skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I heard an interesting talk at Startup Rockstars last week (an event hosted by Viget labs in Arlington, VA) given by Jonathan Aberman of Amplifier Venture Partners.

Speaking about how the current economic "dip" will affect startup funding, he said that the current situation is a result of people investing in completely un-transparent things, and then not being able to untangle the mess.

He went on to say that funding for entrepreneurs will not dry up because people are searching for transparency in their investments, and what is more transparent than one or two guys working on an idea in a garage?

On the other hand, he said that bigger funding will be harder to get.

Finally, he echoed Sequoia in that the goal now is to become profitable and to make your company last, and let economics drive your competition out of business.

It seemed like a reasonable analysis to me. Any thoughts?
See the para near the end: "However, I will concede that thus far there is no definitive study that would leave no doubt that this hypothesis is correct. This, more than anything else, is what's needed to really convince people to dramatically change their practices"
quite a few newcomers come to rails and think it's slow, because they're 'doin it wrong'. every framework's speed is really about your deployment setup. running mongrel can be slow, especially if you're load-testing a single mongrel instance. multiple instances can be slow if they're connecting to a slow database and serving static files.

put nginx in front of thin, start caching frequently used objects, and slice up your database and suddenly speed isn't a problem. php has the (perceived) advantage of running compiled in an apache module, typically. but it's a perception -- you have to do a little more tuning with your rails deployment to make it scream, but make no mistake, it can scream, even under heavy load, and without a huge server farm, at least up to 500K pages/day. i know that number because i've served it. quickly.

in radiant. (gasp! yes, with some caching.)

with one database.

it's a lesson i learned working with tomcat back in the day: defaults suck. learn your framework, learn your app server, pick the Right Thing. it's all about application tuning and app-server choice, and that goes for every language and platform in existence.
That trip to Mexico at the 'all you can eat' resort my wife and I took when she was 6 months pregnant suddenly looks like brilliant vacation planning.
It's not a question of eating a lot. Gorging on pasta when pregnant will just produce a type I diabetic child. The issue is animal/fish fat consumption. Women and children need quite a bit of it.
this can be true, but i was sold so completely on my startup (flowmingle) when i first heard about it that i was anxious to start. one of the things that really got me going, and brought me in fully was the person who'd had the idea was open to suggestions and refinement. little changes i was suggesting were adopted, even before i'd written any code, and that granted me a sense of ownership right off the bat. it was a great idea, and more importantly, it was an idea that was mutable, and one i could contribute to making better. that's a strong selling point.
I wouldn't go as far as labeling it evil - as long as you have the resources and the "follow-through" to make vaporware into a real product. It took a significant amount of resourcefulness to land a deal with IBM, whether it was easy because of prior contacts, or hard-earned from the ground up, is notwithstanding. However, the final product was delivered, and the quality was good is most respects. But Gates' goal was not to build a product from the start, and Orian's goal was, which makes the situation quite different.
Based what I've read about this startup, and on the facts presented, it is difficult to tell whether Orian or his co-founders were in the right. It would require to place all of their efforts under a microscope - we don't know how much time Orian sacrificed to go out of his way to find venture funding, etc.. versus the other partners who may have been slaving away over the code. My guess on the whole venture falling through is this - the other partners felt like they were doing more work and putting in more into it than Orian was, probably because they felt that networking is a lightweight activity. Or because networking sounded to them like a more glamorous activity, rather than coding. Or, maybe because they felt they wanted an equal share in the leadership. Whatever the case may be, we don't know how much coding and networking took place.

Orian's case brings up a good question that I've dealt with in the past, and I am sure is on the minds of many startup founders here - how important is it that the co-founders are all technical, and are all coders? Is it, "product first, marketing second?" Or is it equally just as important to have a strong "networking" guy on the team? If so, what are his roles, just networking, or coding as well? What about a guy who is doing the coding but feels he could do networking just as well, is it unfair to him?

