skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Exploding termsheets are beyond rude. They're aimed at minimizing your ability to negotiate. They prevent you from forcing several funding groups to arrive at the table at the same time and cause more pricing competition.

I recommend you consider that signing a term sheet is like entering into a relationship. Do you want a relationship with someone that's behaving badly beforehand? They're already on their best behavior.
I hope this is not TechStars because I really like their operation as a viable alternative to ycom from what I've seen and read. Exploding term sheets seems pretty short-sighted, and not something anyone should do if they are embodying the motto of "helping young entrepreneurs". If a "mentor" is going to use force tactics, they've lost my respect and I certainly have no interest in giving them 5pts for a lousy 20k. Rather just sell my car and bike all summer than deal with that type of investor.

I think this applies to most people (at least for me), ycom is a #1 choice for two reasons: 1) Huge respect for PG for his knowledge generosity and true leadership qualities 2) ycom's presence and relationships in the media.

So my personal note to yclones: figure out YOUR value add so people want to come to you. Force is not the answer, it's shows weakness in your operation.
Well I'm not sure how to make a lean virtualhost. I thought I could only remove modules from the main apache config, not a vhost.

I mean, "with no interpreters, SSI, rewrites, proxies, etc."

The process will always contain all the same modules. But, the execution path can be very different.
I've clarified what I meant by that in my response. I didn't mean to imply that the Apache process could be made smaller for specific VirtualHosts.
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The Vancouver Entrepreneurial Walks
Mar.25, 2009? 8 new Cisco vulnerability advisories
Could also be to do with management, particularly switching - switching large DC currents is problematic (i.e. it arcs). It's easier to manage on a smaller scale.
I'd suggest digging up an anatomy book (Grey's Anatomy or whatever) and comparing the location of your pain to a map of the nerves in your arm. This will help you debug the specific problem.
Tesla has a long, long road ahead, IMHO. Who wants a car that can't be driven for more than a few hundred miles without a charge? So limiting...

Fisker, on the other hand, is the future (again IMHO). It will be interesting to see these two companies battle it out going forward.
The "It" factor? Have you read anything about his past? Or read what he's written? He started a company in high school that Microsoft offered to buy just to land him as an employee. That's pretty impressive.

It doesn't matter, because we'll criticize anybody who isn't Steve Jobs for thinking they're Steve Jobs, but Zuckerberg is largely responsible for Facebook's formation, from what I've read, and for all his criticism he's managed to get a hell of a lot done for his company. So I'm willing to give him a chance and see if he's as good as he thinks he is - and failing that, if he falls I'll hope he pulls an SJ and comes back in 10 years with something even better.
Robot scientist becomes first machine to discover new scientific knowledge
Yeah, I grant you Galactic isn't there yet :o)
That latter point is the problem. Atlas Shrugged is a fine novel, and I'd excuse people for being jerks if they were in fact doing the brilliant things that AS says jerks are allowed to do, but people don't do that. They read it and interpret it so that whatever they were already doing, they're allowed to keep doing.
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praise God!
In making this argument, you've missed the point of Amazon vs Google/Microsoft.

From http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-05/mf_amazon?cur...:

Bezos doesn't disagree. "I'd be surprised if no one else does this," he says, pausing for effect. "It's a really good idea!" And there may be an ace up his sleeve. Any economist will tell you that a commodity business -- storing and processing data, for instance -- is a mug's game, with prices that plunge inevitably toward the cost of production (in the case of bits, pretty close to zero). That's music to Bezos' ears. "Commodity businesses don't scare us," he says. "We're experts at them. We've never had 35 or 40 percent margins like most tech companies."
Seconded. Atlas Shrugged has a hell of a lot to teach people, young individuals in particular. Frankly, I liked the Atlas Shrugged dicks more than I liked the emo dicks at 16. The guys that read Atlas Shrugged avoided a lot of the existentialist angst, and some of them went on to do some cool things with their time. That's worth the many people who get obnoxious after reading it.
Yeah, I knew he didn't know C. I agree about SO being more popular or whatever than many YC startups. However, my point was just kind of to be surprised that he is making enough money as a full time blogger posting such nonsense. :)
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It may be possible to bring money and morality into line. I'm going to find out: https://ourdoings.com/ourdoings-startup/2009-04-01
Most of his writings are him trying to assuage his users after making them very upset (redesigns, terms, newsfeed). He just doesn't impress me on a personal level. And he still hasn't effectively monetized.

Having just heard about Sam Altman a few days ago I am already much more impressed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m43t44WL8-w
I want an ant farm that comes with bottles of ant pheremones. Then I'd use them to build a Rube Goldberg machine out of ants and make them calculate pi or something.

