skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I worked for a company a couple of years ago that was planning to public in a year or two. The CEO told us that complying with SOX would cost $3 million for the IPO and over $1 million per year after that. That's a huge burden for a company with revenues of $35 million at the time. I have read that it is now $5 million for an IPO and that no company with revenues under $100 million can afford to be public. Malone says that there were 6 high tech IPOs in 2008 compared with 269 in 1999, similar numbers in earlier years.

The failure of IPOs isn't going to affect entrepreneurship, but it could well affect VC funding because it eliminates their primary exit strategy.

Malone does have a point about the FSAB. Treating options as an expense does make them less attractive to public companies, but it was an attempt to correct some egregious excesses. As usual, slap the big guys and hurt the little guys. Mark to market is an attempt to keep companies from hiding their investment losses in bookkeeping. The downside is that it makes their net worth much more volatile. AIG was a blivet in any case.

Cutting capital gains was good. Giving Reagan credit for the boom of the 90s is pure BS.

Cut the WSJ some slack. This was an op ed piece from an outsider. Malone used to be a San Jose Mercury News Reporter. He usually has something useful to say and he has the interests of the developer/entrepreneurial community at heart.
I know, but there are more numbers than real things, or at least maybe they do. Perhaps numbers fail only in extremely large regions that we don't perceive in everyday life. (Unlikely I know, just nitpicking really).
Just the first link I found on Google but: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v4/N2/ARNOLD.ht...

It's not that they do poorly but they are under represented when compared to others of similar intelligence when you look at CEO's and other top positions.

PS: Find the number of US precedents that where valedictorians in high school.
Stop Lying and Start Creating
Thanks for the follow up. I'll stress again, I'm not implying there are any hard/fast rules as you can see from the comments I've made here. If I have set the wrong impression, my apologies.

We all know here that being an entrepreneur is more like art than science. There is no one true way. Something which worked for someone in one instance may not work for you even if by rationale it makes sense and all the stars are aligned.
Madoff Feeder Fund Claimed to Monitor Madoff Carefully
Ask YC: What's the best way and place to start freelancing?
Hi,
I am planning to start freelance coding but don't have an idea which is the best place and best way to start. Any help towards this will be great.
Reality is a scary word.

Are there negative numbers? Zero? Imaginary unit?

There were times when people even didn't know a concept of zero.

A concept of infinity is really useful and it is used almost everywhere.
I think it's more of an issue with city growth and layout.

The biggest issue that mass transportation faces in American cities is sprawl. Subways/buses/etc work great in New York and Chicago because they are far more compacted and urban than Houston or LA.

I live in Phoenix, and there's been a great deal of hoopla surrounding the newly launched light rail system, but they'll be lucky if it serves > 1% of the population. Buses are underused here as well, since they have so much ground to cover. For my last job, the bus would have taken over 2 hours and 3 changes, as opposed to a 30 minute drive.
All the top Math news
I'm still hoping someone will release a solid SVG renderer written in Flash or Flex. There are a few projects that are most of the way there, but it would be really neat to have a feature complete one for SVG Tiny which allowed you to reliably render SVG graphics in IE.
This. Or maybe find a way to grab the page <title> from the target URL and create a separate column with the appropriate information.

Otherwise, nifty little app.
I know. It was a joke. Plus, it irks me that people omit the "D.C.", because it always confuses me for a few seconds.
I don't know if I agree with this. Basically, the argument is that you should borrow money before borrowing becomes difficult. The problem is that it isn't so easy. Heck, if we all knew that the stock market was going to slump in the summer/fall, we would have sold in the spring and bought back in. We didn't know. Most of the best investors didn't know. The chance that a start-up CEO will know is probably nil.

You aren't a financial genius as a tech CEO. Doesn't mean you aren't smart, but it isn't your field. You're just as likely (if not more) to be wrong than right. Even people who make their living this way were almost all wrong this time.

