skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I moonlight as an ER nurse as I finish my Software engineering degree next summer. I've worked in ER/Critical care for 15 years, and I've worked at over 25 hospitals as a contract nurse, and while your idea sounds good on paper, it's a medical/legal nightmare.

How fast you see a doctor in to an ER is not about being on a wait list. It's about how sick you are. If you're close to dying you get in right away. If you're not, we see you as soon as possible. Even then, it's not first-come first serve. And, if you're not here, you're not on the list, and there are no reservations.

And, I can't tell you how many people think they don't have something life-threatening and end up dead. And, there are many people who think that their illness is life threatening and it's not.

All it takes is for you to place one person on a wait list who ends up dead, and you're having a number of long talks with a law-firm. I'm not trying to be a hater, or flame you. I'm the last one to discourage an entrepreneur, but I'm really concerned someone will end up dead, and you'll have a big mess on your hands.

Please, rethink your business idea.
Jon Stewart also makes a funny point:

http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=127766
A List Apart publishes results from survey of nearly 33,000 "web professionals"
The proof of concept stage, where you create something and show that your idea works.

That's where the 80/20 "rule" comes into play - 80% of the work is getting that last 20% right.
Hacker news is great because it is so fast, and simple. All it needs is a search and more comprehensive rss feeds. Thanks anyway.
Why You Don't Need to Upgrade to Leopard
You're probably already doing this, but make sure that you're using geotargeting with your adwords campaign so that the only people who see your ad are actually within driving distance.
sim, tokyo
haha, iamelgringo, you beat me to bring up these comments. let me add on a bit to what you've already said.

hospitals are not just run as businesses, but they also need to serve the public. as such, you also have ethical and social concerns. there are a several substantial problems with your idea:

-promotes inequality of care based on money. this will likely turn out to be a huge legal issue.

-the decision of something being life threatening should not be determined by patients, but by health professionals.

-substantial change to hospital behavior. the act of creating and incorporating reservations to the ER system will likely be a shock that hospital administrators will not appreciate. (just look at how long it took for doctors to move from beepers to PDA's and cell phones, and also look at the adoption of electronic medical records which is still less than 18% of all doctors) making hospital staff jump through new hoops will increase the resistance of using your technology.

please do not take these comments the wrong way. your idea could work, if you tweaked the business model around hospital constraints, and nothing specific is popping up right now. perhaps other areas where waiting in line is a pain that people will pay for?
Things Turn Ugly in the 'Hacks vs. Flacks' War
I'm not a huge fan of Eclipse. I've been using it (on linux) for c/c++ for syntax highlighting, code completion, and go-to-declaration, but it's been really unstable, and for some reason typing anything in double quotes causes the editor to hang. (Has anyone else experienced/fixed this?) Haven't tried it for PHP, I've been using Zend Studio and am (usually) very pleased.
Well, it's certainly inspiring, just a little remark to add: some things are entertaining by nature (e.g. playing soccer) while for other things you need to make an effort (oops, here it is again) to discover the joy in them (e.g. for the procedure of building the right body to play better soccer). Most people will certainly devote more time to the first category of activities (what I've called entertaining by nature).
mabuhay! Rails startup in QC.
wow she must hate men

all that needless offensive intro to her readers and that pointless ending.

she should follow her own advice starting from the "written communication skills" one.

what's the purpose of her article anyway if she hates 20ers-something that want to become founders?

anyway, just another web page in my block list added
I wonder how much of this supposed non-investment in "Web 2.0" companies is because traditional VC's like KP can't get the terms they need (or are used to)?

In the 90's to start even a web-based company, you would spend $1MM+ just on things like office furniture and snacks.

These days a $500,000 investment can get you a working "beta" prototype with users (or even paying subscribers) and much more infrastructure than it ever could in the past.

