skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yeah I do agree to a certain extent.
Forum posts are obviously going to be archived, and examined, and remain public.
Chat-rooms seem more of a grey area to me. I can see enormous use to archiving and mining the data, but on the other hand it does look slightly creepy being able to search and find some inane conversation I might have had months ago when I was in a silly mood.
This is stupid. Please guys don't post things like that. While the "reply all" button gets abused sometimes, it is actually pretty useful.
Is your goal to maximize customer satisfaction? Is their goal to maximize return on investment? Might their goals and yours conflict at some point?
This guy doesn't even like Twitter, come on.
Most VC funds have a 10 year lifetime, so all investment returns are for some period less than that.
Email is the new Private Messaging?
I think I saw an article on ycnews a while ago that talked about how you shouldn't add a private messaging system to your site and should simply use email instead. Does anyone know where that article is?
Something similar has already happened with Bottler/Blotter XDCC scripts ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottler_(IRC_client) ).

Bottler authors wanted channels to "opt out" by putting strings in the topic, but most channels instead implemented scripts that detect and kickban Bottlers.
I got kind of excited but quickly got bored. Doesn't seem like it's for hackers as it is for people like that word games. Does it get more technically harder as time goes on?
>You can purchase DRM-free songs by clicking "buy" on select players.

Can you expand on that a bit? What do you mean by 'players' - like, WinAmp / WMP / etc. or like other members of the site? I use Amazon's music store, so that's kind of interesting to me.

\*Edit: I intermittently get "t61.flashplayer.init is not a function" error. It prevents me from listening to music. Any idea on what to do with that?
Very good point, but it seems more likely that poorly performing companies have a rather short (several years) lifetime.
Why Early Stage Venture Investments Fail
How will the YC model compare?

I'd guess a higher percentage of failures and higher average return on the successful companies. (It's a lot easier to get 50X when you only invest $15K to start with!)
Parsing link parens is broke in a different way - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottler_(IRC_client) chops the (IRC_client) from the link.
Exploratory Meetings With VCs: Open Your Kimono
In my post, Types Of Due Diligence Meetings, I mentioned that there will be Exploratory Meetings where you are meeting with the same partner for the second, third or fourth time. In exploratory meetings your objective is very different than what it was in your first meeting with a partner at a fund. In your first meeting the objective is to get a VC interested enough to have you in for a second meeting. As a result, in the first meeting sharing too much information can be a mistake, if it distracts a VC from the big picture. This isn't the case in an exploratory meeting...
I will be bringing cookies to the potluck on Tuesday. If this message reached you in error, just delete it.
BS. I reply to all most of the time, because usually there was a good reason why people were on the distribution list. Also I find it quite annoying if I put someone on the list and a responder omits them. Happens mostly with people who lack enough email experience or etiquette or are just not smart enough or careful enough to think what they are doing and the author of the article seems to be among those.
If you have a Mac, also consider Ready Lisp.

http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/26203/ready-lisp

SBCL bundled with Aquamacs, a version of Emacs designed to integrate with the Mac interface (including Mac keyboard shortcuts).
I have one customer whose facility is so bad, even the cochroaches eat outside. I dial in as much as possible because I don't feel like doing ANYTHING while I'm there.

Good hackers should be able to work anywhere, but there sure is something so be said for nice digs.

Joel is pretty big on good space:

http://www.fogcreek.com/About.html
Just checked my dell...free from all forms of squishyness, except the LCD, which is a little bit squishy.
Key quote:

``Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered. That scale/burn rate becomes the cancer that kills the business.''

If you don't have time to read the whole article, at least read the last three paragraphs.
Loopt used to be named Flipt? What, were potential investors worried that flipped implies a lack of long term commitment? :-P

This is an awesome page. The speaker list rocks. It reads like the crib notes to Founders At Work.
It's rare to get this kind of info out of a VC. I'm impressed with Fred's openness.
"... detailing a grim, overcrowded future ..."