Going back to Orian... judging based on other factors, there seems to have been some trust impediments in my opinion - having two votes when all other things being equal is not a fair distribution, even for the sake of maintaining decision-making. Trust between partners is more important than decision making, otherwise the whole thing falls apart.

Rather than take apart Orian's flaws, I am trying to understand if this startup could have been saved.
What if Orian went to his parners, and said, "Guys, how about we all participate in the networking?" (Assuming he did his equal share of the coding by working on the demo.) Maybe this would have generated some further excitement and instilled trust in them? AND, it would become self-evident whether or NOT the networking efforts equaled the coding efforts. I know that some may argue this is not a good solution, because concentrating on networking would have further removed them from realizing a product, but at least it could have played a role in bringing the team back, which it sounds was their first priority. Another thing, higher visibility and transparency. If all the partners were stuck in the same office all day long, maybe this lack of trust would diminish? Maybe a regular status meeting to keep tabs on everyone's progress? What does everyone (including Orian) think, what would be possible solution in their case?
not going to happen. The main problem is that in the minds of consumers there is now 3 categories: a cell phone, an iPhone and a blackberry. So any "competitors" to iPhone just fall into the cell phone category, and thus get pretty much ignored by many people as not being anything special
As gtani said google the hooks into other programs. Also think about presenting your data in gnuplot, if you are writing the programs to crunch the data.

Perl is a fun language especially for text processing. As long as you have the memory and processor, Perl should work.

Is it the best choice? Depends on the person and how they program along with what preferences they have. If you have the algorithms in your head already, play around and put them into several different languages until you find the language that works best for you.
Using Screencasts to Share Knowledge Inside a Company
"Gorging on pasta when pregnant will just produce a type I diabetic child."

ORLY?

Seriously, is there study that show a low-fat/type I diabetes connection?
An extended family member knows a diamond dealer in NYC. Everything they do is based on trust - million-dollar handshake deals. If man-made diamonds of this high quality were brought into this tight network, I believe you would be shunned and excluded.

"The De Beers diamond advertising campaign is acknowledged as one of the most successful and innovative campaigns in history."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond#History
DeBeers marketing department are geniuses, but they can't perform miracles.

Nobody, as far as I know, buys luxury goods which are absolutely indistinguishable from cheaper versions. A $300 bottle of wine tastes somewhat better than a $10 bottle. A $5000 watch is better crafted than a $50 watch.

Paying big money for a luxury good only impresses people when they can tell it was expensive without you _actually_ telling them. Ideally the expense will be non-obvious unless you're in the know (which is why rich guys like wearing fancy watches instead of big heavy gold chains around their necks) but there has to be a nonzero difference.
Isstevejobsstillalive.com
I study/work/hack 15 hours a day 7 days a week == 105 hours a week.
PHP might not be the most elegant in the world, but for a small- to mid-size web application, using a solid PHP5 framework (like KohanaPHP) along with a PHP accelerator and you have an easy-to-use and easy-to-deploy application.
Orian,

Are you going to continue with this same concept, or going to start on something new? What are you going to do differently now to make sure that the startup succeeds? Or this this Part IV of your blog? :)
> economic-style research design

If you sample 100 uncorrelated variables looking for significance at 95% confidence, you should find about 5 which are significant.

Data mining to produce hypotheses is fraught with danger. You should declare your hypothesis and then go to the data, otherwise your confidence measurement is bogus.
Startenfreude.
If you're comparing something to PHP's speed, you've already lost.
Ignoring the window dressing about the health risks of extreme low-fat diets (which are real, and there's plenty of better writeups on them) this is an article about Vitamin D. And the question you have to ask when you see an article like this is: What's the groundwork-to-hysteria ratio? I see plenty of hysteria here, but no data. There's one cited reference to the scientific literature... but it's on a different subject.

