skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>>>>
""I'm calling it," Roy sighs, "that's it." And so, at 4:20 in the morning, some 70 miles shy of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Roy puts his turn signal on like some average commuter and once again stops, 2,160 miles short of his dream."<<<<

I found it interesting that they decided to call it quits so soon; in Indiana, of all places, for rationalizing the lack of ability to catch up on average speed. (On this particular attempt) Indiana isn't very far at all from the border of NY state.

The Northeast has extreme population density, slower posted speed limits, etc. It seems to me that after completing that initial leg of the journey, they could easily catch up for lost time going across the more-or-less desolate midwest, even given their slower than desired avg MPH start.

So they technically completed only 635 miles of the trip (2795-2160). . . a mere 22.7 percent of the total miles to be traveled. I think if it were me, I'd wait until at least the halfway point before calculating averages and deciding whether or not to throw in the towel of defeat.

I definitely think that if there were anywhere to make up for lost time, it would definitely be across parts of the midwest.
My question is, how did the attacker get the victim's ftp password? Packet sniffing or brute-forcing a weak password?
I think that "aggressive" is being misinterpreted. SV VCs have a greater tolerance for risk, at least technology risk.

It seems quite reasonable that riskier investments should have greater potential reward. (Otherwise, why take on the additional risk?)
Prototype 1.6.0 RC1 Released
Changes to the Class and Event APIs, Hash rewrite, and bug fixes
Not that it matters, but the first sentence of the article says "only place...if you want to have the very best chance..."

"I don't care who writes the editorials if I get to write the headlines" is a relevant quote I heard a long time ago. I've looked but haven't found a cite for it.
I think he's referring more to the flood of investment dollars at high valuation rather than acquisition at high valuation. The suits are the managers of Harvard's endowment and the like; their desire for returns creates a large supply of venture financing which increases the demand for startups to park the money in, driving up valuations.

That's a separate issue (sort of) from whatever forces are driving the acquisitions; apparently web startups are in high demand with acquirers and they getting in bidding wars driving up the price. The (sort of) is that the high demand for startups creates the large returns the endowment money is chasing in the first place.

So, fundamentally, I think either 1) startups are creating vast amounts of (expected) wealth and people just aren't used to seeing mostly expected wealth divvied up in public or 2) the EBays, Yahoos, and Googles of the world are acting irrationally.
It was a great article. I think the most important part was:

"Software development got cheaper but communication didn't. Pure idea/sales/marketing founders are losing value against founders who can build their own product."
Speaking of bias, let's look at Al Gore.

"It is the most dangerous challenge we've ever faced but it is also the greatest opportunity that we have ever had to make changes that we should be making for other reasons anyway," Gore said.

http://in.news.yahoo.com/071012/137/6lvvz.html
What hacker wants to touch "enterprise" software with a 10 foot pole?

Beyond that, "enterprise" and "startup" - at least to my mind - don't have a large intersection. If I want something enterprisey, I want it from a big, established IBM type company who will be there 10 years from now, and still be interested in my business.
Some calculations don't need to be done that often. Recalculating for a massive data set can often be.. fudged for a period of time, in scientific computing - accuracy decreases over time, and then a full recalculation is eventually necessary. If you need major computing power, but only need it twice a month, this type of plan is economical, whether you're a large company or a small one.
Apple: iPhone SDK officially available in February
Except for the fact that a large number of said 'poor' authors won't react that way. They'll argue, fight, and so on.
Advertising? Forget It. Word of Mouth Reigns!
What I think is scary is the idea of a spammer who knows their shit when it comes to programming and security.

Those are the people you never hear about, cause they're in like, Russia, running botnets for the mafia and all that.

Internet is serious bidnis, mayne.
This is great advice. Going through the application is itself a great exercise in developing our products and pitches. There are so many paths to success, we just have to keep taking them as they come, whether they be in the form of organizations like Y-Combinator or serendipity... it's almost romantic, don't ya think?
The acquisition issue is related in another way: endowment money is also flooding into the publicly-traded stock market, which drives up the stock price of these large acquirers. They have an incentive to trade their overvalued stock for tangible products that increase the value of their business.

It's a bubble, but it's a bubble where everyone is acting rationally. Pensions & endowments and other institutional investors have an incentive to purchase these overvalued securities and ever-inflating prices because the value of their cash will drop through inflation. Large acquirers have an incentive to trade their overvalued stock for successful companies under "buy low, sell high". VCs have an incentive to invest in more startups at higher valuations because acquisitions are being made at higher valuation, plus they need to put their investment capital to work. Entrepreneurs have an incentive to found more startups, to capture this investment- and acquisition-money. The ultimate cause is the Fed, which is flooding the economy with money and driving the value of cash down.

