skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone is always interested in "which site? which startup?", but quite a few people wish to remain anonymous.

If he doesn't mention it and its not in his profile, he probably doesn't want to say.
(sorry if I am answering incorrectly for rob)
Could comparative-effectiveness studies rein in health-care costs?
In praise of nerds
"new" ? I think the term has been around as long as the web. It was pretty much Berners-Lee's idea.
LinkedIn, SixApart and Flickr People Join DataPortability.org: Is This Stuff For Real?
Researchers trigger insulin production in diabetic mice
Is this the big shift to online video?
This article does not attempt to answer the obvious, fascinating question at hand: "How do pre-release online sales affect in-store sales, in terms of units and total profit?" I suspect that artist-to-fan internet sales affect demand elasticity in unknown ways, and for all the confounding variables at play, this seems like a valuable data point.
Considering how expensive booths/presentations are at CES, are they not facing some liability by admitting to this?
I've gone to the music portion four times (didn't go last year, might hit up interactive this year if my schedule permits). The actual panels are pretty sparsely attended (most people are just waking up from the night before by the time they're over), and aren't really that great anyway.

If you're a music geek, it's like paradise. So many of the coolest, best bands play everywhere, every night. There's more must-see shows every night than your time will permit, so you'll have to make sacrifices. Additionally, it's pretty much the best 4-day party I've ever been to, and if you've never been Austin is a really rad place in general.

Even if you're in the music business, no one really gets any business accomplished, so I wouldn't really suggest going for that reason, but you can forge personal relationships that may help you out down the road.
"And if they got all their clicks from 'networksolutionsloveshitler.com' they'd suspect worse."

applause
I generally hate those consoles, as they make things work in unexpected ways. Recently, I spent a while tracking down a bug on a managed VPS with Plesk installed where mail sent by scripts on the server to the same domain (let's call it example.com) were going to local delivery at example.com instead of the MX entry of exchange.example.com (a separate server).

Many times, I want the email system to share its login database with some web app anyway.
Who Owns Your Data? (hint: you do)
So you recommend I start with FlashDevelop? I'd prefer to develop on Linux though, is there a linux alternative? Maybe Scite + flex like Riffplay mentioned?
Maybe it's just recently been hyped up to buzzword status.
The Four Hour Rails Work Week
Apple expected to unveil ultra-slim notebook at Macworld
Newspaper stories that mention "recession"
ReadBurner - see what's shared on Google Reader
Top Ten Myths of Entrepreneurship
In many ways, PG's suggestions do imply a change in your environment as well. And so, it may not necessarily be contradictory to your position / the cited research.
We foresook the quest for VC funding 2 years ago, and think it's one of the best decisions we made. But having said that, I've held key roles at 3 VC-funded startups, and at none of them was $1MM in revenue a predicate.

At $1MM/yr (in product revenue), you're already funded.
The Late Victorian Holocaust
"Eventually, most of us work out that nerdiness tends to go hand-in-hand with higher-than-average levels of curiosity, creativity and enthusiasm. As such, nerds are not merely admirable but attractive. Nerds are cool."

Nerds make more money.
So there's no uninteresting natural number. Because if there were some - there had to be a smallest uninteresting one. And cleary that would be an interesting property.
That's a great point. I bet there are 100 people in the "get sort of rich, slowly" category for every 1 internet millionaire.
This basically is a cure for diabetes. Basically, part of the protein acts as a recognition site for transporters into the cell and into the nucleus. I assume the protein itself is a transcription factor which will activate genes required for cell differentiation. This will trigger stem cells or partially differentiated cells into becoming insulin producing cells.

The effects of this treatment should be permanent. That is unless they get destroyed by the same mechanism that destroyed the original insulin producing cells. Even so, as the article states, an infrequent injection will cause more to be produced.

