skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
One of the most important things I had to learn when I started my company was how to quickly get off the phone with people who wanted to waste my time. It seems trivial, but in an effort to be polite and not burn any bridges, I was wasting a lot of time. Plus, these sorts of conversations often left me feeling angry.

So I developed a system. Step one is to be clear with yourself about what you're looking for. We're not looking for funding and if we do, we will mine our own network for introductions to VC. We don't do partnerships unless the partner already has a customer who is asking specifically for us and who is willing to pay for any integration work. We never work with recruiters and haven't had any problems finding the people we need.

Step two, is to develop a script.

Here's an example, "I appreciate your call, but we don't work with recruiters and are happy with our current hiring practices. Pause. Have a nice day. Pause. Bye. Pause. Click."

If I only say nice things, then that leaves me in a good mood at the end of the call. My barber just hangs up on people without saying a word. But that doesn't work for me. Neither does yelling at them.
YouNoodle scores the buzz on 25,000 startups
AT&T Bringing 4,000 Jobs Back To The USA « Positive Economic News
"It turns out that Ma.gnolia was pretty much a one-man operation, running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis."

This should be a lesson: entrust your systems administration to people that have experience in this stuff. I'm not saying you have to find an expert and pay him or her expert prices, instead, you probably have a developer or admin friend who knows what it takes to implement a basic backup strategy that will at the least keep you from losing all of your data.

I watched a little bit of the podcast and he said he was just syncing the db files... well if it's innodb, that's not going to work. It says so in the MySQL docs. You know, in the section about backups.

The lesson here could be this: if you have a great idea, get it developed and out and the door -- awesome. Now talk to someone with experience in systems planning. Don't just throw a bunch of mac minis in a cabinet, bust out an rsync script and call it a day.
Wait a Moment... Who is the Desperate One?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20071017/092927.shtml
Gmail Adds User-Defined Custom Colors to Themes
Wifi Cat is the world’s first WiFi repeater integrated into a cat collar. It uses patent pending energy harvesting, the cat's movement recharges battery the battery. It spread's WiFi throughout your home and enable you to track your cat using your browser in real time.
Any advice would really need to based on an understanding of what you want to get from the money, and more broadly from life.

I slightly get the impression from the wording of your question that you don't quite know what you want to get from it, but you feel that you ought to do something (there are plenty of people who's job it is to tell you that you ought to).

I think that unless you know what you want from it, you'll never be able to answer this question. Some options to consider: seeding your next company, angel funding, charity, friends & family, financial stimulus of your local area, etc. - these are all investments of sorts.

If you're just looking for somewhere to park it whilst you decide then make sure you're within FDIC limits on each account...
It would use a very large collector so that the energy density would be low enough not to harm planes or birds.
The VC Market Isn’t Dead Yet
I think people write things like that just because they like the sound their keyboard makes. Someone should mention to them that real fiction is usually more interesting.
this makes me wonder about the backup systems of sites like tinyURL.

imagine all those shortened URLs everywhere becoming useless!
Smaller Header, JobSyndicate, Printable Articles
The Elevator Pitch
I smell a rat, not a cat :)
Engineering the Windows 7 Boot Animation
That's not really true. We showed up on a couple VC's radars before there was any real credible reason for us to have done so.

I think there's the assumption that because raising a round can be tedious that actually getting in touch with VCs must be too. As it turns out, once you show up on the startup radar some VCs will want to get you in their tracking database so that they've already made a connection at which point you are trying to raise money.

The last one that we had contact us was doing only growth stage investments for companies doing $2mm in revenue per year ... and we're still in beta. It was pretty clear from the start (and we told them that before the call) that they weren't really looking to invest in us, but wanted to have us checked off a list.

Most VCs have a small set of partners and a larger group of associates / analysts. The latter are basically functioning as scouts but don't in general have the power to decide on investments. Getting noticed by them is nice, but it doesn't say a whole lot -- it's their job to be noticing things.
My usual reply to this sort of comment used to be, "kill them all", but one day the Secret Service showed up at my house and told me to stop saying that. (Seriously.)

So... uh... be sure to vote.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487601
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487311
No offense, but I don't believe you. I think you are spoofing HN.

On the very small chance you are telling the truth, I would say diversify your investments and keep your mouth shut. And then start ramblin'
They also scrape reviews from other websites. I've found a couple reviews that I wrote elsewhere, "written" by various strangely prolific Yelp users who had single-handedly managed to post hundreds upon hundreds of reviews. (These were for small neighborhood hangout-type restaurants... meaning there is no way they were paid for).
"# Read 1 MB sequentially from network 10,000,000 ns
# Read 1 MB sequentially from disk 30,000,000 ns"

That seems weird - wouldn't the 1MB be read from a disk at the other end of the network? So how can disk be slower than network (unless the network is all RAM-Disk...).
Let's say the company's worth $1 million pre-money. To keep the analysis simple, let's say I'm the single founder, even though it's unlikely that I would be (single-founder successes are pretty rare).

