skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The oxygen in Earth's atmosphere is not especially conducive to life. It took a lot of evolution to develop tolerance to it. Perchlorate should be similar.
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Reading the comments has made me think about this some more.

The most frequently used categories should be the real easy to find, more obscure/rarely used might need filtering or searching and should actually be difficult to find, thus discouraging their use and lowering their importance.
Hmm... actually it sounds like I'm describing HN.
If you invest and get 7% interest, after taxes you may get 1-2%. If you have to get 12%+ things look a lot different. Also, investing is risky, debt anchors you and keeps you from trying new things. At that point, you're gambling your house away. That behaviour is exactly what caused the Great Depression.

Government bonds are a terrible investment strategy. You may barely hold out against inflation (the next 5 years I vey much doubt that will happen) but there's better vehicles. The stock market, for all that it's fallen, historically speaking has never had any 10 year windows that it's shrunk. It will rebound.

If you're going to get a mortgage, it should be a 15yr, fixed-rate.
That's a great idea, and I'm not being sarcastic. IMHO startups around here really don't get enough love from anyone. Family look at you like you're crazy not wanting to be a wage slave, so you can afford a tiny apartment in the tenements out by the edges of Scarborough. Lots of government programs will cheer you on for taking the plunge, but few are actually there to help you...
> The difficulty is mainly in financing the deals, not finding them.

I suspect the reasoning for that is because the long term prospects of owning property for rent are not as rosy as they seems, once your renters start defaulting you have a real problem.

A slump in the housing market usually also depresses the rental market, but that lags behind quite a bit.

On a positive note, it may be preferable to own any kind of object with intrinsic value over cash.
probably an opportunity here, since all of the VCs are asking for the same exact information, have a website that has the information for multiple companies in the same place
The TechCrunch 2008 Year in Review
That's exactly what interest-only loans are, heh.
its been there awhile...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=362240 from 98 days ago refers to it.

I also saw a recent comment by pg about 2 weeks ago that referred to it, which is how I learned of its existence.
Monique Wadsted tried to shout down the judge, but that didn’t really help much.

After the lunch break IFPI’s lawyer Peter Danowsky continues Fredrik’s questioning. He tries to pin something on
him, but Fredrik points out that the email he’s referring to is a reply, and that the quotes mean that he didn’t write that part of the email.

Around 4 PM the Prosecutor announced that he wanted to bring in additional evidence, some actual torrent files on a
diskette (he probably meant CD).

Where do these guys find these people? First they had a lawyer who didn't even know about p2p technology. Then they have a woman who has no respect for the judge. Then they had a lawyer who doesn't even know email.And another who doesn't even know CDs.

Does Pirate Bay have an inside man at RIAA/MPAA who made sure to hire the most incompetent lawyers he could find?
By looking over the "best" stories and "best comments", I find it interesting to note that very few of these are anywhere near what I'd consider to be the "best" of Hacker News.

Of course, we shouldn't take high karma to mean "good" any more than we take "popular" to mean good in social contexts, but I think it's telling that pg, amongst most commenters here still conflate the two, and while I'm sure most people here, when pressed, would say that they know this isn't really the best of HN, we see people optimize for high karma all the time, often at the expense of actual good content.

It's unfortunate that we're using a rating system that encourages this behavior.
Thanks to the site's growth, almost all of them are fairly recent. I suppose that's a good way to tell how the traffic is doing here.
That's what CrunchBase (http://www.crunchbase.com/) is. The phone call definitely serves more of a purpose beyond data collection - pitching the company and verifying legitimacy.
the question for Canadian companies was if they would go South instead of when...

And talking of South, real South, I and a few friends have been thinking of a y-combinator like in Nairobi Kenya. Good ideas are many but investors quite scarce
XRoad: turn by turn directions now available on iTunes
Anyone can talk about software, some people can even give useful advice, but there are patterns which define a true expert:

Experts know how to find a useful solution in known time. This does not mean they can instantly come up with the best solution just that they already know a solution and how long that solution will take.

Most experts are willing to try new things up until the point where they will not get it down in time and then fall back to the known solution.

It might not seem like much but it's amazing how much talent and experience it takes to get to that point. What messes with most people is training does not create experts you need to do it without a safety net to really know. And experts don't necessarily know how to teach they can just get things done.
What do your customers want? Just ask them
What do you mean by verifying legitimacy?
It's funny how technical people reason about social issues the same way we do about technology. Maybe marriage is the wrong thing to call it, but unfortunately insisting in that detail places you in a very bad company: people for what that's not a matter of names, that doesn't want equal rights and many of them in fact would hang homosexuals if they could.

BTW, congratulations for the video!
If you're looking at $2k/month for a mortgage vs. $2k/month for an apartment, then the tax savings (at a hypothetical 33% tax rate) are MAYBE $8k per year.

