skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I wonder if he miscontrues the motive. Sure every VC wants to fund the next Google, Facebook, or even Instagram because like anyone rational they would like to get an insane return on their money.

And some of them will listen until you clearly aren't such a business and then tune you out.

But how is that any different from a developer who wants to be a kernel engineer and won't listen to any job offers for doing database development or network programming Etc? Sure it could be just as rewarding, and they could learn just as much. But at the end of the day, somewhere in their brain, they have this bit set that their self image is tied up with being a "kernel developer" not "the guy who built a mySQL killer."

The cautionary tale is to try to look at things that you internally value rather than things you think you should value.

A short anecdote; When I got my first stock in Sun Microsystems as part of the employee purchase program it just sat there. My advisor suggested, as most do, that I diversify a bit (We were talking something like 150 shares so it wasn't a big position :-). Anyway, they explained that investing in stocks that suddenly doubled, tripled, or quintupled in price was thrilling and sexy, but ultimately unpredictable. Whereas investing in stocks that moved up 5 - 15% and then selling them and investing in something else that moved up a few percent. Was like a ratchet. You took $1,000 and each month you tried to add 3 - 5% to it. That grew your investment slowly but surely. Not as sexy but a better long term strategy.

EDIT: To be more clear, the strategy my advisor uses is to make a number of small investments shooting for growth in each of them. That doesn't always pan out but having a number of bets in the pool gives a better over all return than a single big bet (which is what I was trying to communicate), getting 80% return on something is great, but 80% return on 1% of the total portfolio means it contributes .8% to the overall gain.
Whats up with the error "We've temporarily limited requests for old items"
I really want to read through old articles but cannot do it.
Super excited to be an nReduce mentor. The "cloud accelerator" idea is awesome, and the ability to get on-demand mentorship for any field is really compelling. Cheers to Joe for working his butt off to put this together.
App.net Says The Future Is Paid
Going public wasn't required by their investor count, but they would have had to have audited financials, so the benefits of remaining private would have been reduced anyway:

http://www.quora.com/Why-does-Facebook-need-to-go-public
One other possibility is to hack the computers running Silk Road itself. It's a rather high value target, so I'd be surprised if they didn't try. They could also order drugs from it in order to find out how they were being packaged and alert customs to any new techniques. In fact, there are quite a lot of things they could do, none of which require compromising TOR or Bitcoin.
>Apparently youtube is banned on HN

Good!
The nReduce program has been really great for my team so far.
I think the reason the word "startup" is thrown around so much isn't only because its fashionable. "Startup" has come to encompass a whole bunch of different notions (project, feature, app etc), and the only thing that is consistent with everyone's own definition of the word is user-facing.

User-facing is not a business.
One sales book I read, and found quite interesting:

The Greatest Salesman in the World

by Og Mandino.
Exactly. I wanted to be a startup CEO for a while until I worked at an 8 person startup and saw just how much effort they put into it. Now I'm not so sure, at least not right now in my life.
My understanding is that they can claim any amount of damages they want, but won't necessarily be awarded the claimed amount; and that their business model is based on people settling rather than on winning in court.

If this change was made, would there be a shortcut whereby the defendants could simply lose and have to pay close-to-zero damages, or would they still have to choose between "defending themselves in court", "settling" and "paying the claimed damages"?
Hmm, at 3%/mo, your opinions of what count as "slow but sure" are a good deal less slow than mine!

So... um... what did you say your adviser's name was again?
The advantage of the web is that you are browsing the documents themselves rather than som structure hiding them. Since these documents link to each other you do not have to remember folds structures but simply click.
this is a link to a person saying i like YUI because it has a gallery and modules, oh and zillow uses it. case closed!

i like the internet because it has cats. it's better than phones, which traditionally had no cats.
The Olympics Unpeeled
Yes it is! We can change everything , just the problem with social icons alignment that we really can't solve.
This might sound pedantic, but I get tired of people referring to "GPS" as a mobile GPS naviation app. GPS refers to the entire system of satellites and ground stations. From this system, one can build applications on top of a GPS receiver, which provides the position. So yes, the patent troll doesn't own the satellites and ground stations.
Fear and uncertainty? The company that provides fairly clear blog posts, comments, changelogs and EOL guidance for its many of its products?

Goog has made a commitment for at least 7 years on this project which is great for a capital intensive project. This is a long term bet that has tons of potential for both the company and the ecosystem. Google has always been particularly good at building reference models that they are in many cases happy with everyone else copying. Look at Gmail, Chrome, Android, Maps and the features they helped create or popularize. Fiber is another example of what Google thinks is a good idea and one that they think you'll agree with.

