skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
First, the funding here is metaphorical. What we're trying to do is capitalize a company as if it were angel funded.

The metaphorical return on that investment is a company vetted by an established member of the community that will produce good products.

The other option is to let all good companies be forced to compromise their vision to meet investor expectations, or operate slowly to be drowned by crapware.
>Libertarianism is the idea that government intervention is morally wrong

There is a utilitarian branch of libertarianism that argues that free markets are best for society. It does not predict that free markets eliminate economic fluctuations, only that society will be better off with free markets over the long term. This branch of libertarianism is filled with many of the libertarian economists.

Also, I don't think those libertarians would see our credit markets pre-crash as being a shining model of libertarianism.
Could someone explain the purpose of this odd grammar?
From the newspaper: Lehman Brothers 2006 ad. Golden: http://screencast.com/t/K7LKB5ncGqj
> No, no, no. Libertarianism is not the philosophy that free markets will never crash.

I don't think the author ever made that claim. You'll notice he links to a range of arguments, running the spectrum from "government intervention is to blame for the crisis" to "let crises take their due course."

> Libertarianism is the idea that government intervention is morally wrong

I'm curious as to what bases libertarians (particularly those reading HN) rely upon to justify this claim. I've read Nozick, and for a year or two I was actually a staunch objectivist. (I went to an objectivist meeting once and think I scared some of the attendees by insisting upon a fixed-sum tax rather than a flat-rate.) What are the major reasons why libertarians believe government intervention is morally wrong, and what works would you cite as persuasively making the case?
I am a libertarian (well, a philosophical anarchist, actually) and I favor some sort of government intervention to attempt to avert a financial disaster. Indeed, I would have favored more regulations to rein in the GSEs before the collapse. There is no contradiction here.

Given that you have moral hazard problems created by government, it is not somehow unlibertarian to advocate regulation to reduce excessive risk-taking by government-backed agencies. Ideally, Fannie and Freddie would never have existed. Since they did exist, the second-best case would have been for them to be purely private entities with no implicit government guarantee. The third-best case would have been for them to be purely public entities with no profit motive. The fourth-best case would have been for them to be mixed private-public entities like they were, but subject to stringent oversight. We were in the fifth-best case in which they had a profit motive, moral hazard, and little oversight.

For similar reasons, I favor a bailout. There is a time-consistency problem. The government would like to commit to never bailing anyone out. If it were able to do this, the need for bailouts might not arise. But it cannot commit; since everyone knows the government will bail big financial firms out, it basically has no choice.

None of this in any way contradicts my view that the government should not intervene in housing markets in the first place, that currency competition should exist, that taxes should be much lower, that there should be no government redistribution of incomes, that public schools should be shut down, that there should be no government provision of health care, that the draft should be abolished, that marriage should be unregulated, that prostitution should be legal, or that 12 year olds should legally be allowed to purchase heroin from vending machines.
I actually founded a company some years ago that used this exact technology to make advertising displays. We had 72 RGB LED's on a spinning circuitboard, and modulated the red green and blue so that we were able to create full-color. This was enough to display pictures in reasonable resolution. One of the hard parts was getting power to the circuitboard with the LED's, the standard solution would be a brush of some kind but this proved to be too shortlived and needed a lot of maintenance because it broke. We ended up using some voodo with induction and magnetism so that we sould transfer power wirelessly.

I've long since left the company to go on doing other things, but I still dream of using this technology to make a globe (the spinning circuitboard reaching in an arc from north to southpole and revolving around the north/south pole axis) that would be connected to the Internet so it could show live weather, Google maps, or where your global fleet of submarines are stationed at this very moment. We even developed and patented a touch-sensitive technology to go with the display so that you would have an interface to the globe. (you would probably need to put the rotating part in a glass globe unless you want your hands slapped pretty badly)

If any hardware hackers out there that are interested I might be able to dig up the technology. Won't promise anything though.
Well, here’s the problem with this. Banks started making bad loans BECAUSE of Government. Banks do not, en masse, make loans to people who aren't likely to pay the money back without Government encouragement.

The Clinton Administration passed a law which provided funding to banks that gave loans to "risky" buyers with bad credit. Since then there’s been an endless stream of laws doing the exact same thing. Politicians like saying "housing is at a record high" so they’ve been trying to game the financial markets to encourage loans to anyone and everyone.

That’s what primarily caused this crisis.

Don’t get me wrong, there were other causes as well. The 1996 bill did not, in and of itself, cause this problem. But in general this was caused by a society that thinks it can do anything it wants because Government will "manage" the economy and always bail it out.

