skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How will current market impact VC?
The credit crisis has been an ongoing problem, but perhaps the peak of the downfall is yet to be seen gives this week's latest fallout. Given the current market situation, this is certainly a point of valid discussion in the coming months. How will this impact the VC market? I'm hearing from various sources reporting on both sides of the coin, some even suggesting that VC investments may actually increase since they fall under a different asset class.

Here are some links providing input into this discussion. What do you all think? Perhaps this will lead to new and innovative ways of bootstrapping a startup in the early stages.

http://venturebeat.com/2008/04/02/venture-investors-grapple-with-slowdown-ahead/

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2007/11/how-will-toughe.html

What do you think
Just like Abraham Lincoln! Don't you hate it how he got into that whole American Civil War when slavery was going to be abolished anyway? I mean, it was historically inevitable, so what was the point. Ugh.
"Pretty is good. Ugly is bad. It has always, and will always be this way."

Pretty is often good. Ugly is even more often bad. It has often been that way, and it will often be that way.

"If you don't make beautiful products, its probably because you can't."

Or because your product is wooden pencils, or bulldozers, or parachutes, or test tubes, or transistors, or pillows, or ammunition. Various things resist beauty enough that all you get is the elegance of something that's efficient and reliable, which is not the usual meaning of beauty.

(Yes, I remember our host's SR-71 example. And good sailboats look nice too. But efficient submarines and high speed rockets aren't particularly pretty. Once simple design constraints become too extreme --- streamlining in this case --- it can become hard to satisfy the constraints in an interesting way.)

Various other things like books are borderline cases. A well-done book may have more appealing aesthetic touches than a well-done wooden pencil. But not so many more, because mostly its presentation should keep out of the way of the words. A particularly beautiful fire alarm or fire extinguisher is not necessarily a good idea, either.
I'd guess the PATRIOT Act is involved. What's to prevent a terrorist organization from tipping large sums to their American sleepers? Our government really, really hates that sort of thing even being possible.

This is why on Draftmix, we do not allow people to do interaccount transfers. And it's been one of the things the DoJ has been using to justify their persecution of online gaming.

I imagine TipJoy would be exposing themselves to all sorts of legal woes, and that would just be one of them. The are certainly going to have to iron that out at some point.
The future of online video
Make it rain.
Right, the non-personal thing is key. They just answer the phones all day and try to make up for other people's mistakes. Most of them are sensitive to your problem, they just don't want to be unfairly treated as if they were the root of it.
Nanotube-Based Chemical Sensors to Defend Against Chemical Attacks
That would make me not use the service. If I'm short-linking on my blog or Twitter account, I want to know that if someone clicks that link 2 years from now, it will still function.

I actually would be curious to see how many people clicked it (and when) and I usually wouldn't care if other people saw it as well.
PLT Scheme for Game development
I'm not big into the whole eulogizing thing. I didn't know who he was two days ago, and don't really care anymore now.
Which is best?
Expensify: The Corporate Card For The Rest Of Us
Ok, that was easy. Now, why design patterns in general are stupid? Do you mean that all|some|few of them are stupid, or that the very idea of having design patterns is stupid?
you're right, the signals' products are usable, but they could definitely be better. i've yet to meet a website that couldn't be improved by watching customers and translating that feedback into an improved experience.

totally discounting the value of watching customers to improve a product means that the discounter has never had the visceral "i suck" feeling of watching a customer stumble through a product he's designed and built.
The old Yahoo reminds me of craigslist, and the old Lycos reminds me of Google. Perhaps not so much has changed. Links, text and simple forms still rule.
12 hours is half a day(or night), if given a chance you would have slept half of your life. ;)
Evaluating Website Aesthetics via Quick-UX
Nobody is so good as to make up for the destruction of team cohesiveness and morale. Seriously. Nobody. No, not even you.

Everyone is allowed a gaffe or two. Everyone needs to get slightly thicker skins. Life is a contact sport.

That said, if you're a jerk on my team and you are unwilling or unable to change your jerkish ways after my best attempts at coaching, I will eject you from the team.

Simple.
Weight Loss Alternative Discovered | TechJaws
I care. Bloated software tends to be less reliable and harder to use, as well as being harder to make.
Actually, even though you're being sarcastic, you make an excellent point.

The British Empire had just abolished slavery, Brazil had peacefully abolished slavery - the changing economics were lowering the benefit of owning slaves, and increasing the cost. If it hadn't been for the Dred Scott decision, the costs of owning slaves (because running away would be quite attractive) would have been even higher.

If Lincoln was such a genius, why is it that the US is the only country that had a civil war over the issue, and lost over 600,000 men, with another 400,000 or so wounded and disabled ... out of a population of 31 million (that's over 3% of the entire nation either dead or wounded).

