skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think I've ever heard of such growth. What new monster of virality did they cook up?
CASA Lib: A Code Library for ActionScript 2.0 & 3.0
How many companies that get a series A round end up being successful? It seems like having that opportunity to decide if you agree that the company will keep growing or that you've made enough and would rather reinvest in the next round of startups would be nice to have.
The graph doesn't really show the conclusion. If you take out the huge spike in October, startup failures for Q3/Q4 08 are less than earlier in the year, with the summer being one of the low points of the graph.

The data in general seems too noisy to draw a firm conclusion from...
Ah, okay. That does make it interesting.

The interviewees might be a biased sample of applicants, though. I guess you could get some insight into that by looking at data on the age distribution of the the accounts that applied, and comparing that to previous cycles. But I suppose you have better things to do :)
I don't get this argument. Assign the top ten companies as high a percentage of whatever as you like: it won't prevent people from seizing opportunity to create value at a higher rate than large organizations are able to do. The point is that the two barriers that largely prevented talented people from doing so in the past - cost of entry and cultural beliefs - don't hold sway anymore.

The fact that some markets have matured and been commoditized hardly implies that there is no new value to be created.
Python 2.6.1 released  What's new...
So is your app meant to be standalone at all? Or just to interface with the site?

This app feels like something I'd just skip by, though maybe the experience would be much better if I were sent a song. But just getting there directly, there isn't much to do. There's one song to play, which is cool, but how do I find more?
what are the edge cases? what are the advantages of iterators? less memoryuse?
The conclusions really applies to VC for IT, not so much Biotech or clean energy.
Greedy algorithms? Didn't they cause the financial crisis?
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That's a fundamentally different kind of investor.
The current generation of founders want to raise money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically, because Larry and Sergey took money from VCs, and Sequoia specifically.

Excluding YC and the likes, I would have thought, by now, a lot of startups would want to raise money from angels that have formerly started startups -- there are tons of them around. That would be the #1 choice.

#2 choice would be the Founders Fund, Union Square Ventures, First Round Capital, Atomico, Ambient Sound Investments and the like.

Failing these, the #3 would be the Sequoia's, KPCB, Khosla Ventures, Benchmark, Accel's, Menlo's of the world.

What do folks on HN think?
"The reason startups no longer depend so much on VCs is one that everyone in the startup business knows by now: it has gotten much cheaper to start a startup. "

Maybe I'm biased because I was in YC and it was mostly first-timers, but most of us don't even remember a time when it was a lot pricier.
Readers React to David Pogue’s Review of the BlackBerry Storm
just eliminate the penny and use up that capacity on something else. Don't they pay more to make a penny than what it is worth? Whats the point anyways...when was the last time anyone ever paid at a register with pennies?
Evhead: What Blogger Should Do
Mashable
this is nothing but an ad. flagged.
It's worth noting that Kleiner Perkins, as one data point, got out of the web startup business some time ago

That may be their PR, but they're very much still investing in web startups. Here's a list of their investments: http://www.crunchbase.com/financial-organization/kleiner-per...
Ask HN: Stanford Startup Tours.  Is your company interested?
I am part of an entrepreneurship group at Stanford organizing an event called eHorizons. We take a group of 20 or so Stanford students interested in startups around to a handful of early-to-mid stage companies. I'm looking for interested technology companies. It's a great way to connect with the Stanford entrepreneurship community.

It's not a big commitment. The visit usually lasts 1-2 hours. The company typically gives the students a brief tour of their office, a description of what the company does and its history, and then there's some discussion/Q&A. If you're involved in a company that might be interested, you can contact me at mgummelt at stanford dot edu. Thanks!
Ha, that's the exact opposite reasoning to Aza Raskin's "use undo instead of a warning"... this is "make it irreversible as a warning"

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/neveruseawarning

I think allowing a vote change here makes much more sense, FWIW. For the same reasons allowing post edits makes a lot of sense.
Great post Paul. One thing to highlight is that traditional VCs, historically, don't make "venture level" returns in efficient markets.

Your examples highlight the cash efficiencies of early stage software/web based businesses from which VCs have been making a fairly vocal move away from for years. Similarly scaled efficiencies aren't yet being recognized in clean tech, new materials, networking hardware, semiconductors, pharmaceuticals and many many categories.

As for web and software, I think the lesson many firms are beginning to apply from this last wave is that there's an inflection point a company hits where its been sufficiently derisked and is poised to scale at which time the VC is more than happy to dip into their large funds and "pay up" in terms of valuations. Its what they did with Google and Facebook (among others). I think it will create a more bifurcated web/software venture environment than we have today but I don't see that as the death knell for the broader venture industry. Certainly a great opportunity for seed funds like yours and ours...bryce@oatv
Why can't Central Command for RubyGems just upload any gem it gets as a Debian and RedHat package?
They've had something like this for a while, and that's exactly how it works. Log-in stays secure.