It's a very interesting approach. I hope more research goes into designing custom versions of these, as I imagine this can be used in other applications in place of gene therapy. Current transcription factors can probably be used with the addition of the signal peptide appended to the end to allow for transport.
I'd like to hear if Verizon or other carriers regret their inability to get the iPhone. It's still only the 4th best selling phone in the U.S., and seems to be fairing even worse in the rest of the world. The only thing game changing about it so far has been the hype.
What I would really love to see is affordable hosting like this but with the ability to do stuff like run a custom web server. I know this thread isn't really about hosting but has anyone seen something like this or is it even technically possible without going fully dedicated?
Kant, Chaitin and the absence of axioms in arithmetic
"only the 4th best selling phone in the U.S."....

Because going from zero to #4 in an industry where there are literally thousands of options and most of them are free isn't impressive? I'd like to know what you think is...

The iPhone has already over-taken all of Windows Mobile in the U.S. How much better do you want this thing to do?

Not to mention the fact that the profit Apple is making on these devices almost certainly exceeds that of any other phone...
I can't wait. It's wrong that after all these years of Moore's Law, my computer is still the heaviest thing in my bag.
He's not talking about startups in the sense we mean here, but in the broader sense of newly created companies. I.e. auto body shops, cafes, landscaping services.
"Most entrepreneurs head right for the worst industries for start-ups. The correlation between the number of entrepreneurs starting businesses in an industry and the number of companies failing in the industry is 0.77. That means that most entrepreneurs are picking industries in which they are most likely to fail."

What kind of wonky logic is that? I think that perhaps a simpler explanation, is that most new companies tend to fail.

In any case, to make the argument that he's trying to make, he would have to compare failure rates and not absolute numbers.
Oh, definitely - I'm just saying Flex is the way to go, any editor (that you like) will do. I use Flash Develop but I'm (increasingly) neutral on that. :)

Though you might want to try Adobe's Flex Builder alpha on Linux. The Windows version was rock solid, but apparently the Linux version is further behind (I haven't tried it on Linux). It's based on Eclipse so it's a memory hog (slightly uncomfortable even on my c2d 3.16ghz + 4gb), but the debugger, profiler, visual editing tools etc are top notch.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder_linux/

Since it just uses the command line compiler, you can migrate to another editor when it gets released non free (or buy it).
Talking about the ease of use so much feels like you're insulting the user's intelligence. If you just make it easy to use and don't mention it, maybe the user will feel like a genius.
Don't get VC.

Save and don't quit your day job. I've been involved with several start-ups, including one I'm working on now. The great thing about tech is for the most part when you're just starting you don't NEED a manufacturing facility, specialized equipment, a huge support or sales or factory staff, etc...

Hardware and bandwidth is commoditized and available month to month for cheap, and can easily scale as your demand grows. Start with free software like Linux, Postgres, Apache, JBoss, etc... even if down the road you want to go with Oracle or something similar. Go small and grassroots with your marketing and see if people like your product/service first, before you decide you need to blow half a million on marketing. Use contractors instead of hiring people like designers, dbas, etc... Maybe you need to hire them after you get 10 clients or 100,000 users or whatever, but start off paying for the hours you need.

So what do you really need? You need a few hundred dollars to incorporate, setup a business bank account, and consult an accountant and/or attorney. You'll probably need some servers w/bandwidth for a month or two or six. A few grand here. And you need a product/service.

Start off building/writing it in the evenings, weekends, and make take a week of vacation and just work on it. See how you can do without quitting your day job. Sure it takes a little longer, but honestly that's a small price to pay to keep control of your enterprise, and often is less time than you'd spend prepping for and applying for VC, and getting turned down, and trying again....

All this applies only to soft-tech startups (web sites, software, online services, etc...) but I've dealt with many folks who were convinced we'd need $250,000 to get things going, and were shocked with a month or two later I had nice five figure checks rolling in off of a total outlay of just under $10,000. The company has no debt, and no one controls it but we the founders.

You should be able to scrape together $10,000 with a couple of partners. And in the end you're in control and you owe nothing to anyone.
You _could_ run linux off a gumstix.
http://gumstix.com/

With exponential progress, we prove that desire expands at an even faster pace.

