skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The Rise of Fundamental Data Privacy Questions. Zuckerberg Gives Excuses.
Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of social networking site Facebook, wrote a blog post called "Thoughts on Beacon". Beacon is the one month old highly controversial Facebook advertising platform that is developed to monetize the huge Facebook user base in better ways than before.
http://www.antiventurecapital.com/vc_approach.html
1) Don't take out a loan, especially not one where either of you are personally guaranteeing it. Creditors will drive your company into ruin faster than investors, and you'll be left paying for it.

2) Talk to an accountant to see if there's any extra money you need (e.g. income tax withholding, etc.) to keep things legal.
15-20k could be mustered with friends and family, I think. Meebo maxed out credit cards before their A round.

If the angel route is where you want to go, then referral is best. VCs and anges love recommendations from professors, especially if you have a new tech. Try also contacting people you know in startups.

If that doesn't work, go through an angel network to see their process and a screening. A lot of angels are becoming more open to small YC type investments.
Best software error message ever
The Checklist: If something so simple can transform intensive care, what else can it do?
Why are people still building Digg clones?
Windows Error May Bring Galactic Debacle: Best Windows Error Ever May Rip Time-Space Continuum...
Best is to learn coding. Today or tomorrow you will need to do that to keep your bills in low range.
Most worthwhile programming projects entail modifying existing software

Getting a job at a corporation, sure enough this is true: Most of the work is in modifying the existing code base. But the number of people forking an open source project for their own purpose is small (google does it) and the number doing so for purposes of resale is zero.

you will have noticed that the retired or older professional programmers of 10 and 15 years ago had a more fatalistic and passive attitude

This is an odd statement and one that would be hard to support with numbers. I know for a fact that where opportunities existed, they were exploited. A lot of COBOL programmers may have not understood the possibility of creating a software product, but there was no limit to the opportunities for people writing Atari 2600/Apple II/C64 assembler, etc. You were observing the wrong data set perhaps. It strikes me as sad that many small companies are making web knock-offs of products that were genuinely innovative in the bad old days (word processors, publishing software, spreadsheets, media players, etc.)

I've said this before: Keep linux on the server, as it does keep the money "in the family"--between software professionals, more or less. But if Windows goes out of style, it's destroying a huge money flow from other businesses to software. This is mercenary, but that's how life is.
You need more Ron Paul on your site...
This post got gscott the money he was asking for... you could try doing the same.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=73346
Wow, I'm sorry to hear your career is shot.
git-svn makes it easy to migrate from svn to git, or to use git in conjunction with svn. This screencast was a great intro to git and git-svn (not free): http://peepcode.com/products/git
I love unfuddle. I find their UI to be so much cleaner than Trac, and the customer service is great. I usually get a response to any problems in under an hour.
Or your 5M$ check could be signed by the same people! Disney, for instance (which signs, directly or indirectly a large portion of most those celebrities checks), has bought out a couple startups if I remember correctly.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holographic_data_storage

The whole point being that the reference signal can be projected into the storage and match found in a single pulse. Holographic algorithms deal generally with algorithms based on interference, so they might not directly relate to a physical storage device but the principles are similar.
What Windows programmers deal with every day
The article is correct. In this interview (http://twit.tv/floss11) Guido states that Python has been OO from the outset (1990).

The thing you have to understand is Ruby and Python do OO differently. To Python everything is a hash table. This isn't the case for Ruby and their differences mainly stem from that. It adds interesting elements like functions are very simple to pass around in Python because they are not bound to a class. It is still OO, just a different way of doing it.

Guido has also repeated for years that passing around self isn't a technical necessity. He prefers it as part of Python's "explicit is better than implicit policy. What you have to understand is that a method call boils down to method(receiver, args...). Python just makes that explicit.

