skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"These days you can do a Web startup for almost no money and, within a few months, find out for real if anyone will pay for what you’ve built. So why on earth would you sell part of it before you find that out? I strongly believe that a Web startup’s chance of success is significantly reduced by letting VCs into the picture."

This isn't an argument against taking VC investment-- it's an argument against taking it before you have any traction (which I largely agree with). When you have traction, growth, and (even!) revenue-- you've got more leverage.

Once you've proven that someone wants what you've built, how long (and how dangerous/painful) is the road to the point where you can afford to pay yourself a reasonable salary? It tends to be pretty long and still has plenty of risk.

If you take VC (the right amount from the right VC at the right time), you give up ~20% of your company and very little control. In exchange, you get a paycheck and a fleet of valuable/powerful advisors and the ability to hire a guy or two to fill in with the skills that you lack.

"I strongly believe that a Web startup’s chance of success is significantly reduced by letting VCs into the picture."

I am constantly amazed how often people equate VC investment to a loss of control... If you've got good VCs (they exist) and good leverage (because you had some traction before you raised money), your VC has very little power to submarine your business (by design or by negligence). Exactly how does a VC reduce your chances?

In my mind, what reduces your chances is taking too much VC money or not having the discipline to build a scalable business when you have a big pile of money in the bank. This isn't the VC's fault, it's the entrepreneur's.
Are web startups vaccinated from recession?
I loathe the new layout. Now there is all sorts of wasted space so that they could let their designers wank off with gradients.

It's a shame, because it was a very useful homepage. I'll be finding another one now.
Umm... Why? I thought the whole point of Google AppEngine is that you get to run your application on the same infrastructure (hardware as well as development platform) Google uses for their own applications. If you want Ruby on Rails go download Ruby on Rails or find a web host that supports it.
Microsoft Puts Weight Behind Open Source Projects With Web Platform Installer
I haven't been paying much attention to AppEngine, but it seems like kind of a major oversight that there was no SSL support until now. Is anyone using this thing for real work? I don't know how it could be considered much more than a neat toy to play with given its lack for such basic features for so long.
"The Newsfeed" Is Now the Dominant Info-Metaphor of Our Time
Wow! I never thought I'd see Don Box posting about his love of Scheme. This is surprising and interesting change for someone that designed SOAP and WCF. It'll be interesting to see what comes of it. He is a well known figure in the .NET community and even pre .NET. Remember "COM is love"?
I tried to do something like this once. If you were to try in the USA, here's what I might tell you:

The regulatory burden is immense. This is a project for lawyers. However, keeping ordinary investors away from your exchange would help a lot. Open it to accredited investors only. This would make the regulatory environment much simpler.

You would be competing against established competitors, like the Toronto Venture Exchange, on which are traded companies with a market cap of a few million dollars. An IPO for a company to be traded on the TVE is a lot like a series A in the USA.

Keep in mind that you are talking about three functions:
1) turning the stock of a company into something that can be bought and sold by the public
2) distributing that stock to its initial buyers
3) giving that stock a place to be bought and sold

The first two are done by investment banks, who normally do the work of preparing the stock of the company to be traded on NASDAQ as well. Only the last function is what an exchange does. #2 is what W.R. Hambrect has been trying to improve with his OpenIPO (see link below).

Generally in small market cap companies the job of a "market maker" is thought to be essential. I don't buy this. I think an exchange without much liquidity is better than nothing.

Start reading here:

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

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

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance)

I'm not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. Get a lawyer.
Microsoft Web Applications Installer - distributing open source web software. Really?
Thanks for all the feedback.

The Solved Bugs page does give an example of errors being solved, but it's actually primarily there to ensure that bugs people solve also get indexed by Google and other search engines. The importance of that is you can be sure your solution is accessible throughout and not just to users of our site-- it has real value for the world at large.

Thanks again for the rest of your feedback-- I'll mull that over and see what we can do.
I just published a screencast demo of a web framework that I made in Erlang, called Nitrogen.

See http://nitrogen-erlang.tumblr.com

Also, the technology behind my startup company, Stitcho.com is in Erlang.
See http://www.stitcho.com

I would definitely recommend it, especially if you are one of those people who really stretches a language. Once you get past the new syntax, it is very quick to learn.
Anyone know how the API compares to Kongregate's?
If I talked like that, my mother would say that I needed a nap.
The Importance Of Being Selective
We use it for http://www.muspy.com, though we are thinking about moving away to plain Django. GAE has too many limitations.
Didn't like it, personally. The book cherry-picked examples to suit its thesis from the first page. Not that there isn't Wisdom in Crowds, but J.S didn't do himself any favors by picking and choosing facts.