Live frugally, save money, and make plans for rainy days.
The ability to not suck it up when you think it's definetely pointless is a great ability to have. It's what pushes some of us to choose challenging jobs or to go and create our own company.

There are sometimes when you have to do work that you don't like and you just have to suck it up and do it, but it's much easier and rewarding when this job is useful (example, researching a lot to finally decide which type of structure you'll incorporate with.
Does it really mean that a theory can't be found or just like with "everything else", we can only be 99.99999999% sure and never reach 100%?
Does it necessarily mean that the imcompleteness theorem extends to all systems?
The article linked somewhere else in this thread:
http://www.ams.org/notices/200604/fea-franzen.pdf
seems to say that it doesn't extend to other "systems".
Can anyone tell me what new features can still be added to jquery? It looks pretty feature complete to me.

I wish they focused more on jquery-ui, as I find that a bit lacking at the moment.
This is one of Malone's more polemical pieces, and I imagine here he is willing to sacrifice some local nuances to appeal to a wider, non-SV audience. I think his overall argument is correct - we would see more IPOs if SOX were abolished, or at least reformed. From an editorial perspective, I think he should have included the comments of a CEO ala ohhmaagawd - Malone is certainly networked enough to do so.
Unfortunately it is more about who you know than what you know.

So start networking...
Mumford’s treasure map
Right.

While I understand the idea that Matt is trying to convey here (and agree that a dying/inherently boring genre as slasher horror was a poor choice to christen this idea on), I think he's going about it from the wrong angle entirely. One bad movie does not negate the utility, and overreaching novelty of crowdsourcing a movie.

That, and I think

Letting a gas station employee play director is perhaps less dangerous than letting him be a thoracic surgeon, but it’s no more likely to achieve a good result.

Is a wholly inappropriate thing to say, given the ultimate goal of this entire project: do what has never before been done in this spectrum of entertainment and produce a complete movie. That's an especially tough pill to swallow if you haven't seen the movie, or met the director. (actually, it's an inappropriate thing to say even if you put aside the fact that they're making a movie. That's needlessly harsh)
The difference amounts to how much time they have to waste. I didn't care about grades 'till grade 12. From 9 to 11 my grades hovered around 65% to 75%. I didn't do any homework, besides the obviously mandatory huge projects/group work. As soon as Grade 12 hit and the universities were watching I studied every night and got mid 90s. Best decision I ever made. I learned VB & SQL during that time, some electronics, so mechanics, worked as a programmer found out I hated it. All vastly more useful than a 92% in grade 9 drama or art.
We aren't really talking about the features of this release, yet, since we want people to focus on testing (to make sure we didn't break anything). But here's a rough breakdown of the code that's in:

New Selector Engine (Sizzle: http://github.com/jeresig/sizzle/tree/master). Much faster than previous engine, going to be in many of the major libraries.

No more browser sniffing (currently being discussed here: http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/7l2mr/jquery_re...).

.closest() method - extremely useful for event delegation.

// Returns this or closest ancestor that matches selector
$(this).closest("div");

.live() - Super-simple event delegation.

// Will handle clicks on all elements that match selector
// even if new ones are added later
$("#foo > div").live("click", someFn);

.offset() rewrite - significantly faster, uses no browser sniffing.

.hide()/.show() rewrite - 50% - 200% faster.

.append/prepend/before/after rewrite - 10-15x faster.

While the biggest feature of this release is performance, the new event delegation methods are going to be super-useful.

As to jQuery UI - there are multiple teams within the jQuery project - the core jQuery team works on the jQuery library and the jQuery UI team works on jQuery UI. In their last update (about a week ago) the UI team said that UI 1.6 final was going to be out before the end of the month.
This is fun because before doing a startup I was an auditor at Deloitte and then worked in transactions services. It's good to be out. :)

Great points Ryan...just wanted to add a few things:

1. This is mostly true. Going public can add 5 MM - 20 MM in overhead easy...let alone all the additional TPS reports and devoted man hours to bureaucracy. Also, it's significantly harder for companies that are bleeding money to go public; it didn't used to be, which is good and bad.

