skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If I were motivated only by self-interest, I should want later stage investors to drop out. That would leave seed stage investors like YC as the only game in town.

And incidentally, I don't see why it's easy to upper bound wealth creation over any time period. If everyone woke up tomorrow and started working twice as hard, what would limit their output?
You can create your own ad hoc network on a Mac. Airport menubar icon -> Create network then enter the name and select channel to use.
pg won't be getting a job at 37signals.
The startup I work for just hit profitability and we're basically giving up on funding. The offers that we were getting weren't good enough. We'll grow slower, but we won't get dilution unless it's really worth it.

What I'm curious about is that I thought the purpose of VC was not just to stay in business, but to grow fast. I'm pretty sure PG said in a previous essay or comment that if you skip out on VC and someone else takes it you can get overtaken or not be able to catch up to the market leader.
Why are you focusing on acquisitions? There are profitable companies that remain private, like 37signals (plus ones you never hear about because there's no point in talking about how much money you make) and also IPO, which is rare but potentially huge. Google alone is worth $86B, at that IPO was only 4 years ago, so your "$10B in the past 5 years" number is clearly incomplete.
That is actually the point I thought needed more exploration. For one thing it seems to accept that 'startups' are a product of an environment dominated by large companies. There are some interesting questions that arise:

* A theme running through many of pg's essay is that startups are a far more productive use of resources. Pg sometimes uses acquisitions as an example taking the same resources & applying them to a large organisation. The result is reduced productivity. Doesn't that imply that acquisitions shouldn't take place in the first place? A transaction is supposed to take place when it produces some sort of a net surplus.

* Can a startup complex survive without acquisitions?

* If size is a disadvantage, isn't this a disincentive to grow? Wouldn't that put a company in danger of being out competed by smaller players?

* If growth is capped by anti - economy of scale effects, is there still enough incentive for startups?

* Today's startups often float around winner take most areas. Isn't this at odds with small organisations being dominant? The solution to this one seems alarming: Small organisations with huge revenues. If this scales we get a large number of Googles being run entirely by a few hundred employees & responsible for a level of wealth creation grossly disproportionate to their number of employees.

My ideas are pretty uncooked. But what I'm saying is that this prediction might be more robust if it explored a separation startup & big business. IE what does a startup look like in an economy dominated by startups. Foxes can never outnumber rabbits.
Interesting. I wonder if, 10 years from now, VC will simply be high tech private equity?
There’s no room for Ego or Zealotry in Software
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), then one would expect just the opposite of what you assume: more wealth should be created this way in the next 5 years than in the previous 5, because more value will be. And the productivity delta between startups and large companies will grow even faster, since the latter will be increasingly starved for new talent.

Edit: one might also expect current economic conditions to accelerate this process, since downturns are harder on inefficient players than efficient ones. It occurred to me the other day that for this reason, downturns are a healthy part of the economic system, kind of like forest fires in ecosystems.
Wow.

Some choice quotes:

--

One former Lehman executive in her 40s stood in her vast clothes closet not long ago, talking to her personal stylist. On shelves around her were at least 10 designer handbags that had cost her anywhere from $6,000 to $10,000 each.

"I don’t know what to do," she said. "I guess I’ll have to get rid of the maid."

--

"Why should I pay $250,000 for a private plane," he said to a friend, "When I can pay $20,000 to fly commercial first class?

--

I don't know what to say to or about these people. This article certainly doesn't inspire any confidence that we are bailing out the right people/industry.

It reminds me of an important lesson taught by an old economics professor of mine about companies within any industry. I suppose it probably even applies to industries themselves or even countries, although I'm no economist.

This lesson was that excess profits are always removed in the long run. If a company is demonstrating excessive profits, then that might be a good sign that the ride has peaked and that the only way from here is down.

Apply this to American culture in general, and it paints a pretty bad picture for the future. We are returning to the average...and it's going to be painful ride down.

The good news is that I dont get the impression that the averaqe HackerNews reader is in the situation of being at the whims of the idiots like mentioned in the article.
IBM Creates 'Microsoft-Free' Desktop
Several companies have come out with what you describe (and variations thereof), but I don't know of any companies that have been able to achieve enough success that they were able to maintain a business doing it for very long.

As with almost everything else, there are a few companies that own US patents that cover some of the basic processes involved. As long as business method patents still cover this type of stuff, it's a legal risk. The payment aspect, while obviously beneficial, just adds another layer of headaches.

