skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Probably should make a distinction between "bootstrapped" and "self-funded" here. Technically, a bootstrapped startup is one that sells a nonexistent product to an early-adopter customer first, and then uses that money to fund development. Or one that starts as a consulting company and then gradually builds out a product based on client needs. Think of Sun, Allegro, 37signals, or FogCreek.

A self-funded company is one that relies on founder savings or wage income to fund initial development, and then finds a customer after they have a product. Think Del.icio.us or Flickr before their angel investments.

Anyway, my last startup (GameClay) was 100% self-funded. If I choose to do another startup instead of taking a job, it'll also be self-funded, but I'll probably focus on identifying paying customers and generating revenue earlier in the process, which would make it closer to a bootstrapped startup.
I've sometimes wondered whether that should count as a "friends & family" investment. After all, family's putting up the money (in the form of subsidized rent) for the startup.

And does the status change to "self-funded" if you pay your parents rent?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
I don't think it qualifies as a "friends & family" investment, since they're not getting stock. But you could certainly call it a friends & family donation. :-)

And does the status change to "self-funded" if you pay your parents rent?

It would, but I don't.
This is nonsense. In any economy, most companies don't make money when they're first starting. Even pizza places. That doesn't make them "projects" rather than companies.
Looks like a rebuild of OTP, did the author have this in mind?
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I guess, but that "extra hardware" wouldn't be that much. I was talking about like 1 second extra CPU time per 50 page loads or something — I wouldn't worry about that kind of thing, even if I had time to make my code slightly faster, I'm sure I could spend my time better. Maybe I'd refactor it later on when I'm adding extra functionality to that area of code.

I think if your a small company you shouldn't be worrying about small issues like this, even if you have more time than money. It may be making your app more efficient, but your doing it the same way people make apps bulky and never get them out the door! Spend the time on things which truly matter, and fix slightly slower code when its beginning to cause a problem. :)
Republican Dirty Campaign To Use Images Of Terrorist To Scare Voters |
Well, I wouldn't mind being proved wrong if someone has good advice that's not "make it a full time job".
Listen to this
The Path 101 Economic Emergency Plan
But anyway, back to Austin, the Harvard professor. His point is that incentive plans based on measuring performance always backfire. Not sometimes. Always.

Always?!?

Normally, I like Joel's writings, but I have to say this is the dumbest thing I've ever read on hn.

I guess that's why Austin's a Harvard professor earning a living on the bequests of people who know how to implement incentive systems.
My co-founder and I have cut taking a salary from our start-up, which is angel funded. We've both taken (surprisingly well paid) part-time jobs at a local university as mentors to a group of 60 business students on an enterprise module. It's like being back in the garage - recharges the entrepreneurial batteries, keeps the investors happy, and we're meeting future potential employees. HIghly recommended.
What the prodding of Tim O'Reilly could never do, the market will do with scary efficiency.

Goodbye facebook apps.

Back to business as usual.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_asymmetry
Merbcamp Highlights
It's like it's 1996 and he discovered the font tag.
Developing Facebook for iPhone
Machine Translation and Speech Recognition at Google
> you are MacGyver. you are Jeanne d'Arc. you are Luke Skywalker. Muaddib3you are Paul FUCKING Atreides, and the SPICE must FLOW, motherfucker.

I beg to differ. Entrepreneurs shouldn't have be delusional but pragmatic. And to be pragmatic they need to know how deep is the hole.
We're between self-funded and bootstrapped - we put up a small initial monetary investment for servers and whatnot, and evangelized the product as we built it.

That being said, we're working on some big grant opportunities right now (the economic turmoil actually works in our favor to some degree), so I suppose we'll be "funded" soon, though without giving up any equity.

Really, there are probably endless ways of mixing and matching these different methods.
Reading list for startup-founders
Cash (cashflow and cash on hand) is king in times like these.
Interesting, I didn't know that difference between bootstrapped and self-funded. I figured there was a degree of self-funding involved in the early stage of most companies and that you were "bootstrapped" until you were funded or an established business and hence not a "startup" any more...

I guess we would be considered bootstrapped then :)
Why does anyone drive their own cars when they could instead ride in a taxi, ride Greyhound, fly, or rent a car? The simple answer is that different approaches are appropriate in different situations.

To actually answer your question, though, AWS really constrains the way you do things. On your own servers, you can run whatever programs you want. You can write your own server from scratch (see http://python.org/doc/1.5.2p2/lib/module-BaseHTTPServer.html), you can run background jobs that reprocess the data sitting on your server without having to pay any extra for it, you can add memory or hard drives or double your RAID when hardware upgrades are needed, you can be confident in your backup system, etc. etc.

