skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been pondering how to solve this problem for years, and I'm no closer to solving the problem than anyone else.

Your approach involves freezing the user base so that nobody new can join. Granted, it's an innovative take on it I've never seen before, but that's still what it is. The problem with all such approaches is that a certain percentage of the user base wanders off over time, so your frozen userbase constantly shrinks. Eventually it gets below the point you care. (Or, in most cases, below the critical mass of the community.) It only works correctly in the static case where nobody ever leaves.

In your case you could raise the threshold, but all that does is expose you to the very things you were trying to get away from. If there was a correlation between "the people who stuck around" and "quality posters" that might work, but I doubt such correlations exist. (Then again, I don't know, as my words imply.)

About two years ago, I scraped a single article with over a thousand comments on Slashdot and looked at all the UIDs. I theorized that all the old folk would be gone. Instead what I found is that the UIDs were fairly uniformly distributed across the entire base, which, if you think about the temporal distribution of people joining, is actually a moderately interesting result. I just eyeballed the list of unique UIDs, I didn't actually plot it out, but it wasn't what I was expecting. Some small core stick around and keep posting, but over time the vast bulk of the early group leave.
1000 options out of what? If it's a pool of 10,000 that's a good deal. If it's out of 10,000,000 then probably not.

What do they plan to increase the pool to as part of the funding?

What is the estimated pre and post-money stock price?
Punishing people for breaking the law is the role of Government- not business. This is not an example of failed capitalism, but of failed government.
Using the Best Tools in Programming: Not Really Doable
I'd be happy to use it if the only user interaction was flipping a preference switch.
Facebook is providing a platform for a huge number of businesses to make money off Facebook Apps. I would look at building part of their business model off that.
Facebook Apps makes it virtually impossible for them to make money off their own applications because there will always be incentives for new players to make a competing app.
Google for SXSW Webapp Autopsy. (Oh, heck, I'll do it for you. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/sxsw_web_app_autopsy.ph... ) There is a lot of good in there.

Personally I think the data is of limited use even for benchmarking but, eh, your funeral. Users of my downloadable app convert to the paid version at about 1.8%~2.2% most months. There is a bit of guesswork involved there as counting downloads is not quite as reliable as "select count(*) from accounts;" .
(projecting this article to 10 years ago)

Server-Users need commercial applications. That's just the way it is. The extra ten percent of features that makes an app usable for your average Server-User are the 10% that every developer hates; those features are hard and boring to develop, and implementing them is just no fun. You need to pay developers to implement them.

Do you really think that something like INFORMIX-ONLINE is going to be created by the community? My coworker, who manages our customer service group, shelled out 1500 deutschmarks for INFORMIX. He does not regret it, even though installation is a PITA. Why? It just works: it works with our network; he gets results fast; there are a bunch of skilled DBAs and books available, etc.

In Linux we are stuck with mSQL. Sorry, but no cigar! INFORMIX calibre software will NOT be created by the community. It just takes TOO much manpower, TOO much work. No one is coding that in his spare-time.

This kind of software will also not be created by an open-source company. There is no business-model that would supports the effort. Just imagine if INFORMIX released INFORMIX-ONLINE as open-source - you think that people would still shell out 1500DM for a boxed-version? Nope, people would just copy it. There are some exceptions. For example, Cygnus receives their money from chip manufacturers not from their users.
Can you clarify your argument? It sounds like you're saying, "sure, most businesses will cease functioning within 2 years, but you get so much out of starting your own company that it doesn't matter".
The author didn't mention the low-level virtual machine project: http://llvm.org
Why don't we use HTTPS for everything we send over the internet? Why don't we have locks on on all our mailboxes? In fact, the post is just terribly insecure. Heck, plenty of people who live in more rural areas don't even lock the doors to their house.

There are lots of reasons, but when you get down to it, we just don't care that much about security.
You should have a category for people who need my help getting the remaining $47,500,000 from a recently slain prince's bank account out of the country.
But you seem to be forgetting that it's not just the server who is doing the work. . . it's an entire staff of people, not all of whom are accounted for in the "cost" of a restaurant meal. Usually the server makes less than the federally-mandated minimum wage (which I know I did: $2.25 per hour in Utah) and then is she expected (by co-workers) to tip them from her tips only, and by the end of the night it's a whole lot of work for whole lot of practically nothing. Pennies, really. This is why I almost never go out to eat . . . even to this day.

