rescue time folks: how many hours do known YC people work per week?

Do you have data for any people post acquisition?

Custom queries FTW!
It would take a fairly ridiculous amount of money to convince me to work more than 40 hours a week.

Even 40 seems like way too much. I'm going to 20-30 as soon as I'm making enough hourly to meet my investment goals with it.
Design suggestion: On the print page the menu on left to Remove Background, Remove Images... and etc, all have different sizes (width). I think this makes your site to look unprofessional. I suggest to use the same width.
Thank you. God bless you for posting this. We either give in or we FIGHT. I say: let's fight.
"PG talks about Sam Altman pitching phone execs the early days of Loopt to great success, and his background was CS not sales."

Of note is that while pitching execs in the early days he was also doing at least 2x the development work of anyone else. He didn't stop coding until long after we had a fully functional demo application that was good enough to raise our series A.
Intuition + Money =  An Aha Moment
Not the slices... just the home page I imagine.

$ uptime
01:44:08 up 131 days
We pump money into the economy when we succeed in innovating, or at least in creating wealth. That's what he means.
I normally work 40-50 hours at my day job (early-stage startup) and 0-20 on personal stuff.
I've done it at times when a third party does an interview with a known author.
work work, or just the time that is set aside for "working" some of which gets spent on reading HN etc?
Yeah I'm worried that it reads like I'm trashing my co-founders, but it's not my intent. I don't think there is any way to reflect on what you learned about what works and what doesn't work in a team environment without the some people interpreting that as trash talking your partners.

A couple of things I should probably point out: the SXSW was supposed to be a team trip and the point was for everyone to have the experience of interacting with a bunch of top notch startup people (we aren't from the valley) and I only proposed it a few weeks ahead of time after we had a lot of people telling us that it was the single most useful thing to attend all year (I didn't even know about it before then). Only two of us ended up going, but that wasn't my intention.

When we landed the YC interview, it meant flying from NYC to LAX for a ten minute interview. We were told that only I needed to fly out, but I said everyone should go because they deserved the trip. This was obviously not the cost-efficient approach, but I think it was a lot better for the team.

As for the Goldman comment, I find this to be a typical programmer retort to any questioning of what they are doing: "If you're so great, why don't you do it yourself?" In fact, I didn't question what he was doing for way too long precisely for that reason, and I think that was a mistake. Now as for doing it myself... there are some areas of technical knowledge that I do not have, which is why I brought people on. Now that I'm on my own again, I'm doing my best to get it done myself.

Hey, you probably wouldn't want me as a cofounder, fair enough. I appreciate the better luck next time comment though.
A Netbook-style clamshell for the iPhone is coming
As I said, if you want to secure your deposit, use a 100% deposit bank that gives no interest and charges a small storage fee.

What we commonly call banks aren't - they're investment houses - and very highly leveraged ones at that. And what we commonly call deposits aren't - they're investments and no investment is a sure thing. Any system that pretends that there is a sure thing will fail sooner or later and the bigger the system the more catastrophic the failure.
tipjoy and some other slices were down briefly.
Economic reality: E(t) = At

where A is the summation of all current factors.

Average person's view of economic reality:

Dummies(t) = 5At + 90

Which means that average people see reality either better or worse than what it is and they're always late to the game.
Well, that really depends on what you define as value. There are plenty of tech companies out there that created tons of "valuable" code but were not successful because somebody else got the attention or was able to strike one critical deal.

As for allocating resources to networking before there is a working product, check out www.path101.com. I met these guys when they did an open brainstorming session with nothing but a preliminary pitch deck and not a line of code. Being open from very early on enabled them to find angel investors and their first employees, and when it came time to doing an alpha launch they had tons of people that had been eager to try the thing out for months.
I would say 50-60 but sometimes pushing into the 70's

At work it's generally about 40-44 hours a week give or take. I used to stay longer at work but when you have a loving girlfriend at home and your own personal projects to work on (not really a startup persay) then it's hard not to go home once it hits 5pm ;)

At home, it varies by the week. Right now I'm in the push mode for one of my projects and am trying to get it done by end of week so I'm doing about 2 hours a night on it, and more on weekends (This Saturday I did a 5 hour sprint, was fun!)

I don't consider the latter "work" though because I really love it, but it's still something I hope will benefit my resume. Making money would be a nice side effect though
Where's the option for "Not Enough"?
Not if we go to war to plunder :)
Not enough, around 44. 12 hours a day on weekends, 5 hours a day on the weekdays during hs.
I'm appreciative of the answer though, because it raises a distinction between work in an aesthetic, at your desk between the appropriate hours and dressed professionally sense, and work in the sense of really thinking about and solving outstanding problems, and formulating new ideas. These two time periods are not mutually inclusive, and can be mutual exclusive depending on the environment in which one works.