Personally, I have old computers around at home. I have a mostly-always-on cable connection. I have an outward-facing domain name for it thanks to http://www.dyndns.com/ -- a dynamically-updating nameserver. If I want to put up a new service and I'm not too worried about uptime, I can install lighttpd and run it on an old computer right out of my house. I can easily hook up to the live server to investigate any errors or problems I'm having.

If my service starts getting popular such that uptime is important but there still aren't a ton of visitors, I can move to a lighttpd shared hosting solution: just move the server root to the shared host. Now I have a great development platform at home (I could even point beta.mywebsite.com at it if I wanted), and I can commit tested functionality to the shared host. Do you have a nice AWS model at home that you can use to debug your AWS application?

Once uptime and bandwidth become an issue, then I can make the decision on whether it makes sense to go with a higher-tier shared hosting, a dedicated server, or with a service like AWS. In most cases, though, it's going to be hard to make AWS do everything that you need it to do. And with the necessity to have failover solutions for the three or more major outages that Amazon has every year, the need for some other solution is always going to be there.

And through all that, we haven't even touched on security or other guarantees that must be made to customers for certain applications, or on those instances where AWS is more expensive. In short, there are plenty of reasons to go with a solution that does not solely depend on AWS.
People prefer to think that economics, finance, and business are some sort of right-wing conspiracy and so they don't bother to educate themselves on it.
Why don't we have a universal paycheck too? That would make startups much easier. Socialism is obviously the answer to create the most dynamic business environment.
It's a little dated now but the Tcl/Tk source is very good. I'd also recommend the FreeBSD source tree.
I think they're adding $0.03 on top of what they already charge, which is like double what they charged only a few years ago even though there's been little rise in demand. It's already $0.15 on Verizon, it's now $0.18.

However, I remember paying £0.10 per text when I lived in the UK. So 'killing' the market is complete fucking bullshit. Here in Canada, Bell and Telus doubled the cost of SMS overnight by charging for incoming texts. Thankfully the company I got put with, Rogers, when I brought my T-Mobile phone over isn't charging this. So I'm still getting SMS at $0.15 (CAN) and my girlfriend gets charged $0.30 (CAN) per message. Basically they want users to switch from pay-as-you-go to contract (which gets incoming SMS free), instead she's started calling (incidentally putting more demand on the network) and she's going to switch over to Rogers when she buys a new phone.

Ironically, I can't wait until Canada opens up its telecommunication law and allows outside service providers into the country. I'm thinking the Telus operator will be bought out overnight as it's the smallest and is solely a cell phone provider. I also can't wait for competent service, my girlfriends parents have Bell TV and Internet, they've somehow managed to send out Termination-of-Service letters demanding payment 2 days before a bill is due to be paid. This isn't just to us, they've sent it out to hundreds of people asking for payment for a bill not required to be paid at the earliest until 2 days after they're threatening to disconnect.

So I await globalisation of the telecommunication market here, the lowering of prices and the final rise of good customer service.
I was definitely inspired by the erlang work I've been doing lately. Took a lot of those principles and applied them back to a ruby mentality.
The file streaming works by chunking up a file and broadcasting the chunks to an exchange. Any agents subscribed to the exchange will get a copy of the file. There is a small state machine for re-assembling files and each set of file packets is tagged with a token for easy re-assembly even on a multiplexed channel where multiple files are streaming at once.
Can someone define "freemium" for me?
Cool, thanks for replying.
Don't Shoot The Messenger
Look at this:

"Calce estimates that he had hacked into perhaps 40 percent of the major universities in the United States, _using attack code that he picked up online_"

and

"_He took denial of service attack code written by_ a hacker named Sinkhole and developed a way to remotely train all of his approximately 200 university networks on the same target simultaneously, he said."

I think some users are confusing Hacker News with Script Kiddies News.
User Communities Are Critical For Complex Products
Given that "bootstrapping" refers to the (physically impossible) process of lifting oneself into the air by pulling on one's boot-straps, I think it has to be restricted to the concept of growing a company using the company's own revenues.
You did state rather unequivocally that WWII fixed the economy:

> It didn't suffer through it at all, it got fixed by it.

And now, you're attempting to declare post hoc, ergo propter hoc? The whole point of what I'm saying is that there are thousands or millions of changes in policy, technology, demographics, sentiment, which had an impact on the economy, we don't know which did what.

I could just as easily explain the post-war years by saying that it's natural that any country which does not get bombed to smithereens will experience relative prosperity, whether or not it participated in bombing other countries, as we did in WWII. Perhaps it was only that advantage which overwhelmed the tax of war spending.

Again, I can't say for sure, but neither can you. I'm inclined to think you're wrong though, from the simple perspective the the allocation of resources over time.
Google Rewires Washington in Challenge to Microsoft
I regret my vote for this story. It is completely against what I respect.