This is one half of a percent of his net worth. ...which is to say, absolutely trivial.

Right now, the housing market is declining, and this individual may decide that he wants to relocate to a new area.

I am a homeowner. I am HAPPY to be a home owner.

However, I don't think the "buy instead of renting" advice makes a ton of sense for all people.
This article clearly shows the fear VCs have to miss the next big thing.

IMHO thats why they try to collect data on as many companies as possible and according to the article that happens without much coordination or without a clear goal. At least from the outside it seems like an effort to only cover their asses.
Ask HN: What do you look for in a PR Agency?
I'm curious as to what you expect from a PR firm? Do you go with the retained option? If so, what do you expect of them every month?
And you don't go retained, what sort of goals are you looking to achieve?
This is a little un-related, but the more I read HN and actively listen the more I think of a y-combinator like org in Nairobi Kenya. Ideas are many but angels scarce.

Suggestions kindly
You're about a day late for Startup Riot.

Here's an excellent resource for wannabe ATL entrepreneurs: http://atllogos.com/startup.html

A lot of the ATL startup chatter is on Twitter.
You should read some good books and make your own decision. Worst thing that could happen is you are hurt by inflation which can't happen nearly as fast as a stock crash...
Same thing happens to us all the time, really annoying. I've had some associates have the balls to call us up, not do any research, and then try to lecture me on how we should be running our business.

Fortunately, I've had a few "hero" associates who have dug down deep into my social network and found friends that we share, or read quite a few of my blog posts.

Either way, I've found that these associate calls are a complete waste of time. It can be hard enough getting taken seriously if you aren't brought in by the right partner, and getting funded off of an associate or analyst introduction is very unlikely, despite the fact that each and every one of them makes it sound like they are ready to cut a fat check on the spot.
How about a hand for the moderators? They are the guys who keep the quality of this site up. Without them, this would soon just be another clone of reddit
Making sure there's actually a company behind the website and not just a 13-year-old kid who's good at FrontPage.
How to start a (game) business
I was just thinking of writing a small search tool that would search in YC HN...

But you provided this nice link.
177 Million Domain Names And Counting, VeriSign Shows Growth Is Slowing
Ma.gnolia's Bad Day (from it's product manager)
The comments on the article (on boston.com) are absolutely ridiculous.

I think that Massachusetts could rival California as a startup hub; there just needs to be some better foreign corporation laws and less taxes.
It has already been above $1000 before. In the beginning at the month it was at around $900. Now it's at $975, so it's very close to $1000.

How do you know gold is at its peak? With fiat money there is a risk for a high rate of inflation. That doesn't happen with gold.
Pirate Bay Plea: Stop Hacking the Music Industry
Reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Jurassic Park:

"Think about oxygen. Necessary for life now, but oxygen is actually a metabolic poison, a corrosive glass, like fluorine. When oxygen was first produced as a waste product by certain plant cells some three billion years ago, it created a crisis for all other life on earth. Those plants were polluting the environment, exhaling a lethal gas. Earth eventually had an atmosphere incompatible with life. Nevertheless, life on earth took care of itself."
MIT Entrepreneurs Produce $2 Trillion-Equivalent of the 11th Largest Economy in the World
Although game specific this touches upon key topics for any software startup e.g. importance of people, customer development engineering, where to find money and most importantly why would you start a new business.
zomg, never realized news was born on my birthday! Best gift I got today! (Well, almost :)

"This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius ♫ Golden living dreams of visions ♪ And the mind's true liberation"... well I'm no mystic but I just love us aquariuses!
if its a startup that they think is good enough to pitch to, why should they care?
Staggered CDs and Dollar cost averaging.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_of_deposit

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_cost_averaging

Eventually you want to be diversified, but right now, you don't know if you want to put all your money in the market.

So divide your money into 8ths (or whatever, by 8ths right now the US government will insure each $250k in your CDs)

put 1/8 into the market now.

1/8 into a 1 month CD

1/8 into a 2 month CD

1/8 into a 3 month CD

1/8 into a 6 month CD
....

When each CD matures buy more of the market. That way if we haven't hit bottom, yet, you will still be buying on the way down and up.

Unless you are going to spend time studying industries put it all in index funds/etfs.
Your market allocations depend on when you need the money, but I have something like

45% Russell 1000

20% EAFE

12% Russell 2000

10% Morgan Stanley bond index

5% REIT index

5% Nat Resources/Commodities

3% emerging markets

This should be translatable into Canadian assets, just not by me.
Those who try to get in at the bottom invariably find that it wasn't the bottom yet.