There's nothing wrong with hypothesizing that (a) modern medical practices are leading to deficiencies in Vitamin D among certain populations and (b) Vitamin D deficiency is linked to autism. But the responsible next step is to get some good data, or at least link to some. It's not to write stuff like this:

Since the 1970's, our country has witnessed a 3000% increase in the sales of sunscreen products, alongside a 30% increase in deaths from melanoma[17]. Isn't it time to admit that sunscreen is not working?

This is a telling paragraph. It tells me that the author is prone to making mistakes straight out of Darrell Huff's How to Lie With Statistics: Clock A strikes midnight a few seconds before clock B; isn't it time to admit that A caused B to strike?

Autism seems to be one of those issues that really inspires the quack epidemiologist. When you combine it with the opportunity to lecture new mothers -- our culture's favorite vice -- the temptation becomes irresistable. But it's worth remembering that actual epidemiology is really hard. Diagnosing autism without bias is hard. Randomly sampling the population for autism is even harder. Even something relatively simple, like measuring Vitamin D levels in the blood, is tedious and expensive and difficult to do without bias. But just because anecdotes and handwaving are much easier doesn't make them more believable.
The Importance of Sitemaps
Agreed. The hypothesis is interesting, but the phraseology and assembly of info reads a bit like a kook.

But as you say - it's a testable hypothesis, so I don't care how it's been written up, it would be good to test this.
Oh, that is easy to fix. Kill EVAL. I will postulate that EVAL is a much more intrusive thing to have in a language than TCO.

And why kill EVAL? Because it makes it a lot harder to reason about programs and the future mandates we can prove properties about our programs. Better start now than later.
Nobody, as far as I know, buys luxury goods which are absolutely indistinguishable from cheaper versions.

People pay more for wine in bottles, even though the same wine in a box is cheaper.

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22No+cork+sniffer+would+be+c...

.

A $300 bottle of wine tastes somewhat better than a $10 bottle.

It also sells for $300, despite the fact that the $10 bottle of wine can be made indistinguishable from the $300 bottle of wine by merely adding a few dollars' worth of chemicals.

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/science/2006-09-11-wine-chemist...

chemists are trying to isolate chemicals that produce desirable fragrances and flavors. ...

many wineries are shunning such technology and embracing distinctly Luddite, back-to-the Earth growing techniques such as using things like "Preparation 500," the springtime vineyard spray made from the manure-stuffed cow horns, buried over fall and winter, then ground up and mixed with water.

"We're trying to make better wine through alchemy," joked Jim Fullmer, director of the Philomath, Ore.-based Demeter Association, a non-profit group that certifies vineyards as "biodynamic" — a sort of hyper-organic designation that means the vintner relies on such things as lunar cycles and planetary alignment rather than chemistry.

"Biodynamics is probably the exact opposite," Fullmer said. "Winemaking is an art."

.

People do not pay $300 a bottle for wine that tastes better. People pay $300 a bottle for wine that makes them feel romantic -- wine based on such things as manure-stuffed cow horns, lunar cycles and planetary alignment.
Memory usage can probably be attributed to how PHP manages memory (hint: It /almost/ doesn't).
I haven't seen a desktop like that since Dan Quayle was vice president.
...and Python is still 3x faster than PHP and Ruby without psyco..
Thoughtful and correct IMO. Caching is much more important to get right than backend-speed. Number crunching capability does not matter that much for web applications. And you can always outsource the tough calculations to languages better suited for it: ML, Common Lisp, C++, C, etc.
The author reads like a kook, but the good thing is that they put forward a testable hypothesis

Anybody can put forward a testable hypothesis. That doesn't make you a good scientist.

A good scientist is one who puts forward a testable hypothesis and then tests it before publishing.