Edit: somebody should totally apply to YC with this idea. You could even get free publicity by getting PETA on your case.

Edit 2: Name the company "Insect Overlords".
You don't want to know maan. Chaos.

In all seriousness I would imagine every ant carrying each other to the 'dead' pile over and over and over until the smell wore off all the ants and life returned to normal.

Could we combine the 'follow' scent with this and create some sort of elaborate Rube Goldberg ant machine?
What do you know about the merits of this article? I had never heard of LEAP/E2020 before. They have some strong opinions on the near future:

"According to LEAP/E2020, if this alternative to the currently collapsing system has not been initiated by this summer 2009, proving that there is another solution than the « every man for himself » approach, today’s international system will not survive this summer."
It does some data mining, but there's also a lot of soft AI (optimizing an airline travel search, building a basic search engine).

It's quite good, although there are a number of annoying typos in the code, a trend that I've noticed recently with a number of O'reilly books unfortunately.

Still, definitely worth a read, the intro to practical applications of some of the AI topics in particular is really cool.
Do the other seed funding firms say that they'll float you an offer while you're awaiting YC's decision?

PS- I realize that with YC being the "gold standard" of seed funding, other firms will always want to get earlier commitment. But moralizing about adding stress makes little sense when other firms currently have no way to actually cooperate.
You can't judge Zuckerberg by his Facebook blog. The guy is a complete recluse. Yeah, all he writes is apologies, because he can delegate everything else. But try to find some of the leaked letters he wrote people that he tries to suppress for privacy. Reading them you get the image of an extraordinarily focused mind. He's arrogant, but if you can judge people on the confidence of their writing alone the guy is pretty brilliant.

I saw Altman's speech and was pretty impressed. He doesn't dick around. He's also a more confident speaker than Zuckerberg. But with respect to him, Facebook is better designed (Loopt is horrendously generic), and it's done more to change the web than most web sites. The Facebook Platform changed a lot. Making money isn't the only part of design.
I know nothing about electrical engineering but there was a documentary on the history channel about this and they interviewed the leading researcher(a professor in the US) and he basically said no ones ever built a tower the size of Teslas to actually test if his theory would work, it didn't get into the details of why the experiment couldn't just be scaled down. But I think he implied there was some sort of critical size you need to get to where it would become efficient.
This really isn't big news. Asp.Net MVC framework has been under and Open Source license (a custom license - http://aspnet.codeplex.com/license) for a long time now. This news is just that they switched to the common MS-PL license.

I have done a project on the MVC framework, and must say that it is a huge breath of fresh air compared with the ASP.NET Web Forms framework.
Diggbar Demo [video]
http://vimeo.com/3876226?pg=embed&sec=

It looks very well designed and implemented.
You should test that hypothesis. There's only so far they can push ahead.
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The article is FULL of logic problems... I can't believe anyone would take it remotely seriously.
Ah, thanks. M1 seems to be between 1 and 2 trillion, so credit card debt is definitely significant against that back drop.
The only claim I strongly disagree with is that "we will fully understand how the parallel system in the brains works". How can you be sure? If understanding is made of abstraction, what if the brain is computationally irreducible? Our understanding will increase of course, but at some point the "explanation" of some component will be equivalent to describing all the neurons in that component and their connections.
Did we both think of this idea simultaneously? (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=544035).
Astronauts and doctors are fine. But do you look down on kids who want to be professional football players? That similarly gives no benefit to society, focuses on skills that aren't useful anywhere else, etc.
If you really believe your assertion that Fried's post was legally defamatory instead of harsh criticism, why not find a lawyer and show him/her the text of that post?

GS certainly don't seem to think they would have a case.
BlackBerry maker joins the fray with app store
Sirlin is terrific. I've been reading through his blog, and his insights into the gaming world are incredible. I'd recommend it to anybody who's designing anything, especially since to many people using web sites are similar to playing games. (Some of his tips on gameplay would really influence and change sites like Reddit and HN, I feel, especially his article about balanced gameplay.)
thanks for the feedback!

good point about the bandwidth and timeouts.

also, browsers could definitely use the link information. Thought the idea is for the twitter clients (and other micro-blogging tools) to not obfuscate a URL with shorteners in the 1st place.

granted some sites will always need tinyurl.com, etc but there should be a way for sites to specify their own short URL versions of their long URLs

also as i understand it, adding a title attribute would break the purpose of using a URL shortener - i could see the link with title would take up more space than the original URL in HTML code.

also thanks for the opens search and fav-icon suggestions. i will update the RFC.
I would strongly disagree with this. I used to feel this way about Mark Zuckerberg, but not anymore. Just consider these observations about facebook:

1) When it started, there were already many social networks

2) Because it positioned itself as a social network for college students, it got the early growth and adoption any "social" website needs to survive

3) They've grown REALLY fast since then, and have started to really lock in the users

4) It's not unthinkable for them to have a billion users. Once they have all the users they want, they can pick and choose their business model.