It reminds me of a joke made by a general to a bunch of military tech makers: "our marines carry 100lb of extremely light weight gear"
Why Microsoft Must Control One Laptop Per Child
A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys
USB 3.0 in the flesh
Top 10 Underhyped Webapps
The Mystery Box [video]
"And the typical entrepreneur earns less money than he otherwise would have earned working for someone else."

Money is equally important, right? Then why establish a fulltime startup/sel-owned-business if it will pay less than a fulltime job? Can't base it solely on "personal satisfaction of work".
Did Bill Gates Just Say Windows Sucks?
Top 20 Internet Millionaires Under 30
Yeah, that's not me. It's the video blogger from the Politico.
and most importantly pizzeria
Why CNET Is In The Mess They Are In
I love this thread. Nothing wrong with having two superficially contradictory models of motivation.

I would keep PG's advice in mind when raising children.
MLS is dead, long live MLS!
Peter Norvig is awesome! Please, check his PAIP: http://norvig.com/paip.html
70 Websites worth $1M
Mary Lou Jepsen, "My job is simply done."
He was a programmer once. Because we all say that. Many many times.
We all know our "dog food" better.
Because it IS funny?
> but it seems to me that you can use mod_ruby just like mod_php.

If two apps are using the same Ruby instance, then they are sharing String, Array, Integer, etc. And ObjectSpace. So one app can alter any class (say, undefine or redefine to_s on something) and the other app will share those changes.

mod_ruby runs all apps in the same Ruby process.

If the Web sites are pretty basic and not using any metaprogramming magic, then maybe there will be no problem. If they are creating classes with the same name, but different behavior, then maybe not so good.
Windows.h must be the worst engineered header of all times
I drove a Suzuki Swift (same car as the Metro) for a decade. Cost me $10k (Canadian back when they were cheap), never spent a cent to maintain it. Gas, I never noticed actually spending money on it ;-) It wasn't the cheapest configuration, though, it had 4 cylinders (as opposed to 3) and 14" inch tires instead of 13".
This has been rumored for a year or two now. I'll believe it (and probably buy it) when I see it. The Asus Eee is nice, but I'd like something I can comfortably touch-type on...
Are there good hosting services that will let me upload and manage my own Xen image(s)?

(edit: aside from EC2)
As someone whose remote sessions always suffer whenever too many people in our family start to watch YouTube videos, I wouldn't open up a wireless hub unless I could configure it to throttle back the bandwidth offered to public connections.
There are videos, too, of Sussman & Ableson teaching the book to class of HP employees

Too lazy to find y'all a link. ;) Google knows all, though
They are idiots.
RealMedia?

Ick.
"Apple didn't need to take thunder from CES, there was nothing to take," Michael Gartenberg, an analyst with Jupiter Research, wrote on the company's blog.
I think the bandwidth problem can be addressed by learning about your router and blocking (or go meet and make friends with) the neighbour stealing it. But not blocking out casual users - ubiquitous bandwidth is the goal. I love the sentiment -- both subversive and welcoming -- like the best of the hippies.
All you need is love!
Though somewhere down the road, when the hippie experience turns into Altamont, is every person with a home network going to have a privacy policy? Will we all have to buy the same software the hotels and airports use just to avoid liability?

For example, what happens if two people connect to your home network both without your knowledge, one does something bad involving your network and the other person's computer? Serial killer bad?

Giant liability bills ensue.
XHTML and CSS Embarrassment
How I was embarrassed by 3rd party badges at my website. Am I missing something?
All too much. Make people engage, then engage them again, maybe one more time for the late comers, they'll find the signup.

VCs like registered users, but if you do things right, and make it easy for users to register when they want to, they're an inevitable result of page views.
I'm with you. Biding my time until I can upgrade from my trusty 12" PowerBook.
If a community garden supplies free water, are they liable when someone uses the water to drown someone else?
Ask YC: How do you monetize your website?
I asked a similar question before. My idea is to pool the results and share my findings with everyone thats interested.

So, if you've used adsense or other sites before - take the survey!

