skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"They often have a naive view of the future - not Pollyannaish, but one in which failure is just not a potential outcome ... Entrepreneurs have the audacity to believe that the odds do not apply to them, because they know they are going to win."

This sort of hubris has always bothered me about some entrepreneurial types. I understand "looking past limitations", "going against the odds", and "taking risks". But, I think:
a) There are outside forces which you cannot control and which can drastically affect your business (even to the point of failure). To ignore them is foolish, IMO.
b) I think failure is a key part of being an entrepreneur. It's how you learn and grow. Failure happens sometimes.

Also, I wish his points on humility were a little more thorough (and included points on failure). I'm not sure W. Churchhill and John Lennon even qualify as entrepreneurs.
This article buys into the idea that entrepreneurship is hard, and most people can't do it. Beyond being an exercise in self-love, this is the perspective that the 'big dumb companies' crave. Whether we say "damn, I'm not good enough to leave" or we say "damn, I'm one of the few that is good enough to get out", we're still buying into the vision that industrialists wrought for us a century ago.

Pre-industrialism, essentially everyone was self-employed (if we want a specific example, lets take the USA 150 years ago, rather than regressing into feudalism or Egyptian slaves); despite the posited inability of non-elites to be entrepreneurs. The barriers to entrepreneurship are not inherent flaws in the majority of humanity, but intentionally manufactured barriers to promote the industrial model of production and consumption.

Whenever you're cribbing euphemisms off of eight year old 50 Cents' songs, then you're probably driving the wrong way down a one way street.
Sure you can sell it.

Options:

1) Online site markets, sitepoint.com and others have forums and tools that allow site owners to sell and either set their price or run an auction for the site. These are probably your best bet for a quick sale, though not for the highest ROI.

2) Maintain the site and let it run adsense to generate a trickle of side income. One new tutorial a week, or some sort of new content to help with SEO and user returns. The ROI on this sort of site is high, even if the total income is low, the time investment remains low.

3) Try to convert the site to include an editorial / blog to entice ad brokers. A much higher level of time investment with potential for the gains to increase as well.

3.a) To minimize your own time investment, pull a FHWW and look to hire virtual assistants to generate new content or content ideas. Will still require time editing and finding the freelancer / assistant, but can also reap benefits.

Best of luck!
Well, not quite. Different measures of profit help you figure out which bits to concentrate on, just like having a good profiler helps you pinpoint bottlenecks.

In this particular case, showing that a company can get to gross profit streaming purely by web is valuable info -- it shows that the hoops Joost is going through to do P2P distribution may not be necessary. It also chips away at the assumption that pipe-owners have a natural advantage. I did some work in this area, and I had thought Hulu would get murdered by their bandwidth costs.
I hadn't heard or read that he was being considered, or that others had recommended him/think he would be a good choice.

Since I wrote this, I've heard three new names. It might warrant a follow-up ...
I've opted to rely on HN for discussion in lieu of comments, but you could easily hook up disqus or another embedded commenting system. Send me a pull request on GitHub when you've got your features hacked in!
Ask HN: Community software for Overcoming Bias?
The two main posters on the blog Overcoming Bias (which has appeared on HN many times) plan to cut back on posts in the near future.

One possibility under discussion is to split off/convert to a more community-oriented site - one that e.g. would let anyone submit their own articles or stories; the readers would vote up or vote down; and good posts would get promoted by editors to a front page. E.g. Scoop has been suggested to us.

Dear Hacker News - over the last years, billions of dollars in venture capital have been spent on Web 2.0. A rationalist community is surely a good cause. What has that money built that can help us?

We're even willing to spend money - not enough money to develop code from scratch, but we aren't restricted to free products.

We don't want to throw sheep at each other. We do want to have sensible discussions (which requires some kind of community policing such as downvoting).

We don't want people with lots of time to waste, to waste that time at our site. We do want busy people to be able to check in, quickly see the newest comments, and check out again.

(Hacker News does great on e.g. downvoting trolls, making them nicely invisible, but still letting me drag-select to see the text. But HN doesn't do so well on e.g. letting me see the latest comments on posts I've previously upvoted.)

We occasionally have meetups. It'd be nice to know who else, or at least how many other rationalists, are within 10 miles of my zip code - that sort of thing.

But mostly I'll throw the question open - what has all that venture capital, and all the efforts of so many of you, built that will help us?

Please go ahead and say "obvious" things if no one else has said it yet, i.e., "You should have a Facebook group (and use it for X, Y, and Z)". Think of it as if you were creating a standard reference list for new communities. I don't know where to start, myself; and I'm sure this won't be the last time the question comes up.
Me too. It will be interesting to watch this play out.
I'm involved with one and starting another, and I'm an Eagle Scout too.
I am a fan of the christmas light economic indicator http://www.reason.com/news/show/32837.html
Facebook links users’ search profiles to ad Pages
Economist's View: Once Again, It Wasn't Fannie and Freddie
Anyvite created: http://anyvite.com/events/home/vtsjcs9uyl

Let me know if I missed something.
I just went ahead and did it, irrespective of what the economy was doing. Twice, no four times. On two continents. Damn the torpedoes and all that. OK, I did niche consulting and picked a business model which very much tried to save the client money. Problem is that niches come and go, and the challenge now is to find a new racket.

