skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is a pecking order, I guess the engineers figure somewhere and that makes it a question of when and not if they fire engineers/technical folks.
Using "Best Buy" as shorthand for "big retail chain which sells games, but, no no, I'm not talking about GameStop here, no, ugh, I'm talking about everyone EXCEPT gamestop in this bit -- you know, the stores like Best Buy and that sort of thing," works just fine.
I had a similar situation many years ago. It lasted about 3 months - which was about 2.5 months too many. Complete waste of time.

This actually happens to a lot of startups. Usually it doesn't happen until after a certain amount of funding has been raised (often after the series A). If the CEO has checked out and is just pretending to work, the company is doomed - find a new job.
love the ui. really interesting space. have you worked at a dating startup before? are you guys funded? are you planning to charge for premium services?
Al Gore has nothing to do with my reasoning process.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/11/071119122043.ht...

These are the risks mentioned in the IPCC Synthesis report. The seem sound and reasonable.

* The report says that around 20 per cent to 30 per cent of the plant and animal species assessed are likely to be at increased risk of extinction if global average temperatures exceed 1.5 degree C to 2.5 degree C over late 20th century levels.
* The report also points to the likelihood of "irreversible" impacts. For example if temperature increases exceed about 3.5 degrees C, between 40 per cent and 70 per cent of the species assessed might be at increased risk of extinction.
* Increases in sea surface temperatures of about one-three degrees C are projected to result in more "frequent coral bleaching events and widespread mortality."
* There is also concern over the oceans and seas becoming more acidic as they absorb rising levels of carbon dioxide and the impacts on "marine shell-forming organisms" like coral reefs.
* Other reasons for concern focus on the risks of extreme weather events with higher confidence in the projected increases in droughts, heatwaves and floods as well as their adverse impacts.
* The report also flags up concern that the poor and the elderly in low-latitude and less-developed areas including those in dry areas and living on mega-deltas are likely to suffer most.
* There is high confidence that by mid-century "many semi-arid areas, for example the Mediterranean basin, western United States, southern Africa and northeast Brazil, will suffer a decrease in water resources due to climate change."
* The IPCC summary also expresses concern that any benefits linked with climate change will be gone after more modest temperature rises. The guide, launched after five days of discussions in the Spanish city of Valencia, will be essential reading for delegates attending the upcoming UN climate convention meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
* Concern is also raised that new observations linked with the Greenland and possibly Antarctic ice sheets may mean that the rate of ice loss will increase above previous forecasts.
Does a Java web app really require more memory compared to Python web app?
What makes you think they will need to? It's possible that this was an independent decision and not entirely based on economic pressure. Google might not need to move down the pecking order.
Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably resolved and closed to debate.
Yeah, we acquired a few dating sites that we have grown. We are privately funded as an acquisition vehicle but EstablishedMen is our first foray into organic incubation. We are charging for premium services (currently just a single package at $49/month usd with the ability for price variation by region).
Right, and if the person in the second chart had finished by buying a used game they would be part of this equation. The difference being that they would be net up $15 and an extra game to play. To me it is clearly implied that there are used games being bought by other users of Dawdle.

As for GameStop being a rip off, I realize I have a choice and I never trade games to them because I feel the prices aren't fair. I prefer to keep my games and I don't play as much anymore anyway. I don't mean that Game Stop are unethical crooks, just that I believe they don't present a good value to me or my friends.
Reasons Startup CEOs Fail
This is one of the fastest, well designed dating sites I've ever seen. The interface is slick and simple. Searching for users is very intuitive.
You want me to sign up just to see if there are any results in my town? No.

Also, by the very name of your site you are likely to discourage the exact demographic you seek from joining.
If I'm an established man, am I going to go to a site that will surely attract gold diggers? I can join the local city club for that.

Read up on the habits of the well off and be a little more
subtle about it. oh and private jets are passé these days.
The first and largest obligation that Dropbox has is to their users, not to one of the many partnership emails they probably get constantly.