This is one of my pet peeves. BR's future isn't particularly overcrowded; J. F. Sebastian has the whole damn Bradbury building to himself. As he says: "there's plenty of space for everyone".

The L.A. of BR is a dense urban environment, but, if anything, it feels like a city being slowly abandoned, not overcrowded.

I suspect the hotkeys for 'overcrowded' and 'dystopian' are just close to each other. Anyway. I'm sure y'all have some LALR grammars to discuss, or something.
Think you have a secret life?  Think again.
As so often, the solution is not to get rid of Reply All but to log and follow up on misuses of it.
Any chance we will see PG's talk as a future essay?

I also wouldn't mind video of any of the talks.
my macbook pro has two screws that always comes loose on the left side, but that was just a defect
This is so true - you see this kind of thing constantly where somebody has inadvertently changed the way something looks and are suddenly lost. I think one of the defining characteristics of a good IT guy is knowing a bunch of different ways to do the same thing on the software their organization uses (be it the OS or the word processor or whatever).
I've been a big fan of the book 'I am Legend' by Robert Matheson. I'm hoping the studios give the director of the film the same freedoms Ridley Scott now enjoys. Yet as much as I like Will Smith somehow I think this casting decision is ominous.
URLs aren't a big deal. Most people bookmark anyway, they don't type them in. I mean are we going to complain about the character set for domain names next?

I surf sites that are natively in other languages and seeing words in URLs that aren't in English doesn't bother me. It reminds me the world is a big place :)

> Every string displayed in your site (aside from the user created stuff) now becomes a bundle of strings, one for each language.

That's good practice anyway, from the standpoint of being able to make changes without touching the code.

> Hassle.

Web development is a hassle in the first place. But being able to handle other languages isn't any more complex than separating presentation from code.
For some definition of "future":

http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Translation: Expenditures outpaced income. I don't get what this article has to do with early-stage investments in particular, except that early-stage usually means no income yet.

I guess investing only in proven businesses is a lot safer, but every business was "early-stage" at one point.
If this isn't just nicely packaged marketing for gmail, it's more likely they are focusing their resources on targets with weaker defenses.
people are not the only things that can make a space crowded, and the author is perhaps referring to this.
Assuming they're one of the common types of screw used in the computer, that's not a bug - it's a feature. Some day, I will end up having to take part a Macbook and repair it. Invariably, a screw will be lost, but it won't be a problem because there are two spares!
> This is how they want their profiles to look.

This doesn't take into consideration that profile layout is a pain in the ass and most people don't want to deal with the mess of CSS.

MySpace layouts tend not to be what people want, just what they settle for. As it is, it's too much work to get it the way you want it.
"Expenditures outpaced income" is an oversimplification. Every new business's expenditures outpace income. This essay describes a two-part problem. The high burn rate makes you die faster; that's one part. The other part is that scaling up to a larger business makes you less adaptable.
Popular Facebook applications are unabashed scams (even Stanford ones)
i was recently dismayed to find that one of the hottest recent facebook applications, 'Send Hotness,' is nothing more than a scam. It features a 'continue' button that appears to be a functional part of the application, but actually links the user out of facebook into scam webpages asking for phone numbers, etc. A user could easily be fooled into thinking that entering this information is part of the registration process. The buzz around Stanford is that this application, which is trumpeted by the stanford facebook application class, now has over 3 million users and is making many thousand dollars per week. i'm embarrassed of my alma mater and have tried contacting facebook to inform them of the issue, but i assume they have a pretty laissez faire policy in regard to applications. Do you guys think this is just the inevitable progression of facebook applications and web ventures in general?
Anyone else hate that phrase?
Could this be it? I feel like there was something more compelling?

http://paulstamatiou.com/2007/09/16/why-private-messages-suc...
Summary: Max bandwidth needs multiple connections

Large instance (2 virtual cores with 2 EC2 Compute Units each):