I suppose I could try inventing something new. Now is a great time to do it. Of course, I will probably fail, but so what. If I make time to do it, I will certainly have at least a bit more time to ride my bike around and stall that looming congestive heart failure.

But seriously, if you have a little bit of cash, or better, still have a bit of cash coming in, extra help won't get any cheaper than it is now. If I'm in Europe, I'll outsource to the USA.

We never tried to make money - it just happened. Sure, it was much closer to Stallman than Billy Goat, but it paid for the house and will send my kid to MIT.
The loan performance on Fannie's book of business is substantially better than the overall mortgage market. And starting in 2002, Fannie Freddie (pink line) lost market share to ABS
Anyvite link, in case someone misses it in the hailstorm of comments that this post has become!

http://anyvite.com/events/home/vtsjcs9uyl
You can't think of it like that, in the context of a single transaction. If an insider has the right to trade on their insider knowledge, they have an incentive to turn around and use their insider influence to create opportunities to benefit from that right.
Lester Munson gives his take:

http://sports.espn.go.com/nba/columns/story?columnist=munson...
Ask YC: Does music help programmer concentrate better?
Does music help programmer concentrate better? If so, which music? I couldn't figure this one out conclusively yet.
Ask HN: small office network
We just moved offices and we're thinking of revamping our network setup.

We've got an internal server, an external server. A router, wireless router, 24 port switch and 8 workstations.

What we're thinking is:

Internet into the wireless router. One DMZ hard wired port on the wireless router will be for our external server. Another hard wired port will connect to our switch. From our switch we'll connect all our workstations and our internal server.

I'm so novice with network setup it's not even funny so I have no idea how ip's and such will work out. My guess is the wireless router will give 192.168.0.* and the switch will give off something like 192.168.1.*.

Will this make our external server in the DMZ unreachable from our workstations? Will the clients connecting via wireless not have access to our network behind the switch?

If you guys have any simple enough resources please feel free to post links. Diagrams are my best friend.
If an acrobat that does real flips all day long plays this I'm guessing he won't feel sick at all?
Check out slinkset.com -- it's a pretty good roll-your-own-reddit. If you talk to the guys they might help you customize it.
Martha stewart wasn't convicted of insider trading. She was found guilty of obstruction of justice and lying to investigators: http://money.cnn.com/2004/03/05/news/companies/martha_verdic....
adsense is not the best model when your uniques are so much lower than your pageviews.

seek out an alternative ad network. there are quite a few that will touch your site. it won't be optimal CPM rates, but it will likely be better than what you're seeing from adsense.
Fring Trials Ads On Free Mobile Chat/VoIP Application
For the lulz:
http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/2f5a0c888c784a9a...

http://github.com/cliffmoon/fake-tpw/commit/df2fbc653e928624...

http://github.com/abhay/fake-tpw/commit/f81f8577111f6e82cdee...
As sites grow, re-generating and re-copying the entire site may get cumbersome and time consuming. An obvious feature is the make-like ability to determine what has changed since the last invocation, and only modify those files. You can accomplish pushing newly generated sites to remote servers without undue copying through rsync, or an approximation of it.
Theres a fascinating book called "Guns, Germs and Steel" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel) which attempts to explain why Eurasia was a dominant force for almost the entire history of civilisation, despite that fact that humans evolved in Africa.

The main idea is that Eurasia had a massive advantage in farmable crops (that is crops which were amenable to farming after a small number of mutations) and domesticable animals large enough to replace manual labour. In addition, the climatic differences across Eurasia are smaller than in Africa or the Americas so domesticated species were useful over a larger area.

Agriculture supports higher population densities (larger armies) which in turn leads to specialisation (guns and steel) and highly evolved germs to which the local population is resistant (during Spanish colonisation of

Whether or not you agree with the specific ideas its amazing that its even possible to consider the question and produce an answer that is, at least in part, empirically falsifiable.
Programmer writes own website platform. Standard.