You can get your "Web 2.0" company rolling with less than a dozen people, in temporary (or no) office space. That doesn't need "Kleiner Perkins" level investments, so I can see why they maybe can't find any Web 2.0 deals worth investing in.

When $500,000 gives you something that you can start to make logical extrapolations from, you're in a better position to negotiate a lower percentage for the investors. This is good for founders, but not for VCs.
This is an interesting topic and yet the author does it a disservice by simplifying it. Mozart was prolific, it's true, but he could write a symphony in one go. Literally, he would just sit down and write out a symphony. That's not the hard work the author hints at. Then there are others, such as Beethoven, who was great despite not producing many works. Melville wrote few novels, but one was "Moby Dick". Even the work that was done was most likely a labor of love, so that 99% perspiration most likely wasn't noticed by the one sweating.

Further, I'm dismayed that the author attempts to dilute the intellectual capacity as an ingredient in formulating "genius". Name a true genius and I will name you someone who knew their field intimately. It's simply not the only ingredient.

Instead, I would credit perspective. Alan Kay's "point of view". A genius has a way of going down a path where no one else has ventured before, and does so for personal motives. Most geniuses don't try to be geniuses, as much as chase a star only seen by them.

When Beethoven found he was losing his hearing, he wrote a letter to his brothers called the Heiligenstadt Testament, and said, "... but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce"
Mark Cuban, Facebook, and OpenSocial
Why UK Startups Are Moving To Silicon Valley
right! so in your opinion is there any topic outside the purview of hacker news? I am not being sarcastic. That is an honest question.

I don't get how some musicians playing a Darth Vader Track is "hacker news". Help me understand.
This article is all based on an off the cuff remark by a single (often deliberately controversial) partner at Kleiner. And it's nothing new that people in SV despise the term "Web 2.0."

If Sequoia or Benchmark announced, as firms, that they were no longer investing in web startups, that would be meaningful.

Randy Komisar saying that "Web 2.0" companies are a lose is different thing.
http://ycombinator.com/hackernews.html
MySpace To Announce Self-Serve Hyper Targeted Advertising Network
Yahoo FireEagle - A Platform Service For Geo Information
Some technical details of Visvo search startup
The Art of Hyperlinking
Powerset internal problems
Currently the code tree is 9573 nodes. About
1500 lines of code. It's fairly tight at this stage,
because I recently went through it and squeezed out a
lot of the fat.
"When you go to my Facebook profile, you get the real me. Thats not to say I answer every profile question. I don't. I'm not going to disclose everything about myself. However, the data that is available about me is the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet or probably anywhere...."

" the most comprehensive, self maintained database record about me on the internet" is not quite the same thing as "the real me" is it?

The rest of OReilly's article seems to base itself on where the "real me" resides. On facebook vs something else.

All very bizarre.
This comment/article aside - how many web startups have KP invested in recently? They've not had a major hit since Google and have spent their time investing in a bunch of other sectors.

There's nothing new here.
It may not be significant what this particular VC says, probably without giving it much thought. But there is a justified disappointment with many things that go by the Web 2.0 token. I found it very convincing when you wrote this:

"One of the most valuable things my father taught me is an old Yorkshire saying: where there's muck, there's brass. Meaning that unpleasant work pays. And more to the point here, vice versa. Work people like doesn't pay well, for reasons of supply and demand."

How many of those Web 2.0 startups are actually tackling unpleasant, hard, messy problems in your view?
Top Colleges for Entrepreneurship
We did.

We look forward to writing a lisp REPL Facebook app that will provide millions of users the ability to be the next generation of YC's. We plan on monetizing it by taking 0.5% of each company who uses our app and gets through YC, we are calling it meta-meta-entrepreneurship.

We celebrated by stealing some laptops in the parking lot while other teams drank their sorrows away.

