skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"... If all our documents are online ..."

And if they are not?

I don't see all your documents online, nor do I see your important documents (will, birth certificate, marriage certificate, shares, personal papers). This type of app I'd rather have on my desktop.
Spelling was phonetic around Shakespeare's time, and, thus, the most common words had many different acceptable spellings. Nowadays, if you don't conform to dictionary spelling, you'll look like an idiot, and your sentences may require a few extra deciseconds of mental head-scratching to read.

As for the rules of proper English, while it is completely arbitrary whether split infinitives are proper English, if you constantly comma-splice, have improper capitalization, or even omit punctuation, then many will have trouble understanding you, and you'll really look like an idiot.

The moral of the story is that those who speak "the English language" have difficulty understanding those who speak "teh inglish langwidge."
Hi,

I went in front of angel groups, VCs, etc... I'd never pay for the introduction. That's a really bad sign that something is wrong. Think of it this way: that group is now more motivated to get lots of unqualified candidates to apply, rather than find good investments.

I know it's tough to get your foot in the door, because you start from knowing no one, and it feels like only friends of friends get funded. It could take you a year to go out and meet investors and start to build your own reputation, so do it before you have a project to pitch. Really.
They suggest this to minimize their risk. I suggest it to minimize their equity.
"... You will be provided with a complete set of product specs at the outset as well as a rough initial design, which you can choose to use or discard ..."

A complete set of specs? Hard one to fill if you have no say in the design or idea. Is the idea going to change?
How I can charge so much
You have a good idea, but I don't think you're good at communicating it. The above is a good example - I don't know anyone that sets out to 'digitize (their) real relationships'. They might do that, but it's that's a means to an end, not the end itself.

Users are focused on end goals, not means. The end goal for Facebook is to keep in contact with friends, meet new people, organise events, and show off their photos.

Nobody wants to digitize anything. If FB initially told its users they've made a service to digitize their real relationships, they wouldn't be very popular.
You don't need to step outside the SQL standard to retrieve the newest 10 entries in a blog -- SQL window functions (RANK(), ROW_NUMBER()) can do this, and they're part of the spec. You could also use a cursor with ORDER BY.
the product specs are for the 1.0 version (minimum feature set) the product has a huge amount of growth in version 1.5, so a co-founder can still add a ton of value. Also, we are flexible, if you come with great ideas and suggestions we will go with whats best.
This seems a little misguided. Firstly, I don't intend to create most of my important documents in a web application for a long time yet (read: 5-8 years at least). It'll be awhile before there's a high-quality IDE/real Photoshop alternative/video editor/etc. online, and who wants one anyway? The desktop paradigm rules for its speed and better support for multitasking, so much so that I believe it will never really go away.

Second, not everything is collaborative or needs to be shareable.

Third, you can be optimistic, but there's no denying that at today's transfers rates, getting something into and out of the cloud is an arse of a lot slower than pulling it off a HDD or even a LAN.

Everything we've done so far in the realm of online document creation will be as a toy compared to what is to come. Starry-eyed optimism is great in some settings, but calling for the death of backups is not the right way to build momentum.
Sounds like you went to Keiretsu. http://www.k4forum.com/

Our lawyers hooked us up w/ them. We're not ready to present there yet but it was an awesome experience to see everybody present. It showed us what investors are looking for. Ie: 20% of the time is spent talking about the idea, 80% of the time is spent talking about the exit and the terms.
Just the opposite for me... I really prefer light on dark, because I prefer to not be staring into a lightbulb.
http://www.youbethevc.com/rules

Doesn't sound worth it.
Computational Neuroscientist's review of Hawkins' On Intelligence
On the one hand, I don't agree with this article. But that's easy for me to say - I have backups, and I've worked hard to make them work properly. I don't have to entrust all of my precious data to "the cloud" via my relatively slow network connection.

On the other hand, this article is saying what I've said for years: web apps are winning because most people have no idea how system administration works, have no desire to learn, and would happily exchange money, privacy, and freedom for a storage medium that doesn't die every two to five years, taking all of their data with it.

For most of the computer users in the world, it's not so much a question of whether backing up your data is "dead", but of whether it was ever alive in the first place.

Last week an Apple Genius told me that my Macbook's hard drive had crashed. He spoke in a sorrowful and apologetic tone, like a surgeon coming to tell me that my mom had not survived her appendectomy. This surprised me for a second, until I remembered that the typical customer regards the loss of a hard drive as a terrible tragedy, rather than as an excuse to thoroughly test the integrity of his multiply redundant SuperDuper backups.

(Incidentally: SuperDuper works great. And no, I do not own stock in the SuperDuper guy's company. :)
I'm the author of the original article, and I admit that I failed to explain all of the reasons programmers don't like databases -- you came up with one I didn't list (don't want to use a lot of languages) and demonstrated one of the reasons I did list: Who Needs Theory?

