skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
if you're going to make a living at it, it helps to find a niche where money flows as a regular consequence of the success of your idea

as soon as you focus on your art and leave the money behind, you may just discover that this focus turns out to be the secret of actually breaking through and making money.

thats the meat of the articles, overall good ideas..
The act of donating to a party is a public act though... unlike voting. You declare it on your tax return for goodness sake.
I've seen your handle in far too many threads lately, and for the most part I just scroll past; because life is too short. In this particular case I chose to comment because economics is an interest of mine as an entrepreneur. You do not appear to be contributing to the conversation about ideas, you seem to be mostly emoting and acting as though anything that does not conform to your rather straitened ideological views is a personal attack on your ego. And you've been doing this all day every day.

In this particular case it's clear that you did not RTFA since it's about Krugman's workflow, and says relatively little about the substance of his work and almost nothing about his politics other than that he regularly attempts to think and write about topical policy debates.

It looks rather as though you read the the name Krugman and reacted unthinkingly with an attack. That is not dissent, that is noise. If you want to make noise may I suggest that the politics reddit is the right place for you and that Hacker News is for people who want to focus on the ideas rather than the emotions.
Fantastic. Such a cleaner method than copy-pasting table data from web pages into excel to visualize and manipulate it, which I've done countless times doing market research.
APPL actually lowered laptop prices. 100 less for the bottom end. and 700 less to get features like aluminum and decent graphics.
5 High-Tech Eco-Cars Faster than the Porsche 911
I kept waiting for him to say something novel, but gave up after about 15 minutes. Clearly, I'm missing something.
Wake-N-Bacon:  alarm clock that wakes you to the smell of cooking bacon
Cofounders exert a lot of peer pressure. I'd be surprised if being in physical proximity to other startuppy friends generally matters much, considering we do some of that interaction online (HN/Facebook/email/etc.) anyway.
HTC S730 Wing 100 Grey Unlocked
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That is actually a very good idea. A truly independent open channel for business to consumer. Public image matters more than ever, specially in this turbulent times where people are reconsidering paid services.

But I still don't see how Twitter can cash in without impacting the freedom and openness of its service. Why would Comcast start paying them something they get for free?
Hi MicahWedemeyer, Sorry for the trouble. I will be in touch via email to help fix this.

Thanks,
Immad (Clickpass co-founder)
want.
Yeah, but more than likely you can do something doing what you like.
Do you want a reply to this? I'm confused. If I'm trolling (which I'm trying not to) then why comment in this manner? As a way of appealing to other readers? I thought the thread system was set up in order to reply to individual comments. Seems more like a rebuke.

Nicely done -- especially liked the part about emoting. The neat thing is that it makes it impossible to reply in any fashion whatsoever. Which of course was the point.
Marketers Cut Back on Digital Media
Just in case you are a web 2.0 ad-supported business....
Honestly, this was a pretty pointless article.
Classic Godin.
I swear I have the worst timing ever. I go to college just as the .com bubble crashes, and now that I'm planning my jump into startupdom everything crashes again.

Oh well, there's nowhere to go but up, right?

Right?
"You've got to pull the weeds if you want a beautiful garden" classic.

-P
It's an idea that an acquaintance of mine already had. It strikes me as a good one too:
http://www.niggle.co.uk/
Building below the frost line apparently results in a steady 55F temperature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_living

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dugout_(shelter)#American_Northwest

So maybe all you need to do is burrow in and house your servers in a covered clay pit in the basement?
Exactly, and that's why you need to be very careful with hiring. If you give one of your early employees 1%-5% equity, getting bought for 10-100 MM just doesn't cut it. After taxes, fees & TPS said employee could easily walk away with under $1 million (even if you're bought for over $100 million). This is still obviously awesome, but is probably not the upside that many potential hires are expecting.
> Guys: we already dominate the industry, and will for the rest of our careers.

What do you mean "we"? The fact that some other guys dominate "the industry" does absolutely nothing for me.

If this is like other similar efforts, it's an attempt to help connected women compete with connected men. Meanwhile, "unconnected" women and men remain left out.

Excuse me for not seeing that as a significant improvement.

> If you don't see the need for a group to which you'll never belong, just keep quiet.

Would you say that to anyone other than unconnected white men?
You should borrow one from a friend and try it for a few hours.

I thought I'd hate it, but I absolutely love it. I've never had glare issues in an environment that wouldn't have totally washed out my old matte MacBookPro anyhow. For my use, the glossy screen has been an improvement 100% of the time.
Of course you can build an online business that depends on paying customers and be profitable from day 1 like TicketStumbler, but since when is it any easier?
You don't declare them in your tax return. Donations to political campaigns are not tax deductible.
Obviously you're doing this on prosper.com. ;-)
> Less than 5% of those diagnosed with pancreatic cancer survive 5 years.