(OK, I didn't apply)
Get an add for it on the automated answering machine at the hospital, clinic, and or local physician offices.

i think the best way to do this is, via negotiations with ppo groups, hmo groups, and insurance companies. I could see someone like Allstate being interested in this, in regards to their current ad campaign about safe driving. Insurance is a really competitive market place, and I could see this as a feature add on sell, for a monthly fee. say 10$ a month to auto fill your paperwork, when you arrive in the emergency room.

you also need to consider that information is so often filled in wrong, and it makes the billing process hell for doctors and hospitals. if you could validate someones payment options before they arrived, then the hospital/ doctor might pay for that service just to get more accurate billing info.

medical health care billing is a dirty business and doctors get paid less than 1/2 the time. increase their payment percentage and they will jump at it.

when someone calls in, they will be given the option to fill in the data on the web via a website.
I thought it's 2 and 1:

print 'Hello world'

Yup, that's it. A blank line before the indented block, then any amount of indentation.

Reddit is 2 and 4.
Summing Up OpenSocial
Whether entrepreneurship can truly be taught or not is debatable. Still, there's no question that certain schools better nurture an entrepreneurial attitude.

I couldn't help but notice the statistics for these schools, though. I presently attend Cornell University, and have a hard time believing that these schools would be better suited for an entrepreneur. 30 entrepreneurship courses? Cornell has over 200, including more than 30 geared toward web entrepreneurship alone. No less than two of my friends' teams here were given YC interviews. My courses for next semester include "Internet Strategy," "Networks" (taught by the legendary Jon Kleinburg), "Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise," and "Psychology of Social Computing."

In any case, a college education is by no means necessary to be a successful entrepreneur. In many cases, an entrepreneur's time can be better spent working on a startup than attending school. I'm rather surprised though, with how instrumental my education has been to my startup, and how helpful the resources of a college campus have been. No amount of education can replace experience, but I know that what I've learned will serve me well when I begin to work on my startup full time.
"Surprise" Ingredients In Fast Food
While not really "surprising", this'll make you think twice before you opt for fast food.
Piracy and Music
To me Facebook and all the social networks stuff are clearly Web 2.0. Are these guys incredibly superficial or am I an idiot?
ClearContext, helping with your email overload
Facebook SocialAds revealed!
Sun's Ruby Contribution: JRuby Beta Now Faster Than Regular Ruby Interpreter
wow! 9573 nodes is very concise!

I just ran a scheme equivalent of trav on one of my code files and get a count of 300 (on a very small file). This could of course mean that my code is bloated, but I am impressed anyway!

Just curious, but does arc have its own macro system? Or do you use MZScheme's macros?
Is there ANY startup that doesn't have  "social networking features"?
I am trying to find truly unique startups. The ones that are flying under the radar. Last week I asked if anyone was working on a desktop app and we had some very interesting comments. This week I would like to know if anyone is developing a web applications that has no social networking feature, an application that doesn't evolve around your friends and/or a community?
KP halted? Really? What good investments have they actually made in the last 3-4 years? KPCB completely missed out on the Web2.0 while their competitors made billions. Look at their portfolio... it's devoid of anything that made it big in the last few years.

As for Randy Komisar, he's a new VC who hasn't had a SINGLE exit! He's been trashing Web 2.0 for a while now and has contributed to KPCB's decline. KP used to be a tier-1 VC firm that "got it" and in the past two years, they've become a tier-2 firm. I routinely tell entrepreneurs to go and practice their pitch at KP since they will ask tough questions and not make an investment because they won't get it in the end.

Look here how he's trashing Web 2.0 earlier this year:

http://www.venturebeat.com/2007/01/03/with-web-20-its-easy-t...

And look at his portfolio: http://www.kpcb.com/team/index.php?Randy%20Komisar

ALL duds.

Sour grapes, Randy?!

PS: No wonder Vinod Khosla left KPCB.. he probably got sick of slowness and influx of people who suck at envisioning the future and investing based on a vision.
What PR People Should Know About Social Media
Wasn't Powerset suppose to launch at TC40? Wasn't a requirement of TC40 that they company should launch there?