EdgeIO probably got the most coverage of companies that were working in this area because they had an interesting model. They no longer exist, but another company bought their assets/IP. There were also several companies that concentrated on specific verticals (jobs, autos, etc.) and some of those are still around...none are exactly setting the world on fire.
What Exactly Is Adult Content? Google Forces Ning Onto A Slippery Slope.
Facebook Can't Find Buyers For Employee Stock
Now or Never
With regards to the "forward this to a colleague" call to action: this works great for (some!) B2C promotions, too. I often include it at the end of my customer-oriented linkbait: if you have a friend, colleague, or family member who you think would like this, please, feel free to tell them about it! (Works especially well when I'm handing out free things. People rarely feel the need to send sales letters to Aunt Emma.)

And, since my customers are not exactly technophiles, I tell them how to make a link on their blog or website. (If you decide to tell Aunt Emma about my free [christmas bingo cards] via the family blog, or to send it home to all the parents via the classroom website, I win at SEO. All very, very aboveboard, too.)

Given the value of one additional link (high) and the cost of one additional visitor (less than nil), you can do VERY profitable marketing this way even with a 1k or 10k : 1 ratio of visitors to linkers. (Which are, sadly, common in my demographic.)
No one from Twitpay is complaining. Ivan gave me a heads-up about this a few days ago.

TipJoy is a social platform for tipping people, that now has a Twitter hook.

Twitpay is a payments platform built exclusively on Twitter, with some other interesting features in the works.

It seems like overlap, but we're in pretty different spaces. I wish the discussion here had focused on TipJoy, and not veered off into this side of things...although I'm happy people know about Twitpay, too. We'll have our own HN threads for cool announcements soon enough.

Congrats to Ivan and Abby for getting this out there.
PG is spoiling us with great articles this month. Sort of like early Christmas presents.
Wealth is created when people take existing resources and transform them into something of higher value. Money is simply one very liquid type of input that a creative entrepreneur can use to create wealth.

If the marginal value of more investor capital to web entrepreneurs falls below the cost of acquiring and managing investors, then predictably web entrepreneurs will stop seeking capital. A more interesting insight, though, is that long before things get to that point, smart investors should be seeking to deploy their capital to ventures that can actually use the money to produce a better return. If capital is no longer the limiting reagent in web startups, then the money should go to places where money is the limiting reagent, and consequently has a higher value.

It's worth noting that Kleiner Perkins, as one data point, got out of the web startup business some time ago and has been investing in energy and biotech.
Why would you want later stage investors to drop out? You have early, cheap equity; don't later stage investors reset the valuation and give you a shot at cashing out if you want? (I really don't know, I'm actually asking).
If you're already in Boston, the startup part is easy. Idea+Incorporation=Instant CEO

He didn't say you had to be part of a viable startup to play.
Wow, that's very interesting to hear. Thanks for letting us know
Top Ten Web-Design Mistakes of 2002 (oh, the memories)
Numeric Trend Grows in Domain Names
That's an excellent question. Begs these questions:

How much speed does the investment buy you? How much is speed really necessary?

Take the viaweb example: Supposedly, their advantage was in being first. A 6 month head start was a great thing to have when the concept of an online shop was 3 yrs old, the concept of an online shop builder 2 years old & the concept of an online online shop builder 1 year old.

But was it such an advantage? Sure it was from viaweb's perspective. That may have been what allowed them to sell. But what did Yahoo (the buyer) gain from this extra 6 months?

There are still companies making & selling online shop builders of various sorts. They are still largely built by startups. A 6 month head start is virtually meaningless in that market. Yahoo stores is older then any of the players, & it doesn't stand out really. It's a player with a piece of the pie in a pie industry.

Yahoo search on the other hand could have used a 6 month head start. If Google had left them a couple of years to realise they were losing search share, realise how important that was & do something about it, they mightn't have to sit in fear of a hostile takeover.

What am I saying? I think I'm saying that from the early perspective, it's difficult to know if moving first is important. Since when it is important, it is very important, acquires will buy early leaders so the problem is theirs not founders'.

On the other hand, I think it seems likely that the winner take most market is not going to remain the default target. That changes the game. If it's 1997 & you are building an online shop builder to be a serious player with a serious slither of the market in 2017, you can afford a six month break. If you expect a winner to be declared in 18 months, you need any speed available.

The catch 22 is: If speed isn't that critical, you need a different advantage against big companies. But then I think there is one somewhere. Most online shops are not made by huge companies.
If your thesis is correct, then these are really the ones that need focusing on. If the world is about to be be bombarded with startups, they can't all be bought or go to IPO.

The remaining startups will need to find a middle ground of some sort.
Traditional Venture Model is "Broken" for Biotech, Says VC Alan Frazier
Many retailers tack an extra $1 charge when you use a bank card as a debit card... so I always run it as credit.
Wait. If I'm reading that right, you had utils written in Python that were 90% finished but then rewrote them in Perl and got them working.

What about Python was getting you stuck at 90%?
up for me.
If you are talking about a moral hazard on the consumer side I have to say I think it's rubbish.