It's my understanding that pancreatic cancer survival rates vary significantly by type and that Jobs has an (extremely) rare type that has fairly good survival rates.
Ruby’s Popularity On The Up; An Ideal Haven For The Recession?
Technorati Acquires AdEngage - Launches Self-Service Advertising Network
Hmm, I didn't know that. They are up here in Canada.
Site-builder SynthaSite gets new way to make money
From my limited understanding of how VC works, I would think that both distributions (curves) should be bimodal with one mode at zero rather than being normal distributions.

For the higher variance distribution, the mode at zero should have a higher probability than the mode at zero for the lower variance distribution. You might also expect that the second mode would occur at a higher valuation in the high variance distribution.
Mini-laptops sell faster during economic crisis
Day 75. Revenue since Day 3.
Point is, how much did Twitter make on that deal? Would Comcast pay for the service if the other option was for it not to exist?
A bit long, and a bit too much of an ad for his company (soocial). That said, he said some thought provoking things about the term "the cloud" that changed my opinion on it somewhat.

Prior to watching the video I sided with Larry Ellison of Oracle, saying that "the cloud" is at best renaming something we already have/do and probably more self-flagellating than anything else. In the video he contends (as many others do) that "the cloud" is about pushing the commodity line up from electricity or ISP service through the application layer (hosting services and browsers). His contention is that this is a big win for everyone, including software providers, because it's something you expect to have, just as electricity is, so demand rises accordingly.

This casts Ellison's position in a different light for me, because as the market currently exists they're the incumbent, and they arguably have the most to lose by any change (they potentially have a lot to gain as well, but the downsides, if mismanaged, are very direct and real). One argument about commodities/utilities is that you very rarely have electricians or plumbers on site at home, or even in a business of thousands -- it's a service that you generally don't even keep on retainer, you call on an as-needed basis. Oracle's database software is poorly placed here, a fact that's hard to argue against if you've ever tried to install and perform basic DBA tasks on it.

Also, apologies for quoting "the cloud" every time. It's 2008 and I'm still having a hard time using the word "blog" without quotes. Argh. This is going to take some time. :/
Crisis is surely a factor, but I think it also counts that they are practical and easy to carry around, while being more powerful than just a PDA or a phone.

I'm considering getting one to replace the paper notebook I drag around to write my notes. I don't need a 17" screen for that, but a mobile interface is also not comfortable enough.
can we settle for a high return and a very low variance? :)
Not really; women are trying to get a place at the table when they do tech work, not find dates.
Adobe CS4 is shipping (link to faster HTML store)
not really, flickr, stumbleupon, clubpenguin started when .com bubble crashed.

crises do spurr ground-breaking technologies and new ways
Ask YC: Who here has done a rolling close on angel/seed round fundraising?
Just wondering your their experience was? Any advice? From everything I've read and common sense, it seems smart to take whatever money you can get and get the cash in the bank asap. That way the stragglers or undecided investors aren't holding up the round.

Are there any pitfalls to this strategy? Do the latecomers get the same valuation as those who are ready to right the check today?
Um, no. :-)
Did Paulsen actually force the bankers to sign? There's a quote in the article that it was a "take it or take it offer", but it seems like the bankers eventually agreed to the terms willingly.
Quite scary; I'd never get anything done! Not quite as scary as Jesus Camp, but I digress...

All the Seesmic comments I have actually bothered to click on have been people reading from scripts or bumbling through a thought that ends with saying nothing. Cut out the middleman and just give me the script in a much more efficient form.
I'm willing to grant you the benefit of the doubt when you say that you are not intentionally trolling, but I respectfully submit that that is what you come across as.

Starting highly charged political threads on topics that are only tangentially related to the linked article does not contribute value to the discussion.

I've noticed for myself that one of the signs that I am spending too much time in front of a computer is that I get into emotional arguments on internet message boards or IRC. It's easy to forget that a level of emotional involvement that would be normal and healthy IRL can make you seem like a raving lunatic online.

Take that as you will. I am through with this thread.

PLONK
Poignant observations as usual, Matt. Thanks for the link as well.
Definitely - thanks!
Yea I agree but we all need to pay the bills.
It was only stretched so that the bottom axis shared the same scale as the first graph. The scales match, so unless I'm missing something, the second curve isn't wrong at all...
As a female/startup co-founder, I find it rather unfortunate that Christine chose to close with:

Let's work constructively to get more bright young women to apply.

Why young? Are women over 30 over-represented among start-up founders? Does she feel that we are ticking time bombs waiting to run off to have babies? Is she simply uncomfortable mentoring someone slightly older? What is it?