Thanks
I must say, he's still pretty damn awkward.
"millionaire by the time you're age 25" ?

Is that what the kids are aiming for these days? Back when I was in high school the goal was "millionaire by the time you're age 30". Oh how times change.
The nice thing about C++ is that memory leaks are easy to fix. Valgrind is a pretty bad-ass tool.

In garbage collected languages leaks can be very hard to track down. And they do happen from time to time.
Heh, this is algorithm bait.

The obvious algorithm is to sort all the words in order of increasing frequency, then print the 100 first. This algorithm is O(n log n) because of the sorting. It generates the list in order of frequency.

There is an O(n) algorithm that first picks some random item as pivot, then does a partioning like QuickSort where items with higher frequency than the pivot are moved to the front of the array and those with lower frequency to the back.

If the first partition has more than a 100 items, then the algorithm only has to recurse into that part. If it has fewer (k), then it prints everything in the first partition, and recurses into the second to generate the 100 - k best items.

This is expected O(n) and will not generate the list in order of frequency.
I thought this was supposed to avoid click fraud? Our Google AdWords PPA experiment
Robert Stallman posts an ad on Craigslist
I'm highly skeptical: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=96771
No screen and no keyboard.... the add-ons for gumstix would be heavier than a MacBook.
I have a Nokia N800 and a folding keyboard I can use with it, but the screen is too small for real work. I want something with a 12" screen that's very light.
Thai whiz kid launches location-aware Twitter-like service
If you crank up drivenness and hold intelligence constant, you become proportionally more effective.
They should have geotargeted and not used Adsense... mistake only a novice would make. They should read at least a Dummies book on AdWords or just outsource a campaign to someone competent.

When you know what you're doing, AdWords DOES work.
Man I wish I had a name like "Steele".

"Guy Steele" - now that is a name that demands greatness just by the force of the name.
Who loves me loves my dog as well, indeed.
Quality means never having to say you are sorry
When C++ is your hammer, every problem looks like your thumb.
I think we've seen that what matters more is who possesses your data.
Read more on Slicehost -- its exactly that; you have full access to a virtualized machine, and can do pretty much anything.
Certainly general AdWords can work very well.

The issue is the spankin'-new PPA program. First worlders could engage in lead-fraud, too, so geotargetting isn't a sure fix.

You can tighten a PPA program so it only pays for paid signups, not leads/trials -- but then the fraudsters can dispute the credit charges. I don't think you can reverse the PPA commission to Google when, 60 days later, the signup money isn't there.
Hubble finds double Einstein ring
Rails sucks?
For a software startup I don't know that you need a "lump of cash" of more than say $5-10K. You don't have that many capital expenditures compared to other industries (e.g. if you are going to design a chip you need at least $1M for the masks and almost that much for the design tools).

In my experience, VC's are asking "do you have customers" because they want to talk to them and double check that the reasons customers purchased and the benefits that the customers believe that they have gained match what you are telling them.

Also, it matters quite a bit if you are profitable in terms of your negotiating position. If you are unprofitable and tell an investor "we'll be out of money in six months" guess when the serious negotiations often start?

I have never heard of 7 employees being a magic number. Or $1M in revenue.

Also, I would gently disagree with your statement:

"Investors know that the failure of a startup isn't necessarily because of the idea, but in not having enough capital to keep afloat while figuring out how to make money."

I think investors value demonstrated results (e.g. happy customers) a team that can execute well together, and the possibility that they are investing in acceleration of the business, not salaries for folks still trying to figure out how to make money.