If you agree with this article ask yourself this: Once the economy recovers a little, why wouldn’t banks go back to the exact same lending practices that got us into this mess in the first place? If they know the Government will bail them out there’s no reason not to?

Oh, and while you are asking yourself that, also ask yourself why Europe got in the same trouble even though they have an example of the highly managed economy that people like the article’s author are endorsing.
There is a fundamental flaw in academic education given today's speed of change.

So I couldn't agree more to your 8th point on the future of colleges!

I am a professor at a German University of Applied Sciences for 7 years now and a serial entrepreneur and business angel of 9 start ups.
I wish I could vote your comment up more than once.
As an attempt to defend my no-demo application, i think requiring a demo is a poor route to take. I just found out about YCombinator ten days before the deadline. i can see merit to reducing the number of applicants to sift through, but i think erecting such a significant barrier-to-entry isn't the way to accomplish it.
Ummm...No. The article says that this is a failure of libertarianism because the 3 people you mentioned believe in libertarian ideals and their policies led to the current economic failures.

The person responded that those 3 people failed to create a free market and you then countered by saying they did the best any people could.

If those 3 people were in turn the very pinacle of competence than your counter argument would hold some weight but that's clearly not what the original comment is saying.

They're saying those 3 people failed to live up to the ideas of libertarianism and so their actions are not a good example of the libertarian ideal.

I don't even agree (at least not fully) with the person you replied to but I can see how your logic is flawed here.
I take great offense in your unwarranted picking on Danes

:-)
Fwiw, I'm also a no-demo applicant. But odds are odds, and if last summer's less competitive round tilted almost exclusively in favor of applicants with demos, in virtue of the fact that they had demos, then we're de facto excluded from the process anyway.
Test::More, Test::LectroTest (Haskell's QuickCheck but in Perl), Test::WWW::Mechanize and BuildBot
What If US Collapses?
Funny story, I almost took a job at Lehman. I had an offer, but I hesitated to take it because I knew it would seriously decrease the chances that I could launch my start-up successfully... I told this to my girlfriend, and she pointed out that starting my own business was many people's life dream, and it was within my reach, and might be a once in a lifetime opportunity.

On the other hand, the Lehman job would still be there in a year if my business failed.

Well, she was wrong in one of those statements!
Good luck to all the entrants and may the force be with PG in looking through them all! Perhaps my group will be lucky enough to be a finalist invited to the meeting, despite not having an active demo that they have access to.
That's not really how it works. The shitting part comes first, then afterwards, there's nothing really left, and anything you drink just comes flowing right out. They get parched and die of dehydration.

It's easier than dying of malaria. With malaria, you feel as cold as hell, but you're burning up. Then you go into a heat delirium, where you start having hallucinations, you start throwing up at the same time everyday, you can't move anymore, and you slip into death. A lot more people die of malaria than of diarhea. And malaria is a lot easier to cure.
A chart showing a fascinating historical perspective of the current housing crisis.
Sounds like a keeper :).
Give your gadgets some space
Thanks for registering your complaint.
Best of luck to all applicants!
I think the financial situation in the world only helps separate the wheat from the chaff, i.e. those true entrepreneurs wishing to work hard through the bad (now a bit longer) and good times to build a real business from those with a "strike-it-rich-fast" attitude, typical of economic bubbles. I also believe YC is expected to see an improvement in the quality of the applications.
I don't know. Are most of the people that gets laid off prime material for startups? I don't think so, but I might be wrong.

I think you should look at a more technical factor. Right now, it is looking better for startups than ever. You have programmable mobile phones, clouds at Amazon and Google, fast Javascript in browsers, computers so fast that interpreted languages can compete and so on. Combine this with the webs ability to reach a massive userbase in a short amount of time. In short: The toolset for startups has never looked better than this. The idea-space on which startup ideas thrives is just getting wider and wider.

Also note that most companies do not get it. The work they want people to do is horribly boring. People have, via the buzz, realized that taking the chance with a startup might be more interesting. Even if they don't succeed they have tried. And here is the killer: they might have failed, but they have learned more compared to a "common" job.
Oh yes :-)
i'm not sure cloning yourself in this case would be the answer. then you'd have MORE ideas, not more solutions.

i'd consider cloning your friends.

second to that i'd gather them, choose the idea by concensus that everyone wants most to work on, and complete that project. use money from that to fund teams to build all the other ideas.
Wouldn't the next cycle be a better indicator? I am guessing it took a while for folks to get co-founders, work on idea towards a prototype, etc. -- all of which took longer than the past few weeks.
you may get an interview without a demo but a demo is basically required at the interview.
Uncov has been funny in the past, but is pretty much value-less at this point. The personal attacks are pretty weak sauce.
it's okay though. i have faith that really great ideas backed by great people <cough> will persevere despite the tilted odds.

i'm sure you feel the same way, if we weren't dreamers we wouldn't be here. may fortune smile upon the applicants who aren't selected, i hope you don't ever give up.
from Anton Ego:

"In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
Rather full-bore idiocy, there.