Another quote from Guido:

"Get rid of self: I think this has been addressed in the responses; it's not as easy as you'd think, and there are important advantages to the uniform interpretation of methods as "just functions that get called in a funky way". In Ruby, everything is a method, or an anonymous block, and there are no "free functions". Python uses the complimentary approach, treating functions as first-class citizens. Both approaches are complete; they are however incompatible, and you can't easily morph one into the other. (Personally, I find that the criticm of explicit self has about as much merit as the criticism of Python's use of whitespace.)" (http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=214325)

I too think it is kind of a silly argument. Passing around self has never been a problem for me. 4 more letters for each method. Not a problem, imo, in exchange for first-class functions. And super() in Python works fairly similar to super in Ruby AFAIK.

For the record, Common Lisp users probably find both Python and Ruby's OO limited and clunky. Just got to keep in mind there's different ways of approaching it.
Don't knock him for that. What have you built?
I experienced this exact "Retrying" choke to my account where Gmail kept retrying an action and I kept rushing it by continually pressing my Inbox link. Funny to see others experienced this.

Back on the 5th when this happened, I read in the Gmail Help that they disable accounts for unusual activity, and my guess is this continual retrying caused some sort of system flag on my account.

Despite being pissed I simply waited for my account to check-out as clear and it was unlocked the day after (the 6th). Looks like Gmail overall had a system-wide failure that caused these lockouts.
Sarcasm meter broken this morning?
No it isn't. "Both are strong object-oriented languages": the key word (that is wrong) is 'strong'. Based on my examples Python may implement OO better than say Perl but it is NOT a strong implementation of OO compared to other languages.

It's great to know how and why Python is the way it is, but at the end of the day you can give a million reasons, but the kettle will still be black.

What you posted is like me explaining that (current) Ruby is not slow (which is a joke), it just implements threading differently...
You know it's coming though. The solution to VOIP calls is noise cancellation inner-ear headphones. You can't hear a thing. I use them on all my flights.
Designed obsolescence has little to do with manufacturing moving to China.
I wasn't talking about people becoming billionaires, but you could be right: maybe there will never be another billionaire made ever again. Getting back to coding doesn't smack of a get rich quick scheme, just an exhortation to cut the bullshit. Does it matter if there is one or not? If you are making something that is fulfilling a need you shouldn't care.

At any rate, I'm hypocritical by responding to a response of a response to my criticism to stop the bubble talk and just to get 'er done. Let's end the recursion now.
The point is that this paper is about algorithms for classical (e.g., not quantum or anything special) computers. That's why it is so interesting -- it's kind of like quantum algorithms but will work with standard computers.
My Favorite:

In an early version of Linux I used to get "Mr. Potato Head is on the loose!" every once in a while...
Pretty funny. I don't think anything will ever top the simple 'printer on fire', though.
You can directly compare the speed of an application or a language.

It is not subjective to say 'C is faster than Perl' or 'Perl is faster than Ruby'. That is true, in almost every instance, C IS faster than the equivalent Perl code and the equivalent Perl code is faster than Ruby (whether that holds true for Ruby 1.9 we shall see).

On the other hand, what constitutes a 'strong' implementation of OO is purely subjective. Would you consider Common Lisp's implementation of OO 'strong'? It is completely different than how Ruby works. But it isn't any more or less OO, it is a different way of doing it. Now if we really want to get into subjectiveness, Smalltalkers would probably say that Ruby's OO is not 'strong' because Ruby resorts to not making conditionals actual objects, unlike Smalltalk, in which literally just about everything is an object.

You might even say that Python is more OO than Ruby because functions are objects in Python but methods are not similar first-class constructs in Ruby (note: I wouldn't actually argue this, but it is just an example of how the languages do something differently).
Are we really believing that Digg is the unsurpassable pinnacle of social news?

Before Google came along, the search space looked pretty mature with plenty of entrenched players.
I got decent traffic from http://www.KillerStartups.com for my quick and dirty free-stuff pligg project: http://freenormous.com

Pimping your stuff in forum posts and sigs like I'm doing above (hopefully tastefully) works. I would suggest you need to get over being shy about it and your first post should have had the URL. Also, track down anyone who blogs about your area (social news sites/poll sites) and contact them to let them announce you and or start commenting intelligently on their blogs.