I've often thought that history etc for cms/blog systems should be pushed off to a proper version control system etc. I even drafted out a project spec to implement basically the same thing as this guy. Then I put it to the very bottom of my priority list. Emacs muse-mode + darcs FTW.

edit: not to sound like a prick - good on the author for working on a personal project, getting something he likes working and then using it. I just don't think it's news.
VibeAgent Raises $3 Million for Hotel Search
Joe Armstrong Interview at QCon 08
LiveScribe's Pulse Smart Pen Adds Mac Support, Other New Features
Man, all you people with Netbooks are going to make a lot of designers miserable. :)

Designing information presentation and navigation for complex applications gets a lot easier with more pixels, and a lot harder with less. I've been really hoping browser average resolution stats keep going up.
I'm a crass elitist and I'm not sure you want to accomodote complete fools in all situations.
What is the site?
Here's one related example. Jay-walking is done by basically everyone, but there have been studies showing that enforcement, at least in the south, has almost exclusively targeted blacks.
Drupal is the powerhouse when it comes to these sort of sites, but it's not for the faint of heart. It's got the flexibility to build whatever you want but it doesn't have to be a deep indepth site or the endless links of a link aggregator. It can provide the social base for those of your members who do want forums or to organize meetups.
That's a lot better than being a bitter cuber/red taper who criticizes everyone's startup while not having their own. I believe many of them hang out on Techcrunch.
More like outspoken hypocrites. But polarizing the debate works too.
Yeah, there's lots of smarts left to add to Jekyll. Only regenerating modified posts/assets is a big one.
You may also be interested in:

* chronicle blog compiler: http://www.steve.org.uk/Software/chronicle/

* ikiwiki wiki / bliki compiler: http://ikiwiki.info/

I find ikiwiki particularly interesting in that it coordinates with a local vcs (git, hg, svn, etc) to handle revisions and history.
Yes, and engineers learn from those mistakes, rather than repeating them every 10 years.
"I see no monetary value in Facebook because Helxis made a very true statement: I don't want my friendships monetized, someone else profiting because I interact with people I care about is a sickeningly greedy idea to me (read: to me, if you disagree share with us)."

I disagree with this. Facebook provides you with the functionality to interact with your friends that you wouldn't get elsewhere (unless you s/Facebook/OtherSocialNetwork/), and it's ridiculous to expect them to do it for nothing. As long as the monetization is not detrimental to you, doesn't invade your privacy, and is actually perhaps useful to you (read: well targeted advertising), you shouldn't care. You don't get all angry at TV for showing you ads between shows; you may find a means to avoid looking at them, but it doesn't outrage you.

Facebook has a 120 million _active_ users. A million of them petitioned. That isn't even 1%. No effort of that size can afford to attempt to please everyone.
I'm not quite sure why you're posting here, but please, use a spell checker.
Awesome! Let's get rid of building codes, FAA regs, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission too. If a person don't have the good sense not to go into an unsafe building/airplane/city, too bad for him/her. Eventually, we'll figure out which ones are safe because the others will end in disaster. Think how much money we could make! woo hoo! [/sarcasm]
I don't know about anyone else, but self-applying the word entrepreneur gets really old, really fast. I've done it myself out of necessity (and brevity), but it still feels wrong.
Perhaps run targeted affiliate product ads for the tutorial being viewed, if possible. (ex: tutorial for cooking, have ads for recipe books, pots and pans, etc)?
This is actually a good idea.

Google has already proposed a gzip content compression scheme that could operate over a number of pages.

It would also be feasible for them to come up with a header compression scheme - perhaps even in Chrome first.
As the adage says, the quickest way to fail is to attempt to please everyone.
Look, your argument is offensive. The nearest case I could think of is saying blacks & whites shouldn't marry bc it undermines race, or segregation. I'm not going to debate the analogy, I'm just telling you how its increasingly being viewed. I don't think any argument supporting discrimination is worth responding to.
True, but I think the purpose of Ejacs is so you can script emacs with javascript instead of elisp. People always make the mistake of tying javascript to browsers which is one of the reasons javascript bears the title "The World's Most Misunderstood Programming Language."
Sure these are good for young entrepreneurs. Of course, I know dozens of people who are totally entrepreneurs but dont spend any time reading blogs, ever.
You would think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_bridge_disasters
i think you need silence for concentration and music for creativity. so it would really depend on the situation i think.

probably varies depending on the person as well.
How to Boil Your Startup Down to the Basics
Slinkset is a fantastic option. Brett and John have built really the dead simple easiest way to create amazing online communities just like Hacker News. It's a perfect fit.
In my experience that's true. Any other video sites that have full episodes (surfthechannel and megavideo) have problems with quality. The sound on some of the videos on megavideo will sometimes lag by one or two seconds. Now if only hulu would keep tv shows on there for longer than a few weeks.
Are you suggesting that jaywalking laws exist to target blacks exclusively? Given that pretty much every jurisdiction on North America has these laws on the books, that's a stretch.