Your analogy with writing an essay is off target. If writing a program is like writing an essay in English, the SQL/database part of the program are like mathematical formulas in the essay. You could use English instead of mathematical notation but it would be far uglier, less precise, and more prone to error and misunderstanding. In a typical web application (what I've been doing for over ten years) the database part is usually the only part that can be proved correct.

I can't help you overcome your misconceptions about relational theory or relational databases, or do anything about your opinion that relational theory is ugly. But you are just wrong arguing that relational databases are glorified arrays full of pointers and examples of premature optimization.

The "best relational advocate" is probably Chris Date, and if you take the time to read his books you'll at least discover proof that you are wrong.
edw519: I'm not sure you got the point of my article. I am a programmer who happens to like relational databases. I have enough experience with RDBMSs (and the same half-baked alternatives you've run into) to at least have an opinion. My article was not criticizing RDBMSs or SQL, but rather giving my opinions on why so many programmers don't like or don't understand relational databases.

My anecdotal experience is that a lot of programmers bristle when they get into a technical area that actually has a mathematical basis or a demonstrably right way to solve a problem. Programmers are used to problems that have lots of possible solutions, none of them provably right or wrong. I've seen that attitude in the realms of databases, computer graphics, compilers, and algorithms.

A few years ago I worked with a programmer who actually set out to prove to me that bubble sort was more efficient than whatever Oracle was doing to sort rows. He was retrieving a lot of rows, unsorted, then sorting them with his own code. Even pulling out Knuth and trying to explain big-O notation to him had no effect -- that was just so much academic bullshit and opinion that didn't apply, according to him. Of course Oracle was able to sort the rows orders of magnitude faster than his PL/SQL bubble sort, and the <i>coup do grace</i> was delivered by a DBA who took the inefficient cursors out of the solution.

That kind of thing is played out every day between programmers, and when they run into something like relational theory their first instinct is all too often to dismiss it as old, inapplicable, ugly (see the other comments in this forum), rigid, etc. Those are all code for "I don't understand it and I can't be bothered to learn it." When a DBA who is charged with maintaining data integrity interferes with whatever bad idea the programmer has he or she is subjected to <i>ad hominem</i> attacks. Some DBAs no doubt deserve contempt but in my experience a lot of programmers can and should be learning from DBAs rather than sneering at them.

In the comments in this forum you'll see the "Relational databases can't work with tree-structured data" canard hauled out, as if this exact problem hadn't been addressed numerous times in the database literature (Joe Celko, Fabian Pascal, Chris Date, etc.). That's ignorance, and the older I get the more I suspect it's more willful than I'd like to think.
Google Releases New Google Reader For iPhone
Python and Ruby are great. But if you are interested in PHP and like MVC (such as Rails), I recommend trying Symfony. I use it for a lot of projects. There are still plenty of good reasons to use PHP just as there are any other language. Use what's best for your project. Be sure to consider feature requirements, developer skill sets, and your timeline when deciding.

After enough experience at programming you'll begin to realize understanding 'how to program' is fundamentally different from knowing one particular language or another. It's a logical mindset and way of thinking or problem solving that ultimately matters. Language is just syntax and can be picked up in under 24 hours for most languages once you understand 'how to program'.
Or at least CPC.
are both existing cofounders non-technical? (looks like one of you has good css + javascript knowledge or just css?)

rephoria looks like a decent idea and the design was done really well - I like the name too

the only question I have in my head is: how are you going to beat Yelp or even Insider Pages? I could be wrong but it seems like you guys are going head to head with them. Either that or u remind me of an old company called planet feedback
Who thinks they won't do a good job at doing a startup, but does it anyways? And thus, succeeds?

Healthy self-doubt is one thing, but are you supposed to be riding the line between self-doubt and giving up? (if so, I guess I'm on the right track)
The Problems With My Startup
I typed this up in order to collect my thoughts, in hopes of eventually showing them to my coworkers. I am totally open to questions, comments, and suggestions, especially from YC readers.
I typed this up in order to collect my thoughts, in hopes of eventually showing them to my coworkers. I am totally open to questions, comments, and suggestions, especially from YC readers.
So does python "on" django, but python itself in no way forces MVC.
Those are the exact words from Mr. Zuckerberg himself. He said he didn't create Facebook to help you find "friends;" he created it to digitize real relationships and allow you to keep in contact.
It amazes me the level of trust the younger generation is willing to put in faceless entities to secure their privacy.

Your tax return may not seem too important until somebody uses it to empty your bank account.
Interesting...this is only the second UK based YC funded company that I know of, and it is also made up of people from Cambridge and Oxford.
Does it really not matter where you go to school?
This idea: find similar people, good music, good movies, and interesting things.