I mean--libertarianism? Really? That's who you're blaming?

Well, let's assemble all of congress, and ask them, "Will all libertarians raise their hands?" You'll have one hand raised.

Assemble every high level official in the Bush administration--ask them the same thing. [crickets chirp]

Do the same thing throughout all the bureaucracies...well, here you might get a few, since low-level people see how things are, and don't worry too much about political presentation. But still...2 or 3 percent at most.

And Greenspan? The very definition of a market-manipulator is a...libertarian? Ah, and Hitler provided free housing for the Jews! That's right!

This is like blaming the Atheists for 9/11 because there was a single atheist among the victims. I'm glad to see a copy of that rubbish was in Newsweek. That's great.
A video of the offense in action:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IJOm-IJcbg0
I would agree that the crash doesn't refute libertarianism to the extent that libertarianism demands a completely free market. On the other hand, the chances of libertarians getting their way in a large-scale society like the US is exactly nil, and there's an excellent case to be made that injecting libertarian-motivated policies in a non-libertarian environment, for no reason beyond their agreement with libertarian ideology, can be more disastrous than the alternatives.

I have a friend who was beginning to think anarchism was the way to go, but I nipped that thought in the bud by pointing out that the arguments for anarchism are highly intellectual and incapable of swaying the masses. The same is true of libertarianism.

Democratic and socialist revolutions had their origins in highly intellectual arguments, but the confrontations their ideologies demanded were easily translated into something that the non-intellectual populace could forcibly get behind (to whatever extend this was actually necessary). It's hard to see how you'd sway a majority of the American populace into backing the sort of completely free market libertarians want to see. And if that's not doable, libertarian proponents would better spend their time figuring out how to make a decidedly interventionist society work more efficiently.
No, but everything that is novel and clever is a "hack."
New open platforms wiring Yahoo's social dimension
lists of disconnected emails sorted by arrival time. Clients have no sense of priority, urgency, workflows, or connectedness.

Really? All the mail clients I can think of off the top of my head have at least threading and urgency flags. While I can think of some improvements, I don't think that there's anything significantly better out there for managing large volumes of incoming information.
How will Twitter make money?
uhh.. that's the dictionary definition sir. it's not open for your interpretation or dispute.

and it completely validates my statements. so i don't understand why you're continuing to stamp your feet about it.
I don't know if they're prime material, but that wouldn't stop the supply of people who are willing to apply. It's just a hypothesis, anyways -- if there are more people than jobs, the number of people looking for work will go up. being a YCombinator startup is still some sort of job.
If anything, this proves the point of the grandparent post. Having more professors write magazine articles would elevate journalism, not degrade it.
Right, except my point is that, last summer, you basically needed a demo just to get the interview.
Just to clarify, there is a simple general principle at work: the government should provide only public goods (1). The main dispute among libertarians is which goods qualify as public goods (e.g., is fire protection public or private?).

(1) A public good is one that is non-rivalrous and non-exclusive. Protection from commies is a public good (a dead commie isn't robbing you or me). Cheese fries are not (every fry I eat is one you can't).
Software Startups: How to Sell to Enterprise in a Recession
Yeah, I personally think that the moral argument against government intervention is bunk. That said, I do think there's a strong consequentialist argument to be made for markets and against regulation. To me, this seems like the basic position of eg. Reason Magazine, Wil Wilkinson, etc.
No self promotion, but after reading this paper 2 years ago, I started a series called "What Makes Them Entrepreneurial" on my blog - http://www.adeologue.com/adeologue/what_makes_them_entrepren...

You'll find approx. 34 traits of entrepreneurs that made them entrepreneurial that I've collected from different papers/blogs/books I read. The series is still ongoing - so if you find some more inputs, then let me know. I'll try to write about it.
Your comment seems to be more relevant to your own issues than to the actual story, but let me just point out that the "Steve Jobs" character in the story (let's ignore the question of whether or not it's actually true) isn't demonstrating an "epic ego" at all. He's being cloyingly sycophantic.

What does a man with an epic ego say when he meets Donald Knuth? Probably "Hi, nice to meet you".
Tips and tricks to turn you into a faster, smarter web designer
Ah my apologies. I meant (fire)watir. http://wtr.rubyforge.org/ http://wiki.openqa.org/display/WTR/FireWatir
It feels weird not applying to YC since I have applied for all the cycles in the last 2 years. Good luck to everyone I know how nervous I would get waiting after applying.