Remember, I'm responding to the allegation that laws are specifically designed so that everyone breaks them, not that there is selective targeting.
Well you would, wouldnt you! nice.
I don't know who Kim Kardashian is, so I'll just take that as a compliment.
To paraphrase Steve Yegge's latest:
"This succinct yet completely accurate synopsis shows that all OS's have their attractions, and yet each also has a niche. You can choose an OS for the busy person, an OS for someone without much time, or an OS for the dedicated hobbyist, and you'll find that no matter which one you choose, it's missing some of the abilities you need."
Insider Trading, or Political Persecution?
Oh, I somehow omitted the word invest.
You are pushing all the wrong buttons!

If you want as much control as you've already declared then I am afraid you will struggle to find the guy you want, they are fed up of working for people that make the wrong decisions for them and leave them with the mess to clean up.

Listen careful to all this feedback and maybe you can either change the job so that you genuinely do offer something interesting to the guy you want or temper your ambitions to find the competent PHP you want.
I started a company that was funded by YC. It's Blue Frog Gaming, and our first product is Draftmix.com
Really? I'm pretty sure most of their violations are listed on their website. http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/index.shtm
On the PC, It's a latency problem. Acrobat is such a disaster that you do have to WAIT before anything ever shows up.

Scribd at least is far more instant.
Patent trolls buy patents with the intent of licensing them to people who produce. In fact, they often as such spur on production. They sue only when a patent is infringed upon. It's not typically their goal to do so, their goal is to license.
It doesn't really matter whether the situation is by design or simply an unintended consequence. That highway speed limits are often set below the speed at which the vast majority of drivers travel means in practice that police can stop whoever they want for any reason whatsoever. It doesn't have to be a conspiracy for it to be tyranny.
I agree that citing 'quality of eyeballs' is silly. Actually just as silly as assuming eyeballs=money.

In fact, eyeballs have never really equalled money. The ability to affect the things behind those eyeballs = money. Actually, the perception of businesses of the potential to affect the things behind those eyeballs = money.

Your right. Hulu hasn't really proven anything yet. They've proven that they can get ad buyers to buy online if presented with something similar enough to offline TV. You can build a reasonable business based on this model, apparently.

But it's true that Youtube hasn't proved anything yet business-wise.
I can't listen to lyrics and program, the words draw my focus and make it difficult to proceed. I end up listening to Classical music or Psy/Trance for heavy coding days.

It may just be a psychological placebo but I seem to find my groove much easier when I'm uninterrupted and listening to music that blocks distractions.
It seems to help my focus. I noticed a few months back that when I start up some soft music, like Coldplay, I tend to get more done. I think it quiets the ADD part of me that feels the need for extra stimulus. Also, when I'm listening to music while programming I tend to not check the web as often to see what's going on, that alone will boost your productivity. I don't really know why it works, but for me it does.
That would come under the category of selling their own ads wouldn't it?
Of course, I appreciate you suggesting it first though!
Another good static site generator is http://webby.rubyforge.org

It features support for LaTex, markdown, textile filters, autobuild, publishing only changed pages etc. Very small and clean.

'gem install webby' is all needed to get you started.
I play pop/dance/synth music when compiling, running tests, etc, but oddly, sometimes when I really need to concentrate, I pause the song so I can read the code. It's hard to explain, but that's my take.
Ask YC: How to incorporate?
Can anyone here point me to a guide of step-by-step instructions for incorporating one's company as a Delaware Class C (to be parallel with YC) -- how to file 83b, etc.?? I'm a bit overwhelmed with all this and want some guideposts. Thanks.
Your parents have literally hundreds of friends?
I forgot to mention that I will also release a full-blown Flash poker client, once I reach the donation target.

http://www.wagerlabs.com/blog/2008/11/openpoker-vs-zynga-and...
What is it tutorials for? If it's something specialised, maybe it's possible to talk directly to people selling things to do with that speciality?
Agreed. I think a great option would be for the server to specify in a response header that it doesn't care about any headers for the rest of the keep-alive connection, unless they change.

X-Only-Send-Header-Changes: true
"[Hulu] can push the latest episode of the Office to CDNs knowing it will generate a lot of traffic. YouTube can only do that in reaction to content that becomes popular."

Isn't that automat{ed,able}?
The major issues last time were caused by a lack of communications between the packager (Brightstar), the biller (Paypal), the shipper (Fedex?), and the OLPC organization. There were problems at several stages in the order process and no easy communications route for the customer to follow to get them resolved, let alone determine the responsible party. With Amazon controlling the entire flow, it probably will go a lot better this time.
I can't focus on anything analytically-heavy when listening to music since I have a very one-track mind. When I do have music playing and start to actually concentrate, I don't hear the music anymore. When I realize something's playing, my concentration falls apart once again.
I thought the title was "The World's Most Misunderstood Webbrowser Language."
Reentrant Scheme Reader with Flex+Bison
Performance Evaluation Papers List
Google: TSA secret laws
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_limit#85th_percentile_rul...

Most speed laws are based on some semblance of science. Granted there is often that extra percentage, but it doesn't kill anyone to slow down a little.