In theory, I'd be willing to give up 49% for $1 million. In practice, I'd ask for a better deal, given the risk inherent in taking on an investor. $1m for 40% I'd probably do, or $1.25m for 49%.

At 51%, however, he'd basically become my boss, and I'd be an equity employee, so I'd consider it an acquisition and treat it as such. I'd negotiate such terms as CEO job title, a salary, and severance. He'd probably refuse the offer, and thus I'd end up going without his investment.
Articles like this all ways remind me of Dijkstra's old saying "CS is as much about computers as astronomy is about telescopes." Maybe it is just where I did my undergraduate work but there were always two types of CS classes those were you learned theory and those were you programmed. The programming classes were always easy because they never had you build anything bigger than you could hack together without a thought in a couple of hours. The theory classes were always the hard ones were you learned something because the prof wasn't having you build bs.

Algorithm analysis, relational algebra, programming languages. How do any of these require code to be written to understand them? If anything the code takes time away from understanding.
That could make sense if cats weren't the type of pets who absolutely need to be on your lap when you're trying to use your laptop. Not a good location for a repeater.
good stats; thanks sitech.
you need to use it somehow

But you are using it! You're using it to solve your cash flow problems for good. You've given yourself the freedom to do whatever you'd want to be doing anyway, no matter how risky it is, no matter how long it takes for the money to roll in, secure in the knowledge that no matter how unprofitable your next venture is, your worst-case fallback position is "Damn, I'm retired again. How I hate the prospect of sitting on this beach, reading whatever I want, writing whatever I want, until I die of old age!"

The thing about making money on the side is that it's work. It's distracting and requires continuous effort if you have to keep the money rolling in smoothly. How did tptacek put it the other day, in response to the question "How many billable hours are lost on HN every day?"

As someone who often bills hourly, I'll go with $0. Your time isn't fungible; it only commands a bill rate if you can commit to a start time, milestones, and a delivery date. Very few businesses want to pay for your spare cycles.

(http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=467900)

Now, I realize that there is a class of personalities that cannot possibly follow my advice. They will find themselves unable to motivate themselves when they have the option to sit around playing WoW all day, and yet all that WoW makes them miserable and unfulfilled. So they will be compelled to blow some or all of their $2m at the craps table so that they can feel alive again. Las Vegas was built around such people. I can't possibly dissuade them with my feeble arguments (and blowing the money is surely preferable to being miserable) but I would encourage them to try my plan first.
Scientists Exploit Bacterial Laziness to Beat Disease
Arizona Digital Products
Paris, 1938: Beacon of Liberty Amid Depression
Dentists Smile in the Face of Recession
Judge strips class-action status from Vista Capable lawsuit
This company has been built up for months in Atlanta, operating in stealth mode. They announced their product at Startup Riot, and it was revealed the whole thing is a joke. A lot of people have had a lot of fun in the ATL Startup community over this. Hopefully a few people even believed it.

That being said...I'd actually buy one of these things.
Obama uses it when speaking without a script, right? In that circumstance it's a kind of time-filler while he arranges his next sentence in his head -- he often uses a long, drawn-out 'Aaaaand' in the same way. At least it's better than 'uh,' which is what most people (including me) use.

But in written English it serves no purpose.
Perhaps the problem is that the mass transit and highways spread out in too many directions? In Silicon Valley, it's not one line, but it is mainly north-south and a bit east-west.
"Will it Stimulate the Economy?"

Keynes ideas didn't work in the 30's, aren't going to work now. Actually the government tends to get about .50 on the dollar compared to private investment.
I like the Shoreline/Charleston/Rengstorff loop. I live and work there so I often walk in to work. I pass 3 coffee shops on the way all of which are popular with startuppy people. I frequently bump into people I know. It's not as good as Cambridge for intellectual stimulation, but I do end having a lot of spontaneous meetings with relevant people.

Route 128 architecture reflects the Mercantilist view of companies. They all build big self-contained campuses to try to discourage their employees from fraternizing with other companies, lest information be exchanged. I think it's far more productive to have companies interact & share.

I'll take marsh trails over malls any day. A ride on the trail makes a wonderful mental break in the mid-afternoon. IMHO. YMMV.
>But I don't think anyone can ever tell if we have hit bottom unless we are already bouncing back.

Even then you can't tell, because it might just be a temporary thing on the way down. Look at the three or so fools' rallies in the Japanese stock market in the last decade or so, for example.
Hulu's Superbowl Ad and the Boxee Fight
It's not necessarily true that you want to pay of your mortgage.