EC2 -> EC2 HTTP : 96 MB/sec (75 for 1 connection)
EC2 -> EC2 scp : 40 MB/sec (30-40, possible CPU bottleneck)
S3 -> EC2 HTTPS : 50 MB/sec (12.6 for 1 connection)
S3 -> EC2 HTTP : 52 MB/sec (10 for 1 connection)
EC2 -> S3 HTTPS : 54 MB/sec upload (7-12.6 for 1 connection)
Meebo Lunch 2.0 and Dev Camp Today. Anyone Going?
Just checked my Acer. Squishy all over the place...
I think not, as far as I went. That's why I didn't use the word "Hacker" in the title.
The decline of the American dollar and economy
Talking with Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the Web)
Dave Winer: Specifically about podcasting
since there's no way reach standardization on every little arbitrary piece of ui functionality, the best way to deal with this is to provide some "Emulate x" options in the menu, which would switch things around to emulate some other application X.
Making All Software Into Tools Reduces Risk
Interesting take on the "shoulders of giants" metaphor.

With the right software, you can be your own giant.
Small Businesses Using Yahoo! Web Hosting Services Lose Sales on Cyber Monday
I had a bit of trouble accessing it. I eventually was able to see the entire thing, and I liked it. I look forward to the Seibel talk.

The issues:
- Using the pause button for a somewhat extended period of time eventually caused the video to go back to the beginning. I assume this is due to the streaming nature of the video.
- Twice while watching for a few minutes, the video stopped and went back a few minutes prior. I noticed that the video would now and then stop but would start again a few second later in the place it left off--except for when it backed up a few minutes.
Internet Use Up By 24.3 Percent
Video Interview: Daniel Ha of Disqus (Summer YC startup)
Cryptographers break MD5 hash, show false predictions as demonstration
thats a lot of ifs.
I believe Google will make free service available on the 700 megahertz spectrum but I don't see them making the leap into identify verification -- that would even start to creep me out.
While I do sort of agree, I learned long ago that nearly all channels are logged anyway since years by some channelbots. Often enough including statistics which will tell how many lines you wrote, when you where last online and that you where the guy using the most sad smilies this week.
Good point, I think Jacob's going to look into adding that.
There's been a lot of press around that application. That seems pretty shady. Maybe it's been compromised?
Google PageRank, Revisited
More Fibs
More on the naive fibonacci micro-benchmark with Lisp (SBCL) and Haskell (GHC).
"Most venture backed investments fail because the venture capital is used to scale the business before the correct business plan is discovered."

Read: Scale up before they have the income level to justify it.

Being "nimble" or "adaptable" in this case is simply another way to say "didn't run out of money before they started making enough income".

Being large doesn't necessarily make you less adaptable. Think of how many directions Google can explore because it is large. They are far more adaptable than most small companies.

Companies that are composed of only two or three founders don't have the skillsets available to them that larger companies have; Google has a bagful of tricks because it has bought up so many of these one-trick ponies. A lot of them probably were in the category of not having monetized their startup even to the point of self-sufficiency yet -- let alone to the point of making a profit -- and being acquired by a large company was the way to stay alive.

Before ViaWeb was bought by Yahoo they almost ran out of money; they had to borrow a conference room at Yahoo in the middle of negotiations to get enough money from another investor to stay alive. Would you say they weren't nimble or adaptable if they hadn't gotten that last-minute financing? Are they nimble and adaptable just because they got that financing? Or is it that despite how quickly you can change directions, you eventually have to PICK some direction to keep going in if you want to get anything accomplished?

It doesn't matter how adaptable you are, you can only explore so many directions before you run out of money. Some people don't change their idea, but they are able to keep pushing and pushing until they finally make it. Some people get lucky and succeed on the first try.

Paul says, "When startups die, the official cause of death is always either running out of money or a critical founder bailing. Often the two occur simultaneously."