I guess the point is, the longer a group of people sits, trying to figure out "how to split the bill," the poorer people like myself get (got). Wait staff make $ on turnover, not intellectual patrons with financial stinginess.

That being said, I agree that nobody likes to "hurry" through a meal. I can totally understand this, having numerous years of waitressing experience and even having had a few generous customers. There is something to be said for a good dining experience. This is something I always sought for as a server.

However, I think it would be an economically-beneficial requirement for all VCs to have paid their dues with 3-5 years of "on the floor" restaurant experience.

Or maybe if VCs could figure out a way for student loan expenses could get erased with proven work time.

/irony.
I think that business continuity is a poor proxy for "success" and that lack of it is a poor proxy for "failure".

For example, let's say you hang out your shingle as a self-employed software consultant today. Two years and 3 successful projects from now, one of your clients offers you enough money to convince you to go full time for them. You, accordingly, close your business. While that is counted as a "failure" by most metrics, that doesn't look like a failure to me. (Losing all your money and being reduced to bankruptcy, now I'll agree that certainly looks like a failure, but nobody tracks that.)
Why not? What's more natural than sex?

Frankly, I'm tired of all the bogus social stigma against a healthy interest in sex and porn.
I don't want you to be right, but... I think you are right. PageRank is an application of an algorithm; seeing a problem in such a way that it can be solved.

I therefore instead nominate the algorithm which Pagerank applies.
>Anything that is “the Netflix of ___,” “Flickr + ___,” or “MySpace + ___.” >

Those are just ways to describe an idea, not necessarily the idea itself. People do this to quickly convey their message or business; it's straight out of the excellent book Made to Stick.
This is probably the most legit competitor of Y Combinator. Don't lump it in with Dreamit Ventures, LaunchBox has had some pretty cool (and popular) startups.
almost everyone I know hates Godaddy

Pleased to make your acquaintance. You now know at least one person who does not hate GoDaddy.

I buy domain names there. They are cheap and have never treated me poorly. I used to buy hosting there. They were cheap and never treated me poorly (and I'd still be there if I didn't catch Rails fever, which means $4 a month Linux hosting is a bit beneath my needs these days).
> "once the product is launched and gains traction to a massive user base."

Don't kid yourself, this is hard to do.
I'm not entirely sure why a god (or gods) would ever want the people to have a warship. Unless it's used to fight off other warships from competing gods. In which case warship possession is a plausible want for a god.
The Little Known Secret That Rafael Nadal Used to Win The 2009 Australian Open
How Nadal "baited" Federer into the five-set epic tennis battle. He knew he stood a better chance of winning, and this article explains why.
One of the Launchbox founding partners was appointed head of the FCC. That's about as legit as it gets.
The article agrees with you:

"People only work on what they want to work on, when they want to work on it. Most people don't see any need to make Linux more attractive to inexperienced end-users: It already does what they want it to do, why should they care if it doesn't work for other people?"
As long as an idea can make things more efficient or provide a useful service people are willing to pay for, it's a viable idea.

This is an illogical argument: "NO BOOK EXCHANGE HAS EVER REALLY SUCCEEDED. I HATE TO CRUSH DREAMS BUT PLEASE FORGET ABOUT THIS."
I've never been particularly unimpressed with GoDaddy, other than the abysmal site design and inescapable attempts to sucker you into extra "features" with each domain purchase. Their support seems decent, and their prices _are_ very low.
For the big schools that is apparently true, but I wouldn't work for them anyway. There are billions of smaller schools who will judge on personality. Well, none of the people I know have 4 year degrees anyway. Some don't even have 3 year degrees ..

Anyway, it's not going to be the hot startup break the OP seems to be seeking, but I know some guys who have done it for a break and they really enjoyed the experience, plus should be able to work in on a UK passport.
This is indeed an interesting application of game theory, but I should point out that this "Talmudic" rule of division is one of several rules proposed for the same problem, and the rabbis of the Talmud ended up rejecting this particular rule.
I think it's more about the correlation between population density and the issue of "last mile" in the broadband network. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile
I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life.
So he is a millionaire, but lost his wife that according to himself was fundamental on his success.

That is pyrrhic victory to me.
My business does. Anything commercially confidential is encrypted in transit and at rest on anything portable (file encryption isn't currently set up on the servers but will be in the next refresh).

