skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a cool article but perhaps inaccurate data - the Wikipedia article on the oldest companies in the world has a many entries that this article is missing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oldest_companies

Wikipedia has 26 entries before 1300, the article only 6. Notably (the only one I'd heard of) Wikipedia claims the Affligem brewery started in 1074.
As everyone's pointing out, any exchange for trading securities falls under massive amounts of regulation. It's possible to navigate the legal morass, but will require a group of lawyers with vast experience in securities law and regulations, preferably at the international level as well.

New exchanges have been created by private companies in the past, although typically (AFAIK) with large infusions of cash from major banks. IntercontinentalExchange (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IntercontinentalExchange, http://www.theice.com) is an example, although it focuses on commodities, rather than stocks.
I remember the very first time evolutionary biology made complete sense to me, back in high school. I remember when I first made the connection between the theories on how amino acids are formed and the way DNA is constructed and replicated. If you take that basic evolutionary premise, and you just extrapolate it to larger scales, it makes perfect sense and explains the way biological systems build on each other.

The aha! excitement of that discovery was so powerful, and not unlike the aha! I get when I finish writing some good code and watch it work for the first time.

The human body is just a machine in nature, after all, and DNA is sort of like its software.
Google's GrandCentral is nifty and free. Too bad you can't get it.
The original c2 link seems to conflate several concepts, and come off worse because of it.

- working despite being sick
- working despite being temporarily bored or disinterested
- working despite being unmotivated long term on the job/project
- working sub-optimally despite being able to identify ways you could work better and be happier (win-win changes), but changes which you are not allowed to make.

I wish some of those people posting about how great their code and employers are were writing the sort of software I get to use on a daily basis. :/
They should be obliged to disclose anything about the business. And obliged to keep private anything about any employee's health (or finances, or other private/personal concerns).

Privacy is the only rationale I need. Steve Jobs is a person, entitled to be happy, suffer, live in private.

Yes it makes things less predictable for you, but you have shares in the company, not the CEO, so ... tough.
Virtual World Investment: $148M in the Third Quarter
WordPress Acquires Irish Startup Polldaddy
Why Windows Mobile Is In Trouble
Aren't VCs supposed to anticipate trends?
Subject to simple disproof. Here follows the greatest possible program in the universe:
Don't know as as web app, but how long until someone develops a iPhone app?
It is too simple to recreate, that's why. Especially on a small scale like a per-company basis.
The tone of this writer really irritates me. The content is useful to know, but his style seems so vindictive and (dare I say it) elitist.
does any one know of a way to incorporate google spreadsheets with ajax rendered table data?
As eBay’s Core Business Hits Hard Times, Skype Begins To Shine
call the NY shop
Join the United Shareholders of America, And Stand Up For Your Rights
Best program = most functionality, in least lines of code. Yours fails on the first measure.
This is almost as cool as typd.in! I wonder if there's a good way for the two to work together...
I'm almost the opposite, Debian on my Laptop. XP Pro on my desktop (until my next big hardware upgrade, anyway).

But as I'm very partial to Linux, I'm starting to think Mac might be the way to go for my next big upgrade. I use my laptop almost purely for development work, but my desktop I use for work/multimedia entertainment.

While I know it's certainly doable to set up a Linux machine for multimedia capabilities, I'm somewhat attracted to the (hopefully) more "batteries included" functionality of a Mac if say, I want to watch a movie piped out to my TV or whatever. In cases like this, I'd prefer to just be able to click a few buttons and make it happen rather than trawl through mailing list archives looking for the right combination of xorg.conf directives for my particular graphics card.

My XP box works fine for this kind of stuff already, but with a Mac, I get the bonus of the familiar Unix-like underpinnings.