What would be interesting, would be to see some empirical research on a fascinating topic like this.
What's so interesting about Jerry and David's story? I remember to have found what I read about it quite uninteresting, so maybe I lost something.
FYI, he'll be speaking at Stanford on the 22nd if anyone wants to hear him speak.

http://etl.stanford.edu
Yes again. OpenID still confuses the hell out of me.

And I'm saying that as someone who was semi-active participant in the early design stages of OpenID.
OK so the actual title of the entry is "Are Aussie web startups vaccinated from recession?"

The simple answer is no, at least no more than anyone else is. The problem with this article is that the content means little to the title. His basic claim is that "good" startups with "good" business models that sell to businesses have a better chance of succeeding. As far as I can tell, that has nothing unique to a recession.
Not sure it's statistically significant, but very insightful overview - thank you.

One quick nitpick: I'd argue Rapidshare had a business model before users, even if it technically had users before revenue.
The Government Wants to Spy on Your Packets
Just curious, how do you define succeed? Founders becoming millionaires or?
I think it's because they turned a website list into a 60 billion dollar company in about 5 years. And one investor in the early days was Masayoshi Son, and he was once the second richest person in the world in 1999.

And that advert in the film Inspector Gadget.

It's not worth a corporate biography book, I admit.

[Edit] And after the dotcom crash, their market cap (in 2006/2007) was just half of its peak, quite impressive. And they never chickened out and bought, say, Disney. They stuck to their guns.
They already launched Rails hosting with liquid scaling. It's called http://heroku.com
The worrying thing to me is, if you're American and send an email to the UK, that is monitored as being UK email traffic. This seems wrong.
To me it seems the decentralisation of power in the world world is a good and natural course of events. I think that communication technology such as the internet makes this the most likely course of events. The US doesn't have to be 'the superpower' to flourish economically. In fact trying the be 'the superpower' militarily could in part be responsible for the current financial situation.
Would be a lot more interesting if you could mention what your startup does....
I think people from the US need to understand that when you argue that it is right for you to be 'the superpower' you are also arguing that the rest of the world should be subservient. Can you see how that sounds to the rest of the the world? If there is any schadenfreude going on that would be the reason.
"I currently have 4+ OpenIDs..."

I'm not surprised it isn't working so well for you, in that case.

I think some of the centralization/privacy concerns related to OpenID sound like valid points to debate and discuss.

But saying you have too many OpenIDs and that managing them has become a pain is like complaining that you can't remember which of the four wallets you're carrying has your credit card in it, and concluding that wallets suck.
Wil Shipley: Wanted Bugs. $100. Cash money.
Make money, and avoid spending money

Also add "pay off debt."
I agree the book itself was pretty half baked, but I suspect the thesis is correct. He's not claiming that crowds are smarter than individuals all the time, only when four specific conditions are met. He relies too much on anecdotal evidence and not enough on the academic research, but in the end I found the core of the argument convincing, if not particularly well expressed. Maybe I'm not skeptical enough, I dunno.
I pulled out some highlights on Venture Hacks: http://venturehacks.com/articles/khosla-society
Direct link:

http://www.javaranch.com/journal/2008/10/Journal200810.jsp#a...
do you know how a non-stanford-affiliated person could attend this talk?
Revenues rise as Google says hard times will drive business
It converts political gaffes into clean energy.
> GAE has too many limitations

could you elaborate please?

We are looking to get into GAE from plain Django, so I would love to hear your thoughts on the matter.
The Psychology of Success: Obsession
agreed, this is probably just a publicity stunt(maybe for investors?)
“There are many children for whom the important reward to them is the grades they get, the competition among classmates,” Reiss said. “This goes against what some psychologists say, who think competition is bad and a non-competitive attitude is good, and that learning and curiosity are intrinsic values that everyone shares. They are pushing their own value system on to everybody.”

That last sentence is extremely disingenuous.

I would be like to read the his original argument though.
The man who helped set the stage for Nobel-winning work - now driving a courtesy van
So if it's sci-fi, what does that say about Nokia?
Let's see how long this will hold up since now we are in a recession and Apple's stubbornness in regards to high pricing of their laptops.
Every time I read something, later it turns out to be wrong.

Is there a news site that only prints news that has marinated for a bunch of years? (Different amounts depending on the subject matter.)

Idea for startup?
If I were you I might think instead about asking the user for his/her postcode. Then the user can decide to rank hits by proximity if they want, or by other criteria.

I want the closest piano stool. I live in East London; some parts of Essex are closer to me than some parts of London.
Note the date: October 2005. Especially interesting is the last sentence:

This melding of code and data is central to all dialects of Lisp, and is fundamental to the way Microsoft is integrating multiple expression languages (most notably SQL) in future versions of the Microsoft .NET Framework.
I think that is the exact difference between building a "small" business and a startup. Businesses are made to be essentially sustainable from the start (or at least soon after start). Startups are trying to become large in a hurry and are cool with losing a lot of money upfront to generate it later. Obviously however, there are a million examples of companies and businesses that blur the line.
Ask HN: How do I profit from my idea? (new tagging system with many benefits)
I have a idea but do I have to patent it or is there any other way to profit from it?
I live in sweden and dont have the money or time to patent it. What should I do?