EDIT: typos.
here - http://justfuckinggoogleit.com
I agree that "professional networking" is often a waste of time, but meeting other startups and potential users and sharing ideas has always been valuable to me. That's what I was trying to say by referring to "connecting" and not just "networking". Maybe there's a better word...
Anecdotal evidence from my own experience if anyone's interested.

I was waking up at 10-11 AM worked through the day without breaks until 5-6 PM, had dinner with my better half, watched some TV, met with friends, etc and then typically resumed working at around 10 PM for another 4-5 hours. That works out to about 11-12 hours per day. Plus another 10-12 hours per weekend -> a bit over 70 hours per week.

I was going at this pace for close to 2 years. The work included designing and coding the product (windows/linux/osx clients, the backend server and the web interface), graphic design (incl. website), system administration and support of a live server cluster, support (ouch), busdev, etc .. pretty much everything except for the accounting and legal/IP stuff.

Stressful, but totally doable. YMMV of course.
Revived Fervor for Thin Clients
European Union Bans Incandescent Light Bulbs
That can be explained, in part at least, by the fact that proverbs are often oversimplifying overgeneralizations, contradictory with each other, such that for every situation in life there is at least one proverb that seems like it 'would have helped'... and a bunch of others that would have been unhelpful or misleading. At hindsight time, our pattern-craving minds are more eager to recall the truisms that best apply.
"...because we all know that no one understands credit default obligations and derivatives, except perhaps Mr. Buffett and the computers who created them." Statements of this sort are getting really tiresome.

Will some of the derivative designs be made public as a result of the congressional hearings? Shouldn't that be part of the investigation's purview?
I read the book, and what I understand is that he started working 4 hours a week AFTER years of very hard work until he built a profitable business. The really hard part is getting to that point. The book is still a good read, though, and highly recommended.
MySpace Launches “My Ads” Self Serve Ad Platform
You can also say "Smalltalk isn't slow" or "Lisp isn't slow", but you won't see anyone run towards either of them...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/unicode_url_ha...
:(

I have 6 slices and none of them had any downtime. Maybe it was just the single server that went down or a single router...
How do you count a work hour? I answered 40-50 because I count only the 'productive' hours in which I'm doing something specifically for my startup. If I include the hours I spend reading, learning new technologies, networking, and attending presentations then my answer would be 70-80.
7 Tools to Stay Ahead of the Curve
> We as a country have not defaulted on our debts and based on the strength of the treasury market few are betting on that scenario.

I haven't read the article yet, but I just want to make one comment about this quote. Although technically speaking we have not defaulted, we are inflating our currency through the roof, which is virtually a default -- In other words, our creditors will not be able to buy the same amount of stuff with the dollars we are going to repay them. And we are only able to do that because the dollar is a reserve currency.

For example, Argentina defaulted because they didn't have enough dollars to repay their debt. The difference in our case is that we own the dollar's printing press.
Actually our debt amounts to $53t (including future obligations).

http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2008/10/07/americas-53-trillion-d...
> I don't think there is any way to reflect on what you learned about what works and what doesn't work in a team environment without the some people interpreting that as trash talking your partners.

Something I've noticed about writing postmortems: focus on "What would I do differently?" and "What mistakes did I make?"

Other people are who they are. You aren't going to change them, and they usually have good reasons for what they do.

Most startups fail because of team issues. Mine did - I tried to keep it going for 2 months after my cofounder left, but couldn't. But then, this is my fault. If we'd been further along in development, he might've felt that the startup was a better bet. If I'd listened to him and released the easy version he was proposing, we might've been further along in development (but then, we had good reasons for not doing so...startups are hard). And he certainly had good reasons for leaving - hell, if I'd gotten into HBS, I probably would've left too.
When Cat's Design New Web Apps [how poetic]
How to go down with style
My mentor was the CEO and co-founder of a hundred-strong successful (not-so-tech) company when a strong recession hit. He explored all the options, talked with his top clients and creditors, and did an accurate forecast of the business for the following years. The outlook wasn't good at all.

He spoke with all the employees and told them exactly what was going on. He made found other jobs for many of them. And paid everyone full compensation plus some extra benefits (like health insurance.) The employees did a thank you barbecue for him, completely on their own. The price was splitting with the other founder, to sell everything up to his car and some personal assets, and go back to basics in his personal life. His wife left him.

Not many years later, after the recession, he decided to set up another very similar company. Getting credit was trivial. Setting up a workforce swift as several key former employees joined in even without discussing salary. Within months the new company almost wiped out the competition. "His word means a lot to us." By then he had a much happier and younger girlfriend.

I've seen it with my own eyes as I was a small partner.