Really, your last sentence there is unnecessary.
Summary - the blogger envisions the bare minimum of roles needed in a startup and lists them all as different hats.

The Hat List

* Visionary/Architect

* Lead Developer(s). AKA Hackers.

* Sysadmin

* Toolsmith

* Webmaster

* DBA

* Graphic Artist

* CSS Designer

* Content Creator

* Customer Support

* Tester

* Marketer

* Manager

* Lawyer

* Chef

The roles don't necessarily equally different people - the smaller your startup, the hats combine into larger multitasking sombreros.

The Sombrero List

* Developer

* Sysadmin

* Artist

* Marketer

Overall, I found this to be a useful exercise. Although I'd disagree with which hats are the bare minimum and how they'd combine into larger sombreros, it got me thinking about what my personal list would look like and it wouldn't be too different (remove Marketer & Sysadmin, add another Developer, rename Artist as Designer), so in that sense it was still pretty useful as a thought experiment.
You are both right, thanks for the feedback. These are the types of things we need to iron out immediately. We've been working with a few different layouts, but without users actually engaging, it is difficult to assess what works best. We will change it tonight, and through some trial error, hopefully we can express what the site actually does. The concept is sound but what good is it if nobody can figure out how to use it?
Mr G made an insightful comment regarding the problem of getting off the ground with a dating startup: ". . . no one wants to use a dating site with only 20 users, which of course becomes a self-perpetuating problem. So if you want to do a dating startup, don't focus on the novel take on dating that you're going to offer. That's the easy half. Focus on novel ways to get around the chicken and egg problem."

Did you get around the chicken and egg problem?
An Engineers Approach To Climate
It's the inverse to the Peter principle, an organization grows until it is unable to govern itself.
Not at all in the corporate market.
Does presenting a product launch at the YC investor day count, as far as TC50 is concerned, as prior release - so to speak? Has anyone been caught out by this?

(The same question goes for the YC-competitors' demo days/investor days)
Did you miss the part where they kept the client's money, with no explanation whatsoever, and the client's only recompense is to sue Google, probably costing more money in the end?

For a lot of people, that's close to some definition of evil at any rate. Either that or incompetence. But when it comes to money, most people view incompetence that ends up with their money being stolen as pretty much the same as evil.
The only way a lawsuit would happen is if someone gets interested in a class action lawsuit. That's a bit of a long shot, but this thread helps. You could do the online petition thing too to start documenting the number of people screwed this way.
You are suggesting that we ought to take all costs into account when doing cost-benefit analysis. You are not providing a substantive criticism of cost-benefit analysis.
While Lomborg's five-minute speeches do not touch on every cost and benefit of Global Warming, the Copenhagen Consensus does operate with the latest research estimates of the comprehensive costs and benefits.

If you're looking for an easy way to dismiss Lomborg, you're not going to find one. The dude is not a hack.
You can see the whole process of a blue fin tuna's journey Canada's east coast to Tsukiji on the Canada TV show "Chef Aboard" Episode "Bluefin Tuna, Canada to Japan" at http://www.foodtv.ca/video/

You have drill down the menus. I don't get the direct link.
Click on "Full Episodes A-E" in the middle bar and then Chef Abroad.

The Aircraft Carrier episode and Tokyo Food Adventure episode are interesting too.
As someone who's been on the sales and marketing side (and is now on the Angel side), I agree. When I look at potential investments, if it's an internet company run by MBAs or sales and marketing folks, I immediately pass.