Still probably be a while before I might say goodbye to Bill, though.
FCC Gives Whites Spaces a Boost
I once saw this, it could be what you are talking about, kind of: http://couchtycoon.net/
They need to associate themselves with the Disco movement of the late 70's. That is the general idea. Yuppie "groups" going to trendy places like Studio 54, and meeting up with other "groups". Perhaps letting trendy (upscale) nightclubs to advertise or interface on their portal would be a good idea. Like let a "group" book a room at a club listed on the site. I support the disco movement in principle, or more precisely, I support its revival. But a fuzzy definition like "group dating" doesn't really get me on the love train.
It's purely the laws that force that.
Not meaningless. But potentially unhelpful or even misleading.
Ask HN: Where are the Midwestern startup jobs listed?
I'm looking for a job working with/at/on a startup in the Midwest. I've cruised Craigslist and the various web boards for jobs, but I don't see any such jobs posted. I know there are at least a few startups that I've seen on TV in Milwaukee and Minneapolis...

Any tips for where to look? Who to talk to?
I see your point now, thank you.
Using Bayes Theorem to Believe in Miracles
http://startuply.com

http://dice.com
Highlight the code to any source with this handy bookmarklet
That was my thought too: a cute hack in 2008 for a problem that was cleanly solved a quarter century earlier by software that remains popular to this day. I know it's easy to laugh at stuff like this, and I'm sure someone will use this and like it. But still, guys: software development is a mature field. The realm of useful tools for editing code is pretty tapped out. The good ideas lie elsewhere.
Evolution as bootstrapping an interpreter for DNA code is an interesting idea, but I wonder how deep the analogy
goes. There must be some simple biology fact that invalidates it.
A useful addition to this would be the ability to automatically POST the results to some URL so you can be notified when client-side errors occur, probably because you broke something.
I just wrote 5 lines of text right now in like 2 minutes.

Doesn't seem like much of a comparison. Sure, I could write hundreds of lines of code in a few hours (or thousands of lines of text) if my goal was to produce volume. But if my goal is to improve a complex program, it might take 8 hours to complete a 10 LOC change.
New iPhone Source Code Every Day: Apps A Muck
Video Tutorial: Writing Your First iPhone Application (SDK 2.1)
Just take a look at the Yahoo Answers sections on math, chemistry, biology, etc. to see people who are obviously doing their homework.

http://answers.yahoo.com/dir/?link=list&sid=396545227
And less accurate, yes.

Considered asking yourself why something being for women is offensive?
Tip of the Day - Queries that you do not want to replicate
Right, because we never do that ever.
just use your pencil to draw one
In technology, not financial markets. And in any case, even in the financial markets few anticipated this. A lot of hedge funds have lost money.
I agree this is not c2's finest hour. But, there are serious gems of wisdom all over the place on c2. It's a seriously awesome source of knowledge. Random, "drinking from a firehose", kind of knowledge...but it's worth soaking in it every once in a while.
You could use the test driven development to regulate an interval between gratifications (the interval depends on granularity of your tests; more granularity corresponds to shorter time intervals).

Thus you can build a giant system and get instant gratifications every 5 minutes if you'd like to.
If you where about to meassure out your... Size.
You'd do it in inches. Though it will tell you nothing about performance, it'll still be a form of meassurment.
Let the man be proud of his size!
Nah. I kinda like the clean circle right smack in the middle. I'm thinking right now about how can I retrofit this into my filofax planner. Very nice idea.
Thanks for sharing the link.
Well, if I accept money from my uncle with the understanding that I'll pay him back ten fold if I make it big, that's legal right? And let's say I get five friends and make the same deal with them; again, nothing illegal there right?

Where exactly is the line drawn here...
Yahoo BOSS Mashable Challenge Recap
And thus Tesla has fulfilled a rite of passage for an auto-maker: closing a factory in Detroit.
Are things like Intrade regulated?
Maybe that should be read as "The PROSPECT of starvation is a a spur to success."
Sure, for the same reason if something is for whites only it's offensive, or for men only.

It's pointless anyway... Why aren't there more white basketball players? Racism? Probably more likely the same reason there aren't more women founders.