FWIW the way to use it successfully is to use it to get people to think about the sensitivity of the data (as in 'should I send this unencrypted?') as opposed to using it for everything. People that gripe and moan about it at work tend not to need it and are generally less exposed to it. Those that need it understand why.
Strategies for creating a new Web 2.0 product
I would avoid talking about shares till it starts to take off. It might be worth getting agreement on what will happen if it takes off. Otherwise you might feel locked in to something you can't walk away from easily.
I have seen the argument that this system is more fair to small creditors. Under the current bankruptcy, if I extend $1000 of credit to a financially shaky company, and then some bank extends a million-dollar credit line, and then the company becomes insolvent, we all have to line up for our X cents on the dollar; the bank's easy credit effectively reduces the amount I can recover. Under the system the OP described, small creditors are far more likely to get repaid in full or mostly in full, regardless of how much the debtor also owes to large creditors.

But I'm not sure how this system could be extended to a world where, for example, a company takes out loans from Bank A and Bank B, both of which are actually subsidiaries of a bank holding company that owns 75% of A and 30% of B. Talmudic law doesn't recognize corporate personhood, so the Talmudic discussion doesn't have to consider that problem.
PhpBB's site hacked
There is an investment site http://www.adultvest.com/ that specializes in "adult entertainment" startups. It appears to be a legitimate investment group.

http://venturebeat.com/2005/12/21/adultvest-investment-commu...

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/business2/business2_archive/2...

http://www.hedgeco.net/news/06/2008/adultvest-hedge-fund-acq...
I agree exactly. I truly DISLIKE Godaddy because their site is a huge mess - yet I still buy my domains from them. Its simple, cheap, and they have full dns control. That's all I need.
Why didn't you try S/MIME? It is built into all email software worth using.
I might suggest looking into the design. A table isn't necessarily the best use of space. Try making the frequently visited links bigger
find out what % that 1000 options make up.

But you should definitely look for some cash on the side. Even if its a measly 500 bucks a month
You can't really compare yourself to those guys. Sure they might have ~2% conversion rates...but thats because their users trust that they pay for quality, You on the other hand will be an unknown, so they'll be more hesitant to give up the credit card info. To be on the safe side, put your conversion rate at .5%.
Amazon target of mysterious postal investigation
Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 8126464) (tried to allocate 311296 bytes) in /home/ryan/htdocs/wp-content/plugins/falbum/wordpress-falbum-plugin.php on line 433

Maybe an article about python should use it to present it on the web?
One of the most valuable things a cofounder does is shine light on your blind spots. By definition you can't see these problems, but someone else who's intimately involved can.
http://www.orkut.com/

Google is not god.
Agreed - worth considering too, that kids like to get into t-shirts because it "seems pretty easy, like, I could make cool t-shirts". Then when it comes time for logistics, shipping, dealing with returns/bad addresses, customers pissed that their shirt hasn't come in the mail, etc, etc, etc. - "I'm done. I quit this f*ing business."

It looks to me like most monumental successes are created one of two ways: Out of love, or out of messing around. Savvy, experienced entrepreneurs and investors can make some bucks just "doing business", but when you haven't got the experience, love or curiosity is the fuel that keeps you going.
add me please 131756172
- better funnel graphs. Meaning their funnel logic doesn't work for anything but straight simple navigation - tree like. I would rather need something like what statviz generates.

- A drill down upto session level navigation.

- A query editor that can expose a view of the db of critical visit data. Could be more like a user writing MDX queries on cubes.

- Ofcourse, fixed time stats - A user knows the frequency of update on his/her site stats. (note i am not using real-time). On GA no one knows when does ones' site gets updated. I have had instances where partial traffic for a period gets updated. Instances where today's data has started coming in perfectly but yesterday's 2 hr window shows 0 visitors.
while it is good to raise awareness about the federal reserve this video draws fallacious conclusions based on a stupid premise: that when you make an agreement to pay back a loan you aren't creating value. If i give you a piece of paper that says I will pay you $x over the next 10 years that paper has value and can be used as money to the extent that you are legally obligated to make said payments.
A loan is transplanting future productivity on your part into value today, which can then be traded for a house a car what have you.

I'd suggest the free literature from the Mises institute if you want to understand banking.
The truth of the matter is that you always know the right thing to do. The hard part is doing it.

Norman Schwarzkopf
The smartest thing about this post is the point he makes about developers re-evaluating their tool chain at the end of each project. Anyone who makes tools needs to keep that in mind.