BTW, this is how capitalism is supposed to work (except possibly the part about the Fed). Textbooks recognize 3 factors of production - land, labor, and capital - and I'd add a fourth, entrepreneurship, responsible for turning those three into products that satisfy consumer needs. Right now, land is cheap (relative to farming days), labor is cheap, and capital is cheap. The limiting regent is the supply of people with good ideas for turning capital into useful products. In economics, when there's a bottleneck in the value chain, it pushes the returns for that industry up. That's what's happening now, with average returns for entrepreneurs being much, much higher than for the general labor force. As more people found startups, it should equilibrate, so that the returns for entrepreneurship are only the difference between their productivity as entrepreneurs and their productivity as employees.

If history is any guide, it'll last until enough wealth gets concentrated in the entrepreneurial class that the ordinary labor force starts thinking of itself as oppressed and hopeless. Then it usually ends in Depression, war, revolution, or some other major event that kills a lot of people.
In my school we had a mechanical turtle that drew lines on a big piece of paper on the floor. If you were really good and didn't mess around with your screen turtle you got to have a go at using it. We had to stop using it when someone gave it the command FORWARD 500 and it pulled its own cable out of the computer. Good times.
I had just read this on an investment board a few minutes ago. This rocks.
Life Before Google.
Do you remember you life before google? Or am I too old here? :-)
RMS is right. Most of the big enterprise packages were started by college graduates but that certainly doesn't make it a requirement. Most of the big computer companies were started by college graduates, too. And then there was Apple.

You can't be innovative by thinking that just because something hasn't been done a certain way before that it shouldn't be done that way.

Real innovation REQUIRES violating some generally-accepeted principle of how things should be done.

Real innovation is one thing that that the current crop of enterprise software is largely missing.
Sex, Nazi, burrito and Viagra: Who Googles what?
Thank god. That was the stupidest patent ever.
Fountain of Youth Gene?
This is an old article (2005) but still interesting.
Loopt is going to have to go on the offensive for the next few months if it wants to remain the top player in its space once the barriers to entry are lowered. I wonder how this will shake out.
Microsoft to Productize and Integrate F# with Visual Studio
iPhone Aftermarket to Hit One Billion
I disagree with this statement they're quoting:

EURoespread of share options may be distorting the economy, contributing to a temporary overvaluation of equities, encouraging short-sighted managerial decisions and storing up problems for companies in future.

I would not call those decisions short-sighted, because typically there is a hefty vesting period associated with your options. Additionally, most employers (if they are smart) keep giving more options to top performers. Therefore, most valuable employees/executives will always have some non-vested shares and it will be their interest to have a share price constantly growing as opposed to sudden spikes and drops.
One reason he might need funding is to stay ahead of the competition. He has identified a good market, but now that the word is out, competition will emerge. And if he doesn't move fast enough he might lose his niche to faster competitors.
The potential problem with web-based email startups is that good AJAX email experience requires fast response times. Google can afford multiple data centers with thousands of servers powering gMail making sure UI response is nearly instantaneous.

A little company with $3-4 million in the bank will most likely feel sluggish. A good example is Plaxo. I like them a lot, always have been. But I simply cannot use it because their UI makes me feel I'm on a dialup.
More people need to read Clayton Christensen's books. Today's commodity consumer webapp is tomorrow's robust enterprise software. Just ask Wang, Apollo, DEC, Stratus, or any of the other enterprise software companies that were based around Boston 20 years ago.
Go global, get funded!
Wierd little comparison happens in that article

Yahoo: 38x more employees than Facebook
Yahoo: 32x more revenue than Facebook (estimate)
IBM: 8x more revenue than Google
IBM: ? more employees than Google

IBM has 27x more employees than Google, something like 355,000 worldwide. I'd say that offers a rational explanation for why Google's stock is worth more. Google has more room to grow.
I just hope Apple is fair on whos apps they permit. Assuming anyone can build an application provided it passes certain criteria, there will be definitely be a frenzy of 3rd party app development. This could be a great opportunity for mobile software startups.
How Twitter Made My Website Better
In software, though, having more resources often makes you move slower. Your communication overhead scales with the square of team size, yet work done only increases linearly. This has been known since The Mythical Man Month was published 35 years ago, yet people still think that raising $5M and hiring 20 programmers makes you faster.