In the end Google doesnt care who you get a gigabit connection from they just want everyone to have one. The KC network is just an example they want people to copy.
No, it really does have a lot to do with religious beliefs and institutions because those are examples of the kinds of social communities which define marriage and the kinds of institutions which carry traditional culture. Traditional cultures are where the idea of marriage comes from and cultural communities are what give it any meaning.

That doesn't mean all traditional ideas of marriage have been the same, they haven't (any more than cultural ideas of homosexuality or gender-bending have been the same). That doesn't mean you aren't free to choose or make your own religion. but doing so doesn't remove the historical context and social meaning of "marriage."

Having me use a certain terminology with regard to your relationship (let alone believe certain things about your relationship) is NOT your civil right.

It isn't the government's business to provide financial incentives for "marriage" either.

You should be able to have any person you want to visit you in the hospital, however. Could be your horse trainer, why should it matter?
Right now the biggest value nReduce has provided my startup has been motivation--7 weeks in a row I've shipped new features or improvements to my startup (http://Thetaboard.com).

Coming up fast (and soon to eclipse) in importance is the virtual feedback/community the program provides. The weekly advice on specific items and general conversations about direction/business model/strategy is awesome.

I'm in Ireland but booking a ticket tomorrow to visit the nReduce team and my nReduce group members in Manchester next month. Anyway, the program is evolving and I think may end up being a real bonus for young/aspiring startups.
This is what I am doing and it is attracting work for me. My website has been up less than 2 weeks and I've already started building an app for my first client.

My site is just a WordPress blog with pages for my Google Play store, LinkedIn profile and a Contact Me form.
Check it out - jamesjguthrie.com
15 Things I Wish I'd Known Before Starting My First Company
>It seems like some people just want the founder title so they can broadcast to their LinkedIn network and impress people.

Unless you have VC? nobody but your mom is impressed by the 'founder' title. If this "start companies to create features and get a really big hiring bonus" phenomena is a problem, it's the fault of the VC (and the companies that hire through acquisition.)

I mean, personally, I think it's a ridiculously inefficient way to hire, but hiring is hard, so maybe it's better than what companies can do on their own? (I think it's a horrible way to hire because the best founders often don't make the best employees, and vis-a-vis.)

Meh, my point of view? things are hot right now, if you are an Engineer. Take advantage of it. Gain experience and/or money. If the highest paying gig you can get is taking money from a VC? who am I to tell you that is the wrong thing to do?

I mean, clearly it's not sustainable... but really, what economic upswing is?
I must say, this is at least as accurate as Klout! Let me down easy on my intelligence next time, but it's good to know I'm so attractive! http://quibird.com/MrSpandex
Those are what its advantages were. Now its main advantages seem to be: (1) Omnipresence and (2) Easy to migrate from a static site (I missed that one in my prior comment, and it's an important one - thanks!). All the others are relative to the environment of its birth, rather than today's environment.

Today we have choices other than Perl, C, and PHP - and many of those choices are free and Free and have great docs and large healthy communities and have languages and libraries with a better design. When people get good enough at programming to understand why global variables are bad, they should generally not be choosing PHP for new projects unless they need one of the above two features.
- We are going to make money in the future providing services to investors / service providers.
That is all being prototyped and will be shaped in the next few months. But the main thing is that we will never charge startups / take equity.

- We are not a gate keeper. Meaning we don't say which projects get in.

The real filter is whether other teams will want to collaborate with you. If you have a small project and are not engaged you may have difficulty connecting with great teams. Or you could also just connect (build a group of other startups) with other part time people.

So in summary, any project can join. And for the most part if you are working consistently and help out the other teams in your group, you should have a great experience.
> It's human nature to see the future in a bleak manner. I don't know why this is.

I got a different impression - they were either very pessimistic about the future, or unrealistically optimistic. Either a dystopia or a utopia. I suspect that this is because both of these viewpoints were interesting. The most boring viewpoint would be mediocrity, especially to science fiction writers. Yet, mediocrity is probably the best bet for the future. Some things will get better, others worse, human nature will stay the same as it's always been, and barring catastrophes like worldwide nuclear war, life will go on.
Pacifying the superstitious is a very good reason, a perfect reason. Because it is creating a huge fight over nothing that will never end.

There is no reason for the state to name anything "marriage" or give any special recognition to the concept.
Absolutely true. That's a great quote.
Microsoft Has a Death Wish
Almost certainly true. I doubt the Sparrow developers were deliberately misusing the libraries (which LGPL code was used, btw?). It's just that packaging and shipping a relinkable binary was way, way down the priority list and they probably just never got around to it.

But for a big corporation with an established IP policy, that's a big no-no.
This patent appears to more or less very specifically claim Foursquare.
I would strongly contest that statistic you came up with. Please provide a source for it.
While I appreciate that you don't think that gay marriage is illegal, I am not sure if I understand your basis of accepting a compromise.
I wanted to start this exact company. When I learned about Vayable I was a little disappointed. But I hope they succeed because this idea done right is something the world needs.