I don't question the intentions. But I do question the quality of a mentoring group where the mentors themselves carry outdated self-defeating stereotypes. Reminds me of an otherwise intelligent Indian friend of mine who is completely hung up about having darker skin.
Well, that depends on the individual situation. A micro-ISV could bring that number as low as a reasonable salary. A startup like 37Signals needs to have that number high enough to support a small number of employees. Of course, a VC backed firm counting on a grand exit needs a much greater reward.

I think what Matt correctly points out though is that by limiting yourself to the VC option, you are only seeing 1/3 of the avenues available to you. These are limits for the VC, but they don't need to be limits for a founder.
A (truncated or folded) normal distribution is completely inappropriate here.
I keep trying to post a reply, and this app simply hangs and then displays a blank screen.
Helping website owners fix broken links
As I mentioned, finding out what the users want is a worthwhile problem in and of itself. There can be no one true formula, as not all scenarios are the same.
Actually, you probably have the best timing ever unless you want your name associated with things that people gnash their teeth at. :-)
Starvation is a spur to success.
I wouldn't worry about it. You can't be too thin. Or too powerful.

http://images.teamsugar.com/files/users/1/15111/34_2007/imac...
Then you would have to change the measure to get both curves to integrate to 1. Of course the distribution is nonsense to begin with.
What has worked for me in the past (for the provision of services) has been a combination of becoming intimately acquainted with a process, and talking to people who carry out this process regularly, both with the intention of identifying where a need can be fulfilled. I am not talking about a bullet list of features to checkmark or cross out, that's junk, users don't LIE about a feature that they say they need and then don't, no, users simply do not know what they truly need a lot of the time, I don't focus on getting them to tell me a feature per se or a highly detailed aspect of the service I aim to provide them with (because what the hell do they know about the work I am doing, they know about the work they do, which is why I go to them) I focus on obtaining information and insight from them. I aim to give people what they need, as opposed to what they want . . . why? because if you just give them what they need, they will thank you for it later when they realize that this is what they needed, if you give them what they want, they will later realize that is not what they needed, but will not blame themselves for it, they will blame you.
Market surveys and market studies in many ways shapes and forms have been, are, and will continue to be used to great success, the problem with your variation is that it involves deception. You don't bs people and trick them into taking your marketing survey under the guise of a product offer.

I am seriously curious to know how many times you have seen that work. I would think that many people would resent the tactic and retaliate by not purchasing your product, or they would lose their trust in you (and rightly so, you done suckered them once) and therefore respect.
It's interesting to note how many thousands of products have been researched, developed, and taken to market to great success, without deception tactics.
All probability density functions must integrate to 1.
I always took it as a given that employees will not get rich off an acquisition, unless the company is a Google or Netscape or Stratus (and even then, only if they were management-level and hired fairly early on). I did the math on my last equity offer (as an employee; not counting cofounder offers): I would've ended up with about $5000 worth of stock in a best-case (~50M) acquisition. My former coworker was an early employee of CCBN, purchased for $40M: he ended up with $3000.

Both founders and employees need to be very aware of the different risk/reward structures for each. I've heard some founders complain about how hard it is to get decent, hardworking help. Well, of course it is - their upside is 1/10th of yours! And their downside is lower as well, since they usually take a market-rate salary. People are less inclined to put in herculean effort if they have no incentive to do so.

For employees, be very cognizant of how much risk the founder has actually eliminated and make sure that fits with the reduced reward. It's really, really hard to build something people want: if they've already done so, they deserve every bit of those outsize founder stakes. But if all they have is an idea and some VC funding, they're asking you to bear many of the same risks, yet leaving you with much less of a reward.

The takeaway, IMHO, is don't hire and don't take VC money until you have product/market fit. That gives your employees a risk & upside profile inline with their equity stakes. It also gives your VCs an acceptable return without them forcing you into taking outlandish risks, eg. going after that pie-in-the-sky market opportunity.
My guilty pleasure is evolutionary biology.
I had to break up my reply into several posts in order for this app to be able to handle it.

How dissapointing. I have seen PHP do better than this. This is depressing.
Plugging Ruby Memory Leaks: heap/stack dump patches to help take out the trash.
It was a classic addiction: prolonged frustration, occasionally rewarded by a briefly glowing fix of achievement.

When you put it like that, I guess I have another addiction. I've been sitting around waiting many a year for someone to finally just say to me, "You don't really know what you're doing, do you?" So that I could reply, "That's what makes it fun!"