I'm not scared of a big company or a venture-backed startup, because I've worked at both big companies and 10-20 person venture-backed startups, and know how slowly both of them move. Any feature they implement, I can implement in a couple of days. I am scared of a couple guys in a garage that start with a slightly different take, positioning themselves in an angle I don't expect that gives them an advantage in market share.

It's a lot like sailing, I guess. A dinghy will outsail a yacht nearly every time. However, among dinghies, initial positioning at the start of the race is crucial. If you find yourself too close to the edge of the line and the wind shifts, you can lose so much time tacking and trying to get back in line that the race is practically over before you start.
I have no problem at all paying 8x for $1 of Google's revenue what I pay for $1 of IBM's. IBM is a consulting firm.
That's a really interesting idea. I've never thought of that. One problem with it is that the trick might be exposed if the evil-doer ever viewed the site without being logged in.
Practicing Proper Project Management Process
Once the "creative" prototyping is completed and the product or service is launched, how many of you begin to practice "project management" principles? ... Do you ever feel the need to manage the development of the project efficiently?
In the US, most motorists are going 55-65, swerving across lanes in tractors with tinted windows, and have never heard of leaving the left lane to faster moving traffic. Also, the way most of America is laid out, every trip, even 'local' ones, has a freeway leg, so there is constant merging on or off. Without blinking, of course. In Continental Europe, freeway traffic is much more predictable.

Another thing is, Amsterdam to Nice can be driven overnight, on mostly empty freeways.

And last, your manager was likely exaggerating grossly. Amsterdam to Nice at 120 avg., would take only about 7hrs 30 minutes door to door (Or Sea to Shining Sea). With 3 kids, that's more like the time spent at rest stops along the way.
Sample VC Legal Templates
To be fair, the search space was much smaller before Google. Also, I kept using Altavista for quite a while before finally switching over to Google as my default search, changing only because google is infinitely better on technical searches.

Now, I use Ask for non-technical searches and google for technical ones -- I'm really starting to like ask, but it doesn't prioritize technical searches like Google.
Ask YC: Experiences with founder burnout?
One of the reasons I've started using this forum is because I'm burnt out. I've been in a product development startup in China for the past 10 months (as in the design and engineering of real, physical products to ship back to Canada/the US) and it's been the most exciting and learning-intensive time of my life, but I've hit a wall and now it looks like this means the end for all of us here. We were undertaking a pretty ambitious project (though we only learned of its true difficulty along-the-way), and it's still technically possible and definitely marketable -- but requires a lot more money and time than can be committed given my pretty-much-incapacitated state.

Burnout feels incredibly illogical, because you can't do what you tell yourself you want to do. You can have a conversation with someone and get right fired up about an idea in-the-moment, but when you try to execute, a blanket of fog comes over your brain and you sit there like a deer in headlights. You can hardly perform at the level of a 10-year-old, no matter how much you tell myself that you want to continue. You try to explain this state to someone else and you get a blank stare; how could you be so "disabled" when you still look reasonably healthy and vivid in conversation? It's tough for them to see this as anything other than a conscious choice, on your part, to quit. But, you know that you keep getting up and trying to hack away at things -- and you keep hitting the same wall. Thankfully, my partners and investor are being very understanding, and they are the ones with the most to lose.

This is really, really tough -- my amazing and talented staff, my dreams and plans, all the relationships we've built, my reputation -- all of it is now at the mercy of the buzzing of my neurons and the chemicals shooting through my veins, caused by the way I've handled myself over the past 10 months ("full steam ahead, I'm 24 and invincible!").

Has anyone here burnt out before, or seen it happen? Has YC learned of any warning signs?

I would guess that being a part of YC itself would help prevent this, because of the opportunity for social support -- it can be really tough not having friends who know what it's like to be where you are, doing what you are.

As for me, I am pretty confident that eventually I'll be able to put myself back together and start something new again -- but I won't be operating anywhere near 100% any time soon, even though I certainly can't sit still as there's still rent to pay and I'm dead broke from having no salary all year.
Venture industry decline?
from the article's comments:
"If we think of VC as resellers and our startups as the marketable product, then the problem is really that there is not many customers (i.e., liguidity opportunities) for companies. On top of that, it does not take much to build a company these days, so it is non-trivial for the VC's to tell a story when they are trying to raise money. [...]"
I wouldn't count on it! ;)

My sense is that apple is much more concerned with keeping the iPhones 100% trouble-free for the 99% of people who don't want to do anything more than make calls and check e-mail than with providing development freedom for the 1% of people who are excited to start hacking their phone. (Or even just to start adding new widgets).