Between the riots in Northern cities, the economic decimation of the South, the suspension of the free press, the jailing of political opponents, the drafts and the deaths ... yes, maybe Lincoln should have found a way to kick the issue down the road 10 or 15 years.
Are cocky developers worth it? Depends how cocky and how good they are.
"In 1996, the New York Times website was dead set on getting users to sign up to access any Web content at all."

They've since opened up most of their site, but it's so frustrating that a good chunk of their content still requires you to sign-up.
Decisionero is now "complete." Feedback and alpha guinea pigs wanted.
A while ago I posted to y combinator in an attempt to rally the locals towards the cause of convincing my business partner to stay and work on our project.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=233570

As it turns out he elected to pursue his doctorate. C'est la vie. The nature of our working relationship was that of the tortoise and the hare. Him being the super star coder, me being a jack of all trades but with slow, steady progress. After his departure, I carried forth in my clumsy fashion and "finished" our site. I'd love feedback from people, and to see if anyone finds it useful. No, I'm not spamming the internets with requests for testers seeing if I can ensnare users. I'm targeting the y-c crowd due to the nature of the users here.

Decisionero: what it is.
A tool to get your ideas on the page to help you and a few people make decisions. We found it useful when sorting through various design decisions, for instance.
http://decisionero.com

sample decision page:
http://decisionero.com/43t_friends/San_Francisco_or_Indiana%3F

Feedback can be posted here or sent to sgibson12 at gmail.

Cheers!
A big thank you to the entire YC Community. That's it.
Yup, nothing crazy here. We were having a really good day today, and I realized that I'm so fortunate to be able to work on something I love everyday. And I am forever indebted to the YC community for all the help/advice/tips/knowledge over the past year and above all, for convincing me that quitting my job was the way to go.

Ordinary people can do extraordinary things. And this community is a perfect example of that.
thanks tim! 37 signals is good but some of their stuff is not that great. look at basecamp. if you want to move a todo to another list. you have to delete it and re-enter. im not discounting what they do and their stuff is simple but not the end all. nice on the links.
When you say you're writing the client API for a Python object database, do you mean a database that will only hold Python objects, or one that may contain arbitrary data structures, and be accessible from other languages as well?

XMPP may be a more efficient protocol than HTTP for stateful, session-oriented communication, but using it as a database client protocol is going to introduce a lot of overhead as compared to, say, using Protocol Buffers, or even the native ZEO Client interface.

Is there something about the ZODB/ZEO combination that doesn't work for your application?
I worked at a place where the lead developer had this problem. All of the other programmers were new, and he'd been there over a year, so I think we were all willing to learn and listen ... but he did not accept any feedback at all and was determined to dictate, not cooperate. There's a difference between engineers and monkeys, and the lead clearly wanted monkeys; little coding robots who didn't question his strategies or methods, didn't make suggestions, and just obediently churned out what they were told without providing any input into design or architecture. To boot, he was absolutely unforgiving if your style didn't match his (for instance, I usually put the first property of a CSS rule on the same line as the opening bracket, and he doesn't ... and he told the owner that I was incompetent for this and similar infractions), but there were no formal style guidelines; you had to look at his code and try your best to format it exactly, or suffer embarassment and wrath.

The whole thing was rather demoralizing and I left in the first month, after quickly learning not to contribute if I was intent on keeping my job for even that long. The other skilled developers left shortly thereafter. He now works mostly with designers-turned-developers and purposely hires less-competent developers so that he doesn't have to field criticism.

It's a little disappointing still, because there's a whole group of people who believe that myself and a group of talented ex-colleagues are incompetent because of this person's [intentional and petty] mischaracterizations and immaturity, but I'm trying to be over it.

I guess that's only tangentially apropos, but cocky developers are no fun, especially when they're in powerful positions.
Wouldn't a floating data center be at-risk to high-seas pirates?
This seems like a good business. "Build something useful and charge for it" model always works for me. If they can follow up with Wufoo-like execution, it could be a winner.
Unlike all the soft suburban dwelling people, some of us realize there is a real world where things go wrong, and being able to still use your computer for critical things can be a life saver. Just ask the military, even if you SIPRNET is down you still want to pull up imagery, print out maps and plan your mission to go kill the guys who made our power fail.
Arthur C. Clarke said it better, shorter, and more accurately:

"When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
it won't. or, at least, not the type of VC's that you actually want to get involved with.
The cocky guy in the story sounds like one of those extreme "we should code it all in assembly" types. I'm not usually very impressed with the pragmatism (and therefore the technical decisions) of people like that. Of course I don't know the context here.
I didn't see anything in the article that suggested it was (or wasn't) fiction, so where'd all this archetype nonsense come from?