Thanks!
I love stuff like this. People presenting cool new things but keeping fun about it: we need humor at times like these. (And most other times too, for that matter.)
Nothing in writing?

You just got screwed.
LOL. Much smarter than the story I read of paying a bounty for bugs to the same people who create them.

Mozilla does this too http://www.mozilla.org/security/bug-bounty-faq.html
The Story of Alice and her Boss
The limitations are well known, just Google around. A relatively good overview can be found here:
http://aralbalkan.com/1504

It was discussed in this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_threa...

It definitely depends on the kind of app you are doing. From my experience GAE is great for websites with high ratio of reads to writes. If you have a lot of writes or any non-trivial background processing, it becomes harder to develop for appengine.
> Don't require your users to activate immediately, give them a day to do it, and just don't give them access to anything a spammer would love to use - or limit how many times they can do it before they need to activate.

This is exactly what we did at a popular site I used to work for. Let them in, let them go crazy, but have a "time's up!" period and a few restrictions to stop spammers.
"... OK so the actual title of the entry is "Are Aussie web startups vaccinated from recession?" .."

Title changed because it was irrelevant.

"... His basic claim is that "good" startups with "good" business models that sell to businesses have a better chance of succeeding. As far as I can tell, that has nothing unique to a recession. ..."

It is a bit of a motherhood statement. "Good" is at best a relative description. Probably could be changed to the "best". What is unique to recessions is margins & necessities. If you are a running a good Startup and rely on margins alone and those margins drop or change quickly, be it users, advertising, sales. You can be killed a lot quicker than when there is no recession. In that respect recessions sort out what the essentials from discretionary that users want.

Make things that (recession conscious) users want?
A modern vegetable farm or hothouse operation is eight times as hi-tech as your ruby on rails site. A maglev train and its infrastructure eight times again.
...but considering that we have nothing in writing at the moment I think there's some flexibility there.

You are thinking wrong. The odds of you coming out with what you think you are owed in this deal... well, we need C3PO to tell you with enough character to get the tone right.
That dreams are much more exciting than mundane reality?
Nice I didn't notice the date. A notable change since then is the DLR.
Lawyer up right now.
I rarely see them mentioned but linode is probably the best deal I have seen. 19.95/month you get a VPS solution, full root access, 360mb ram, 200GB Transfer and they have awesome customer service. And no, I am not affiliated, its just nice to see a hosting company that serves its customers well @ Linode.com
Why did he (and the audience) think the profanity was so funny, were they serving drinks?

Also, he shouldn't sound so surprised when explaining how hard multiplayer network code is - it certainly makes it sound like they are in over their heads as programmers.

Very slick presentation video though, and I'll be checking out the site.
Mathematician Solves Problem After 30 Years
The UK government has a history of being:

Rubbish at implementing IT projects on-time, in budget and to specification. (2 billion GBP+ in failed IT projects in the past 8 years: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-9840497-16.html )

Rubbish at keeping personal data secure. (see: lots of poorly handled data stories recently)

Rubbish at not "misusing" legislation. (Last week they used anti-terror legislation to freeze the assets of Icelandic companies in the UK when their banking troubles were announced.)

Geoff Hoon(?), on Question time earlier, said he was prepared to go "quite a long way, actually" into civil liberties if it meant preventing terrorism, as "the most basic right is the right not to be killed by a terrorist".

I can see why, if you believe that, more government data collection seems like a good plan. What I can't really see is how you can believe that without having your scaremongering-detection sense going at full volume.
That actually made me laugh out loud. I thank you.
Six questions for Eric Janszen on the economic collapse
include concert listings for followed artists. link to ticket sellers for revenue. explore other ticket related ideas.
First superconductor operating at 200K
I could design one if you're serious. would you like to stay with the knight theme? or could you go in other directions. i dont think your current is horrible though.
No one is screwed yet. Odds are, if goofygrin goes (his user name non-withstanding), then so does the company, which benefits no one. However, this ought to be rectified as quickly as possible; as greater time leaves everyone with more to lose.