A great scientist is one who creates a testable hypothesis, tests it, and then -- when the data fail to prove the hypothesis -- shrugs, publishes the definitive refutation of her own hypothesis, and moves on to something else. It took me years to realize just how rare a skill this is, even for scientists. Part of the problem is that the career system for scientists actively discourages this -- once you've finally managed to sell a line of research to a funding agency, there are very strong incentives to keep that research going, even if it isn't getting anywhere.
...and POOF! Ruby on Rails' RJS templates rolled-up into an 11-dimensional ball and vanished...
The issue is in utero insulin exposure.

http://tinyurl.com/447xh5

When mom eats french fries and rice the insulin spikes permanently screw up the kid's endocrine system, leaving a propensity to obesity if not diabetes.
Also some similarities with the Nuke Anything extension.
I think it's more of a high-carb/diabetes connection.
The Culture Chart
Have the studies also been published exclusively in hell, or can you provide a citation?
In 1000, Cluny was the most dynamic institution in Europe.
...while Apple is already working on whatever comes next.
But that's perfectly economically rational: a glass bottle is more aesthetically pleasing than a cardboard box. You pay for the whole product, not just the liquid it contains.

Diamonds are just commodities. The original packaging doesn't count for anything. While some customers will believe the DeBeers marketing message that mined diamonds are somehow superior, many will buy purely on price versus cut / color / clarity / carats. This must drive down the price.
I would say Snow has some blame in this along with Henry.
Hmm, I don't get it.
Can anyone explain?
How close to Zero Friction is your signup process?
Is that what a PhD thesis is? Someone internalizing the advisor's/funding provider's ideas (and building them up)?
SciAm: Learning to Stay Calm
I had the opportunity to hear Krugman speak in 2004 before the election. What I found surprising was how much he seemed to value his column. It certainly seemed like he thought it was much more important than his academic work.
1) He didn't win a Nobel prize; it's actually the Sveriges Riksbank Prize http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_in_Economics#Relati...

2) As someone who advocated the flawed (and now admittedly failed) bailout scam, I'd have to question this
Friday Night Lights: How The Other Half Lives
Eric begins to wonder about his job, while Tami is makes nice with Katie McCoy. Julie and Matt connect again. Riggins and Billy work on a money making scheme, which worries Lyla.
And why single out Mr Buffet on understanding them? He is a clever guy - but he is not very keen on derivatives.
Private Practice: Nothing to Talk About
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That doesn't fulfill my deep emotional need to see kids crashing their bikes.
> How to Lie With Statistics

There is no fallacy in the statement you've focused on. I'm a bit confused. Sunscreen is sold and used to prevent cancer. There's no evidence it has, and sound reasons to suggest sunscreen has contributed to cancer. That's all it's saying.

> Diagnosing autism without bias is hard.

Are you suggesting the autism epidemic is a product of better diagnosis? If so, where are all the autistic 50 year olds?
Worse is better as they say.
Whiner Jerkins All Hands Meeting Powerpoint Revealed
Link is broken, here's the correct URL: http://hnr.dnsalias.net/wordpress/?p=80
We don't know whether the bailout plan has failed yet. Calling it a scam is certainly premature.
yeah, this (currently printwhatyoulike's front page) "This Google App Engine application is temporarily over its serving quota. Please try again later." isn't exactly a great advertisement for the service
When the employees benefit, the shareholders often do as well.

http://www.businesspundit.com/good-work-environment-higher-r...

I don't know if the data is significant, but it's certainly worth nothing.
http://www.sciam.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=learning-to-stay...
another reason why web startups should not rely on advertising. even if media powerhouses like the NYTimes or Washington Post has their revenues stalling, why would your startup do a better job?
Land.
Hi.

I generally agree. If you build something awesome, people will pay for it. If people are completely unwilling to pay for it (no matter the price), you're probably doing something wrong. Think of all the free services you'd pay for if need be (for me: gmail, yodlee, google alerts, backtype alerts, favtape, pandora, google analytics, yahoo fantasy football)
Overview of PNUTS - Yahoo's take on distributed data storage a la Dynamo (link fixed)
He has a far larger audience via his column.
So, if someone disables javascript support or runs noscript (quite common), my layout will be completely broken? No thanks.
Not really. I call it a scam because it's not limited to just 700 billion. It's an unlimited raid on the treasury, and even the modified plan still doesn't have enough transparency. It gives the executive branch even more power.