Maybe menloparkbum was just writing an ironical-kinda-funny comment, but I've known people very similar to the character in the article, I've occasionally been the character in the article, and I'd be surprised if at least a few of the regulars around here weren't similar to the character in the article.
turn it into a social network!
Your old boss is not really cocky, just a fascist control freak.
open up a few more credit cards with as big of a limit as they'll let you.. put $10-$20/month on them and pay them off when they're due. you'll boost your credit score in no time.
Why isn't there a Linux distro out there that is made for huge web 2.0 infrastructures?
This is good advice. A big mistake a lot of people make is believing that they have to contribute something groundbreaking to be successful. That always helps, but even if your product represents a revolution in your field, there's no guarantee that you'll do well; it all comes down to marketing, in reality.

If your shirts and practices are at least on par with the competition and you can provide designs that people like, there's plenty of room and no reason you can't do well with an enterprise like this. Good luck.
What it's like to work at YouNoodle
Whereas I come at this from the opposite perspective.

If you're absolutely certain you're correct, it's natural to want to limit the amount of discussion, feedback, and argument you have to deal with. You've already made up your mind, and that's that, and it's unlikely that a convincing enough argument exists that would cause you to change your mind.

The catch is, you have to be really, really good at what you do in order to adopt this stance, otherwise it's just sheer overbearing arrogance.

That's where the conflict comes in. Most people, frankly, aren't that stellar at what they do. A lot of folks kinda muddle along, and often change their opinions about accepted practices whenever they read something that takes precedence over their experience. If you doubt this, I think you need only to read some of the security-related threads here on News.YC, or just about any thread on OpenBSD-misc that incurs the wrath of one of the developers.

Furthermore, if he was the team lead, and he established a particular syntactic convention -- for whatever reason -- and you didn't follow it, then -- and I say this as gently as I can -- you weren't doing your job. That doesn't mean you were incompetent, and I'm not looking to insult you. But, basically, you weren't following his rules, and he was within his authority to establish those rules. It sucks that his rules weren't written out, but on the other hand, it's really not all that hard to look at some code and then format yours similarly. (Especially with CSS.)

Then apparently the lead developer started hiring what you call monkeys. I call them trainable.

See, my grandfather had a similar problem. He was one of the best RF and cable TV distributions systems guys in the Bay Area up until he died a few years back. He was an idiotic businessman, but when he was dealing with the technology, he simply was one of the best. (I could bore you to tears with stories.)

He absolutely refused ever to hire anybody else with cable TV experience. He hated dealing with them, because they'd been taught all of these bad habits that he would first have to un-teach before he could even begin to get them to do things his way -- the right way. Instead, he hired people with no experience at all, and they naturally just followed his lead, along with a little coaching.

It isn't quite possible to do just that in software development, because I think software development requires an entirely different kind of thought process from just about anything else. But, I can see the appeal to hiring inexperienced developers, and making them do it your way right from the beginning.
Pricey!
I'd focus my energy on making a deal with a large bricks and mortar retailer for the top n shirts, possibly as a loss-leader just to advertise my site (on the clothing tag) to drive traffic there. Basically something different than what your competitors are doing (focusing on design and t-shirt quality).
Since I don't have any experience with doing system code in Perl, a small example would be nice.
That guy doing pullups in the first picture is soo weak!!

Oh wait... That kind of looks like... Wait nevermind.
Microsoft and Cray to unveil $25,000 Windows-based supercomputer  —
Journal Says Google Android Phones Will Appear This Year After All
VMware Looks to Solve the ‘Desktop Dilemma’
I remember hating that Netscape banner at the top of their page because it took so damn long to load over a 28.8 (my rural phone lines only got to 31.2 on a "good day" once I got a 56k).
ASK HN: mobile phone start-ups
Hello guys,

what do you think of using the mobile phone for developing applications/running a start-up? It seems that 99% of the people here are aiming for a web start-up. Are mobile phones worth pondering about?
The lady is kinda cute. Way to boost productivity.
I don't share in your cynicism or in your application of the phrase 'historically inevitable'. There are many technologies that were invented along time ago and that were historically inevitable that still haven't reached many parts of the world, for example electricity and clean water. Poverty may have been reduced substantially but it still has a long way to go and can benefit hugely from organizations like the OLPC and their ilk.
showed that only IQ had predictive value when pitted against values theories.

How you control for values? If I value taking peoples money by force because I feel like it my intelligence will negate that values effect on my life outcome?
Sadly it depends. I find Flot the most pleasant to use but from memory it is missing some important features. (I last used it ~1 year ago)

ESJChart is really feature complete, but bloated and has a bad interface.

I would try Flot first, and if it doesn't meet your needs try the YUI one.
python-xmpp is the only one I have used. Though it was not extensive, I was happy with it.
Have you tried Ubuntu lately? It's easier than OS X.
They are nice looking charts.