Google will start bringing digg-like sites traffic based on your unique keyword combos after a while. I would post to some free directories to boost pagerank (but not paid links or directories) to help this happen sooner. There are also free forums for link announcements. These won't bring you much traffic directly, but google still is awarding some rank for the links and you will probably start placing for off-beat combos. I was getting google traffic for "huffing purel" for a while after a friend made a comment joking about that.

Google Analytics is a great tool. I suggest adwords to get some starter traffic. Be warned, my users were so lazy ( less than 1% post and almost none vote) that I started populating it using scrapers. They will lurk though and read your content. So if you get bored talking to yourself, try and build traffic fast. Avoid Adbrite if you do this--the traffic is worthless.

Anyhow, those are my tips...
if its not a digg clone, you can start marketing it by not describing it as having the same metrics of a digg clone.

how is it different?
Here is one thing you could do ( inspired by that youtube video marketer guy on techcrunch )

1. Nobody wants to join an empty social site. Either do it yourself or pay some people in 3rd world countries to have multiple accounts on your site and make it look popular. Each story should have hundreds of votes and there should be 10s if not hundreds of comments, its better if there is heated debate or discussion going on in the comments

2. Once it has the appearance of being popular, Time to make it popular.

-You could pretend to be a ron paul supporter and point out to other ron paul supporters that ron paul is getting the bad end of one your questions, and then 1000s of ron paul supporters would rush to your site to correct it.

-You could make a facebook app for it.

-You could do traditional advertising on other news or news related blogs.
Just signed up on your site and I like the mixing together of news and polls.

we've just launched a free service http://www.freemyfriends.com that lets your users find their friends who are already members of your site without violating your user's privacy. We're looking for new startups to see if they are interested in using this service.

We're working on making the website look prettier, but we wanted to get it out to gauge market demand.
http://www.gatherama.com/

if this is your site, then i would describe it as a way to poll people about a website with user submitted options to vote on.

digg is a 1 metric site, your site adds value by allowing people to define their own metrics.
Tech Startups Eye IPOs Again, After Long Lull
The _best_ way to meet an angel investor is to know someone and have them introduce you. That's the _best_ way, although probably not the easiest or most convenient.

I know of several angel investors, but it all depends on what your product is, and who your ideal investor would be. Why don't you send me a message and we'll chat? I'm one of the 3 guest bloggers at Go BIG Network.
I particularly like this one error I got in one of my ubuntu installs:

"The program 'apt-get' is currently not installed. You can install it by typing: apt-get install apt"
it still faces the same problem.. a small group of members can block information if they wish.
"Those Crazy Ideas" - Isaac Asimov on Creativity
it's slow if you are on a shared hosting package...otherwise it runs very well
Pretty much sums up my entire history with Windows.

How else could I explain my love of Gentoo? It's transparent in comparison.
I still feel your 1st post was weak, but you make good points in this post - u win; i'm not keen on religious flame wars
What's with comments 138-142?
How Do You Build an Airline? Offer Free Wi-Fi.
I just started using flot. It's great. One major advantage is its interactivity. It allows users to select regions.

Fully recommended.
I never said I personally thought it was worth anywhere near that. Of course the valuation of a private company is completely speculative... and of course the Microsoft investment was just a stunt to produce a really high number.

I was just saying to the person that commented about no startup founder making the list that if we counted paper-make-believe-valley-money... there wouldn't be anyone on there BUT founders.