Well, there is a different school of thought too:
Those who wait for the bottom to be hit will never be able to realize when it was hit. It's fairly easy to tell whether the market is in a downward spiral or is in boom. But I don't think anyone can ever tell if we have hit bottom unless we are already bouncing back. Same goes with the peak, you can't pinpoint it until we find ourselves in downward cycle.
Bang on. About time someone took the VC's to task.
Only had time to skim the comments but here's mine anyways.
Your essay has a lot to do with a self perpective and the balance between objectivity and subjectivity in a belief system.
It kind of splits people into two groups Objective and Subjective with a bias towards objective being "better" - smallness of self tends toward objectivity.

Going further, the only two types of people in the world are those that split people into two groups and those that don't
"Raises the question" also works (although suggests is certainly more correct).
Because, honestly, it’s so bad out there, that it would probably take very little to actually impress us even a little bit.

Brilliant! Applies to much more that just VC.
The problem with 2) is that it's really easy to get up-sold. It may be better to just take a year cooling-off period.

In general, if you are not in a rush to buy, you have a tremendous advantage over sellers. With $2M in the bank, the OP should feel no rush to buy a place.

The other thing is that if, for instance, you buy a house and haven't owned a house before, it's a significant lifestyle change.

That can be great -- it was for me, but there will be a lot of maintenance. I've been lucky enough to have parents in-law who have helped with (um ... done) all of my renovations.

I do sometimes pine for the apartment / condo + mattress + kickass computer lifestyle, but less and less now that my house is set up.
Why are you replying this to me? What does it have to do with my point?
Yep, me too. The other reason for having lots of pages is to make room for annoying flash ads.

I usually click the "print article" or equivalent link - there usually is no pagination there.
> what kind of birthday gift do you give to a website?

Probably a really sweet submission. Like "new web framework lightspeed lisp screencast by Paul Graham on Justin.tv".
What the credit crunch means for the internet
Gripped as we are in the worst recession since the ‘Great’ one, the respective sphincters of all Business Owners are twitching violently. And with good reason: money is dropping out of the systems at an alarming rate, demand across all geographical and international boundaries is down and falling and it has never been more difficult for an entrepreneur to make a buck or two. There are, however, signs that the web is going to emerge out of this current crisis as a stronger place to do business, and more importantly what money is spent over the next twelve months by consumers will be more likely to be spent online. This translates into increased revenue from web based advertising and affiliates, as well as increased revenue from recommendations, product placement and even direct selling. You will note that this is the way in which most web businesses generate their income. So to understand how to maximise your revenue in the coming months, it is a good idea to understand what is happening and what is likely to happen in the use of the internet by consumers.
The site is actually mostly one big Javascript (built using GWT). For easier bookmarking, we will add special URLs to go directly to a specific video or discussion. Thank you for the feedback, those are good suggestions.
Wifi Cat
Wow 2 years. It's strange, but I can't really remember how I came to start reading HN. I know I had been reading PG's essays for a while, but there seems to be a gap I can't recall. It's kinda like the way I can't really remember when I started using Google for all my searches, I just kinda naturally assimilated it into my life.
Because VCs invest in teams with good ideas not in ideas alone.
I'd recommend this Edward Tufte book for visual data design, it's very good:

http://www.amazon.com/Visual-Display-Quantitative-Informatio...

Also, FlowingData is a great site for data visualization: http://flowingdata.com/
Isn't the tech sector weathering the storm better than other industries?
Being Canadian...I recommend PC Financial. Their high interest savings is great, and no fees!

With 2 mil, I would personally:

-Buy a place to live in the 400k range. Housing is probably overpriced right now, but generally speaking the Canadian housing market is not too badly bubbled. I really don't see a Canadian crash coming, but there may be a slight price reduction.

-Put 200k into a high interest account. Easy to access, guaranteed return, etc.

-Put 200k into a new business. But that is because it is what I enjoy doing, if you want to learn to paint, go to school, etc throw the money there.

-Put 200k in the stock market. Canadian financial institutions are amazingly underpriced currently, and so are several commodity based companies.

The remaining million I would use for stability/hedging. Hedge against the Canadian dollar, inflation, etc. I would probably get some professional help from investment banking friends, but this would probably be a combination of US bonds, CDN bonds, gold, etc.

The Canadian economy is currently almost untouched by the current recession. There will be a bad 2-3 years at a minimum coming up so plan for that. I would plan on shifting into the stock market cautiously over a period of time and not throw it all in at once, we could easily see another 50% decline over a few months.

Lastly, I would take a month and travel around before doing anything at all.
Because they are humans who need to form social connections. If they were programmers they would realize the information was logically equivalent whether it was gathered from CrunchBase, the company website, or a phone call with a smooth-voiced young man who claims to be a founder.
I like YUI a lot - especially the components they've written for it.

The YUI Rich Text Editor blows away everything else I've tried.

And on a current project, I'm using the YUI DataTable to get in browser sorting (and it does a lot more than that, too).

But for day-to-day stuff we use Prototype or jQuery because it's easier to write.
yes at the earliest stage, when its just an idea, and nothing more.

