skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If everyone woke up tomorrow and started working twice as hard, what would limit their output?

demand and supply, as always

it is trivial for some hypothetical foobar corp to spit out twice as many widgets as they do now. but why would they? without viable demand, they indeed show a loss for their effort-spurt. as you heard the CEO of ford say today, oversupply was a major problem for the automakers. working twice as hard will kill you if you don't have twice the demand

the better question is how currency growth can be employed to stimulate demand over a period of time. growth comes from healthy inflation (3-5%). inflation is always a monetary phenomenon. this is why you will often hear opponents of "secured" currencies (gold etc) tell you that you can't get growth in an economy in the mid term unless you have a fiat currency.
Because this is a service most places online will give you quotes for free. Just run a standard google search (http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&...) and get quotes from the top couple results. I haven't personally used any of these services.

If you're lucky find a friend/family member who is fluent in Spanish, a surprising number of people are, and have them do it. It would be best if they learned Spanish in mainland South America, preferably not Argentina, because those places speak the most universal Spanish. Spanish writing from Spain may look to a South American like British writing looks to an American. Caribbean Spanish uses more slang (although that may just be a stereotype) and Argentine Spanish is proper kind of like Spain's (again maybe a stereotype).
Ask HN: What was the first blog/site/newspaper that covered your app/site?
No matter how small or obscure it was
when it comes to nuclear or hydrogen, a billion might only bootstrap the company.

One of the only giant LBOs that isn't a disaster area is the buyout of TXU. I would expect VCs to hand it off to PE guys if they had an asset that generated a steady, regulated cash flow.
you can take a page out of Facebook's book and let the users do it for you.
There's a lot more to Greentech than energy or hydrogen fueling. Also note that most people don't consider nuclear power green. (Arguments of cleanliness aside, it's just usually one of the thing that green campaigners disapprove of.) My co-founder tonight met with the founder of greenvironment.com and I know that they're certainly not working in the billion-dollar range.
Would be interesting to use (build) something similar for Windows/Linux/Mac apps. Anyone knows of anything like this that already exists? Maybe tied to VersionTracker or Download.com etc.
Cool stuff! How's Adpinion going btw? I had really liked your idea, and still hope for the day when I'm delivered just the (display) ads that I want/need to see. (I don't block ads.)
I was figuring the adult sites on Ning were differentiated from Adult Friend Finder in one (or many) ways.
If there's any truth to pg's claim that the paradigm is shifting and that talented people are increasingly likely to start their own thing than go work for a boss (and personally, I believe there is)

no there isn't. come back in five years, the top ten internet companies will control 95% of all traffic and 99% of all revenues. this market has almost zero friction...how is it that google has already sewn up over 80% of ad revenues on the web? where are all the mom-and-pop ad networks? they're on deaths door

by the same token anyone can build a PC...so what happened to the 10,000 little PC makers that used to be in every strip mall? today we have basically three pc makers....hp, dell, apple. so much for "low barrier to entry = high res"
Here's an idea, don't. It's a silly idea.

You're riding the fence there. 'Luring' people into connecting to a network where private information will be readily accessible is (even if just for marketing purposes) very, very sketchy. Especially if you're using a deceptive SSID. Just a bad idea.

I think it's just best to leave it as a network issue and not try to force advertising campaigns every nook and cranny as possible. That includes broadcasting domain names using a poorly designed network identification method.
Because having higher I.Q.'s via Iodine couldn't possibly allow them to get more doctors per capita and reduce pain and suffering that way. Let me guess, you didn't get much Iodine as a kid.
it would be nice to have your employees categorized like Diablo 2 Characters. :P (slayer, etc.)
Agree it's standard procedure (and that it is a useful hint to all readers), but I thought the original purpose of the site was to engage potential YC applicants so you could better evaluate them.
Not really. Private information is already readily accessible. If you don't think it is, your information has already been stolen.
"From a purely mathematical perspective, it doesn’t matter whether there are 1 million or 10 million fully-diluted shares. However, when companies are granting options to new employees, even the smartest engineers feel better receiving options to purchase 100,000 shares as opposed to 10,000 shares, even if it represents the same percentage ownership of the company."

So very true, that.
Perhaps we could see co-investments or investment pools by several VCs.
at $300 a pop, it's not realistic to push this as a gaming device when it costs more than most video game consoles, especially during the onset of a depression
Startup Failures On The Rise
how much money would it take to set up an alternate local currency with full plastic card support?

you need someone with a brain to regulate the amount of currency in the system. how many FooDollars will exist at once? this has been tried. years ago, a neighborhood tried to set up a "chit" system for getting babysitters. because they had no idea how many chits to print up, they just printed up as many as anyone would ever want...in the end they just created their own hyperinflation.
Since the Fed is not property of the government, but rather
an associtation of bankers

Doesn't that mean that government is already out of Coin Manufacture?
Facebook delays employee stock sale, citing recession
The Supreme Court wants you to pay more for things you buy online
"turned YouTube PG."