The competition was hated by knowledgeable people in the trade as they didn't pay salaries for months and then either went bankrupt or just fired most people anyway after many broken promises. They defaulted in their debts so their creditors weren't happy. And the few remaining customers during the recession had a terrible service, in particular they were left in the cold in many cases due to the chaotic situation. There were just too many competitors for only a handful of clients.

Think twice before passing forward your pain, be it by inaction or by delusion. Nobody will judge you if you can't kill a gang of Goliaths. But everybody will hate you if you lie and fail them.

DISCLAIMER: This story is not related to Silicon Valley and I don't have a company right now (was incorporating.) It is just a lesson to counter-balance some dreadful advice seen here on going on no matter what. It isn't my place to tell anybody they have a chance or not. I'm sure investors, clients, creditors, and experienced entrepreneur gurus (like PG) can advice you on that (just like my mentor was advised in the story.)
Yeah, I use Google Reader and although sometimes I don't always keep up, it's a great way to keep everything in one place... and Twitter- I can't believe how many young people still don't have a twitter!
Indeed. Take everybody with a grain of salt.
Why would a victim of a scam deserve it? Specially in this case it seems the victim wanted to make a real living out of it.
You know, maybe I didn't make it clear enough that I thought we had a great thing going right up to the end. But what happened when we landed YC was that a lot of stuff came to the surface that hadn't been addressed well enough before, including a partner's belief that a lot of my effort up to that point had been worthless and he didn't trust me to do any better going forward. That was a pretty rough pill to swallow, especially after being responsible for most of the YC application, leading the three interviews we did to get accepted and building the front end for what we demoed.

I certainly may have killed the startup by emphasizing things that I thought were important, but it doesn't make any sense to think I was actively trying to kill it. My point was that I was blindsided by what happened in the end, so now I've gone back to think about how we got there and, you know, these are some of the conclusions I've drawn and of course they could still be wrong.
A professor told us at the start of grad school that the secret to success was to be "humble, gracious, and hard-working". I see only one of those three qualities in the author.

Here we have a CEO that refuses to step down to keep the company together, that gets two votes in group decisions while his partners gets one, and that places all the blame for failure on his cofounders when things go south. The arrogance approaches the comical, it becomes more and more outrageous as one reads along.

What is the first lesson he learned? "Getting the team right". You see, he had a bad TEAM. That explains the company failure. Yep. Not him. Nothing to do with the guy that chased away perfectly competent people that wanted to work with him. Nothing to do with the guy IN CHARGE.

Leadership is a two way street. You can't have control without responsibility! I don't think there is any team that wants to work with that kind of leader. You will never "get the team right" if you see your position that way!

His second "lesson learned" is to connect with people, and by "people" he means networking with potential investors, advisors, other businessmen, etc. Yet he never connected with his own teammates!

Next, he finally finds fault in his own leadership. You see, he is too much of a consensus seeker so he can't get things done quick enough! Obviously, he places too much trust in his cofounders. THAT is what he believes his problem is.

Then there's this little gem: "Then I decided not to take Paul Graham’s advice to make the other partner our CEO for the sake of civility (a decision I stand by fully), which effectively ended the company." You would rather your company fail than not be in charge? What kind of leader is that? You still stand by the decision that killed the company? What does that say about you?

Good leaders are famous for taking credit for failure, even when it is not entirely their fault. They also DON'T take credit for success. They let others give the credit to them unbidden. That's what causes their subordinates to at first respect them, and eventually love them.

Dear author: does that sound like you?

I'm sorry if I'm a little harsh; as I read this it is blowing my mind a little more with every paragraph.
I agree that vaporware has been successfully marketed before, however, that is not my idea of creating value, so I agree that it depends on how one defines value, and I would not want that - marketing non-existent products - to become the meaning of value within the context of a tech startup, that is best left to a marketing/publicity outfit if you ask me. I also think it is wrong to conduct market studies under the guise of a real product offer.

What happens when it turns out that the bullet points with features cannot be implemented, or are simply not the best solution for the users?

I find pg's thoughts on the subject of how problems may end up being redefined as they are being worked on to be very wise advice.
YouTube - Famous Failures
Sure, this is only a recession so far and on Monday a recovery of the stock is expected after a worldwide coordinated plan is coming. Even if that works, the problem is far from over as the IMF, World Bank, and major players state the risk.

But back to calling names...

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_(economics)

"There is no official definition for a depression."
"a depression is characterized by 'unusual' increases"

[ ] "unusual" increases in unemployment
[ X ] restriction of credit
[ X ] shrinking output and investment
[ X ] price deflation or hyperinflation
[ X ] numerous bankruptcies
[ X ] reduced amounts of trade and commerce
[ X ] volatile/erratic relative currency value fluctuations

Many of those are just starting but coming strong. For example all the announcements on mass layoffs (eBay, HP, and Virginia state.)