Invest in and keep the people who build stuff. They're the talent. The rest (with exceptions, of course) can always be brought back in, outsourced, etc.
One way around the problem is to create a site where dating is a natural byproduct - HotOrNot does this well as that the social (or selfishly compelling) aspect of uploading a photo and obtaining public opinion has a very good tie in with boosting esteem and meeting people, which happens to be the revenue component. With EstablishedMen, we have a family of sister dating sites that could feed users. Also, we have raised significant capital and have had good success with our other dating properties of converting users via offline and online ad spends.
In their defense they probably didn't know a recession of this magnitude was on the horizon. If they were hesitant to grow in the early days they may have missed a number of key hires or growth areas.
I think not. Darwin had a second theory of evolution by sexual selection, and it may be the more important. It's selection, not by the jungle, tooth and claw, but intraspecies mate selection. I think a lot of human activity is driven, directly or indirectly, by mate selection: Wall Street Money, superstars, Nobel prizes, boring jobs in IT. I have read reports that human evolution has its afterburners on. Curing disease and helping the less able is irrelevant, because it's overshadowed by all the other competition going on. A century ago, the pool of potential mates was limited by your home town or county. Now you have college, world wide travel, and the internet.
Skype for the iPhone next week?
Have you guys heard of http://www.sugardaddyforme.com/ and is this a competitor to them?

One of the guys I worked with knew the guy who ran that site. I thought it was a pretty funny name and concept, yours sounds much more refined. Took a quick peek at it, can't really give feedback since I'm at work but upvoted and may take a look later =)
Wow, cynical and offensive. I think it's a winner.
Could you please tell if you were also selling digital products?
You've provided a funny answer instead of a substantial one.

I'm not quite sure who you consider a "douchebag" here. It carries the connotation of a mean, shallow person. Yet you also use it to denote people who seek status or money.

However, from my own personal experience, many of the people interested in pursuing status and money are competent, capable, curious people who are always looking to do a favor for others (you never know when the good karma from those favors will come back to you!). My investment banking peers were some of the most outstanding people I've ever met.

"Douchebags" seldom get anywhere in business unless they're related to someone important, contrary to what Hollywood directors might have told you.
Cloud computing is not the panacea for all problems and that is why we built Tonido that bridges the Web and the Desktop.
Tonido allows you run Personal Web applications on your desktop, but at the same allowing you access from anywhere.
[http://www.tonido.com]
Did you create this account just to comment on this thread?

Considering the biased tone of your post, this sounds a bit too good to be true.

If you're not connected to the OP in any way and just liked his site, I apologise!
Choosing a Development Stack for Installable Web Applications
'Your match is just a click away' should be changed to 'Your match is just a registration away'

text does't show up properly in the chrome browser

how about some teaser listings?

nice layout and design
Microsoft pokes hole in 'cloud' manifesto
The Internet Industry Is on a Cloud -- Whatever That May Mean
I like to summarize it as:

1) Coders, to code

2) Designers, to make stuff people want (interaction / product design, NOT visual design)

3) Hustlers, to get the stuff to the people
Yes, I just like the local Fry's more than Best Buy. Bias, that's really all it is.

[edited with new magic editing powers]
With EstablishedMen, we have a family of sister dating sites that could feed users. Also, we have raised significant capital and have had good success with our other dating properties of converting users via offline and online ad spends.

Sorry, when I read sentences like that then I can only say: Instant MBA failure.

You're apparently trying to "produce" a dating site like others produce tin food. It doesn't work like that. You don't pour money into a few developers, stir, feed users until boiling - then serve with a strawberry for guaranteed hot exit.

I don't see a site that would create dating as a natural byproduct. I see only the byproduct - and a pretty bad one at that, for all the problems that others have already mentioned.
Thank you for arguing my case. :-)
True, but that's fine. It doesn't affect you in any negative way.
I think that this article really misses the greatest threat to Google, which is the potential decline of the value of advertising. Google makes virtually all of its money from text ads. If ad-blocking software were to get very popular, or, due to consumer behavior, people clicked on less ads, or bought less after clicking, Google's ad inventory would be worth less.