How are those not benefits?

The benefit of finding movies that are similar to Jurassic Park is that you find new movies that you might enjoy. This is very obvious. What is the benefit of finding new music on iTunes/Pandora? It's the same thing! Of course it's for comfort and delight. That's what you're supposed to be pursuing in life.

IMDB does not recommend movies at all. If it does, it does it horrifically badly because it has never helped me before. IMDB is not a recommendation engine, it's simply a database. And they don't seem to want to innovate beyond that.

Video stores are enormous and movies are ordered alphabetically by genre. There is no way to know which movie is good, or which one you will like, because all you have is a promotional paragraph on the back and a pretty picture on the front. This is also very obvious to me.
its called digg.com and about a dozen other sites I've seen. You could even build most of this in Ning for free, right now.

My point being that I don't see anything in there that really evolves the social content sharing platform in any significant way.
The poison NULL byte - Bug that caused Adobe.com to be open
Why we won't help you
Theora 1.0beta1 released (6 years after announcement)
I appreciate the frank dissection of your startup part way through. Just a quick question, you had some guy do several months work for you and you didn't pay him anything?
Stories like this, from startups that are still struggling, are very helpful. Are you full-time, or do you still have a day job? How about the others on your team?
Definitely note that point he made about it being his experience with the software industry. Other areas you often have no f-ing clue what format is expected. Sometimes application processes are bizarrely complex. Cornell, for example, lets you apply to multiple positions, and lets you update your resume and cover letter, but doesn't tell you what exactly gets sent to the relevant parties. That is, it's not exactly clear whether you're allowed one authoritative version, or if your current 'live' resume gets forwarded to the reviewers when you click submit.

At least, that's what it was like a year ago.

A lot of places just say "email a resume" and don't specify whether they mean send an "email resume" or an "email with a word doc attached" or an "email with a text resume attached" or "html-email" or "email with html attachment" or "pdf." You just have to guess. I typically would send a rich text, informal email cover letter with a few lines, then I'd attach the resume as html and word doc.
as a rule - I think most people would stay away from a "service" from a for-profit or non-profit that charges something with a "tangible" product. It's almost like a pyramiding or Ponzi scheme.
I should probably have been more clear about this--no one has ever received any type of salary. Our media production side of things has generated some money (unrelated to the startup) and that has allowed for us to be paid a little (i.e. $500 a month) here and there.

Thus my beef about venture capital.
I have a day job, for which I "telecommute", and sadly that's not working out too well. My day job folks just asked me if I would be willing to relocate, and I've been considering it. It would mean much more work from them, which would mean easier payment of bills, etc. I would be living near the job that pays me, not the other way around.
"I could be wrong but it seems like you guys are going head to head with them"

Scared of competition?

Lots of good ideas have competitors but the ones you should be worried about are the ones you don't know about. I'd rather be just competing with myself making it better than anything I could think up myself than just competitors.
Dangerously speculative? The severity of recessions has shown a downward trend since the 1970s. Milder downturns is largely attributable to better monetary policy.

If Greenspan should be nailed to the wall for anything, it is for stabbing social security in the back by cheerleading Bush's tax cuts and priming inflation by throwing the budget massively into deficit. These costs are going to be borne by US consumers for a long-time.

The problems Greenspan has engendered has everything to do with his personal ideological bent and nothing to do with the role the Fed plays in the national economy (in that capacity, he did his job excellently). As someone who enjoys eating, I'm glad his successor is keeping the economy from a liquidity crisis.
It sounds like this guy would like Standard ML and OCaml. Maybe F#?
But its your company, this guy you brought in got nothing. That kind of shit is very bad karma indeed.
Agreed. In our defense, he was (is) a friend and got the same deal we all did when we agreed to work on it.
MIT researchers develop motorless exoskeleton
Briefcase-Sized DNA Analysis System
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SSH beyond the command line
Joel is letting them off easy when he talks about how it's unlikely that this bug would come out in testing. He's right that black-box tests wouldn't catch it. But, obviously someone wrote some special-case logic for formatting 65535 and 65536, and there's absolutely no reason that that special case logic should be there. That code should have been flagged during code review and terminated with extreme prejudice.
Negabonacci Numbers
There's math behind the "If half the people don't say 'fuck you', you're charging too little" principle. If you double your prices, you're taking in twice as much revenue. You can afford to lose half your customers, and you'll still be making the same amount. However, you'll spend half as much energy doing so.

It's more striking if you have overhead. Say you charge $5000 for some job, but have expenses of $4000 for it. If you double your prices, you now make $10K, but your expenses remain constant at $4K. Your profit has gone from $1K to $6K. You could afford to lose 5/6 of your customers and still break even.