Powerset still doesn't have anything to show for. I actually got a "beta" invite to find a bunch of "custom" searches that you can vote on and grade them. Heh! Imagine if Google said: "sure, you can search for anything as long as it's one of these 10 terms."

Powerset is just a giant hype machine that will eventually fail. People are conditioned to type a word or two into a search field and get an answer they want. No one wants to type long questions and any company that believes they can somehow change the behavior of the masses is highly delusional.
ugh. Eclipse is completely retarded. The only reason I use it is for Flex (Flex 3 beta 2 is based on it). Doesn't hold a candle to VS 2008 Express.
How Salespeople use Digg to get an edge
Sales folks are always looking for an edge and to get it on the Internet they're looking to Social Networking sites like Digg.
10 Tips for Pitching to VCs
One good reason would be in case of emergency. Movie theater companies have debated about jamming cellphone signals in theaters. What would happens if someone started choking? Can you imagine the lawsuits if you couldn't call 911 on your cellphone because the theater had jammed your signal?
Technology Review: The Blow-Up
I may not be into web 2.0, silicon valley or all these website stuffs but when I checked their website: http://www.kpcb.com/portfolio/ , I think they did okay with Google and Amazon(doing a bit well this year) in the web arena.

After all are there any startup within 3-4 years that got bought out and the VC won big time other than YouTube? Remember, all Facebook has is "valuation".

Maybe Randy is looking at the real world and he's thinking that none of these web companies that he invested are going to give him a big payout (in the area of hundred millions) so he prefers to move to a bigger industry: energy and oil. It's understandable.

On the other hand, Vinod seems to have his own venture now. Maybe that's what he wanted: his own.

Go to his venture website and check the Renewable Portfolio section: http://www.khoslaventures.com/ , I don't see any web company (even though I knew Vinod invest in several web companies within 2-4 years since 2002/2003 ish). Khosla ventures is investing in Energy companies too.
What Open Social means for Startups
A take on what open social means for startups.
IACI To Break Into 5 Companies (Thank Heavens)
Google's Android (Google Phone) announcement coming at noon Today
Where's my Gphone?
Google announces Open Handset Alliance - Techcrunch
Hi Hexayurt, we're looking at a couple different heathcare IT problems to solve, and creating expert systems for specific medical domains is one of the areas we are currently investigating.

Can I pick your brain a bit? Send me an e-mail, or let me know what your e-mail is.
Government funded research is one way of transferring the risk of product development from business to the tax payer. If the research succeeds in creating a marketable product, the taxpayer return on the investment is the opportunity to pay for it as a consumer. In many cases, but certainly not all cases, the end result is a publication, ownership of which is transferred to a commercial scientific publishing company.

In many disciplines, not only scientific, academics have decided that it makes more sense to publish their own journals electronically. Open source systems like the Public Knowledge Project's Open Journal System, together with freely available text processing systems such as LaTex make the transition from commercial publication to open source publication straightforward and inexpensive. Academics already have considerable experience writing, editing and refereeing academic publications for no pay for commercial enterprises, which generally demand the copyright in return for publication.

Editorial boards have been frustrated by concerns over ownership and pricing of the journals they edit. Some boards have decided to quit working for commercial publishers and form their own journals, taking their experience and prestige with them.

But who gets to own tax-payer funded journal publications is the tip of the economic iceberg.

The Man will come and get me for saying this: look at virtually any government grant application. You'll find a section that reads (more or less), "if the research results will be transferred to a corporation, enter the name and address of the corporation below." It looks innocuous enough, but it isn't. It means that you can use government funds to pay for research and development, and transfer anything profitable to a corporation--no questions asked. The tax-payer might get the opportunity to pay as the ultimate consumer for some product his dollars helped to finance, but all the profit will have gone to some corporation.