Too much YC...I was scratching my head; what does Paul Graham have to do with YouTube?
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=219085
I think it's somewhat petty to dismiss Objective-C 2.0 because it was created by Apple. gcc's Objective-C support originated at NeXT. Apple is the closest thing to a benevolent dictator Objective-C has.

Otherwise I agree with him. Synthesizing accessors (like attr_accessor in Ruby) is nice, as is fast iteration. Dot notation for property access isn't a huge win but some people seem to like it.
Heh, I visited a client's office today and there were two networks -- "Free Public Wifi" and "Free Internet". It amuses me because you plug into the Ethernet there and can't route to the outside world, but one employee can take their laptop to Starbucks, and all your company's internal information is stolen.

This make me laugh, and it makes me cry.
RubyConf'08 Videos: Ruby VMs: Internals of YARV, Rubinius, MagLev
I was referring to people actually carrying paper cash on their persons and using it for purchases.
If I'm not doing school work, I'm typically freelancing. School + Paying the bills + Entrepreneurshipping is hard to maintain. Especially when two of them are mere formalities.
>An unappreciated miracle of our world is how rare shortages are among truly free-market goods.

Name some (specifically, name some in the United States).
In other news massive factories that use steel paid less per pound than your local railing fabricator, and General Mills was paying less for a bushel of corn per pound than we pay at the grocery store. If only these giant corporations paid their fair share we wouldn't have to be subsidizing them at the hardware and grocery stores of this fine nation.
Awesome article.

http://www.frugalsquirrels.com/cgi-bin/ubb/ultimatebb.cgi?ub...
Ah! There you go.
They're not saying you can't use US dollars, just that you get a bonus for using the local currency.

http://www.ithacahours.com/
#12 - my issue isn't with the side projects done on company time. It's in doing the side projects on company time and then trying to unambiguously own them. Didn't you sign something to the effect of saying you wouldn't do this?

Back when Diffle was a part-time project for me, I did bugfixes and stuff while I was at work. After all, I was often blocked waiting for another team member, and coding on some other project is a better way to keep skills sharp than surfing Reddit. But I threw away the code and started fresh when I left my day job and turned it into a full-time startup. Granted, part of this was for technical reasons (I found the code I'd done on nights & weekends basically sucked), but part was because the best way to unambiguously own the software was to not have written it on somebody else's dime.

#13: For me, the appeal of programming is in having my code get used. Making it incomprehensible seems a good way of ensuring it won't be used in the future. In both of my last two employers, I put a premium on readability and documentation, even staying about a month longer than I'd hoped to at my last employer so that everything was documented, all known bugs were worked out, and all unit tests passed.
A Pilot Disagrees with Gladwell Over The Role of Cultural Issues In Plane Crashes
> larger commercial operations tended to be more successful than small ones. It's just that the big ones weren't very big by modern standards.

It seems that you have a different idea than Coase about what limited the size of companies; he believed that companies stopped getting bigger because as they got bigger, they started becoming less "successful", in the sense of "profitable". What's your alternative explanation?
The valuation goes up between us and a series A round, but in a successful startup it should go up much more afterward.
What if the choice is between a strong candidate who looks good, is fun, and has a ton of linked in buddies, or a strong candidate who doesn't?
We have already built in the tech, so now we can assign users to be a special "translator" class and when they log in they can click a button to translate the page. Then they enter the text for the language they are set up with.

Now our challenge is to find good and reasonably priced translators to do the service (preferably uni students who are in our target demographic and "get" the service as well)

But as we're still small it's hard to find volunteers who could do the job well (and we're in Hong Kong so don't know any Spanish native speakers).
Ask YC: Do any of you primarily target women?
The other day I was launching a piece of linkbait to promote my software. I tried promoting it through a campaign on Stumbleupon, which lets you show the advertisement only to certain demographics. This made me practically scream with joy -- I immediately restricted it to 25-99 year old ladies.

Then I realized "Wow, that is probably pretty rare for software companies". But that is, judging by customer contacts and names on orders and credit cards, about 95% of my business.

Anybody else here in my situation? Got any tips, tricks, etc?
Does anyone know is this is constitutionally legal?
What limits demand for cars is that people can't afford them, not that they don't want them. But since by my assumption everyone is working twice as hard, including the buyers, there should be demand to match the supply.
Gvke - MISSING BOMB KEEPS MUMBAI ON EDGE : Kasav Says Each Terrorist Carried A Bomb
I like your ideas. They should be explored more.

I think the big danger is that, in this model, currency continues to exist in the ether. Without something in one's hands, a financially strapped nation might avoid this type of system.
There might be a limit, but it's much bigger than $10B in 5 years. Just in 2007, I counted up $29B of publicly announced web startup acquisitions. That easily justifies thousands of startups trying for a piece of that pie.