5) Mark Zuckerberg can't be removed from the CEO position, and probably holds more than 20% of the company

6) Facebook is hiring top talent, on par with Google and probably better than Microsoft.

These things don't just happen out of the blue. For someone who has consolidated power in a company that could rival Google, I don't think Zuckerberg gets enough credit. If I were pg, I would have put him in my top 5.
Digg kind of bores me now. We've seen this exact same feature a dozen times before. There is nothing unique about this one.
I'm not an avid reader of businessinsider.com. Anyone have any insight into whether that title is meant to be a joke?
Why does anyone owe GS good PR out of this?
> People in the US have a lower life expectancy than many other countries,

The USA's life expectancy is 78.06 years – this is not far from the European Union average of 78.7 years and it is higher than some Scandinavian countries (such as Denmark) .

> is mainly due to the US having an appalling infant mortality rate

The infancy mortality rate (under five) of the USA is 7.8 per 1000 life births. This again is not that much worse than European countries (UK is at 6.0).

Now for my defence of the USA health system. Firstly, what are the leading causes of death in developed countries? They are listed below (with the number of people who died per year):

Ischaemic heart disease 3,512,000
Stroke 3,346,000
Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease 1,829,000
Lower respiratory infections 1,180,000
Lung cancer 938,000
Car accident 669,000
Stomach cancer 657,000
High blood pressure 635,000
Tuberculosis 571,000

What are some causes of Ischaemic heart disease ? Here are some:

“Its risk increases with age, smoking, hypercholesterolaemia (high cholesterol levels), diabetes, hypertension (high blood pressure) …

There is limited evidence for population screening, but prevention (with a healthy diet and sometimes medication for diabetes, cholesterol and high blood pressure) is used both to prevent IHD and to decrease the risk of complications. “

For the second leading cause of death high cholesterol and cigarette smoking is also a contributing factor (you can see where I am going with this).

What is the obesity rates for the USA? For a BMI of >30, as percentage of the population it is 30.6%! (Here is a nice graph: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Obesity_country_comparison...).

You can see that the average health of an American is therefore far worse off due to his/her lifestyle (diet, etc...). How can you compare the health system in the USA with one in Norway (8.3%), Denmark (9.5%) or Canada (14.3%) that does not have to contend with this obesity rate?

The health system in the USA is amazing for bringing the average life expectancy of the USA close to European levels with such a high rate of obesity.

We have just talked about obesity – there are quite a few other things that contribute to a larger death rate. A few examples is smoking (which is much more regulated in the EU, car safety (which is stricter in the EU) and AIDS prevalence. The AIDS prevalence for the USA is 0.6% which is higher than all the Western European countries.

Here are the sources for this discussion:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expec...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mor...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Obesity_country_comparison...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_causes_of_death_by_rate
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ischaemic_heart_disease http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroke
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_HIV/AIDS_a...
The answer is in the comments on the blog post already.
Could this sort of "mania" fight depression?
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Some sources is given in the post above. The USA has a marginally larger infancy mortality rate than some European countries.
Curious, which forum?
I was denied an account at Wachovia in 2006. They invited me to apply again in the future. I won't.
Ask HN: Anyone doing a startup part-time while working?
I am just coming out of school and have been bootstrapping a startup for the last 8 months. We're not quite ready to raise capital yet (in this market) and cash is getting tight.

I was contemplating getting a full-time job (ideally 30hrs/week). But there's always a million things to do to get a startup running and I'm not sure how feasible it would be.

Does any have experience running a startup on the side? Is it possible? Any advice?
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This looks like the beginning of the end of your average joe paying for computer hardware to use at home. Apple + awesome design will be able to withstand this trend for a while but the starter Dells / Acers / Toshibas of the world are going the cell phone route (free after rebate a year after launch).
I wasn't ever close enough to see what kind of disks they were.
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Exactly. I liked quite a lot of what he said, but that "appalling" was appalling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_infant_mor...

Iceland IMR (the lowest) is 2.9, and the US is 6.3. Wow! That means twice as many kids in the US die as Iceland! That's appalling! But we're in the noise floor here. 0.03% vs 0.06% is noise floor, It's certainly not appalling.
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Of course, that's what everybody said about Watchmen.