What is Facebook going to do, start charging users? become the next MySpace? If they have accomplished anything, it is making the net cast off the idea of anonymity. Now you can't even have a drink with your friends without your Mom/Boss/Professors seeing it online. A sad world really.
One wonders why "we" have the $30,000 a year to give in the first place. Perhaps if there was no food at all we could all starve and morality could be had by all.
Gotta love Vista. Blue screens on boot up have become part of my morning ritual.
Also see http://www.kiva.org/
My favorite one was "Non-System Disk or Disk Error". It seems subtle, but it had everything:

1) Doesn't make any sense.

2) Doesn't point to a solution.

3) Isn't really an error.

4) Completely prevents the computer from working.

5) Happened routinely--millions of times a day, I'm sure.

6) Seemed to infect pretty girls the most, allowing me to heroicly solve the problem (by ejecting the diskette from the drive during boot up.)

Good times.
It's a pathetic error message but it does make sense I think. The computar tried to boot a disk but it wasn't a (bootable) "system disk" or it is a system disk, but it's broken.
Reading this, it seems that maybe the first market for Trevor Blackwell's Anybots might be robo-nurses. Being computers, they'll be able to follow algorithms perfectly.
I'd lose the digg color scheme though. It's very much reminiscent of digg.
Google maps now has a "take public transportation" option
Is it available in most cities now? It launched in Pittsburgh early.
Fark Wants To Trademark Not Safe For Work
Stonehenge: The Incredibly Simple Secret of How It Was Built
A friend told me about once receiving a BIOS error like the following:

Error: No keyboard detected. Press any key to continue.
I'm working on a startup, how do I take care of the business aspect of it?
Hello,

My name is Andrew, I'm located in the US, and I'm currently working on a startup (yes, by myself; I'm glad I know programming as well as graphic design.) And I really think it will be something a lot of people will find very useful, so I'm excited about finishing it (it's about 1/3 done).

I'm wondering though, how do I legally and officially create a company to back my startup? What steps should I take after creating my company, to make sure everything goes well? Also, does anyone have any tips for this kind of thing?

Thanks to everyone who helps me out.
I've no advice, but be careful who you market it to; your first x users have a huge effect on the culture of the site.
Yeah. There was a discussion about it in an earlier thread.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it anymore.

If you look at the code, the session store is stored in plaintext with the hash. Rails rehashes the plaintext in the cookie and checks it against the hash to make sure it has not been tampered with. The last time I checked, the hashing uses OpenSSL's HMAC hashing rather than the SHA1 in earlier versions of Rails.

You, as the developer, are responsible for entering in the site's secret code. It should be possible to write a Rails 2.0 initializer in config/intializer to check the presence of config/secret.yml and if not, generate it in runtime. This keeps you from having to save the secret in the version control, but unfortunately, doesn't work well when you deploy it across several machines.

Note that the cookie store was available in 1.2. Seems as if the core developers like it enough to enable it by default. As for me, I think I'll stick with ActiveStore for a while until my sites needs more drastic means, such as memcached or even cookie store.
The change between 1.1 and 1.2 was much more disruptive than the change between 1.2 and 2.0. The biggest changes are in reworking the RESTful controllers and cutting down the cruft. 2.0 is more polished and shinier now.

The 2.0 release may be coming in close with the upcoming Ruby 2.0 release, which will be highly disruptive (YARV bytecode backend), though I'm not sure if Rails 2.0 will work fine without any changes in Ruby 2.0. Besides, I'm not really sure when Ruby 2.0 is coming out.
Hope this helps ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=79626
I would think its not that Digg is the pinnacle that these sites can be, but that social news sites are not usually defined by their features-even if a new social news site makes tons of improvements over the digg/reddit model, it simply won't have the user base that digg does. No one wants to use a social news site that no one else uses. Whereas with search, it doesn't really matter that no one else uses it because search isn't about other people.
A number of folks have already suggested that you need to be introduced, and that's normally the best way to proceed.