To me this is just politics, since the prize was awarded by one of the central banks to someone strongly advocating their policies...
Also, there is no Maths Nobel. The closest thing is Economics, which is what John Nash won.
Making friends.
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For the sake of your sanity (and health), this article is arming you with 100 fun, random, challenging and even educational and productive websites that will keep your mind engaged and distracted from your miserable nine to five.
I agree in general, it's just not for me.

For small to mid-size web apps, I far prefer python and cherrypy (http://www.cherrypy.org). Easier to use, and easier to deploy assuming you have hosting that gives you control over your hosted machine (here's looking at you, slicehost).
It seems a little misguided to try and regulate the internet, since it's inherently an international entity. Even China, who's willing to sink a lot of money and resources into the problem, is having a lot of trouble with it.

It also seems like the easy way out for South Korea. The real problem they're grappling is a long-standing cultural problem in which suicide and suicide pacts are glorified. Trying to come to grips with this and deal with it is a heck of a lot harder than blaming popular media and the internet.
One thing I find interesting about Lua is that it has tail-call elimination, coroutines isomorphic to one-shot continuations, proper lexical scoping, and a "feel" similar to a (cleaned-up, better thought-out) JavaScript. The language has an entirely intentional semantic resemblance to Scheme yet seems to orbit that black hole rather than get sucked in, to abuse the metaphor.

I suspect that one reason it can do this successfully is that the authors are not afraid to break backwards compatibility with each new major release of the language. The fact that it is intended to be embedded within an application which ships with the appropriate revision of the language helps greatly in this regard.
oh, crap.
The closest thing is the Fields medal.
This is complicated by the fact that most doctors don't know jack squat about statistics. Since most medical data nowadays is collected through statistical means you end up witht he embarrassing situation where a economist or a mathematician would be better informed about a subject if it were not for the constant attention a doctor pays to it.
Only 2 years late... The only way to dethrone the iphone is to innovate even more which is not an easy task.
Advantages of Buying Badminton Accessories Online
The biggest and the most obvious advantage of buying badminton accessories online is convenience. You will not have to drive around looking for a sports accessories store. You will not have to haggle with the shopkeeper and in case you do not like the accessories available on one site, you can just switch to the next site.
Turns out, Sequoia raised more money than any other VC firm
SourceForge Announces Hosted Applications
We can, there's just a lot of factors making it hard to gain market acceptance (is that the appropriate term here?)

I would jump at the chance to live in something like a Dymaxion house* in a walkable community.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion_House

EDIT: For more awesome houses, have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_building
This is weak evidence. I would be more convinced by a controlled experiment. Do a study where two demographically equivalent groups are given equal sun exposures one with sunscreen the other without, and then compare their rates of melanoma. The author doesn't have data on sun exposure or evidence that the sunscreen sold is actually used, etc. etc.
MySQL Multi-Master – Single-Slave – Replication
Social Media ABC's - T is for Troll
I have to wonder if she specified the resume format and medium. If I ask for a resume as an RTF attachment, I'm not going to get mad at someone who sends a link. I'm just not going to look at it. That said, I've received some truly horrific resumes over the years.
is this criticizing hackers and/or programmers?
Could Wordpress MU fit in?

To many people today, a blog and a traditional website are almost the same thing, so perhaps a multi-user multi-blog framework might get the job done.

http://mu.wordpress.org/
Ok. Here's a hypothetical (actually no longer such a hypothetical scenario). The shareholders are the tax payers in a financial institution where the employees have been quite handsomely paid till now. Who gets paid first - employees or shareholders ?