Furthermore, there are several potential feedbacks to this that make the problem worse. First, businesses that rely on Google ads either to drive sales, or for their own revenue source could abandon Google or go out of business. Second, as this trend continued, Google would become unprofitable and be forced to lay off staff, reducing morale. Furthermore, Google's stock price would go down, making employee stock options worthless, and causing a loss of morale, or force increased salaries which Google would not be able to afford.
Fell Stressed? Tips For Meditation in Busy Life
In these troubling times, many people are focused on what's not working and what they do not have. With the pressures of bills, the job or the job hunt, the practices we most need to combat stress are the most neglected. We don't have time to exercise, to connect with friends or to meditation.
Untodos was kinda fun.
HAHAHAHAHAHA. Love it.
"Don't be evil" is google's corporate motto. I believe that's what she was referring to.
From what I've read, NEVER mix InnoDB and MyISAM tables in the same database.

Update: While they don't say never, they don't recommend it. Managing backups gets a lot harder. Also, you should never mix innodb and myisam tables within a transaction, which is probably what I was attaching never to.

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2009/01/12/should-you-mo...
We are cyborgs. Our technology is not orthogonal to our biology.
Requirements don't stink, they're just hard to do.
There's a difference between "don't use Google" and "don't use Google for business."

A story like this turns me off Google in a big way if I'm using them for anything at all commercial. I don't want to have to worry about the stuff I'm doing. The idea of Google Checkout is to make my life easier. They're failing that in a big way.

It's not even a lack of trust of Google. I think Google's a good company that's just stupid in some ways. It's more a matter of, I don't want to bother with that stuff. I'll find somebody easier.
They missed a few things here. Cold fusion isn't thought to be impossible by anyone, just impractical enough that it may never be a legitimate source of power. How two nuclei could fuse at room temperature has been elaborated, I'd bet you could find three good theories on Wikipedia. And it wouldn't be a totally clean source of power, though the waste would become safe in a very short time relative to fission.
Yes, but I think I also triggered it by responding, which means only an admin can change it.
Ouch.

So much negativity in these threads. They are just stereotypes.

There are (some) bad MBAs, sales and marketing folks out there saying "I'll pass on the techies - it's just grunt work, I can get it done for nothing in (insert country here)". Stereotypes again.

Google has simply decided that their marketing department is too big. It happens. Particularly when you acquire a lot of companies as Google does (other shared functions such as HR, Finance are in a similar boat).

From the vibe of this thread you'd think they're getting rid of their marketing function entirely.
It's not that crazy if you think about it. We have 50 different sets of state contract law and precedence to deal with (unlike your 13 superior courts to watch) and a larger amount of interstate commerce and contracts to be handled. Compounding the problem is that fact that state laws regarding contracts can vary quite widely. While some companies may wish to restrict jurisdiction to states that have a pro-business bias this is less of a factor than you might think (companies sue each other far more often than consumers sue companies) and what most companies are looking for is a single standard to use for the contract. No one wants to learn the hard way that some state changed a law six months ago which completely hoses you for liability or contract enforcement and if a contract could not specify a jurisdiction then companies would be forced to stay up to date on new legal precedents and new legislative efforts in all fifty states.

You can try to change the jurisdiction, but it is hard to do this for a very specific reason.
It's irrelevant. We'll have perfect control over our bodies and genes within 500 years, which in evolutionary terms is a very short time. We don't need natural selection anymore.
Yeah, I was thinking the same. I wonder how many of those lines are really "kernel-for-real" essential code and how many are in various drivers.
I'm amazed that Zilog is still selling Z-80s. Must be a lot of legacy products out there. I'm still hanging on to a few tubes of Z80, Z80-CTC and Z80-SIO in case anyone needs to make an emergency buy in 10 years :-)
Amusing, perhaps this is an attempt to seed the site with new users.
Obviously just a failed attempt at self-promotion.

Unless you want to believe that Hany discovered this story, jumped through their registration hoop, was impressed by the UI and signed up with HN to post an appraisal - all of that in only 8 minutes after the story was posted.