Mortgage's have tax benefits, and if you have a mortgage at the prime rate, then your money is likely more valuable invested elsewhere, while you pay the mortgage.

High interest credit cards are another story.
If you have a chance to prepare before the calls, they must be prearranged, right? So why not send a form email that says, 'We're flattered that you'd consider working with us. We're not looking for funding right now, and we're really busy improving our product, but if you have any thoughts on what we could be doing better, send me a short memo at this address, and we'll follow up. For more information on our company go to wufoo.com/faq.'

From what I understand about VC psychology (all from PG essays and this site, not personal experience) this would drive them mad with desire. Plus you'd save a lot of time.
I don't see how scientific identity falls outside identity politics. Humans have a tribalistic genetic heritage, and so we behave this way.

I would say that the better you understand your identity, the better positioned you are to escape a slavish defense of it.

But you also have to be careful not to avoid conversations just because they are difficult. Religion and politics are in one sense two sides of the same coin. It might be better to contrast religion and democracy.

Just because the answers aren't easy to access doesn't mean the struggle to find them isn't worth having. ...no matter how messy.
Agreed, and frankly these "You Should Do It This Way" articles are getting a little old.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=487300
Venture capital is not broken. But it could use an alternate incentive structure.
Here's the direct link:
http://kevinmerritt.blist.com/2009/02/10-steps-to-land-a-gue...
Ask HN: How do I get through to startups for a summer position?
I am a second year student at a university in Ottawa, Canada. I have a fairly broad range of technical skills (graphic design, programming, networking) but none are particularly developed. For instance, I can create an AJAX web application, but lack the experience to know how to scale it or structure it for future maintenance.

I think that I could learn a lot from working in a local startup, but not quite sure the best way to approach one. Who should I contact? And how?

Also, which startups would even be interested in hiring generalized students like me?
689 days for a non-techie hanging with geeks. What is it like?

Well, participating (silently) in conversations between the advantages of one programming language/tool over another.

Reading some of the most thoughtful comments from users who clearly seem to know what they are talking about.

Experimenting with new web startups that launched here for the first time that are eager to get feedback.

Getting/giving advices on what to do and what not to do to achieve success in different fields.

Being constantly reminded that smart people who want to impact are everywhere.

Still don't know how to program, but I am loving HN. If I had to have one digital home HN would be the IT.

Thanks to every user, moderator, to the founder and to myself for mingling with smarter individuals.

HBHN
The Skinny on Cloud Lock-in
Think about the small business owners you know. In their regular business, do they do a lot of searching on google ? Spend much time reading flyers that came in the mail ?

The answer is probably not, and that's why it is hard to advertise to them.

They do talk to their friends and employees if they have any. If you do something that saves money at one small business, word of mouth and the migration of small business employees can bring you new business, but on a long time scale.

One reason why cold-calling and personal visits can work (presuming your target has money, and you have a useful product etc), is that it costs the advertiser to a substantial amount to go to each potential customer, therefore the advertisers must focus and do some research, and the buyers can believe there is a reason to spend a few minutes hearing the proposal.

It's kind of like those proposals to end spam by charging a penny per email.

I suspect that most advertising money is simply wasted. That vast sea of billboards, the commercials on TV, ads in magazines, etc, represent nothing more than a massive long term drain on society. It's possible that with new ways of tracking the effectiveness of adveritising, like linking your google adwords to google checkout transactions and "closing the loop", we will reduce spending on advertising overall. That would be a big shift in our economy and society.
Wonder how it interacts with browser cacheing and parallel JS resource downloads?
Your HN posts may be removed without your knowledge
I posted a comment on a recent story about Adobe software and it only shows up if I'm logged in!

I don't support sites that do this. If you don't like my opinion then just respond with your own. Don't be a baby and censor me.

Goodbye HN!
Unless I missed something, this is exactly what django-compress already does for the Django framework:

http://code.google.com/p/django-compress/

We just started using it in a project I'm working on. Most excellent.
Meetic Acquires Match.com’s European Operations
Sorry, it was a brain-fart on my part.
I was trying to comment on a general trend I was seeing in the comments and then I quoted what was mentioned in one comment to preface my comment.
email and offer to work for free
Despite 14x growth, the character of the site has remained intact. So far this experiment seems to be working.

I'm not sure what counts as character and this is obviously subjective but my personal feeling is that HN's quality has taken a slight hit in the past year. It doesn't seem as unique as it once was and many of the topics that make it to the front page seem to be more formulaic. Furthermore many newcomers seem to post the same things that were raised here previously. I've lost track of the number of topics about hosting providers, credit card processing and the like. Also with the increased volume it's been hard to make effective use of the "new" page. Odd things that may interest me that don't quickly get enough attention are lost faster.