Please don't guide your life by poems in science-fiction novels. In particular, treatment of fear has nothing to do with being a fearless bad-ass.

The bully irrational adrenaline-pumped attitude is part of the reasons for the US problems.
Google Gmail, Other Apps, Vulnerable To Attack
http://blogtalkradio.com
I like Matt's blog, he brings a much needed bit of realism to places like HN without going into Uncov's over-the-top contrarianism.
I'm suggesting that affiliate programs are the kind of incentive he's complaining about. And the artificial need to click to page 2 is even moreso - i'ts a direct attempt to inflate page views while reducing the quality of the customer experience.
Fair enough, though I think that we have strayed from the topic of taxes on capital gains on startups or investments in startups or whatever it is that Obama is proposing.

My point was, however poorly made with the Gates example, that I doubt that the thought, other loopholes aside, is to eliminate capital gains tax for people that are deemed to be "rich".

Regardless, I am all for any tax incentive that provides incentives for anyone to start or invest in a startup.
Despite what a couple bloggers might say, I don't think anyone is actually angry at "Team Cyprus" for having a vacation. More so, it is a feeling of jealousy/admiration that they were able to enjoy themselves at a time when many of us are in state of worry and fear.

Calling it the end of web 2.0 might be too much, but you have to appreciate the juxtaposition in some of the most beautiful and successful people in the valley partying on an island paradise while the world that made them so successful is crashing down.
Great Data Visualization Tells a Great Story
What's up with Apple shipping miniature iphone chargers in enormous boxes?
GNOME code and the Linux kernel are both pretty good examples - writing a well-structured, small GTK+ app will do wonders for your C skills
Did Some Insider Just Spill The Beans On New Apple Laptop?
But that's the thing, nothing in the valley came "crashing down" except maybe the net worth of some investors, who just went from obscenely wealthy to very wealthy. And maybe TechCrunch's standards.

Buildings are all still standing. Almost every company that was in business yesterday is still in business today. There've been a few layoffs, but those were due to issues stemming a while back.

Everything is, for the most part, the way it was two weeks ago. It'd be one thing if there was an 8.2 Earthquake. But the Dow dropping?
Lessig FTW

Deregulate amateur remix: We need to restore a copyright law that leaves "amateur creativity" free from regulation. Before the 20th century, this culture flourished. The 21st century could see its return. Digital technologies have democratized the ability to create and re-create the culture around us. Where the creativity is an amateur remix, the law should leave it alone. It should deregulate amateur remix.
Hats off to Joe for his exceptional efforts. You made the right decision, Joe. Keep up the great work!

I very much look forward to your "simple" code snippets.
5 Ways to Know If Your Business Idea Is Any Good
Please release that photo viewer! You would be my hero.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freemium

"Freemium is a business model which works by offering basic services for free, while charging a premium for advanced or special features."
VC dean Alan Patricof warns against panic, urges entrepreneurs to seize the day
Watch MerbCamp Live!
I think the pessimistic view is that we've seen the explosion, but the sound and shock wave haven't hit, yet, due to the different speeds at which they travel.

Frankly, I've given up attempting to have any idea what to think. I'm not a doom'n'gloomer by nature, but it's clear that there are some strange things afoot at the Circle K.

So I've decided to just get on with life and see how things develop. I'm watching the financial stuff and election with an eye to going back to the US...
Congrats on Merb 1.0!!! I'm looking forward to a somewhat stable 1.0RC.

Nanite does look interesting.
I did quite a bit a of erlang work a few years ago. Loved it. It was a tough call to go with ruby for building my http://shellshadow.com webapp instead of moving along with erlang. In the end, I went with mindshare.

Hey ez, Can you explain why github is down quite a bit lately? Is it only because all the caretakers are hanging ou in San Diego right now? ;)
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Just curious, being a Valley outsider (Washingtonian): How common is the startup that finds the middle ground between working to the bone (trying desperately to be the next Google/Yahoo/Microsoft and secure massive VC) and the expect-nothing-back, RMS-enamored open source group?

Because that's where I'd like to be: A tech shop that cares about turning a profit, but that's equally concerned with innovation and just having a good time. It seems to me that many people affiliated with the startup scene are way too dollar-driven or take themselves too seriously.
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So the answer is so obvious that any opposition isn't worth hearing, and no debate is necessary? You have your fingers in your ears.
Those Knowing History May Find It’s Time to Invest
If you have investors, you have a responsibility to them to be dollar-driven. If you don't, then you're pretty much free to do whatever you wish.

People in every sphere take themselves too seriously I think. Everything is life or death the the people involved.
Artificial intelligence put to the Turing Test - Loebner Talks AI
Greed explains those sorts of conspiracy theories away.