I don't know if they'll make money off of this, and that's Facebook's achilles heel, but I've never understood the people who mock Facebook's features. It's the most comprehensive site I've ever used. And this is another excellent step for them.
H. M., an Unforgettable Amnesiac, Dies at 82
Nokia 2650 Insert Sim Ways Jumpers
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Ah, I messed with it a bit. Ability to post to walls is pretty sweet. Definite virality there. If only I could find some songs I knew.
It's a security hazard because it's an entirely different update channel for security updates, as well as a second system that runs with root privileges and installs things from other people. It is not an immediate threat, but it is worrisome.
There are probably in thousands of potential greentech companies that could achieve profitability on 10 - 100 million. Probably the best example here is solar, as many companies already have achieved profitability, but there are tons of opportunities in fuels, materials, building technology, vehicle technology, water supply, agriculture, construction, data centers, refrigeration, industrial processes, road construction, and so on. There might exist companies you'd need to pump a billion into, but why attempt it?
Ithaca New York has been doing this for a while. They're trivially counterfeitable, as you might expect, and the IRS considers much of the activity tax-evasion (and rightly so) though to my knowledge nobody has yet been busted for them. Technically people are supposed to claim them and pay taxes (and many do) but there's a lot of nonpayment going on too and it's very hard to trace.
Nintendo's Miyamoto On Innovation & Wii Ambitions
Life is all about deception, isn't it?
It looks like the Berkshires region of Massachusetts has been doing this for a while too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkshares
Sounds like time banks.

http://www.timebanks.org/

"For every hour you spend doing something for someone in your community, you earn one Time Dollar. Then you have a Time Dollar to spend on having someone do something for you. It's that simple. Yet it also has profound effects. Time Banks change neighborhoods and whole communities. Time Banking is a social change movement in 22 countries and six continents."
It may be that social institutions are shaped by the intelligence of the people who form them and control them.

All else being equal, having a higher IQ population is probably a good thing. It probably leads to more long-term planning, capital investment, and other good things.

Helping people in most ways are not mutually exclusive.
of course it is - anyone can print currency. You just can't claim that your currency is legal tender for any debts or try to pay your federal taxes with it.

Most retail stores offer gift certificates or store currency (e.g., Toys R Us Dollars).

Article 1 Section 8 grants congress the right to coin money, not to prevent others from doing so.
Yeah, the essay needed s/startup/internet startup/ in at least one place, perhaps with a bit of explanation.

It all comes down to capital requirements. If you require a lot of money to get going, you need VC.
Pretty big I imagine if you could say, broker a deal with the bus companies to allow you to sell passes.
No offense meant, but I probably wouldn't have received any up-votes if you weren't so aggressive.
"Thus Google’s 16.5% share of all 2008 U.S. consumer bandwidth usage, is ~21 times greater than Google’s 0.8% share of U.S. consumer bandwidth costs – or an implicit ~$6.9 billion subsidy of Google by U.S. consumers."

Um, economy of scale, anyone? If Google paid the same rates the average consumer paid they would probably be bankrupt.
Ivan, I assume you saw @tensigma's invitation on Twitter to play poker if you're ever in Atlanta, but I'll mention it here, too. He's not any good, though, so go easy on him.
"I'm pretty sure ... that this spike in applications wasn't due to people learning of our existence for the first time."

Maybe the spike wasn't, but my application was. I never heard of YC until three days before the deadline. It's a coincidence that I was already working on a new app so I had a reason to apply.
Timebanking is a great concept.

However, amazingly, the IRS also considers 'time banking' tax evasion. Apparently, if someone does something for you as a favor, you're supposed to log it as 'income' with wages charged at 'fair-market-price'!
Smartbolts : direct tension indicating fasteners
Scientists get closer to creating artificial life
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Help: Rails/DNS Question
1) I'm just about to take the plunge of setting up and hosting a website off one of my own boxes in my room. The one thing I haven't had to deal with before is DNS. Is installing/setting up BIND the best alternative? What would you guys recommend?

2) Let's say I have a Rails app and 6 domains, each of which has a slightly different landing page. What's the best way to deploy things such that all six domains share the one app/db?

Thanks for your help!
Laughing too hard to read beyond the title. Yes, I primarily target women.
Is it not the case that like a VC, a seed-stage investor maximizes his income when the startup he funds tries to hit a home-run? And are not home-runs much more likely if a VC invests in the startup?
Best Consolidation - loan refinances
Individual IQ is heavily affected by genetics, and this fact has been well established. So far, the evidence that population IQ -- which is what is at issue here -- is influenced by genetics is far more sketchy. The distinction is rather important, because of the sensitivity of the issue of racial IQ differences.
Wasn't it also the first cycle where "Startup Ideas We'd Like to Fund" came into play? That seems like a giant roadmap for anyone who may have heard about YC and never seriously considered it before.