A good list (including more than web) is at http://startup.partnerup.com/2008/01/02/2007-acquisitions-we...
How to backup files to your gmail account?
Bills cost more than coins because they don't last as long.
It's true that it can be dangerous not to take VC if your competition takes it. But it's not so dangerous if the reason you don't take it is that VCs are saying no to everyone, because that implies your competitors are also less likely to get it.
Wow, this is frightening.

I've heard rumors that Internet providers actually make money selling Internet bandwidth. They even make money moving packets between two ports on the same switch!!! The thieves!!!

I've also heard rumors of peering arrangements between organizations that don't charge each other for Internet bandwidth.

Why won't someone subsidize my Internet connection? Can I get someone to pay for the maintenance of my circuit? Tech support? And the bandwidth too? (yeah and the taxes and monopoly rates, that's an entirely different matter)

I have something of value I can barter in return. Let me think about this for a second... no, I don't have connectivity to other parts of the Internet, and I don't think my ISP would trust me anyway. Hmm... maybe, I could do something useful for someone else, get paid, and take some of that and pay my Internet provider for service?
Designing The Holy Search Box: Examples And Best Practices
StyleHop Matches Social Gaming With The Fashion World
So perhaps this is better as viral mudslinging, naming a competitor?
When I was finishing high school, I went through a bad patch. Nearly dropped out. I fell out with the math teacher at week one & never went to a class.

The school decided to let me have a chance at taking a few versions of the year's final. I took about 5 hrs 1-on-1 tuition with approximately 1.5 hrs preparation each + about 10 hrs of self study + about the normal amount of pre test practice (maybe 20-30) hrs. That adds up to approximately 45 hrs all up compared to maybe 5-6 times that much pursuing the normal study path. I had similar examples at university (though not as sharp).

Assuming that 5 hrs 1-on-1 is probably cheaper the 1/30 X 1 year of teacher time, that's an efficiency. But you could probably have 7-8 hours of 3-on-1 with similar results. 1 teacher could potentially "teach" 10-15 students how to pass that test in a week.

Of course there what you have is a totally different experience. I was taught how to pass the mathematics test, not mathematics. My classmates were taught mathematics, but they still learned how to pass the test.

Universities have terrible inefficiencies. They basically subsidise research with tuition. The students receive some of the prestige gained via research in the form of their degree. But if you look at it from a purely educational perspective, it's inefficient.

In many subject areas attendance in lectures was about 40%. My own attendance was in no way linked to my results. What I did find important were the tutorials. But that was only about 100 hrs per year (10 - 15 students). Everything else, from lectures to course administration is very scalable.

I could have received a very similar education with 10 hrs per student tutorial time if the structure was behind it.

But if I had to place a bet on what the future disruptive innovation would be I'd say it won't be the same thing just more efficient. I think there is a lot of potential in separating education from certification.

The knowledge is accessible online for the most part. It still needs to be arranged. But that will almost certainly occur if certification exists separately to education.

I also think/hope that it will occur in the developing world. Employment is becoming accessible via the web already so the motivation is there. Knowledge is already there. I don't think that a situation where $1000 in hardware & internet access can take someone from a year 9 education to paraprofessional or professional level of education.

There is a huge amount for the world to gain. The biggest economic inefficiencies are barriers to trade, barriers to investment & barriers to immigration. Trade barriers & investment barriers can (& have) been lowered to allow the flow of capital, technology, products & services but not labour. Education is part of that.
Perhaps I should have added that 40% was more than applications usually go up year to year.

I'm pretty sure, based on conversations with founders, that this spike in applications wasn't due to people learning of our existence for the first time. Most people we interviewed seemed to have known about us for a while.

I don't think application numbers are much correlated with News.YC traffic either. I think most people who come here are just looking for what people found at Reddit 3 years ago.
I don't think there's any limit to the number that could get bought. The upside that founders are willing to trade in exchange for safety is an opportunity that would call acquirers into being if they didn't already exist.

And why couldn't there be 100 or 1000 times as many public companies? Stranger things have happened in history.
I sell my product primarily to parents and teachers (mostly teachers).

A 4th grade teacher with a web page, we'll call her Mrs. Smith, picked up my first linkbait and included it in the paper and virtual version of a list of resources she sent home with parents.

Mrs. Smith is now in the good company of several state departments of education, a few curriculum guides, various and sundry teachers, and a smattering of homeschooling bloggers.

As to the first site that featured my product qua my product, as opposed to something free I gave out to get my name out: a particular 3rd grade Spanish teacher, on her personal blog. She liked it.