The frustration caused by it is probably why I smoke so damn much, though. Oh well, better frustrated than bored.
Congrats to my old friend Mike Olson - Hadoop is a beast and anything that makes it easier for startups to scale is good. The stuff Cloudera will do will surely seep into the project as a whole.
At an early stage of requirements gathering they're complementary for wireframes. Revisions/UI specs will be fleshed out in Omnigraffle for greater precision later, but that's after we've iterated with client in Balsamiq, which is what it makes so easy.
I tend to following your line of thinking, but "you" is different than "many people". :)

Agreed; we're not.
Also known as the "diet buster".
"...I honestly feel safer out here than I did in Vegas... I also never work outside of the camp's secured perimeter. "

In one line he skewers CNN for portraying Iraq as dangerous, and then another he talks about working within a US military secured perimeter. So which is it?
I don't think this was a waste of time at all. In fact, I was thrilled to read about exactly who made some of these predictions. Especially the analyst who based his "projections" on a false rumor.
Accountability is a good thing. All the "pass-through" journalism, where sites simply take what other sites say and post it themselves, can easily obscure the source.
I did think the thing about the apostrophe was a bit over-the-top, though.
The New Organizers
Seeing as I already bought into CS3, this is a generation I'll skip and spend that money on other aspects of my business.
Except that Firefox is backed by the (huge) Mozilla Foundation, which has a U.S. presence, meaning that they could easily be sued for patent infringement. Not a good move to make.

However, being that MF brings in a lot of income through partnering with Google and others, I don't see why it should be such an issue to work out a patent licensing agreement with the respective owners...
Social Web CMS - a Pligg fork web software, version 1.0 release
I think I'd throw up after day 20 (and I looove bacon).
Well, it certainly won't be an unsurmountable obstacle.

Depending on who you ask, I'm either persistent, stubborn, or muley.
This is precisely what OpenID IS!
Not always true. There is the rare founder who is an "empire builder"-- the kind of guy who wants to do crazy ambitious things like build a railroad across the country (or the software equivalent). Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg would both qualify-- both have had ample opportunity to walk away with $30m.

These are the founders that investors want (including YC) - the $30m exits are just to "keep the lights on" if you do the math.
Whatever your politics, there are some lessons here for entrepreneurs. The effect that he describes at the end of the piece seems to be much the same that Paul mentions in his piece about the difference between founders and employees.
Not if you're on the Atkins diet.
Only if Day 1 was launch day (which it never is). Don't do funny math. :-)
Outside.In Scales Up - Case Study - PHP to Rails
Lightweight!
I think there's some kind of implicit sentiment that the happiness from doing something you enjoy and getting paid are additive when you do something you enjoy. I'm not sure that's true.

I love computers, UNIX/Linux, scalable architectures, yadda yadda yadda. I work in the field, and am reasonably well compensated, but I've always said "I'd keep doing computers even if I was the one paying."

Doing something you're passionate about for someone else (whether your customer is a manager, or you're self employed and your customer is the one paying) isn't inherently pleasurable if the customer's goals aren't perfectly aligned with yours -- in fact it can be deeply saddening to know there's a better way to accomplish something, if only some business reality (cost, technical constraint) wasn't in the way.

For me, the big win working in my favorite field is that the job is easy -- I have a great pool of contacts, I've spent over 80% of my entire life immersed in the problems and solutions of this field. That said, I'm pretty sure I'd enjoy computing a lot more again if I went back to bagging groceries -- 100% of the computing I'd do would be computing for pleasure, no more chores or building stuff for people that have needs that are different than mine.
How to Execute (Against) Your Resume
Right, but you're focusing on the exception. He's focusing on the rule.

I'd like to see a VC firm that kills it from dividend payments instead of _soley_ exits/IPOs (maybe one exists?). You'd need some very "open" limited partners.
GPL not good enough for Google AJAX Library API
In an interesting decision, Google decided not to host the Extjs framework as part of their Google AJAX Libraries API service, a CDN and loading architecture for popular open source js frameworks.

"For now this will be a no-fix due to licensing issues. All libraries that we host on the Google AJAX Libraries API
are offered free of charge with very liberal licenses. EXT, however, requires a fee for users wishing to use it
commercially. We like to keep the libraries consistent so that we don't put our users in a dangerous situation
where they might be liable without knowing it."
(http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=50#c44)

What's interesting is that Extjs is available under GPL v3. A commercial option is available if you don't want to release your code under open source (http://extjs.com/products/license.php).

Clearly, Google can support whatever it wants, but from the viewpoint of at least one team at Google, GPL is not liberal enough to be considered true open source. "Open source" is when a commercial company can use code without a fee.
You can refuse to read messages in any medium after all.

For SMS, though, the reader (often a mobile phone device) has to read the message the moment it arrives (or it, well, won't arrive). Since tweets are not limited to one person, reading Twitter can happen asynchronously.
Before clicking, I fully expected some sort of synthetic bacon machine integrated into an alarm clock.

But it's just ... bacon.

Hilarious.