It seems like you can make progress without additional funding, just at a slower rate. Is your partner really committed to the project? Asking an angel to pay development salary for a co-founder may be a difficult sales pitch. It sounds like your partner may have lost faith and is now asking for money. You are much better off to proceed more slowly and not go into debt or waste time on trying to raise funds until you have something that you can sell, so that you can use additional funds to accelerate revenue. That being said there are several pitch events a month in Silicon Valley you can go to and meet Angels and VC's.

http://www.vctaskforce.com/

http://www.sdforum.com/ see Venture Funding SIG

http://www.svase.org/ see "First Impressions" event; also you might check out the Startup-U events, it's normally a chance to meet a VC or Angel.

http://www.startupepicenter.com/ runs pitch events (with training) periodically

http://www.angelsforum.com/ have a monthly pitch event (here an introduction probably helps)

http://www.sandhillangels.com/ have a monthly event (again an introduction helps)

All of these are either free or a nominal charge. I wouldn't pay any "introduction fees or percentages" and I would not pay any "beauty contest fees" (e.g. Kieretsu forum charge $3-5,000 to present).

Our firm does not help with fund raising, our focus is on early customers and early revenue, but please feel free to contact me if you have additional questions.

Sean Murphy http://www.skmurphy.com/
I'd have to cosign a previous post: Dell Vostro or Thinkpad T61. Do NOT get a Vaio. I've had a FZ-190 for about 4 months now. I got it for the exact reason he suggested, I really liked the MBP but knew I wasn't going to be using OSX as my primary OS (ubuntu) and the FZ matches up perfectly in terms of size/features. Problem is, the Linux drivers for this thing absoutely blow. No function keys, no video out, no webcam.

Another thought: they're a little harder to get, but Asus makes some great models.
Liability's way, way too high for that. Industrial uses where there's no chance (or a small chance) of injury to humans is a lot better application.
I've said this before, but it gets routinely ignored, so I'll put it in caps:

DROP THE GOOGLE ADS UNTIL YOU GET REAL TRAFFIC.
Stress impairs cognitive functions - The loss of those functions can explain why programming is hard
Thank you for all your comments here. I'm a programmer and new to the marketing domain. All your comments are very helpful and give me some ideas of the dos and donts.
Coding Horror: Hashtables, Pigeonholes, and Birthdays
I didn't see from this angle before. Thanks for the detailed comments.
XML machine the successor to von Neumann? (old, but funny...at least to Lispers)
IE team shares ... a version number
Thanks for your encouraging words.
I got this one yesterday on a brand new Dell.

"No keyboard present. Press F1 to continue or DEL to enter setup..."
Javascript - Simple "Class" Instantiation
Valleywag: Mark Zuckerberg cashes out
"I think therefore I am" is not from Aristotle but Rene Descartes not a good way to start :P
I imagine they could still be entered through the serial console, though.
Is this even by Asimov? It's hard to imagine him making such a mistake.
"President, Jamar A. Martin" added the first paragraph. This is more clear in the actual .doc. Some short phrases can be matched up in Google's indexed version of the publication of the essay.

http://books.google.com/books?ei=gGhaR77JGoTqiQHAht20Bg&...
What great collective intelligence or statistical feature recognition libraries are out there?
I recently started a website http://www.tastestalkr.com. I crawl the web looking for mp3 blogs then I index the mp3 blogs frequently. I currently do a bunch of keyword analysis using the wordnet (http://wordnet.princeton.edu) library. I would like to do some more advanced analysis like theme recognition or unique feature extraction. I have read the book "programming for collective intelligence", its a great start, but I wondered if their are any libraries out their that do this already?

* Python preferable, but I'll take what I can get.
FYI: Jason Calacanis asked Ron Conway specifically about Zuckerberg cashing out some money[1] and he had no problem with it because FB is in no danger of running out of money.

1. http://www.calacanis.com/2007/07/20/calacaniscast-beta-30/
Oh man, that story interests me, but why can't they just get to the bloody point??? I stopped reading after page two, and there still was no mentioning of a checklist...
Doctorow: Scribd introduces copyright filter