I completely do that - and it's how I ended up using (and loving) jQuery. Of course, it makes going back to work on old projects a drag and inspires a lot of (too much?) refactoring.
I'll tell you a story. I started a business, worked about 50 hours/week on average for about a year, and made $12,000. That's 2500 hours at a rate of... $4.80 per hour[1]. When I could've made $15/hour right away at a boring office manager job doing estimates, phone support, and yelling at the men when they leave their tools a mess. Or could've gotten an entry level job at BigCorp and been making... I don't know, whatever people who work hard and get promoted fast make within a couple years.

So when I start a new company that pays me more the next year, my first business "closed" - that means it's not going. You could say it "failed", but really, I learned the lessons, made a tiny bit of coin, and then promoted myself into the next business. I know lots of entrepreneurs who leapfrog themselves the same way - and similarly, lots of small companies get bought and integrated or stripmined by a bigger company. This is actually a hard part of being a businessman - that's your baby, y'know? - but if you're ready to move on, it's certainly not a failure.

Paul Graham sold Viaweb. Viaweb company is no longer a going concern. It didn't fail by any stretch of imagination, but will be included as a "failure" in these silly "most small businesses don't exist (fail) within five years" statistics.

[1] Numbers might be off a bit, my memory's kind of hazy. I remember calculating at one point that I was making something like $2.20 an hour, maybe after six months or so. $5,500 net split with my partner after six months? I'm smiling now, but it's kind of ugly to remember those days...
What core competency do you perceive facebook has?

No, I'm not a fangirl of facebook. I've logged into my fb account maybe a couple of times in a dozen or so months. Sorry. You want to assault my karma for this? Puh-leeze.

I look at structures: overall structures and value-added structures. Facebook really has none. If you disagree, please tell me why and how you disagree this setup is theoretically "profitable" or more profitable than, say, a random Internet page or a blogger blog. :)
Fair division, the win-win solution, etc, also have some roots in the Nash equilibrium (a beautiful mind).
Also known as adjusted winner:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjusted_Winner_procedure

Fair division is really an algorithm based in game theory on fair distribution. There's actually a bit of software based on it... a couple examples:

http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1352161
http://www.fairoutcomes.com/

and a patent:
http://www.patentstorm.us/patents/5983205/description.html

I first read about it because of conflict resolution:http://www.amazon.ca/Fair-Division-Cake-Cutting-Dispute-Reso...

There's also some interesting analogies in OS, multi agent systems, and Database conflict resolution. But that's probably for another thread.
I saw your comment in the original thread. Like you, I enjoyed reading Alex's thoughts on the subject, but his was a poorly thought out rant. Your diplomatic response actually brings a lot more to the table.

I'm also reminded of the proliferation of document-oriented DB technology. The relational model is powerful, and has a theoretical elegance that will not likely be replaced. Nevertheless, there are reasons no one's implemented a true RDBMS, and there are practical reasons (legitimate or not) that people fudge on the relational model, or decide to go direcly to the "Everything Hash" model.
Imagine a nation, Canerica, where the penalty for writing a bad cheque was death. In this country I could write a cheque for $100, have the money in my bank account, and could be reasonably certain that the money may not come out for years. Why? Because cheques would be as good as real money. Everyone would trust them.

At the same time, however, my money would be lent out. While my money is in the bank the banker can lend it out at interest. For the 2 or 3 year expected circulation time there is an additional $100 out there. I get interest on that $100 for a couple years, that isn't really mine. So in Canerica I (and to a lesser extent, my bank) am the net benefactor due to the inflation I've created.

That is basically what the banks have done, only they never need to cash their cheques. They can deposit them, lend them out again, collect more interest. But one day people are either going to get their deposits back or their debtors are not going to be able to pay their interest and it is all going to come crashing down. With a reserve ratio of 10:1, only 10% of their depositors need to claim for the bank to go bankrupt.
Jumping continents is a pain in the ass though. I did it when I was 21 (seemingly permanently, as 7 years later I'm still in Europe) ... it took months to pull it off, get everything lined up and so on. Especially if you're in the startup game you don't want to risk falling foul of the US immigration authorities and being denied entry in the future.

My take on things: If one wants to do some crazy traveling improvising along the way kicking back and hacking as you feel inspired, by all means! But why the heck would you want to do that in the US?

If you want to get into American startup culture, well, then you should focus on what you need to get in legally and stay there. College degree, convenience marriage, student visa...
The problem is not in having managers. As many posts here point out, someone has to do all that stuff anyway.

The problem arises when managers have more power than engineers. In large organizations, by default, managers have more pay, perks and power than even the seniormost engineer/hacker. Avoid this imbalance and you'll be fine.