2. Agreed. Seriously, fuck going public. Going public is for companies who are not profitable, desperately need liquidity (e.g. Google) or capital. You can issue dividends, institute profit sharing programs and even have internal company stock exchanges without being a public company.

3. Just wanted to add that raising capital includes making the company liquid so people can cash out. Private equity firms and some tech shops that went public are a good example.
Almost all people use mathematics where "Axiom of Choice" is set to be true. It is grossly-unusual to consider systems without that axiom.

If you are not a mathematician chances are you've never encountered a system based on axioms without "Axiom of Choice" (for systems where it is applicable at all).
Evolution of microprocessors (with images)
Would you consider adding something like .live() for CSS? (Or maybe it already does that.)
"they couldn’t even afford the narrator with the really deep voice that everyone else uses"

That's because he's dead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_LaFontaine
I agree it's "grossly-unphysical", but you can do hardly any math without it. Now try to do physics (or computer science) without math.
Do you have a source of the pre-SOX company IPOs vs post-SOX company IPOs? I'm more curious than anything. SOX didn't just eliminate fluff it eliminated many profitable companies who don't have the earnings and market size to justify going public. This is fine by me - going public is overrated anyway.

The companies that are too immature to do SOX just simply don't deserve to IPO.

It has very little to do with maturity. Just like the Patriot Act, SOX was an overreaction. It adds layers & layers of red tape & costs (even if it has "worked", which I don't know one way or the other). While it has certainly weeded out some bad companies, it's discouraged some good companies from going public as well.
Designing Classics iPhone app
Or they issue dividends :).

What's wrong with having fewer public companies?
I'm really happy with these recent upgrades. Especially in regards to event delegation, not having an effective baked in solution for event delegation was one of my biggest complaints about the previous releases.
I'd like a more expansive AJAX API that is capable of handling HTTP headers.
Unfortunately it's not as simple as it is with events. With events you have the advantage of binding to a single point (e.g. the document node) and using the native event bubbling that exists in all browsers to capture any event that occurs on the page. This way we can detect a click on a new DOM element that we haven't seen before.

We don't have that luxury with CSS. There's no universal way for all browsers to let JavaScript know when a new element has been added to the page - or that it's been moved. There's the W3C DOM mutation events but they aren't implemented everywhere.

More info: http://www.w3.org/TR/DOM-Level-2-Events/events.html#Events-e...
"The code is expected to be brought into the fold of the publicly available Android source code over the next few weeks."

Google is doing Open Source wrong.
I think ESXi server and VMware Infrastructure are both "bare-metal" but I don't use their tools so I don't really know.
Young people in the UK seem less bothered about passing their driving test at 17 - university is ahead of them, so there is no point putting money into a car - I went down this route, and am now 27 and still don't drive, and cannot see this changing unless it becomes essential to work or family. The roads are so congested where I live that the car is no longer a symbol of freedom like it had been for my parents.
Have a snack every couple hours and drink lots of water.
congrats, posterous!
What? I thought you could just edit the stylesheet object.

Thanks for your quick response.
Are you pro-deregulation?

yes.

"We hold that all individuals have the right to exercise sole dominion over their own lives, and have the right to live in whatever manner they choose, so long as they do not forcibly interfere with the equal right of others to live in whatever manner they choose.

Governments throughout history have regularly operated on the opposite principle, that the State has the right to dispose of the lives of individuals and the fruits of their labor. Even within the United States, all political parties other than our own grant to government the right to regulate the lives of individuals and seize the fruits of their labor without their consent."

from http://www.lp.org/platform
Is there any difference between your thinking and less intelligent people besides just being able to "get it" faster? Based on the link you give, I'm curious whether IQ isn't just a quantitative metric but perhaps also qualitative. Like, past a certain level high IQ people have a different kind of mental capability.