I guess the test is: Were the pitches clustering more around those ideas?
Koofers raises $500K to pass along old exams, study guides
Annoucing the Merb open source book
HN

(Sorry. Someone was bound to write it.)
The unfundable world-changing startup
Mashups Get a Hosted Database with NextDB.net
Are those curious george drawings in the public domain now?
Discovering a Place Through Its Thrift Shops
S.E.C. Charges Venture Capitalist With Fraud
The joke wasn't too bad, was it?
I hope this guy realizes that most internet businesses are more than happy to pay the freight on the bits google pulls. If a slightly better ranking in the SERP can double your revenue for the month, then it's well worth it.

And you could make a strong argument that google is using that bandwidth on behalf of it's users.

But yeah, this article betrays a staggering, if outright wilful ignorance of the actual functioning of the network.
What a coincidence. I just started working today on a social network crossed with a CMS that aims to be way simpler and flexible than Facebook and the rest. (But when I actually started writing the code, there were a few things I conveniently forgot that will definitely slow development down.)
Duh. Google buys in bulk, and all us suckers pay individually. (inter?)Nationalize internet, people.
If only you'd spent half the time RTFA'ing as you did arguing.

The goal is to prevent mental retardation, not create Einsteins. They're measuring success in terms of increase in IQ.

Or are you actually claiming that preventing mental retardation is not important?
Someone failed at math!

Lets say google used 100% of all bandwidth, they would need to pay for 334mil/.165 = 2024.24. Now to calculate the overage: Other peoples share = 44000-2024 = 41976 divide by google payment (2024.24) = 20.7 - magic - the overage number didn't move! Still 21.

Now lets try the reverse.

Say google used 1% of trafic: 334/16.5 = 20.25 - other people will then pay 44000-20.25 = 43980 divide by google cost = 2172, adjust for 1% usage (* .01) = 21.72.

My head asplode - is seems no matter how much google uses they always seem to have an overage of 20 to 22 times as much!

Could it be, no, but could it be that home users pay 21 times too much for bandwidth??

No couldn't be, then this firm "funded by broadband companies" would have to tell it's people to drop prices by 22 times.

Seriously this has to be the stupidest study ever funded. I wonder if the authors of the study put their names on it. They completely ignore the fact that the recipient of the traffic should also pay for it, so lets see how much of that 44bil is home users, adjust for 16% and then we'll see.

Edit: As I thought, the authors did not put their name on it. And to make it stupider the 44bil is consumers bill only! Doesn't include costs paid by any other company!

They are seriously comparing the costs of home users vs the cost of google, and ignoring every other site on the internet! It's like they think the only thing home users do is browse google and nothing else.

At the very least adjust that 44bil by 16% to at least account for that. That would turn the overage into 3 times as much - which would imply that wholesale prices for bandwidth are 3 times cheaper than retail.

Actually ignore that last conclusion - the study is riddled with so many errors I would not want to draw any conclusion whatsoever from it.

Take a look at this little gem:

...[some math]... trucks pay 4 cents/mile, cars pay 1 cent/mile. So "trucks/businesses pay over four times more for their usage of the U.S. Interstate Highway system than cars/consumers do."

Is he brain dead? I mean if you want to compare adjust for the weight of the vehicle, the volume of it, the number of people you could fit in it, something.

But no - just straight compare.

(PS. Damage to roads goes by 4th power of weight. So 3000lb car/2 axles=5.1 * 10^12 of damage, and truck is 34000 per axle=1.3 * 10^18 of damage - so trucks do 254,901 times as much damage to roads as cars do, but they pay just 4 times as much.)

And he testified before congress! Is there some way to tell them he's an idiot?

You have to look at the graph on page 11 - he extrapolates data in such a way that he assumes that by 2012 google will have a 130% share of the video-to-pc market. Yes you read that number right, google will have 30% more share than actually exists. Not sure how they'll manage that.

PS: Someone please register for his site (he - blog author - is the author of the "study") and post this as a comment - I give you copyright permission. Let's see if he'll have the guts to post it.
Awesome.
Well, I live in India , always have.
Born and live in Bangalore, a startuper and love doing exactly that.
In India,
Mumbai means money, Bangalore means power(as in the bay area), Delhi means political power, Kolkata is an intellectual's haven so on and so forth.

I guess we dont have a say in where we are born, but most of us do end up "belong"ing somewhere, like, i will feel completely at home at SF.
You should write about the other cities too.

Divya
Glad that people find the site helpful.
The problem is, "low cost of entry" is just another way of saying "commoditization". Your argument depends on the assumption that because it's cheaper to produce a website than (say) a motherboard, it's therefore going to be easier to create a valuable website. That's wrong.