You have to admit a special school only for white basketball players would be pretty offensive. no?
And then he steps on the grill one day, no? Haha! Bad idea...
Bearing in mind that you haven't said anything else at all about either program, I'd have to say yes, absolutely meaningless.
Yeah. He's skinny. So what. Lots of monks are that skinny. He's obviously nearly completed his metamorphosis into the first of the aliens that will whisk us away in a few years. That doesn't mean he's gonna die, it just means he is becoming so good at manipulating the reality distortion field and his psychic energies that the lower aspects of his body is burning away. He's good. You don't say a caterpillar is dying because it's turning into a butterfly. Steve's Jobs slow transformation into a grey isn't any different then that.

You should of read this all on your iPhone already, if you can figure out the secret gesture to unlock it, if you want him to come pick you up with his UFO brethren.
Twitter could easily implement ads and let users upgrade to a premium account that would hide ads and provide additional goodies like analytics.

Just like on Flickr, people love to flaunt their upgrades.

Another interesting thing they could do would be to develop some killer add on like a location-based friend meet up deal or follower recommendation thing and force people to pay $6/mo to use it. I think twitter users would pay for anything that could help them accumulate followers or potentially meet someone new in person.
An excellent analysis, this section in particular was outstanding:

In good times and bad, startups should be asking themselves the same questions:
1. What’s our runway?
2. What experiments are we running to extend our runway? (e.g. chasing revenue, raising capital, taking debt, writing grant proposals,
cutting burn, grabbing market share in the hopes that it will help us raise capital later, et cetera)
3. How long will we try the experiments before we switch to plan B?
4. What’s plan B?
Not including the oldest commercial corporation in North America, The Hudson Bay Company is a bit weak.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hudson_Bay_Company
This is not a very meaningful list. They just take these companies' word about when they were "founded." Often all that means is that there was someone in the same place doing the same thing. It doesn't imply any kind of organizational continuity.
Also remember that "normal" stock markets are secondary markets, buying a stock doesn't actually provide capital to the startup (unless it's the IPO).
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The powerful 1000 mAh battery will provide you about three hundred hours of standby time and 240 minutes of talk time. The phone comes equipped with polyphonic and mp3 ringtones.
The 8 Books Website You Must Bookmark
If you were John Gruber you'd be elitist too.
i think IDE has a big role in this,

with Visual Studio i feel so much more productive, but it also puts so much information at my finger tips, and programing in C# or VB.net were really pattern based.

programing raw javascript and dealing with DHTML with support for IE6/7, Safari, Opera, and FF can really cut your productivity. Not only are you looking up everything on the web when something breaks, but there are just so many pieces to the puzzle that make good JavaScript hard. Thank you Douglas Crockford for part one of making JS better, and thank you John Resig for making the second part easier. Hopefully mozilla will be able to make a 3rd part easier with their new tools R&D lab.

In PHP I generally felt really unproductive until I had zend and a debugable server set up.

Closing that loop is hard, and I wish there was a better measure of productivity than LOC.
In order to monetize your work, you'll probably corrupt it, taking out the magic in search of dollars.

The great artists of the Renaissance were very highly paid. In fact they were probably the best paid craftsmen of the time. And they are hard to beat for magic.
Plants now have "dignity" in Switzerland.
I think LOC is a better measure of complexity than productivity.

and complexity hits you in maintability, growth, performance, and ultimately cost.
Tough Times, Tough Decisions
Forget Net Neutrality, ISPs To Serve Up “Address Not Found”
Giant database plan 'Orwellian'
Well, if I accept money from my uncle with the understanding that I'll pay him back ten fold if I make it big, that's legal right? And let's say I get five friends and make the same deal with them; again, nothing illegal there right?

Unfortunately, induction only works in mathematics, not in the legal system. I'm sure there's an arbitrary line somewhere, and that that line has to do with "intent". (Getting 10 friends to invest, probably fine. Getting 10 people responding to a newspaper ad, probably not fine. Ah, the legal system...)
Strange. The important conclusion that I read is that OpenID is basically unusable unless you have somebody explain it to you. And then it's still really unintuitive.