Also, do you meet more people than you would statistically expect who are around your level? Another interesting claim the article makes is some researchers say there are more exceptionally gifted people than their statistical distribution would predict. Since the IQ metric is based on assuming a normal distribution in the population, such a result would mean IQ scores are not accurate.
It was conceived at the worst possible time (after Enron, Worldcom, etc); it was bound to be a failure. There's a reason why it's not wise to go shopping hungry. I agree, though, the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
I'm not a big fonts person, but when I found Bitsteam Vera Sans Mono I knew I loved it:

http://img376.imageshack.us/img376/1897/picture68gr5.png

It just looks fantastic to me — I simply don't get the attraction to fonts which look like they came directly from a 1970's typewriter! :)

(good anti-aliasing on OSX helps too...)
Massive scrape of the Twitter friend graph
For men, Reddit t-shirts would probably mean adverse selection.
Keep the company private and cash their dividend checks for millions.

Yes! I wish more people talked about this. Especially with the tax benefits, issuing dividends is the way to go.
AIG was killed because they were run by amateurs who didn't know what they were doing. See also: Ford, GM, Chrysler, Lehman Brothers, etc.

It's very unfortunate that they brought down a lot of other people along with them.
"capable of handling HTTP headers" - can you expand on this a bit?

Right now you can set HTTP headers in jQuery like so:

$.ajax({
beforeSend: function(xhr){
xhr.setRequestHeader("Accept","application/json");
},
... other options ...
});

More info:
http://docs.jquery.com/Ajax/jQuery.ajax#options
> Also: without porn, where would the internet be?

In church?
This is anecdotal, but I've never heard someone say they would or wouldn't start a company because of the after-tax returns.

Cuban talks about this point here:

http://blogmaverick.com/2008/10/23/the-cure-to-our-economic-...
As best I can tell:

Point 1) Normal people (people you and I know but aren't) buy iPhones because they're "cool", or they look neat, or they are known to be easy to use.

Point 2) There is essentially no competition on all three of the attributes in #1 -- every competitor falls down in at least one major way: The Series 60 brand is in too many devices for any one of them to have substantial mindshare, Windows mobile is a kludgy UI mess, the Blackberry browser is atrocious, Android is still too boutique, etc. Apple has a clear story anyone can understand: "Buy our [one] phone. You can use [all of] the features it has." Nobody else can really say that.

Point 3) As neat as the App Store is, it's a geek/gee whiz feature. The iPhone sold incredibly well with 1.0 software, and the app store seemed almost like a grudging concession to geeks (remember "the browser is great! you should just use web apps!"? ). People that buy iPhones go "oh, that's cool too" and buy $0.99 applications that show glasses of beer that tip when the phone is rotated -- things that are not reasons to buy or not buy a phone. The app store isn't key to the iPhone story.

Point 4) Apple would get a lot of bad (general) press for certain categories of application, but will only get a negligible amount of bad technical press for swatting applications, even arbitrarily. Of that bad technical press, half of the people will write it off as Apple haters having their way, regardless of the merits.

Point 5) Sometimes it's hard to see the world-changing effects of an application. It's easy to imagine how an application might jeapordize #1 or #2.

Point 4 authorizes heavy moderating. Points 1 and 2 serve to protect Apple's top line revenue from same. Point 5 supports capricious moderating. Point 3 isn't enough to prevent them from doing so.

Until there's real, compelling competition (meaning at the OS level, point 1, and at the device level, point 2), I would expect this to continue.
That reminds of these paintings, "designed" by committee: http://www.diacenter.org/km/painting.html

Everyone likes each individual element, but in concert they produce (hilariously) awful artwork.
Its interesting that Rosenberg focuses on the self-funded model only for what he calls "ecosystem" startups. I disagree that the issue is risk in that way that he describes -- i.e. that Facebook or Apple could theoretically crush these companies quickly. Instead, I think the issue is more that the platform itself is unstable. Particularly with a limited platform like Facebook, nobody really knows if these apps will be profitable in 5 years, and even then, what the growth of an "app within an app" will be. Since VC's are generally interested in the big payouts, it always seemed to me like funding Facebook app companies was largely outside the VC domain.