I've never read the book, but I've heard a lot about Ayn Rand's philosophy, none of it good.
"Well, let's be charitable. I'm sure a lot of people are in shock."

Hell, I was shocked. I didn't know GS operated that way. I had only vaguely heard of them and thought they were a community site, not a company that engages in the sorts of practices that they've openly admitted.

But shock is only a plausible justification for so long. The group of people who think the real problem here is that this story became public and people got unhappy at GS have had plenty of time to think it over.
> For someone who has consolidated power in a company that could rival Google

I think you may be getting ahead of yourself on that one.
This was a nice read and I learned a thing or two, thanks.

Hopefully progress continues to be made in the area of things like better parsing for more helpful coding environments, because while it feels incredibly "impure", there are times when I almost feel like having language rules (such as "End If", though not as ugly hopefully) solely for the purpose of making my editor more helpful would be a worthwhile tradeoff. Emphasis on "almost", but still.

Just as intelligent programming language design saves time, intelligent syntax highlighting and other editor provided assistance does too (and a non-negligible amount at that).
Really depends on the type of startup your running. Is it just developing technology? Then that can be easily done nights, weekends (and overnights). But if your startup involves significant operational work, dealing with customers or meeting with clients/partners, then it's almost impossible to do unless you have that work 'outsourced' someway, whether to partners or to other firms, etc.
The guy is a complete recluse.

Part of being a great CEO is being a cheerleader. You can't do that being hidden.

There are many different types of leadership, some of which Zuckerberg has. Making Facebook into the culture mainstay it is has been a huge accomplishment. I am sure a lot of this is due to him. But he needs to be an effective communicator both internally and externally in order to succeed. He can have awesome ideas that are technically groundbreaking, but he needs to make others believe.
"Are these barriers legal? Doesn't matter. You still will be sent out the door without your money...and then you go back to the loan sharks."

Wait, you're now arguing that the "loan sharks" are useful and helpful, after denigrating them elsethread?

In any case, I agree that you can cash a check at the bank it is drawn on, and that it can be difficult. Because my newly opened account had an eight day clearing time, I needed to cash my checks and trot over to my bank to deposit cash quite a bit last year (small employer had no direct deposit). It was comical what lengths they went to to try to avoid giving me cash.

"Are you a customer with us? [No.] Oh, I'm sorry." (But I didn't go away).

"Oh, you'll need two IDs." (Okay, here you go).

"Oh, we don't have that much money on hand." (It wasn't very much, especially for a bank).

"Oh, I'll have to get my manager." (in a vaguely threatening-maybe-you-should-just-leave manner).

"If you open an account with us, we can cash this." (But of course they could even if I didn't).

"We can't give out that much cash. Can you come back tomorrow?" (No).

"I guess we could do a cashier's check for half of that [said doubtfully]. Would you like to open an account with the remainder?"

Etc. The first few times, I was polite and firm, and eventually they recognized me when I came in and I didn't get any hassle. But lots of people wouldn't know that "We can't" doesn't mean they can't.
Facebook/Google comparisons always strike me as way off base. It's like comparing a Central Park (busy, no money) with Disneyland (busy, big money).
swimming works great for me.
Yup.

Cf. http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1662-hot-trend-part-time-...
"Similarly, buying things doesn't make anybody happy."

This was obviously written before the iPhone.
Very unfortunately, yes. I'm aware US economics aren't a carbon copy of what Rand wanted, because it simply doesn't work.
He's the best cheerleader Facebook could have. He gives speeches, but hides personal information. If you're a spokesperson for a company whose number-one selling point is privacy, the best marketing move you can make is to stay hidden. When I was younger I wrote him a friend request and a little message, which he promptly ignored, and my respect for him swelled for that. In a Silicon Valley that's becoming infamous for celebrity and over-the-top drama, he's a breath of fresh air.
Not that it will help the original poster here any, but I've been running a site on Slicehost using SBCL since last November or so.
Obviously we're discussing faith and intuition here, as none of us has the facts. I don't think there is anything computationally irreducible in the brain.

About some component not being expressible as the result of simpler computations: that has to happen at some point, by definition. But that point is probably within the reach of our understanding.

All in all, I don't think there is much magic, just lack of knowledge on our part. Of course, it's just my intuition.
Sounds plausible given Zuck's talk at startup school.
I wonder if we'll get the complete Galt speech? ;)
Yup. It's possible, but extremely difficult. Moreso if you have a family.

Take pg's advice here if you at all can and stay away from that day job. Couldn't you monetize your service immediately instead?
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Central park isn't a business. If it were a for-profit venture, it would be fairly easy to monetize, purely because it's so popular.