OpenID needs to go away soon so that something useful can replace it. Something where you type in a username and password. Something that does what OpenID set out to achieve, yet does it in a way that real users can figure out.
You might want to look at private trading markets. It is sort of a lower scale version of the public markets. Companies can be traded between entities as stock without the onerous accounting requirements but there are certain stringent requirements. There can be at most 400 share-holders and the deal killer -- stock holders have to be institutional investors with over $100 million in assets. If you have that much cash, you may as well become a VC.

I am not an expert on this so independent checking on this would be nice. To my knowledge, NYSE and GS have setup something like this.
Cook then showed two pie charts. One showing the Mac’s unit share in the U.S. retail market at 18 percent, up from “a single digit number, just a few years ago”. Cook then drops the kicker, the single key point you need to grasp to understand Apple’s Macintosh business: “And what’s more impressive than this is if you look at revenue share. Because we focus on fully-features systems, and we don’t compromise on quality, our revenue share is over 31 percent. That means that one out of every three dollars that’s spent on computers in U.S. retail is spent on the Macintosh. What a difference a few years makes.”
Good point, but it could still be helpful. If you are a VC, it is probably nice to know you can inject some cash into a company and if the company starts going downhill, you can easily sell your shares to someone else.

At the same time, Joe Average might be able to pick up some "deals" on startups that VCs think will fail but he thinks will do fine.

The market is not a bad idea.
IIRC this just won an Ignobel peace prize.
It'd probably be an auction, too. You could easily use Ebay, except for regulation.
No no no; I said _ask yourself._ Don't just repeat what you already know; think a little longer and look a little deeper into where the offense, the _feeling of offense in you,_ comes from.
I think ClickPass (YC startup) solves this problem pretty well. The only problem with it is that so far not many sites have signed up for it (which kind of makes sense if you're the 800lb incumbent in your niche/market)
It seems bad but most of the changes can be taken care of using the 2to3 tool written GvR. The changes are really not that bad and quite a few of them are very long overdue.
Lenders to Kiva also aren't buying securities -- they're providing money to a microfinance institution which then distributes the money as promised, hopefully to return it later. Should the loan not be repaid, the lender has no rights to any assets.
Dimensionalizing the web
Apparently the author of the article did not read it before writing the title. It is a list of the 100 oldest family businesses. From the first paragraph:

"Below there's a list of world's top 100 oldest companies that represent family business."
wrong thread dude.
The old political adage: "If you're explaining, you're losing."
The better the artist, the more they are able to explore their ideas and abilities. It's not universal but it's as circumstantially true now as it was then.
I don't know whether to be sad or intrigued, but I've just realized that this article is way too long.

It's not that I don't like to read long format articles and books, but when I'm on the internet there is an objective to reading blogs and articles, and that objective is to ascertain useful opinions and information without the fluff. Anything that takes longer than a minute to read is too long for the average internet user.
You've got to love a guy who's so productive that he takes time off being a rocket scientist to run a car company!
thanks mojombo!
A friend of mine complained that Orwell, being a kind humanitarian, should not have a bad word named after him. Perhaps Stalinesque?
I predict Google will pick up Twitter. Google is one of the few companies that can sustain internet businesses without a business model because anything that encourages more internet use indirectly helps Google.

In my opinion, Google is still a strong exit strategy for many years to come. Google has $7 B in cash, $29 B in assets and only $3 B in liabilities.

Of course I would never build a business with Google as an "exit" strategy, but I think that's the best option that Twitter has. Sure you can argue for the corporate spin, but I personally feel that is a weak play (like someone else said, there are a million other corporate collab startups out there already that can clone Twitter).