But we are talking about something that has already been built. Something that is already popular enough to catch the eye of VCs. So obviously the team is good enough, if they arrived at that stage. If they didn't have a good team, they wouldn't have arrived at that stage to be hounded by VCs.
IPhone App Economics: Free vs Paid
so how do you do that? :) Can I contact you?
One way is to buy long-dated call options on a broad range of issues: indices, index funds, precious metal funds, commodity funds, etc.

For instance, the SPY index fund currently trades at $80. Suppose you want inflation protection for it going above $100 by December 2010, and you want to protect $250k of your money.

You could buy SPY calls at a strike price of $100 expiring in December 2010. The cost of those call options would be about $8 per share. To hedge $250k, you'd need 3100 options, which would cost $25k. If the price rises into the $100-$108 range, you'd start recovering that cost. If the price exceeds $108, you'd start turning a profit. If the price popped to $175 due to hyperinflation, your profit would be ($175-$100-$8)*3100 = $208k. (BTW, options are sold in contracts of 100, so for 3100 shares you'd buy 31 contracts.)

Honestly, though, I don't see this as a good idea right at the moment. The market has been volatile lately, which drives up the price of options. IMHO, inflation is not likely to pick up in North America for at least 1.5 years, so you would need to buy 2011 options, which raises the price even more. If I were going to hedge inflation, I would wait until the current stage of the collapse had reached a lower plateau, some time had elapsed for volatility to decrease and option prices to go down, then buy before inflation expectations build and drive up the cost of call options.

Whatever you do, never use the various "ultralong" funds for buy-and-hold hedging. They are strictly for short-term trading. (Well, you can do buy-and-hold, but you have to wait for the price to bottom out, and pray that the fund manager doesn't burn up all the money with failed trading strategies.)

Warning: I am not a professional options trader. This is not investment advice.
Google's Numbers Every Developer Should Know
That book is so incredibly good. When my kids are the right age I am going to give them that book to read so they will get hooked on science. It should be required reading in high school biology classes. Think about a class centered around that book where students do little experiments related to passages like this one. That would be amazing.
Washington Times releases open source projects (Django apps)
Will the Internet Doom the Planet?
I'm not sure why this is, but when I first get to your site, i don't know what to look at.
My eyes are being dragged all over the place, and I had to concentrate to read a single heading/paragraph.

You'd think with the big lettering you've used, and the layout (which is good), this wouldn't be an issue.

The 'call to action' isn't clear enough.
Could be that I'm just having a strange day, but it isn't exactly clear to me what I'm supposed to do (and yes, I see the (ready to begin/sign-up), but something about your overall layout/design just isn't sitting right with me.

Sorry, wish I could explain exactly why.
Indeed. It's not widely known, but oxygen is still rather poisonous to humans. If you breath pure oxygen for over about half a day, your lungs start taking damage.

There's a reason that oxygen and perchlorate are used as rocket oxidizers.
I would want to add 2 things to the list, from my experience so far:

9. Organize. If I don't get my billing system straightened out soon, I'm going to drive myself nuts.

10. Delegate. This is a big one I think. No matter how awesome you are, you can usually get even more done, and do a better job, and be more successful, by gathering a couple of good people around you and making a team of it.
In the face of the generally gloomy hiring and financial situation in the US and around the world, the high-tech industry added 78,300 jobs between January and July of 2008, a minuscule but significant 1.3 % rise, for a total of 5.92 million. The increase marks the fourth straight year high-techies added jobs, according to the American Electronics Association's (AeA) which conducted the job study. The AeA survey is compiled from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics' Current Employment Survey.
Take a cooling-off period of a few months to relax, and research. During this time, do not buy a home, or any other large purchase (> $4k ?) that you wouldn't have before your windfall. Stay out of the stock, market, except for GICs.

Think about what you would need to be permanently semi-retired. I.e. you don't have to work for anyone else, but you don't upscale your lifestyle. You now have 24/7 sweat equity, independent of your other capital.

The problem with this particular time is that we're in some kind of transitional period. I have no confidence in my ability to predict what the Canadian and US economies will look like in 10-20 years.

I've been very aggressive in paying down my house and contributing to my RRSP. OTOH, I now wish that some percentage of the funds I put into my RRSP had been devoted to disaster preparation. Nothing too extreme -- just another form of insurance.

I.e. an RRSP is preparation that makes sense within our current model of society. I currently have few hedges for scenarios outside that model.

I guess the main thing is to take small steps. It's very hard to scale back your lifestyle once you've scaled it up. If you are mostly content now, then be very careful about up-scaling.

You may have different goals, but for me the greatest luxury is free time to pursue my ideas wherever they take me.
Interesting, thanks for the correction. I've been using that wrong for quite some time. There's even a whole Wikipedia article devoted to it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question