Thus, "If you can just avoid dying, you get rich."

http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html
Digg + Polls = Gatherama
Pretty neat site www.gatherama.com. It has Digg style voting for polls and overall the design looks quite decent.
Wow, that was far-fetched.

I'm starting to wonder, is there a limit on the number of ad-based services we can have in the economy? (i.e. are there are fixed number of ad dollars to be spent)
There are lots of 'niche' resources in Austin and you have to do a lot of legwork to get to them. Additionally, if you (or any of your founders) are alumni of the University of Texas, the networking events at the MBA school are valuable.
I had a friend who was new to Lisp check it out - and they really liked how simple it was.

So definitely a good option to get started.
I've wanted to do something like this for awhile. I think the better way to go is to incorporate this into a new web browser. Put in an algo to generate a 3d space for a website from it's html but also allow site owners to build specific 3d versions which are specified in xml.

That way you can browse the entire web in 3d (although pages with pictures would look more interesting than say... Newsy ;) and stores, game companies, whomever can create fun 3d worlds for their visitors.

If you could do some clever look ahead you could even make links into portals that show you what the next page is going to look like in 3D. So if you link me to a World of Warcraft page I can look through the link and see what that site looks like. Walk my avatar into the portal and I'm on a new website.
This is much better than the Reddit headline for the same thing.
If you put a link - you can't put a comment (or so I understand). Also this was more meant as a discussion, the link isn't the important part.
Mindrosia: App Ideas Generated Through Horseplay
This never would have happened if they had kept it written in Lisp.
This seems a little narrow minded. Many highly talented programmers find a lucrative area and stick with it for a while, but they can pick up on the "new big thing" almost instantly.

IMO it all comes back to talent and drive which are almost impossible to judge in an interview but they tend to swamp all other factors over time.
Any laptop is squishy if you press hard enough.
A New Reason The Kindle Sucks - This Time It's Availability and Monetization
Apparently this article's advice is "just hire someone who is good at everything!"
Sure, they'll want to cash in on their investment in a few years, so the exit might be different from what we would do if we were on our own. But we would have already had to go get real jobs if not for them, so in that sense they've enabled us to work on good ideas.
Beyond Ajax: Software Development, Two Years from Now
> IMO it all comes back to talent and drive which are almost impossible to judge in an interview but they tend to swamp all other factors over time.

I would narrow that down even further, to drive.

Plus I don't believe in talent; but one's level of skill will increase if she has the drive to improve.
The place looks quite nice inside. I would imagine most places with millions of funding can't work at such a nice location.
I think a lot of brain regions are involved in gain functions, but that the LIPFC is specifically involved in gain for word associations (which is no doubt multivariate). But that's saying a lot without really saying anything. A specific hypothesis is that the more you have to code knowledge in verbal (vs perceptual) terms (or with increasing "abstractness"), the more you rely on LIPFC. We have one paper out which supports this account.

The venture is geared to quantifying knowledge - what is it online and, more importantly, who has it best. The finding brains bit is just a simple way to describe what we'll do, where brain = storehouse of knowledge (versus database of information). In our formulation, real people, via the output of their grey matter, are wholly needed to compute ai (actual intelligence). I know I'd rather find, learn from, and interact with knowledgeable people, than "search" among pages.

If you're interested, feel free to send me a note at robg AT psych DOT upenn DOT edu and we can chat.
MobMov featured on NBC
This was one of the ideas I was going to pursue but trashed for another one...
There will always be advertising dollars available for:

1) companies that can increase sales by investing in ads
2) big companies where bad advertising can't be effectively measured
On the contrary, people like Richard Feynman and Edward Teller were all late talkers. Einstein did not speak until he was 3 years old: http://pinker.wjh.harvard.edu/articles/media/1999_06_24_newy...
The article screams "Enterprise" out loud. Every other sentence has "IT department" or "infrastructure" in it. What a boring space, who cares where they are moving...