Unfortunately I predict growth and network effects will speed up this trend and 2 years from now HN will likely be much less interesting as the HN of a year or two ago.
Stantum's multitouch interface on video
I think it was made pretty clear, that Hulu does embrace boxee, but it was the content providers that pulled the plug. Without content from the providers there would be no Hulu, so they had to cave.
I prefer a ranked list, one tag per row. Also draw bar graph next to each item to visually show the difference in magnitude between the ranks.
"Photoshop is the only Mac program I've seen that uses "setup" and "uninstall" paradigm, two idiocies from the Windows world."
I guess you hate apt and yum too? Gee, having a list of programs that are installed is really lame.

Right, because the Mac makes so much more sense. The dmg files that you download have to be mounted (lame). Inside the dmg, you _might_ find a folder, a bunch of files, a single file or a setup program. You just never know. Then when you're done figuring that out and you finally get your program "installed" on your Mac, you have to unmount the dmg.

Windows is much simpler: Download setup.exe, double click, Next, Next, Finish.

(originally posted by user: wizlb)
Faust and the Physicists
HN is my homepage on my desktop, and the first bookmark on my Blackberry. It's really all I need for news that's relevant to me.
Sounds like great stuff! I think we shouldn't limit ourselves to source code directory structure so much and this is a step in the right direction.

One problem I foresee with this approach is that it could make debugging harder, if you have to look at the "concatenated" javascript file in production to make sense of what code's included and not, it's harder to know what comes from where than if you just included the original source code files.

One solution would be to have a way to switch between "concatenated" and "normal" modes easily (maybe it's already possible, I don't know), so that normal development would be unimpeded. But you'd have to resort to the big concatenated file for debugging in production.

Another solution would be to somehow preserve the information about what comes from where, so that via a browser plugin you could browse the concatenated file as if it were the original modular files.

Lately I'm getting really interested in ways to preserve information about "what comes from where" so that you could point to something in a generated output and ask the system to explain the sum of all inputs and considerations (decisions, transformations) that resulted in that "atom" being generated in the output through the various "semantic levels". You usually generate a low-level representation from a higher-level representation and it can be useful to proceed carefully from one transformation to the next so that you preserve meaningful semantic information about intermediate stages.
Twitter Drives Traffic, Sales: A Case Study
JavaScript resources are never downloaded in parallel. They are downloaded sequentially because they are interpreted while they download, and (existing) browsers always run JavaScript in a single thread.

This will have very little effect on caching. You will still need to configure your web server for optimal caching, by setting the Cache-control and Expires headers, for example.

Even so, this still has two main benefits: The JavaScript is minified, which will reduce the amount of raw data sent to remote users. Plus, by concatenating all the files together, you avoid the need for multiple separate HTTP requests.
2,500 languages threatened with extinction
I would definitely recommend trying to get on the inside of the startup somehow. A huge part of business is networking. Do anyone of your friends know someone who works at or owns a startup? See if they can put in a word for you and maybe get a face to face interview set up.

Make sure that you are clear that you are doing it for the educational experience and not for the money. I wouldn't necessarily offer to work for free, because I think that makes you sound a little desperate, but be clear that you aren't expecting to get paid a whole lot.

This is basically what I have done to get jobs the last two summers, and it has worked really well for me. Last summer, I worked for a guy who spoke in one of my comp sci classes and who I had a few connections with. The summer before that, I worked for an international nonprofit that I had several connections with. The pay was not great (basically just covered living expenses), but the experience was well worth it.
jQuery plugins for your development
What Facebook's Stumble can Teach Your Company
I agree, and I felt the same way when I read the whole book. It was hard for me to learn anything about writing from someone whose own style is so flabby.

But the substance of his advice is good, and anyone who enjoys the style would probably benefit from reading it. It's just kind of ironic that he's unable to apply his own instructions.
Facebook is not taking over /our/ lives. I don't even have an account there.

The chart they link to is more interesting than the article: http://i.l.cnn.net/money/2009/02/16/technology/hempel_facebo...

What it shows is that new technologies are growing a consumer base much faster as time progresses. Facebook got to 150 Million users in 5 years. Soon, companies will be doing that in 4, 3, 2, 1 and even less than a year.
MacBook Pro 17" Unibody First Look
sorry about the linkjacking thing - thanks for adding the direct link
Chris Wanstrath's Startup Riot keynote text
I can't tell if you're trolling or serious.

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt. It won't be rewritten in ASP.Net because of this: http://arclanguage.org/
Keeping a housing/college/retirement reserve allows you to take more risks. Plowing money into a new startup simply magnifies one risk.