That said, I generally agree with the big picture about self-funding -- its pretty much in line with what PG said in the recent essay about VCs in this recession.
Since SOX has all this overhead, I wonder if there's an opportunity for a startup focused on reducing it.
You think not having SOX outweighs all the other hurdles associated with doing a startup in China? Like say, communism?
Well, we could certainly inject new stylesheet rules but that's bound to cause problems since we're at the mercy of the browser CSS engines. I suspect that most jQuery users enjoy writing selectors like "div:first > span" which will be completely null-and-void once we step out of our protected JavaScript garden. Since we can't get full API compatibility it really makes the prospect not very exciting for us.
‘Bush Shoe’ Gives Firm a Footing in the Market
stock jockies lead to the first bubble?
and the fed drastically cutting the lending rate in 1995 had nothing to do with an expansion of the money supply?
Well it used to be for raising large amounts of capital (even for unprofitable companies). This is apparently no longer the case.
Here's an IPO table covering 1980-2008:

http://bear.cba.ufl.edu/ritter/IPOs2008VC.pdf

Interesting to see that 2004-2007 there were over 150 IPOs. 2008 has just 20, roughly half venture backed.
Indie game made by 2 people out-selling Spore, Left 4 Dead, & Fallout 3 at Amazon
If you are in a country where cost of living is low, then elance.com and other similar sites are an option. Competition there is extremely fierce, don't get into underbidding wars.
Much better would be to work on projects where you do get some face time with the client.
Trolling To Win: Can trolling work better than asking for help?
Good writers develop through practice. If crowdsourced films gives aspiring writers the opportunity to practice their craft, then there is some justification alone in that.
It's also the case that not wanting to kowtow to investors is a valid reason for bootstrapping. It's why we switched to bootstrapping a few weeks into talking to VC --- the VC pitches were fucking up our product plan.
view more information gives an warning.

Warning: mysql_fetch_array(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL result resource in /home/.dodi/jamesgarrett/malicelabs.com/linkalyzer/get_urlstats3.php on line 7

more warnings follow
Yum, I'm glad .live() is in the core.
Tell HN: Quickbooks is practically free only today (12/22/08)
Thought I'd pass this along to the startup community. Intuit is running a promotion with Staples that gives Quickbooks pro away practically for free.

http://www.staples.com/office/supplies/p1__246612_Business_Supplies_10051_SEARCH
Speaking as a single workaholic entrepreneur, I can safely say that without porn, I would not be able to function in my job.
Don't Idealize Regulators
There's actually a few of these guys, but LaFontaine was the best (and some only do Disney fare)

http://www.collegehumor.com/video:1633395
Concentration of wealth and less efficient capital markets.

There's really nothing wrong with it from most entrepreneurs' POV: they build something people want, they get paid for it.

The problems occur at the margins: the businesses that could be started with enough outside capital but can't be bootstrapped off initial cash flows, or the small investors that are perfectly capable of doing due diligence on companies but are banned from investing because all the attractive investment targets are private. It's really an opportunity cost issue: things work okay, nobody gets visibly screwed over, but all sorts of little transactions that would make life better for everyone never take place.
Thanks for the link.

M&A has taken a blow too (article is slightly dated):

http://www.americanbanker.com/usb_article.html?id=20080325E4...
I'm not sure about adverse selection, but a reddit t-shirt on a guy would not stand out much at all. If I were a single guy, it would definitely peak my curiosity.
Perhaps the movie can come out before crapping all over it?
IPhone App Developer Strikes E-Book Deals With Major Publishers
Mmm.. jQuery makes me giddy. This week, I wondered if something akin to jQuery but running server-side would be useful. (Modifying the DOM before it hits the client.)