My mom charges $80/hour for elementary-school tutoring, up about $10-15/hr from when she started tutoring. None of her clients have ever blinked at a price increase. I know 20-somethings who tutor high-school math and make over $100/hr.
Either I misunderstand something (which is unlikely in this case), or his formula for CPM is wrong.

Correct:
CPM = Clickthrough Rate x Price Per Click x 1000

Example:
If you have CTR or 2% and each click generates $0.40, you have CPM of 0.40 x 0.02 x 1000 = $8.
OAuth Draft 2 released -- big news for anyone with an API
Can you tell us more about '[your] work' ? Why and how does it validate the British Empiricists?
Although I am very interested to read your comments, I feel that it is disingenuous to put your name on a 'secret' blog. If you want to have a secret blog, make it secret. If you want to be open and honest with your co-workers, be open and honest w/ them. Half way in between strikes me as more likely to hurt than heal.

Unless what you are trying to do is get at your co-workers, in which case I think you will succeed.
Google adapts GWT to the iPhone and opens the source
Your point is well taken. It wasn't my "secret" blog, really, until I typed this particular post. I had not revealed its existence to any of my coworkers, but as you will notice, none of the other posts are particularly charged as regards business or business politics.

I do want to be open and honest with my coworkers, and I've already had one (one of the designers) have a look at what I wrote. I am going to present the ideas contained therein, to the group, ASAP--it's a matter of finding time to meet and talk about "serious stuff". I was hoping to get some feedback from YC readers because I trust their opinion and ability to perceive when someone has gone off the deep end as regards ideas, reasoning, etc. In other words, I'm hoping that if I'm smoking crack, or if all startups are this way, someone will tell me before I unveil it to my coworkers at large.

I am certainly not trying to get at my coworkers. The stuff at the top is in case it's discovered by a certain coworker who i would rather heard it from me, not the blog. He's been known to read YC news once in a while, thus the precaution.
I liked this article. Much of the same attitude applies to startups. Do stuff. Big picture and details. Finish stuff.
I think the solution is to get the idea guy down in the details of each idea. Bring him along for the ride and let him come up with lots of micro-ideas. It can be very useful to have two people thinking about the minute details, especially if they balance each other. Involve him in the thousand tiny decisions you have to make while implementing an idea.

Get him to stop looking at competitors. It's nerve wracking, demoralizing, and distracting. You guys probably have more than enough ideas by now, if you'd just focus on the most promising ones your competitors might start looking at you.
I've known more than a few 20-somethings who charge over $100/hour and a couple that are around the $200/hr mark. There's no correlation between expertise and hourly rate in my experience. Some of them are ripping people off and some are undercharging.

The reason this works is that person writing the check is usually not spending their own money, or if they are it's a drop in the bucket for them and $5k or $15k isn't much of a difference. They've probably already wasted $100k+ in salary over time having their employees try to handle the same task before deciding to bring in someone new. The other factor is the (mistaken) thinking that if you charge a lot you must be worth a lot.

At most companies the idea of giving one of their own programmers a $20k cash bonus to do a 10 week project in 1 week is out of the question, but paying a consultant to do the same thing is no big deal.

The Expensive Consultant idea is what IBM basically lives off of these days. In their case I think it's pretty unethical, but for individuals who are truly qualified it's a win-win situation and I highly recommend it as well.
Mabye I never needed them much because I have mostly been using Java, which has things like NullPointerException. So no need to write an assertion for that special case. By blow up I meant do something bad, not fail in a noisy way. That would be the exception.
So basically, neither the founders nor the angels are sufficiently bold or well-connected to find a deal without going through some kind of rigid organizational structure. Sounds like a sure-fire winner!

But seriously, these kinds of organizations seem like a nice place to learn, network and meet angels... for the members. The startup founders of the world would be better off creating their own organization, that is if they ever do find the time...
This guys comments (first comments in the blog) ring true ~ http://tjic.com/?p=7265
Up next for Apple: the return of the Newton
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Microsoft revamps its Live Search engine
This is nicely reminiscent of PG's high school talk.

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
This here shows that you have huge doubts about the startup, if you are willing to leave it for a less risky decision. It saddens me to see your operation come down to you deciding to leave it for a job. To keep it business running, I would try to get another coder, tell the marketing guy to focus on current products, not future side projects. Take control of the company...basically what everyone else has been saying.
> different forms of moralizing - utilitarian and the categorical imperative - use different brain systems.

Whenever a neuroscientist gets involved in these debates, I see a lot of claims like this. "Thinking about x uses brain system y, therefore [some outrageous claim]."

In this case, you seem to be suggesting that the brain activity proves "both types of morality are wired into us," but that doesn't follow at all. Brain activity doesn't tell us whether utilitarianism or the categorical imperative accurately model what is really happening in the brain, or whether the corresponding thoughts and behaviors are innate or learned.