Come on raja, you can do better than that...

Oh and btw, I flagged the story for that crap. Pull your PR-stunts elsewhere.
Not a very inciteful comment jonas_b.

I like your site design. I like having the perfect princess in the search. I was expecting from the domain name that it would only be able to search for men.

I like how it automatically knew to put Waterloo as the city.

Some things to improve:

* Show results first.

* You need to be useful to the user first. If you can do it without asking for anything in return then even better.

* Take the drop.io model. Upload and go...no user info required unless they want to offer it.

* Get rid of the sign up. You want to make money 2nd and get users first. So no signup. Make it free then add value added services to service your members.

* Make it even more niche. Up to you how to do this.

* Focus on only a few major cities. Make it clear where you operate.

* Hook into other services - plentyoffish. They may not like this. But do it then deal with it. Afterall both you and they get exposure. Don't steal their users though. Remember your goal is to be useful to the user not yourself.

* If their match is somewhere else lead them there. Offer them to give you their email and you can help them more in the future.

Good luck
I'm surprised no one's mentioned the utility "stow". It lets you install things to their own /usr/local-style hierarchy and will symlink all the files for you. That way you can easily remove something after you've deleted the source directory.
Thanks for picking up on the subtlety.
If I had wanted to suggest that, I would have.

How does a group of people take all costs into account when doing a cost-benefit analysis if they can't agree on what constitutes a cost and what constitutes a benefit, and their relative values?

You and others here are talking about CBA as the basis for rational decision making, and yet I bet you couldn't even describe it in any formal way that could apply to all logical decisions.

What does it mean to do a CBA in terms of your immediate environment? What factors are you taking into consideration? Aesthetics? Health? How much money is clean water worth to you? Or, from a CBA standpoint: is it worth pouring a gallon of paint into your drinking water, or is it better to transport that paint to a remote facility which will handle it in some fashion? And in that one relatively minor decision alone, how many different factors are you going to account for? The size of your drinking water supply, the chemical composition of the paint, the ecology of your drinking water supply, the distance to the waste managing facility, the vehicle used to get it there, the methods the facility uses to handle it ...

This CBA hand-waving is bullshit. It's impossible to take all costs into account for this kind of stuff. Most people -- even the most knowledgeable climate scientists -- don't even know what all the costs are. So just how are we supposed to justify our environmental decisions using a CBA when you can't even correctly do the accounting in the costs column?

And this is what constitutes the basis for rational decision making? Bah! Bah, I say!

I think it's perfectly rational to make decisions based on morals and ethics, and whether or not the consequences of that decision get you closer to your goals or not. So, for example, one of my goals is to experience wilderness areas in as pristine a state as possible. I see trash there. The trash is heavy, and I have a long distance to hike out. It will cost me a great deal of effort to remove it. But, it still does help to accomplish my goal: the next time I visit that place, the trash won't be there (nor will it be there for the next visitor). Thus, I will remove it, if possible.

Is that not a rational decision-making process? Does that not make sense from an environmental standpoint, as a species?
I think the concept is sickening. I doubt you'll find the classy people you're looking for: more likely you'll find yourself attracting the desperate and the depraved.

It's a pretty nice design. A little bit overcolorful: trim down on the blues and greens up top, it seems a little bit like confetti. But overall, very good. If all you care about is getting people to hand you money, your design isn't going to be what turns people away.
AT&T to start sending copyright warnings
I assume you mean more the site than our thoughts on any sort of moral issues. The graphic design is great, and the app is responsive, both of which are unusual for a free dating site.

I think you force the signup box too early. Show me some matches in my area and get me hooked. Give guys a few pictures of pretty girls nearby and they'll give you any info you ask for.
The author's apparent todo list:

- Write blog post

- Put paid link to one site in.

- Do internal SEO to other post with paid link