The possibility & unpredictability of a bailout & the terms under which you can get free money are such that it's insanely risky trying to take advantage of it. Swaying stock prices by a couple of percent b is one thing. An individual risking all of his own wealth is something else. Virtually no sophisticated investors would take advantage of it.

The overwhelming market signal should remain: do not borrow more then you can repay.
It sounds overly optimistic.

Why a total amount of money spent online should increase? More and more players are competing for the same or diminishing pie slice.

Google can buy only so many startups after all.
Nassim Taleb on Charlie Rose
this is certainly non sense. i can guess some corporation paid for this study!!!
Warner is now signing acts to 360 deals. They finally are re-inventing their business by making money off of the brands they create via touring, merchandise, public appearances...everything but selling music.

This is what they should stick to and the rest of the industry should and I suspect will follow.
Are you seriously saying that since VB and Delphi don't count for you, they should not be included on the TIOBE index?
#11 - Take advantage of your health and dental insurance. If you haven't gone to the doctor or the dentist in awhile, or if you have an appointment that you should make in the coming months - make it now!
Generally speaking TCP is an endpoint protocol that runs over IP. Switches don't need to know anything about TCP to rout TCP traffic. Anyway, I was not talking about TCP, I was referring to the simplest way for a high bandwidth ISP to deal with oversubscribing their network without pissing people off. They don't need to know anything about the IP packets your sending be the UDP, TCP or whatever.

His suggestion is that people who use less bandwidth on average should have better bandwidth when things get congested, but your network is only effected by the last few seconds of traffic so letting people have all the bandwidth for new connections seems like a bad idea. (Comcast was doing something like this and it ended up messing with a lot of low bandwidth apps.)

PS: Networking equipment has internal buffers so they can buffer 20 and only 20 packets from each user / network and then round robbin transmission of those packets down the line. The advantage to this is if your sending a small stream of data your going to have low latency and if your trying to flood the pipe you and only you will get a high number of packets dropped.
When people are suffering physically from the effects of lack of iodine, isn't it rather Western to consider raised intelligence the most talkworthy improvement!? Iodized water should be used to make people's lives better and reduce their pain - not to increase their intelligence by some token amount. Increasing intelligence is a weird motivation to help people in dire straits - how about helping people because it's the decent, human thing to do?

An educated guess is that iodine deficiency results in a
needless loss of more than 1 billion I.Q. points around
the world.

The prevalence of TV and gossip magazines in our culture are responsible for a lot more than that. I don't see a big crusade to fix that.

The point this article makes is as meaningless as Shirky's assertions that our "cognitive surplus" equates to a million Wikipedias we haven't written or whatever. If billions of people in the developing world gain some intelligence, great, but I doubt it'll be as much use as making their lives better and more pain free so they can use the plentiful intelligence they already have (I don't subscribe to the argument that the poor are any less intelligent - they just have fewer opportunities).
What's Your Company Worth? (story about younoodle)
I made an error in using the phrase "in bad economic times". Economic conditions are actually fairly irrelevant, because one can be in a positive career situation despite a terrible economy, and vice versa. I meant to say "in a bad career situation" and, specifically, a truly terrible one.

I know people who've been put in the humiliating position of being outsourced, while being expected to train the cheaply-hired replacements. That's the sort of situation in which obfuscation, in the hope of having, at least, the option to come on later as a consultant, may be an appropriate strategy. Why is it unethical? It's not nice, but it's not nice either (though not unethical) for the company to fire all the American staff and replace them with overseas workers at 1/3 of the cost.

So I'll back down from "in bad economic times" because, really, obfuscation only makes sense in rare and outright terrible situations. I've never needed to do it, never done it, and I don't even know how often it works. What I'll say is this: I've known people who've been laid off recently, and one of the warning signs is when they are asked to suddenly place a high priority on clarifying previous work, and it's definitely not in their interest to do so.
Hilariously if you read the comments, several confused people suggest that the problem is just that it is "alpha" software, and of course such simple problems will crop up. Right!
You could work on integrating with the twitter api. Look how much linkage blip.fm is getting on twitter: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=blip.fm
Additional checks end up biting you in the back.

I think what he said was that additional checks have a cost that must be weighed against the benefits.

Funny, you are the one who is touting himself as able to handle complexity. And yet in this debate you can only perceive black and white. If communism is bad, that means that ALL regulation is bad! And if some people need extra help or training to deal with credit, that means that they're SHEEP who will be the wards of the state forever!

I am sad that nobody has taken up the point that I was trying to make; that we all need some help from time to time. Hackers have an easy time bouncing back from rotten luck, illness, or poor life choices; things that would cause other people to eventually amass an unsustainable debt.
“It is ironic that Google, the largest user of Internet capacity, pays the least relatively to fund the Internet’s cost; it is even more ironic that the company poised to profit more than any other from more broadband deployment, expects the American taxpayer to pick up its skyrocketing bandwidth tab,” said Scott Cleland, President Precursor LLC, and author of the study.