Since the other individual, a friend, is full time; and goofy is still working elsewhere part time, it might make sense to get an agreement to gradually escalate goofy's profit sharing in recognition of what has already been accomplished. (Yes, we all know that this is counter to PG's recommendations on startups.) This will allow the founder to live successfully and make everyone eager to grow the company in the short term, and, as profits increase, then the developer can dedicate more time to the company and get more in return ... possibly abandoning the part time job eventually.
But don't you think they'd witness a similar discount in the valuations?
the cappuccino one fails all of my criteria for being a good logo also. nice graphic but not a logo or an icon at the size it is used at.
That is how you can write lambdas in linq that can operate on a variety of different data sources.
The best way to learn any language is to build stuff. Build something you think is cool. Allow yourself to suck at it and do everything wrong. Then build it again, or build something else cool.
i think the only really tried and true method is to bring it to startup in a company and demonstrate that it is really a new and beneficial addition to the market.

take your tags and make a business out of it. until you do it has no value and can't really be safeguarded as just "an idea".
I think drinking + charisma.

There was at least one person who didn't think it was funny:
http://is.gd/4dMK (vw link)
"... Much smarter than the story I read of paying a bounty for bugs to the same people who create them ..."

I was thinking it was smarter than your average (bear) because it might entice users or new users by dangling cash in a recession climate to speed up the beta bug-hunt. Hacking users?
yea, good idea. We were planning on including the postal code in the post flow so once we have that people could browse based on proximity.
The dogma on campus was always to maximize what you have instead of adding more to the mix. Some teams are pretty resistant to hiring as it's a sense of pride to be working 80 hour weeks. So in that way, Apple runs very lean. In fact when Jobs came back one of the first decisions he made was to axe the research division in the company not because the company was weak (it had a good chunk of cash reserves) but because it was the easiest and fastest way -- from the management point of view -- for him to get products out. The mentality of the company switched completely and I believe it's partially from that early decision to act as a small company.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegemonic_stability_theory
replying to self:

They are getting tons of flack on their support group.

http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Web_Search_Help-Person...

I don't care how many focus groups it went through, it seems to be pretty well despised.
The MacBook and MacBook Pro splayed-out revealing intimate details
Seeing as you were a participant in the design of OpenID I must ask - what happened? Why is OpenID so awkward and confusing? Why URLs instead of email addresses or something else people already have?
62 pages. For comparison, let's look at the simple rule you need to follow to avoid buffer overflows:

Count.

Buffer overflow cost so far to the industry? In the billions, at least: companies buy hundreds of millions of dollars of products every year as countermeasures against them. And that's for a bug whose fix can be described in one word.
"... I am constantly amazed how often people equate VC investment to a loss of control... If you've got good VCs (they exist) and good leverage (because you had some traction before you raised money), your VC has very little power to submarine your business (by design or by negligence). Exactly how does a VC reduce your chances? ..."

Because hackers are by definition optimists and Venture Capital + successful Startups "can" be risky. A counter view can be read in "Founders at Work" Livingston, Ch24 Phil Greenspun and here ~ http://philip.greenspun.com/business/startup-tips/ and http://waxy.org/random/arsdigita/

Lack of control is a subset of risk.
Ask HN: Test-driving a Porsche: Arc or Perl 6?
I've been trying to make time to learn some Arc, however...

The Perl 6 development effort has been showing a lot of progress lately, and the language itself seems pretty cool.

Are Arc and Perl 6 both [Porsches][1]? Which do you think will be more fun to drive, and why?

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/design.html
I was part of the anti-OpenID movement on StackOverflow. Our complaints, unfortunately, fell upon deaf ears. Fortunately I have my own domain so I decided to be my own OpenID provider with phpMyID, but I don't plan to use it for anything else besides StackOverflow. It's just not worth the hassle.
> (short of doing stuff like RSA & PKI in Javascript)

The only thing that I can see which would actually help, without breaking the "install nothing" goal of OpenID or making the existing usage path any more difficult, is to build some sort of OpenIDRequest object into browsers. And you'd want to design an unspoofable credential request window to go with it.
I think sidsavara meant people will invent bugs and then claim rewards for fixing them.
According to one of the comments quoting an excerpt from the license for Microsoft's Web Application Installer, MS does not agree that they are "distributing" open source.

THIRD PARTY SOFTWARE. This software enables you to obtain software applications from other sources. Those applications are offered and distributed by third parties under their own license terms. Microsoft is not distributing those applications to you, but instead, as a convenience, enables you to use this software to obtain those applications directly from the application providers. By using the software, you acknowledge and agree that you are obtaining the applications directly from the third party providers and under separate license terms, and that it is your responsibility to locate, understand and comply with those license terms."

Phew... That was a close one. :P
http://1password.com
congrats goofygrin on the success and fun! Regarding "getting things in writing and what not", screw what the others are saying. You're on the path to having the discussion. Good luck and enjoy the ride!
Correct title is "How to Write Injection-Proof PL/SQL"
Man I wish it wasn't like that.
Incorrect small prime numbers algorithm
Is Math a Young Man's Game? No