Ultimately, there's no strategic advantage to be gained by entering an industry where the barrier to entry is so low that everyone can do it. When you're competitor N+1 in a market like that, your only hope is to compete on efficiency (i.e. the Dell model), or novelty (i.e. the Apple model). Otherwise, you're just a guy in a strip mall, selling beige boxes; you might make a living from it, but you're not going to get rich.

In short, don't think of the PC industry -- think of the teriyaki restaurant industry. It's cheap to open a teriyaki joint, and anyone can do it, but unless you're going to serve gourmet teriyaki, or find a way to produce it for less (/shudder/), it's not the place that you want to be as an aspiring entrepreneur.
Antivirus Ware
Found some good coupons, screenshots, and reviews on this Norton download website.
You're right. We need to abolish editing.
Is a transgender social network mature content? seems like it is to me.

The word "mature" in "mature content" is a bit of a puzzle whenever it occurs. Surely most intellectual content is "mature" as opposed to "immature"? A really bad term for a complex concept.
It seems to be slightly short on facts as well:

The study estimated Google used 16.5% of all U.S. consumer Internet traffic in 2008 ...

The study estimated Google’s payment to fund just the U.S. consumer broadband Internet segment to be approximately $344 million in 2008 ...

That's a lot of estimating.
Wakoopa (my company) does this for Windows and Mac apps: http://wakoopa.com
Steve Jobs sleeps like baby after Nokia World
If it is backed against another currency, presumably US dollar, don't you avoid this problem? If you put in USD1 you get out small-town-dollar1.1
'That included fabricating names that included the words Sand Hill, which is the name of a Menlo Park road that is home to the most prominent venture capital firms.

“That’s how he got people to trust him,” Mr. Dicke said.'

awesome.
That's great. Thanks for your help!
You CAN use apt-get to install ruby packages. But it totally totally sucks.

(And as for the Ubuntu thing. I keep around the tarball with the ruby gem source, and have a script that scps, untars, and runs the install script. I have to type in the root password, but thats about it. Its definitely not ideal, but there are worse things ;))
because raising overall intelligence is the only long term solution to the problems of the world.
Get mises.org out of news.YC.
yeah, tax levels are the only thing affecting the economy. wacky interest rates that were eventually disastrous didn't have ANYTHING to do with the first tech bubble, right?
Your assertion was correct but vacuous.

The study you and Warren cite does group alcoholism, drugs, and gambling under medical problems. But, even combined, they form just 3.7% of bankruptcies observed. Even if you threw these out, that wouldn't affect the main conclusions.

http://content.healthaffairs.org/content/vol0/issue2005/imag...

Now, I'm not saying that this study was flawless or Warren's use of it beyond criticism. But the criticism you made was indisputably worthless. It seems to be designed to inflame passions and exploit stereotypes in a few words, and to be difficult to refute without long explanation. You should go on FOX News.

Or perhaps you did not read the study, as you advised me to do, but merely quoted someone else's critique? If so, I suggest that you re-evaluate your sources.
1. you want http://zoneedit.com/ Free for the first 5 domains.

2. Virtualhosts. Either your app looks at the Host: header or you use different static html/css to skin the landing page.
If you want to help, here's the Canadian non-profit he talks about:

http://www.micronutrient.org/english/view.asp?x=1
If the title doesn't ring any bells (it didn't for me):
... He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. ... As a participant in hundreds of studies, he helped scientists understand the biology of learning, memory and physical dexterity, as well as the fragile nature of human identity.
Why is this even controversial?

Fetuses, babies, and children need certain nutrients to grow healthy. Vitamin A, Zinc, Iron, Folic Acid, etc.. Iodine has to do with good brain development, vit A with eyes (among other things), etc.

What's the problem? It's elitist and western to think that people should have a chance to grow up healthy? And to think that this will lead to better outcomes on average?
you could try using Google friend connect launched recently. Definitely adds viral functionality as people can invite their friends and you can push their activities on your site to open social containers to which they belong. For example id love if you could push my reviews on your site as my updates on Orkut (sorry am from india not a big FB fam:))
That makes it illegal.
Free Wifi - Death to America
Yea slashdot has no editing and it works well
Maybe we're just seeing a buffer being flushed. He may have worked on all this stuff earlier.
Thanks, Henry. We wouldn't be where we are today without you. You were an anonymous legend if there ever was one.
Brain Workshop : a free open-source version of the Dual N-Back mental exercise
I watched 8 min of the first video in there. Lot of abstract talk and nothing credible. Anyone who can provide a gist?

why is Scoble going gaga around this yet not fund it himself.
Also, H.M. is the main scientific basis for the movie Memento.