It doesn't make it "right," however.
Amid the Gloom, an E-Commerce War
Britain overreached imperially. The U.S. has been doing it financially.
Why Tip?
Are You Ready for Silverlight 2?
I agree, the content on techcrunch continues to tend towards random wild opinion instead of tech startup coverage. From Arrington's summer of hate for twitter, to the current sky is falling, its becoming impossible to stay interested.
I'm surprised the techcrunch article got more points than the original writeup at http://waxy.org/2008/10/memeorandum_colors

I'm also pretty dissapointed this gets credited to me when it was mostly Andy's idea (I just did some math.)

Brendan O'Connor did a correlation between our output and a website that uses humans to measure skew at http://anyall.org/blog/2008/10/it-is-accurate-to-determine-a... which is pretty great. As a statistics and collective intelligence behavior junkie, his blog is pretty good reading, btw.
i remember it was somebody else who did the time for those ddos attacks
We need a better video search engine
Is there a better video search engine that crawls the entire web instead of just the major video streaming sites? All the major search engines like Truveo, Blinkx etc. simply aggregates the major video streaming sites.

I am looking for a true video search engine that can find flash videos embedded outside of these streaming sites. Eg. if I search for George Soros clips, I expect the engine to pick this up: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10102008/watch.html
depends on the implementation. squeak makes using C routines and libraries easy. The older commercial smalltalk's all have simple ways of making system calls or writing primitives inline or as libraries.

Ruby does make adding C easy. Smalltalk is a little less friendly in this regards. But only a little and that is implementation specific.
I run userscripts.org, a rails site which runs on a single serverbeach box.

To keep memory usage low, I find recycling mongrel processes via monit can help a bunch.

Before monit, my mongrels would hit 2GB quickly, after monit with a rule to restart when they hit over 100MB, my memory usage is around 800MB for 15 mongrels. (I'm assuming you are using HAProxy or a similar balancer that can deal with changes of availability).

http://userscripts.org/articles/2-scaling-a-rails-site

Another useful tip is make sure your queries aren't doing stupid stuff. A long time ago I had integrated Beast (a rails forum project) into my site. Unfortunately it was loading EVERY topic on the forum index page, which was resulting in slowness as well as large jumps in memory usage. (The culprit was a .last method that caused all the records to load and then grab the last value)

So - I tend to agree with "don't worry" because you can "patch" over memory usage pretty easily.

My site is currently getting 17req/s on a single box - it is never what you think will be the issue that you have to fix.
"a project isn't a business until you have paying customers"

..is not a popular opinion because it's false. I hate to go all cliche on you, but Google & Facebook are two examples that would, per your definition, not count as startups (or businesses) for the first few years they existed.

I reckon if you've quit your job and pursued whatever passion you have in order to try and make it a success, then you've earned calling it a startup.

I get your drift about needing to have a plan to make money though, it's probably something that will separate the wheat from the chaff in the coming years.
Cheat Masters
You should wash your mouth out with soap for misquoting that. The UN is a treaty body, meant for eliminating global conflict.

That's it. It's not a global government. It has no representation from the masses, it has no balanced system of government, it has no executive to speak of.

It's done a great job of preventing WWIII. Let's leave it at that.
4/5 (all except for the paying customer) isn't too bad, right? Plus, I'm using my own money, and I use look.fo on a daily basis, so perhaps I'm the paying customer?
Nothing makes me more miserable than having to scrunch up my hand to hit the Alt key. I can deal with stretching out my hands and using the pinky -- most musical instruments don't baby the pinky, and saxophone makes it do extra work, for example. But thumb-scrunching just makes me feel clumsy.

Sorry.
Exactly. Unless you're working on an open source project, you're building a business. The core purpose of any business is to maximize value for your shareholders- that's business school 101. If innovating or having fun are means to maximize value, then that's what you should do, but I don't know how any startup that doesn't keep its eye on the prize($$$) can be succesful.
FCC moves to reserve free wireless waves
http://www.affiliatemp.com
I've read your diffle-history blog, and it's amazing the parallels I've seen with my own work.

I'm spinning up my second startup now, and taking a similarly revenue-oriented approach. Forget about pageviews and popularity and focus on revenue.

However, I'm also going to focus on possibly getting angel funding this time around.
Affiliate Marketing Program Resource
Accurate or not, that's a pretty good idea. Being able to detach the screen and plug the computer into a bigger monitor would suit perfectly the way I use my laptop at the moment.

Plus, with the screen removed the "brick" is presumably a computer in a keyboard form factor, just like in the good old days.
While you are doing that - you can also rewire your caps lock LED to show more useful information. Mine shows whether I am on Dvorak or not. (Actually it is lit when I am not on Dvorak.)