Consulting and working on the product in parallel has been one approach I've taken, another is keeping my day job and working nights and weekends with a partner. I think if you conceptualize the problem as how to raise 500K to $4M you overlooking the most important risk: market risk (is there a market for your product). Most teams don't fail because they can't build what they set out to build in my experience, most fail because there wasn't a market and they were not willing to adapt, refine, and improve the product until they found a market.
This to me is a much more common path to success. You avoid debt, determine if there is a market, and stay flexible on your objectives. Once you take 500K or more you can become committed to a path of action just because of the funding and not wanting to appear wrong--I must be smart these guys gave me $500K. If you are willing to listen, you can learn much more from 30 prospects than 30 VC interviews. And it's often much easier to talk to 30 prospects (some of whom may even become customers). To me the time to start talking to VC's is when you have clearly identified a market opportunity that will benefit from additional investment because you are consistently exceeding your plans.
I'm told the next generation of NVidia chips are going to be amazing. A friend is working in high end audio, making a "iphone on steroids" touch-screen remote for the system. The tablet will have full 3D graphics for an 8" screen with half the thickness of an iphone. With a tiny folding keyboard, solid state storage, and some sacrifices on batter life for size, hardware designers should be able to put an ultra-ultra-portable on the market within a year or two.
Study confirms link between chemical in red wine and slowed aging in humans
My point is just that the cpu, mobo, battery, and drives of a laptop could easily fit in 1/10th the size of a MacBook sans monitor & keyboard.
I can't wait until this drug hits the market. It is approved for patients with diabetes because you can't get something approved as a general anti-aging drug. But it is clear that it works in all people. I hope I can afford it.
Any other bright ideas? No one likes compact fluorescents.
Man I wish I had a name like "Steele".

So did a famous Soviet political leader.
Starting a business is easy.

I love lists of "myths" that contain sentiments that no one actually believes. Even starting a gardening company is a 14-hour job, I'm sure.
I don't think he said Windows sucks, I think he was saying whatever they make five years from now will make what we currently use look like garbage.

Any one who's ever listened to Gates knows this is how he likes to talk.

But, sadly even after five years Microsoft products usually don't get that but much better.
Who do you follow on twitter that helps keep you informed?
Who do you follow on twitter that helps keep you informed?
Not to over beat the question, but I think he said what any futuristic type programmer on a deadline would say: "if you give me more time I can make it better".
Needed:Sombody to help me customise Wikimedia
Hi,

I am looking for a programmer/developer to help me customise wikimedia and integrate it w/ a messageboard.

if anyone is interested email:
oneokayfella@gmail.com

Pay is negotiable
Thanks.
me:

jowyang
Scobleizer (duh)
steverubel
factoryjoe
swardley
gruber

for starters ... great stuff - other recommendations?
Our first lump of cash came from angel investors that I got to know working (as an employee, not a founder) in a previous startup.
In general, people who know you already, are more likely to be willing to bet on you.
I completely don't understand that kind of humor. The episode Steve Wozniak describes in iWoz, playing pranks with the remote control a few decades ago, OK, it was weird and sort of interesting, although I am also glad that I was not the victim of his joke. But to copy that kind of thing now, I really don't get it. At least Wozniak built his own remote control.

Sorry to rant about it, but it seems to me to be the same mentality as the script kiddies, it's just plain annoying and making the lifes of everybody else harder.
I seem to have heard the same kind of answer from the Rails community before: "do it yourself if you really care". I don't blame DHH for it, but I think it is interesting to note the difference to the major Java frameworks I know, like Spring. I think they care a lot more about their community and the popularity of their framework.

Apparently since DHH built Rails for his own use, he doesn't care if anybody else uses it or not. Although I wonder how much the popularity of Rails contributes to the success of 37signals - would anybody even know about their web applications if it wasn't for the Rails hype?

In any case, that kind of thing is why people still choose Java over Ruby.
The Ultimate Web Developer Setup
That could be just a bit problematic. PHP doesn't have Ruby's metaprogramming features, but it does have globals, classes and the like. How does it deal with this issue?
upvote for (the real) rms.

I bet there are a lot of geek girls that would love to fuck/go on trips with Stallman.
Or you could get a golf tdi thats a few years old. Mine used to get about 45mpg.. 50 with a good tail wind. :)
*engineers at Ford (F) and GM (GM) can make cars that run on H20

He means H20 and electricity, right? They can also make cars that run just on electricity.
Leave it to reddit. :(
I hope it also has a multi-touch screen.