It makes even more sense since Evan Williams (founder of Odea, parent company of Twitter) sold his previous blogging company, Blogger, to Google.
also midwestern, and have also historically had problems finding edgish work there. they like their .NET and their java. also, work rates are terrible. i can generally expect to take a $30K pay cut working locally in central ky/southern ohio/northern tn as opposed to working remotely.

even if there were some random startup, you still wouldn't be able to participate in the startup community you would in the bay, or boston, or chicago, or ny. there'd be no networking, no idea sharing across company lines, no post-work barcamps. part of the fun of a startup is the culture.

good luck. as for me, i'm hoping YC comes through for us so i can move to the bay.
How far did you push it? I've met one or two female scouts. Maybe they were ventures wearing the wrong uniform. :)
Domready - The smallest subset possible from jQuery to support dom Ready event.
The US also has strict rules against gambling, and stock markets are very borderline -- so watch out!
The FOREX (Foreign Exchange) market is pretty much the wild west of trading at the moment. No central exchange, little to no regulation, etc...

On average you'll need around 400K to buy a trading server (Meta Trader, ActForex, Manhattan Platform, etc), market the brokerage, and setup relationships with liquidity providers.

Not exactly a stock market, but its the closest to a tangible trading business for someone looking to get into that type of market.
I would disagree. Few lines of code means reduced readability - not good for future development. There has to be balance.
Don't quote me on this but I thought there's already a substantial wait list for the roadster. Once more people take delivery I think their show rooms will fill up a little bit with maintenance and stuff but don't expect tent and fairground sales like the Ford and Toyota guys. :)

The lambo dealer near me is the same way, yet somehow I still think they're profitable. Probably only need to sell only 1 car a week, if even that.
Yeah, text really is so much better for comments. I don't really care for Seesmic's product, as you probably guessed, for just that reason.
It isn't easy, but it's far easier. I know lots of people who've done it (hell, I have a couple myself).
Intrade doesn't sell stock. It sells betting contracts. It's an entirely different type of regulation, and is actually illegal here.
Where exactly is the line drawn here...

It varies by jurisdiction, but usually the rule is that "friends and family" are ok, but you can only take money from strangers if they're rich (i.e. "accredited investors"). In BC the "friends and families" rule is defined more or less as "people who have direct knowledge of you and are investing in you instead of the company".

But again, the rules vary by jurisdiction -- so consult a lawyer who is familiar with the rules in your jurisdiction before you do this.
Think microfinance. I'd love to join that revolution.
Depressing? All this are saying is: Unless you're a founder, you're an employee. Earlier employees are closer to the founder end, later employees are closer to the employee end. Neither are probably going to retire at 23 from an early acquisition. The latter are probably not even gonna retire from a monster exit (though in this case there are probably more employees, early is relative).

They do have a chance at making quite a lot of money though. 3k/40m is less then 0.01%. So it's not really a big part of the compensation package. In that case, stock just isn't a reason to work there. There may be other reasons to.

It's depressing that being in the vicinity of a startup doesn't make you rich? If everyone was rich, it wouldn't be rich. By definition, it's not available to everyone. You think market rates + a 50% chance at being millionaire, should be the going rate?
Getting 10 people responding to a newspaper ad, probably not fine.

There's two reasons why this isn't fine, actually: You can't get strangers to invest unless they're accredited investors; but also the newspaper ad itself is illegal ("public offering of an unregistered security" or something along those lines).
Cohort Analysis of Retention, Churn and ARPU
Unless that thing has a refrigeration unit that wasn't mentioned, it's a really bad idea. You can't let a frozen piece of meat sit out for hours, and then just cook it and it's ok. I used to be a meat cutter and had to do this training where they show you how fast bacteria builds up, and it's really fast. There'd be more microorganisms on that thing within a half hour of thawing than there are humans on the planet.
You'd throw up on day 1 because you just ate a piece of meat that sat out overnight.
What makes you think that Google would have any interest in buying twitter?

You don't just get to choose who will buy you.
Ask HN: Who designed the graphics for your web app, and where did you find them?
I want my web app to look less like Google and more like Vimeo.

Have you been able to pull good talent from local colleges, Craigslist, or other websites, and how did you narrow down the field? (I am reluctantly moving forward with eLance, but I'd rather find someone local.)