I would be surprised if the opposite were true. The company that gets the most bandwidth for its dollar will probably be the one that spends the most dollars on bandwidth (if someone were able to get gas for $.20 per gallon other people pay for the rest, would it surprise anyone that this person was responsible for a huge fraction of the gas sold in this country?).
This is an interesting perspective, but it seems to be (potentially) true of one class of startup, but there are many others, requiring much large amounts of money to start, that will still rely on VC funding.

Software startups, specifically web startups, have been a favorite of VCs (for good reasons). If those startups no longer seek VC funding, will it trigger a renaissance in funding for other startup classes (e.g. semiconductors or hardware)?
That helps :)
Thank you.
Results From My Facebook Ad Campaign
I don't think this is likely, because turning a kind-of-flawed tech business into a good tech business usually (though not always) requires a lot of technical work. I could imagine a collaboration between VCs and hackers, though, or just a group of savvy hackers, taking on this kind of role. Basically a larger-scale version of going around to my friends and saying "I think doing X would make your company better and I'll do it for 10%."
Quality time or so I like to call it.

Usually spent with the girlfriend, at friends, or very alone. I use the time to relax and turn my brain off. I usually avoid alcohol and stick to things more natural.
A lot of people want to start companies now, VC or no VC. But IT and development jobs remain relatively abundant; someone who can make a credible run at a startup can also land a new job in less than a month. That may not remain the case, and job security could constrict the flow of talent into crapshoot startups.
Neighborhoods Propose Printing Their Own Currency To Encourage Local Shopping
isn't it rather Western to consider raised intelligence the most talkworthy improvement!?

I assume you're using "Western" to mean something very racist and vile, like "analyzing the data rationally and coming to the most sensible conclusion." You are unfairly assuming that only Europeans can look at the correlation between IQ and income, or IQ and crime, or whatever. Obviously, the Japanese (IQ 105, crime 5% to 10% of that in the US) or South Koreans (IQ 106, crime rate about 15% of what it is in the US) can look at these data, too, and hope that the rest of the world catches up.

The prevalence of TV and gossip magazines in our culture are responsible for a lot more than that. I don't see a big crusade to fix that.

Probably because you haven't read about how hard it is to change IQ. Nutrition is one of the only things that can measurably affect IQ in the long run. The other one -- the big one, accounting for 40-80% of all IQ variation -- is genetics.

On the other hand, stupid but happy people are probably easier to control.
#12: This seems a bit vicious, but that's probably because you're spoiled by startups and tech companies, where there's a lot of work to be done, and a high proportion of it's actually interesting. At some of the big-box companies, neither of these is true. Some of the BDCs have beginning programmers doing office work during the first year to "pay dues". The saving grace is that 25% utilization is the norm for BDCs, leaving the underutilized hackers time for side projects. Unethical? It's not more unethical for the hacker to work on side projects than it is for the guys in marketing to spend 6 hours per day on Break.com.

#13: I discussed this in my reply to the other poster. As I said, it would only make sense in an extremely negative career situation. I was utterly wrong to imply that obfuscation would make sense in poor economic times without other extreme circumstances.
Code terrorist: the person that you blame things on to draw attention from the fact that your project was already screwed.
Wotsit.org: The Programmer's File and Data Resource
MIT’s Introduction to Algorithms, Lecture 16: Greedy Algorithms
Open Source: Your Expectations are Broken
Shoes and harnesses aren't too bad. You can get a good pair of entry level shoes for 60-80, an entry level harness/chalkbag/ATC will run 80 to 100 dollars. That will at least let you climb at gyms with your own gear, or go out with friends who have rope.
Even if it is paid by someone with inherent interest it can still have some level of validity. It is definitely economically inefficient to have someone who reaps so much traffic and revenue to not have to pay their costs, and it inherently makes it costs more for everyone else, hurting other web based companies if Google gets a great deal.
I'm not very knowledgeable about this, but from the charts I remember seeing during the Sequoia "buckle-up" PowerPoint, isn't it an undisputed fact that there has been an unsustainable boom in VC? Investment in VC has been independent of it's marginal profitability declining due to traditional deals becoming fewer and the recession in general.

The shift in what is funded is no surprise by now. The only questions are 1)if the new bio/green tech startups will be successful, and what the role for VC will be in other sectors and 2)What will happen to the current crop of VC firms now? As flattering as it is that funding in VC has remained constant, is it still a wise investment?

I don't know what the answer to these questions are, but they're the ones that stick in my mind. On a positive note, at least one stressful part of the Internet startup process is in decline.