If this fact is pointed out, it's often excused as "the only system we have"; or "the benefit to the consumer in the form of new products and services is compensation enough"--a matter for politics to decide; or else the implied critique of the inequity is attacked as socialist, as if the spectrum of economic alternatives consisted of precisely two points: capitalism and communism. But a more equitable system could be envisioned, in which tax-payer funded capital gains are shared with the tax payer and corporations.

Imagine if one approached YC for seed money with the following proposition: Paul Graham and his crew would invest in your startup. However, YC would not receive a portion of the company; instead YC would benefit by being given the opportunity to pay, as an end consumer like everyone else, for whatever product or service your startup developed. If you could get this deal, it would be irrational not to take it. And the raw end of that deal is what the public gets with the current tax-payer funded research and development scheme.
Say NO by default
Google announces that there is no Googlephone - Announces an alliance with 33 companies in wireless
"At the end of the day, there is a deep, long term trend towards the network as platform, and to applications that leverage the true strength of that platform. That's what I call Web 2.0, and I know that KP is still investing in that trend."

The network is the computer bromide #38,323.
Does the Web 2.0 Emperor Have no Clothes?
"...With Android, a developer could build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect." From (http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/android_overview.html)

Isn't that what Dodgeball did? I find that quote interesting since Google already owns that company and didn't do anything with it.
Building Brand Awareness with Web 2.0
A problem with pmarca's implied 'give writers whatever they ask for and move on' solution is that sometimes legacy royalty arrangements can strangle new-media potential in the crib.

For example, it's my understanding this is what killed the wide republishing of every TV advertisement, as in the early days of the AdCritic.com site. Why wouldn't a company selling something want their TV ads to be as widely seen as possible -- suggesting something like a Creative Commons share-all-you-like license would dominate? But the standard talent contracts from the pre-Internet era required a royalty per showing, which was impossible to collect with open-permission redistribution. Voila -- sites that were only providing free publicity for popular commercials got cease and desist letters, instead of pats on the back.

What I want to know -- Slate explainer, take it away? -- is why the whole industry needs to negotiate a single contract between one cartel of buyers and one cartel of sellers. Why can't different companies and shows try different arrangements, so that talent can vote with their feet (if underpaid) and the widest diversity of novel pay arrangements, that might better enable new-media success, be tried?

Apparently one of the sore spots is that in the last negotiation, writers undervalued future DVD sales -- and DVD income is also a sticking point going forward. Any single master agreement that lasts for years will make the same mistake, in some other area. (Or in DVDs -- whose sales may evaporate as fast as they arrived.)
You have good points, but this article really isn't about Amazon or Google or their recent developments.

This KP guy presumes:

- you need VC to get a startup off the ground

- the end game for all startup people is a $billion+ IPO or buyout

- "web 2.0" has any real meaning.

We all know "web 2.0" doesn't really mean anything in itself: it's just a stamp we're putting on the current state of the web. Unless the whole web is about to die, I think we're OK.
Google signs up 30 partners for mobile phone push
With Growth Slowing, eBay Gets Innovative
Google Makes Its Entry Into the Wireless World
Is Zeno, a humanoid robot, the future of home entertainment? (vid)
The idea may have been to buy Dodgeball to prevent competition, and/or to get in on any collaborations or partnerships DB had.
Kleiner: Web 2.0 is So Over, Dude
I think the article is pretty accurate though. Mozart could create a symphony in one go but the author does say that he started at age 3. His father encouraged him and then Haydn was also his tutor.

The way I read the article is that intelligence is necessary but is not sufficient in of itself.
Interesting, but there's not much substance there, yet. They release the SDK November 12th.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=6304687408656696643
Why Startups Have Less Dilbertian, Pointy-Haired Bosses
CODING! My work must be 99% debbuging legacy code and documenting, or modifying code to work with the test environment, and only 1% actually coding something new and useful, but this 1% make it worthwhile.