I also got a good chunk of nepotistic links when I was starting out from other software entrepreneurs who hang out in the same forum I do. Ian Landsman (http://www.userscape.com/blog/) and Joel Spolsky stand out from the first few weeks, but I'm probably forgetting people who were no less important to me at the time.
Download Engineering Books
That was one of the side benefits, but the main thing was just that we wanted a good news site.
Meltdowns: Facebook cancels employee stock sale
no, the demand does not manifest itself spontaneously. people just don't decide to wake up and work twice as hard, there has to be legit economic growth. there is a monetary role. its no coincidence that "healthy" economic growth conforms to healthy monetary growth. this directly addresses your point of people wanting cars but not being able to afford them. this demand could be trivially induced artificially by monetary means, but it would lead to unhealthy inflation

monetary cycles typically manifest over an eighteen month period. i.e. the increase or decrease in Fed policy would impact demand directly likely no less than a year. the only way to dramatically alter this...i.e. to actually get people to wake up and work twice as hard takes drastic currency action.

this is all undergrad economics
"And why couldn't there be 100 or 1000 times as many public companies? Stranger things have happened in history."

They would need to be smaller or the economy would need to be bigger. Ties in with your other essay.
Are you sure about that? I often used to tell retailers that they "had" to accept, say, 2 dollar bills or whatever because currency says "legal tender for all debts public or private". I found out some years later that this is quite literal. If I owe you money and I want to pay you in US currency-- that is, I want to use the money to pay off a debt-- you are legally obligated to accept it. However, if, say, you offer to sell me a hamburger, but refuse to take anything but 5$ bills, that is okay. (Unless you sell the hamburgers on credit...)
I've got a startup in the works that will lean a bit towards the female demographic.

Facebook ads allow you to target specific genders and age ranges.

It shouldn't be too hard to find the top web properties among women.
Hindi Movies and Indian Models
Sounds like a larger scale version of Smoot-Hawley. Such perfect timing!
The U.S. Mint makes coins, not the Federal Reserve. They are two separate entities. To further complicate things, the Bureau of Engraving, still a different agency, is responsible for making bills. All these organizations are related to the U.S. Treasury, however.

Our system is much more complex than Ron Paul and fellow gold standard libertarians would have you believe. They exploit this complexity for their own purposes. Because the system is hard to understand, they try to convince people into thinking that a simpler one would be better. This probably isn't the case, however. Sure, some simplifications could take place, but they would potentially have large impacts on our economy and society. Our system has evolved to become what it is today and any changes should be made with much consideration and caution.

Macroeconomics is a very complicated field. There are many theories about macroeconomic behavior and none fully explain or predict all economic situations. In microeconomics, one can do experiments to test the various theories, but macroeconomics is another beast entirely.

I would be wary of anyone who tells you that they fully understand how the economy works and has solutions to solve the problems of our day. The economy of the world is a very complex system. I do not pretend to understand it, but know enough to see that changes can have vast and unforeseen consequences.
I meant to say "in a bad career situation" and, specifically, a truly terrible one

Well, who put themselves in that situation?

I know people who've been put in the humiliating position of being outsourced, while being expected to train the cheaply-hired replacements

No one is required to remain in such a humiliating position.

Why is it unethical?

Because it's your job, not to mention your duty, to contribute the best code you can. Not to mention not actively destroying it.

obfuscation only makes sense in rare and outright terrible situations

Courage and honesty are what make sense in rare and outright terrible situations. What the person who takes the sneaky, greedy route under duress never gets to learn is how many benefits flow from standing up to what you fear.

I've never needed to do it, never done it, and I don't even know how often it works.

Yet you are prepared to offer it as advice to others?

I've known people who've been laid off recently, [who were] asked to suddenly place a high priority on clarifying previous work, and it's definitely not in their interest to do so.

There's a big difference between taking responsibility for your own interests and actively screwing the other guy in order to (allegedly) protect yourself. See what allenbrunson said.

So I'll back down from "in bad economic times"

You've missed the point. Ethics that fluctuate with one's career situation aren't ethics to begin with either.

Look... I wouldn't write this if it were just about critiquing your post. Personally, I am far from being a master of appropriate behavior. But I can't emphasize enough how rewarding it is to get to a place within yourself where you just won't do shit like this (and how punishing it is to live with the beliefs that make you think it's ok).
I believe it is, but that doesn't mean the Feds won't seize it.

To avoid the possibility, they should just call it gift certificates or something similar.
That sounds about right ... I've seen plenty of stores that don't accept bills over $20
There could be 100 times as many U.S. public companies while Sarbanes-Oxley remains in effect?
Card Printing
I found this site for those who want a tangible hard copy representation of your business in a way that cannot be achieved with electronic means. And this Printed materials are still the best approach to making a lasting impression in the minds of the customers that will sustain your business
This is why it is good to be a lisp pacifist in times of conflict. It may mean being largely ineffectual to the eyes of mere mortals but at least deep inside you know you are being more effectively ineffectual.