There's a weird label positioning issue (label text stays a fixed width from the left edge of the screen, not the left edge of the chart) with Google Chrome, but not with Windows Safari or Opera.
Remember that a BMW without seatbelts is still a car without seatbelts, and a computer with the lacking functionality of a Macbook Air is crippled no matter how good it looks. I'll take the seatbelts, thank you very much.
I would not say that 99% of the people here are excluding mobile phones. Platforms like Android and the iphone are pretty hot right now for applications. There is a lot of debate surrounding how stable they are as exclusive deployment platforms, but there have definitely been large scale successes.
Story Driven Development with Rails - Part I: Up and Running
kinda? you probably don't have that kind of girl where you work.
T-Mobile Android phone to hit stores on Oct 17, Sprint Android phone coming next year
Russia halts trading after 17% share price fall
T-Mobile To Introduce 'G1' Google Android Phone Sept. 23
Sadly, I was only in town for djangocon. Back in Canada now.
Good Job. I'm glad you were able to release.

I think it's kinda neat. I like the way you've approached collaborative decision making. I know you're just testing it with simple questions at the moment, but I'd really be interested to see how it would work with more complex issues. (Which target market should we pursue this quarter? Which candidate would make the best hire? Etc Etc)

One thing that strikes me is that it would probably work best as a part of another system, such as a PM system or bug tracker, or even in a e-vite style invite system.

I'm not sure how much value it would have just on it's own above cute curiosity... What's your long term goals with this?

Quick EDIT: I just saw the feedback from the SF or Indiana thread... obviously, some aspect of commenting seems to be something people are clamouring for... but I like your idea of bringing "factors" into play... something to play with I guess.
Not being intimately familiar with her works, I can only take your word for this. If that is the case, then that seems logical and I have no problem with people being encouraged to do their best.

However, that is not the impression that I got from Brook's quotes. The word "perfect" has one meaning, it is not a relative thing. If you don't actually mean "perfect" then use another word.

I still see a strain of absolutism showing through when you say "the "perfect protagonists" are the ones who always live life according to moral values without ever slipping"... Where do these moral values come from? Who agreed that they are the values worthy of being adhered to? And they live life true to these values "Without ever slipping"? Sounds like we're looking at the dictionary definition of "perfect" again... If there's one place where this kind of perfection could be achieved, I guess it would have to be in a fictional book.
That's brings up an interesting question. I have no doubt that the concept of universities as gatekeepers needs to go & that the time is ripe. Actually, they can stay on as gatekeepers but in the same way that American fraternities & such do, without pretending it's about education standards.

The question is if this should be achieved via some sort of widely available, low cost way of providing a widely recognised degree-like thing or by removing the need for a degree-like thing in altogether & replacing them with specific certification (like CPA) whenever it is necessary (a small fraction of those jobs employing mostly university graduates).

But either way we need accessible education.
I wonder if you met any of these people and told them that you regarded them as perfect, what they would say. I believe anyone truly worthy of the respect that you give to the people on your list would laugh at the thought of themselves or anything they have done being perfect (in the actual meaning of the word).

Leonardo da Vinci is quoted as having said "Art is never finished, only abandoned."
OK, that's fair. Given all that, the guy isn't qualified to lead a mule, let alone a development team.
Like a fat ugly lady who's been hit in the head by a mallet - in a black dress.
You sir, need professional help.
Source Code Milestone (commit 11111)
That's what I'd want, somebody doing chin-ups next to my desk while I'm struggling with some pesky coding issue.

I know I'm not in the in crowd for saying this, but open concept offices suck, no matter how cool they may be. Joel is definitely bang on with this. Hasn't anyone read Peopleware?

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BionicOffice.html
Chevy Volt unveiled
10 Smart Javascript Techniques to Improve Your UI
Tumblon approaching prime time
I wouuld say you would be more productive with private offices but the culture and the camaraderie within the office would probably be better with an open concept.
Good idea, but 3% really does seem excessive. I'd price it at about 0.7% if I were them.

But I'm sure they know this, and they're probably planning to drop the price in the future.
Some questions to think about:

- Are the customers genuinely frustrated with the low quality of the products currently on the market? How do you know? How can you convince them you're better?

- Will you create new markets? If not, can you differentiate yourself enough that you're not competing purely on costs? Can you beat your competitors on costs? How long can you sustain that? (i.e. as your costs rise can you stay competitive)

The typical books here are:

http://www.amazon.com/Competitive-Strategy-Techniques-Indust...

...about competing in markets, and...

http://www.amazon.com/Blue-Ocean-Strategy-Uncontested-Compet...

...on creating new markets. (At this point I've only read the latter. The other one is on my queue. :-) )
JQuery and JavaScript Coding: Examples and Best Practices
Google Blog: Audio Indexing now on Google Labs