I guess the good news is that I am not applying because we are doing well with out startup and moving forward with customers.
This is near facetious. These aren't "theories" that sprang up overnight like the bailout did. Austrian economists have specifically identified Freddie/Fannie etc. as the agents of credit expansion to the housing sector, BEFORE there were problems.

A total non-sequitir, he dismisses them without even bothering to offer an alternative theory.

Also, it's misleading to reference CATO. No libertarian outside of CATO respects them. Randians are fair game (it IS fun to poke at them), although their mention in this article was more to sensationalize than to add anything relevant to the topic at hand.

Oh well. It seems that those animal spirits area acting up again. It sure is convenient that all government action is supremely rational.
I agree that we’ll probably never see true, pure libertarianism in American Society.

But part of guiding society (as you suggest) is trying to push it towards an ideal even if you know it will never fully reach that ideal. The issue here is "what ideology led to our current economic problems" and the author (and yters above) is trying to say these 3 men claimed to adhere to libertarian principles so that means libertarianism caused this problem. That’s simply not true.

The fact is this problem started when the U.S. government started encouraging loans to people with bad credit (which started with Bill Clinton but has continued through the Bush Administration). Banks felt empowered to give risky loans because they were all but guaranteed (and through this bail out actually guaranteed) by the U.S. Government. This was done during the tenure of the men being mentioned above and is the antithesis of libertarian ideals.

So the question is never "will we ever achieve a true libertarian society" its "how can we push society to be as libertarian as possible." The biggest component in doing that is making sure libertarian principles don’t get blamed for things they weren’t responsible for.
> On the other hand, the chances of libertarians getting their way in a large-scale society like the US is exactly nil, and there's an excellent case to be made that injecting libertarian-motivated policies in a non-libertarian environment, for no reason beyond their agreement with libertarian ideology, can be more disastrous than the alternatives.

Exactly; the funny thing about government intervention is that it ends up creating a need for more government intervention. Regarding the current financial debacle, a libertarian might oppose further regulation of financial institutions, but given the reality that the government has proven that it will bail them out when the going gets tough, they would probably just create the same problems again.

A libertarian would just say that we shouldn't bail them out, and maybe they're right, but a half-successful libertarian campaign would just result in more "heads I win tails you lose" bets by the financial sector and would be worse than either a more heavily regulated economy or (if the libertarians are right) an unregulated economy.
This really is a hack though. It only works in high school rules by exploiting a formation designed for kicks, but using that formation for passing plays. Since it doesn't work at higher levels, it's actually a disservice to any players who will want to play college ball afterward.

It's clever, for sure, but I'm fairly certain it will be eliminated quickly.
Multiple mice in Flash (or why ActionScript is a bad language for device drivers)
Yahoo Changing Its Home Page, Gradually
WWE, amazing. Do those sell out these days? I haven't been to a taping of Raw in many years, but I remember they used to backing during they heyday of The Rock and Stone Cold Steve Austin.
Many of the problems were blatantly and directly caused by Government intervention, for example when they forced lower lending standards on banks in the name of anti-racism. And Fannie and Freddie were not private companies. One thing they did was use their connection to the Government to get better deals than any private company could get (because dealing with the Government = no risk. The tax payers won't all go broke.)
>At least we know now not to debase the currency; it took the Romans a couple hundred years to learn that didn't work.

I wouldn't be so sure of that. I think debasing the currency DID work in the short run to solve whatever crisis the emperor had to deal (no funds to pay the troops, etc), despite the negative long-term effects. Modern politicians could get similar short-term benefits - voters would probably prefer debasement to tax increases because the problems caused by debasement aren't as obviously linked to it as larger withholdings on a paycheck are to taxes.

It may become tempting for American politicians to debase the currency to reduce the massive debt we've accrued.
I'm okay with this as long as past planes and cars stay as metal or fiberglass.
The natural trend for housing prices should be down, as technology makes equivalent houses cheaper to buy, and better transportation infrastructure (in theory) increases the supply of viable housing.
Cloud Computing, Virtualization and IT Diseconomies
It either Just Works or you're in for some pain as you google for somebody who had the same problem as you or try to get help on a forum. I had little trouble getting Ubuntu to work on the machine I'm using now, but I have had serious problems before.

I've been using linux since 2002 and things are getting better. With Ubuntu, your chances of throwing it at a random machine and having it Just Work aren't bad - but they're still far from certain.