Anyone who has overpaid for a Kilimanjaro hike, a Serengeti safari, a Rajasthan camel trek, a driver and guide in Mongolia or had any of the thousands of other opportunities to pay 4x as much for half the experience knows this. I hope they really focus on connecting local guides and tourists rather than just become a marketplace for overpriced mega tour groups.

Most of the best guides don't know how or can't market themselves, especially online. Most potential travelers don't know where to start to find them or don't trust themselves to find the right one.

So best of luck to Vayable and please make sure to make it a service that empowers locals and doesn't circumvent them.
Nice site!

Here is something I threw together. Maybe you can try a split test?

http://i.imgur.com/N6fEk.jpg

The problem I had when I visited your site was I could not quite understand what the product was about. I was not convinced enough to provide my email and expect a positive result.

Use the video to tell us what you are building, what it does (will do) and/or how awesome the team building it is. Bring the product to life!

Hope that helps some!
Love the idea behind nReduce. We (Fogbeam Labs) will probably look to participate in the future. The initial opening was really bad timing for us, but down the road should be an option.

No, it's not the same thing as YC, but that's OK. Support is support and everything counts in it's own way. The one thing I realize more and more with every passing day is that this is hard. After the 10th time that somebody declines to return your email, or answer your phone call, after someone blows off a planned appointment with you for the 4th time (after 3 previous reschedules), when you get off work at the $DAYJOB and trudge home on sore feet to crawl upstairs and hack for another 4, 5, 6 hours, when you wake up on < 8 hours of sleep day after day after day, and when you fly from Chicago to RDU for the 4th time in a month so you can be home to meet your cofounders to hack a few hours.... you realize that this is no joke. Making a startup go takes some fucking serious hard work and sacrifice.

So yeah, if a group of people from a virtual incubator (or even something like Startup Guild, or the local Hackers & Founders meetup) do nothing but provide support, encouragement and the occasional "attaboy", that can be huge.

and now to go listen to 'Til I Collapse for the umpteenth time... :-)

'Cause sometimes you just feel tired,

Feel weak, and when you feel weak, you feel like you wanna just give up.

But you gotta search within you, you gotta find that inner strength

And just pull that shit out of you and get that motivation to not give up

And not be a quitter, no matter how bad you wanna just fall flat on your face and collapse.
totally agree with you. One major point of that article was that, had Facebook IPO'd sooner, it would have been better off with the discipline that comes with being a public company. Baloney. I can think of a ton of companies that have manipulated their way under the watchful gaze of Wall Street. this follow up post makes some great counter points:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomiogeron/2012/07/27/post-ipo-f...
Thanks Tyler! This has really been a team effort! Josh and Team Lizi all make this possible. Looking forward to meeting up in NY.
Skip ads on YouTube (Video Ads)
Well...Facebook's IPO valuation was about 100 billion US dollars. So if Facebook generates 100 billion dollars in profits throughout its history, inflation-adjusted, IPO investors who hold onto their shares will get their money back. Otherwise, their gamble will not have paid off. There won't necessarily have to be any fools anywhere.
Pro tip: Stay as far away from YUI as you can. YUI is painful to work with. Even after the changes that were done in the YUI3.x releases, it's still a nightmare. Syntax is awful and all of the various components you have to configure together are just more levels of bloat than you need.

People use jQuery + <insert other js frameworks> because they work better, are easier to use, are lightweight, and don't trap you into using the entire monolithic package that is offered by YUI.
>Also, it's hard to change a complicated system in a way that doesn't break it further (as most hackers can attest)

So what you're saying is we need to apply BDD to our legal system?

describe PatentLaw
context "a patent troll with a super obvious patent"
subject { PatentTroll.new(patents) }
let(:patents) { [mock(:bullshit => true)] }
it { should be_laughed.out_of(:court) }
end
end
Great, thanks for the responses. I'll definitely take a look. I've been wanting to put together a mastermind of other micropreneurial people for a while...this might fill the role perfectly.

Best of luck!
Do you guys find that some of the investors you are talking to are interested in companies outside of the US?

For instance, there are some famous VCs (A16Z come to mind) that only want action in US-based companies.

How are you guys tackling this issue?
Assuming you already know jQuery (since most everyone who works with js does), what benefit is there to learning YUI over the jQuery based frameworks? It seems like you would have to learn something new and complex anyway.
The difference with the housing bubble is you can't walk away from your college debt by just filing bankruptcy.
Why wouldn't they focus on that? It allows them to control the market for profit and so it's in their financial interests to control distribution as much as possible.