Besides, since when Laslo, Sun and CodeGear became experts on where technology is moving? Everyone on their list, with a notable exception of Adobe, has NO solid reputation for being an expert in future software trends. Just don't mention Java please - it did not become what Sun wanted it to be.

Without someone from Google or Microsoft, true software technology trend setters of the past couple of decades, that interview has little value.
"Take all the web usage and YouTube video data Google has been acquiring about us all, glue it to our data down at the credit bureau, tie it to our mobile phone number and our mobile activity"...

Yahoo has as much, if not more data about us than Google - and for longer. Yahoo knows everyone I emailed for the past 10+ years (Yahoo! Mail), what links I find interesting (del.icio.us), what links I find interesting but don't want you to know about (Private del.icio.us), where I've been and who I meet (Flickr photos), who my trusted friends and family are (Flickr Contacts/Family), what online communities I take part in (Yahoo Groups) - and we haven't even touched on Yahoo Web Search History. Plus I've bought domains from them so they have my CC and home address.

If Yahoo wanted, I am sure they could build a frighteningly accurate dossier on most of us.

Why is it that all these Big Brother scenarios worry about Google finding out everything and more about us rather than Yahoo?

Is Yahoo such a has-been or has Google taken on quite the Sauron persona - the all-seeing eye?
From what PG has said (can't find the thread), most of the companies are still intact and the success rate is much higher than the average for VCs.
Sounds like a CIO all right.
Google goes digg-like on search
GeoNames founder opens up the GIS world
Free medication: May be useful for startups who have no insurance
I was really starting to get into during the last hour of work, but then I came home and I really don't want to reboot over to Windows from Ubuntu. And starting next year even my work machine will be Ubuntu...

VMWare Player is free and images are bountiful.
VMWare player: http://www.vmware.com/products/player/
Ubuntu: http://www.vmware.com/appliances/directory/1068
Can you give me music now? :-)
"Advisory: This film contained adult language, nudity, violence and gore, plus one tortoise lying on its back, with its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs to turn over, but it can't. And you're not helping. Why is that?"

Awesome.
I agreed with you right up until 'Microsoft'.
"Player" is in reference to the individual song players on the page -- sorry for the confusion! Just click "buy" on the song you like, and you'll be able to buy it from Amazon MP3...aside from the mandatory client (although it has a purpose), I'm also a fan of the Amazon music store.

We'll look into the issue you reported (thanks). What browser/OS are you using?

You can respond to this thread, or simply send in Feedback from the site.
Thanks, Ian. We do it for the people, and it's incredibly rewarding when I get to read comments like yours.
Haha, thanks for the suggestions. We actually bought a $400 Dell laptop (I have a Mac, but what a steal!) and are expecting it within a week. You can bet Ubuntu is going on that within <30 seconds of its arrival. If you have an e-mail address, I can send you a message when the site is Ubuntu-ready.
Soon, Google will be able to hire without interviewing.
The important bit is the metadata plus the uniqueness of the phone number. Whereas an IP address or, as he notes, a SSN can be used by many people, how many people use the same cell number/phone? And the IP is tied to a specific location while the SSN has no real world significance except as a verifier. By contrast, it's easy to see if a phone number is live and where it is. What's better from a marketing perspective, especially since you're out in the world uniquely traveling around with it?

If that's the Google play - wow.
I'm betting the Social Security number with 3,000 people using it must belong to the guy from Lifelock.
Yeah, but it's too bad the article is still too wacky to decipher.
Don't put down aesthetics in the name of MySpace. It's simpyl a weak argument to make. I explain here: http://jtame05.wordpress.com/2007/12/01/when-you-grow-up-des...
I think you missed his point while you were taking some sort of personal offense to his article.

I don't think your response is in the same league as his well thought out observations, and comes of as a bit of a rant quite frankly.
"...I'm not saying Andrew Chen did this, but some people out there like to make this claim."
I'm going to write one that sends you free cd's with "software" on them.