Just as its in everyone else's interest to make them unable to do so (and that includes the artist's interest).
Presumably not for native app testing though...
I don't think you responded to the right thread. And if you did, could you please expound on what you said, because it doesn't look like you groked the article
As with most things, hard goods require moving through meat space to get from seller to buyer. Having followed the laments of law enforcement officers (LEOs) from the bad old days when we joked you couldn't legally be deported if you had the source code to RSA tattooed on your skin, to today. The lament is more about 'costs' and less about 'effectiveness.'

None of the security work that protects civil liberties makes it 'impossible' for LEO's to do their job, it just keeps it more expensive. The debate over GPS trackers, where the FBI claims they should be allowed since they could also just follow them around in a car makes this point boldly. Then just follow them around. Is the correct response, not "Here is a way to make the economics of liberty impairment work in your favor."
There are a lot of js frameworks out there. YUI is good, maybe take a look at it, but why stop at YUI? Go oldschool with prototype, check out dojo, look at some bleeding-edge stuff like meteor. They're all worth looking at, and trying out one or two for a small project.
I don't have a 'LinkedIn' URL and have no desire to create a profile.

Why are you guys insisting on having a LinkedIn URL?

That's very annoying.
"6. I think the part that's hard to scale is the notification."

Why not email (SMTP/IMAP)? Deployed, standardized, widely supported.
Sparrow binaries + code available for download
> the serendipitous connections that I made by being mixed in with a bunch of smart people who like to tinker.

You're lucky - some colleges have that atmosphere, and many do not. At 18 I certainly wasn't capable of picking that sort of environment on purpose, and no one around me knew how to advise me. So I tried a few different colleges, and didn't find anything that I cared about, and just started working instead.

Fortunately there are other places to meet those communities of people. Sometimes you'll go to an event and half of them went to college together - at MIT or Reed or Grinnell or Bard or UC Berkeley or Mudd or some other random place (most of which I had never heard of when I was looking at colleges). But the other half are just random people like me, who jumped into this culture at age 23 or 30 or whatever. And the handfull of years that they knew each-other way back when matter less and less over time.
Apple doesn't prohibit GPL. It's the other way around, GPL prohibits certain aspects of the App Store distribution model (I forget precisely what). In any case, this is LGPL, not GPL.
I'm pretty sure it's been the main conduit for viruses for a while now.
Is the author using "vs" as a synonym for "Against" in the headline?

The two expressions cannot be used interchangeably.

"X vs Y" seems to require that X and Y be "of the same type", whatever that means.

"X against Y" has no such restrictions.

When I read this headline, I come away thinking that there is some product with the proper name "The Case".
let's call it Wintter
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncertainty_and_doubt
No.
The LGPL requires you release them, it does not require you release them under the LGPL.
Both Android and this move are as much motivated by defensive interests as anything else.
I have changed some details as you said about the text sizes, can you have a look, do you think is it better now?
"Yes, it has" is not a very good citation.

The evidence of human diets spans millennia, including pre-humans and early human populations. There are a very few bits of evidence of isolated populations eating what could be called a "paleo diet" by modern definitions (with a lot more bugs and grubs and nasty stuff like brains and organs from rats), but on the whole, humans have always been omnivores, eating anything remotely edible within their grasp, including mammals, reptiles, plants, fish, insects, fungus...if an alien landed during early human times, they'd have probably tried to eat it, too. But, most populations in most places were eating plenty of plant matter, including grains, and some of the oldest food evidence we have includes grains.

The idea that the early human diet was nearly all meat is a highly selective reading of the evidence; picking and choosing from only those populations in those locations where meat was the only available food source. I don't want to attack your deeply felt beliefs, as you seem to have a personal investment in the paleo cult, but it's simply not borne out by science.

Also, I strongly recommend not taking ones anthropology lessons from fad diet book authors.

Citations:

http://www.nature.com/news/2010/101018/full/news.2010.549.ht...

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2009/12/17/...

And a fun discussion of the woo factor of the "paleo diet":

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Paleo_diet

Note that I'm not arguing that people should be consuming a bunch of white bread and refined sugar. Knowing the paleo diet is based on junk science doesn't mean I think the modern first world diet is sane.
I like this part: "And so you have a whole generation of people building startups who have been taught to make bullshit."
A 40% to 80% yearly return is not slow, and there is no risk free way to invest in such companies.
I'm not familiar with PVRTC, unfortunately. Here's one of the better articles I could find:

http://www.kihongames.com/blog/labs/2011/04/labs-pvrtc-power...

Some highlights from the article:

- "Avoid using PVRTC when you have static images that are the focus of your content"
- "images are 2-4x larger, but memory use is less"
- "amazing memory improvement, but no real change in performance"
- "textures must be power of two"

It probably doesn't fit my use case, but it's fascinating.
Facebook is making money and has a giant warchest from the IPO.

The main risk of being public is to employee morale, but the right internal culture/messaging, and (occasionally) option-repricing/reissuing can manage that.
A warning about cliff vesting