It's disappointing for those of us who like fun, but probably a good business decision. Suits have a lot more money to spend on phones than kids and hackers, and reliability is very important to them.
we set milestones. but we don't worry about methodology.

we do feel the need to manage development efficiently. again, we're small, so we sketch the future state almost constantly. we keep the burning stuff in our brains all the time. the less important stuff either comes up again or it doesn't. most of the time it doesn't.
Hear hear. I've worked for big and little organizations too, and software is the only place I know where 3-5 guys in a basement can kick the butt of the biggest company on the planet. Some people say those days are over, but I think they're just beginning.
Funding can slow you down, or make you faster. It depends on how you use it. I know what you're talking about; and yes, if used the wrong way, more resources are actually bad for you. But notice my emphasis on "speed", not number of employees.

For his case, he's losing time to consulting work which distracts him from his main product. Also, he's doing the development and marketing at the same time. A little funding that allows him to focus on building his product and hire one or two people to pick up the marketing tasks could make him faster.
Eat healthy food and practice sports =)
The fact that you can write such an articulate article tells me that you are much LESS burnout than you think you are. Give it some time and take care of the other two legs of your three-legged stool first (take care of your health and your family which I suspect are also in need of some repair). If you don't have your health and you don't have the support of your family, you don't have a fighting chance to re-start your career. Also, you cannot look at your career one job at a time, it is a piece-wise continuous journey that happens to have multiple rest stops. The following is my experience, hope it helps.

Why Startups Fail and Why Gigamon Should've Too
http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/09/why-startups-fa.html

--Denny--
Here's the patent:
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazonpatent.html

It's great that they got rid of most of the claims, but it looks like independent claims 6 and 9 still broadly cover a client/server approach to one-click shopping carts. Can any IP lawyers in the house comment on the ramifications of losing the method claims?
And you think the people who started VMWare, ITA software, Akamai & Ab Initio were dumb, stupid, second-rate hackers? Obviously by your definition these were never a startup because people would have bought stuff from IBM anyway.

Like a lot of other people in this group you are confusing web startups with startups.

Here is a list of Boston area Enterprise startups that went public this year: Airvana, Starent Networks, Bladelogic, Netezza, AcmePacket . They could not have done so without real customers and real revenue (not traffic, not unique visitors).
"DNA and the Brain" - Dr. James Watson speaks at Google (talk includes advice to marry for beauty if you are intelligent)
"Real innovation is one thing that that the current crop of enterprise software is largely missing."

Based on what? You don't think virtualization is real innovation? Spend some time learning about Netezza, Endeca, ITA, BladeLogic, Scalent, VMWare... before making blanket statements that are blatantly inaccurate.
No Web Dessert Before Dinner
Times like this when I really miss the down-arrow. Way to generalize, asshole.
Denny is an incredibly smart and dedicated guy, and I think you should consider his words of advice. It's easy to feel overwhelmed and "deer in the headlights", sometimes you have to step away from things for a bit (maybe a week or so) and just sort of process the whole situation in the back of your head.

Think things through, determine what you need (and where to get it), and move ahead.
Additional Tip: Describe your product as "Web 2.0" and submit your site to this site http://www.neobinaries.com/Contribute/LaunchYourSite/tabid/7.... It turns out a lot of "Blogs" just syndicate blog entries so you submit to (this) one and the next thing you know you are on 60 blogs. This is what happened, normally I sign up 500 users a month but that month I signed up 1,500 users, my pagerank went up, and I get about a lasting effect of 3-5 extra signups a day because of all of the listings.
Even more funnily, it probably conveys as much meaning as an hour long talk on the phone.
New Job Board Launches
Another Napster Relaunch - Yawn.
A little hypothesis:

Burnout is your subconscious's way of telling you that you're on the wrong track.

I've found that every time I've felt burned out - whether in writing, coding, startup, life - it's because I was working on something that ultimately was going nowhere. I needed to revisit my assumptions, yet my conscious mind didn't know that. Burnout was a way for my subconscious to say "This isn't going to work, you're not working on the important stuff, take a step back and look at the big picture."

When writer's blocked, I delete the last 3 paragraphs I've written and take the story in another direction. This has almost always cured my writer's block; when it doesn't I delete the last page and take the story in another direction.

When coder's blocked, I revert to my last svn commit and start again, usually with a smaller task. I've thrown away up to a week's worth of work this way, which is another lesson: commit early and often. Commits should be an hourly or minutely process, not something you do after a whole bunch of work.

When blocked in general, I think about the last design decision I made and revisit. Oftentimes, if I'm blocked entirely and can't even get started on implementing a feature, it's because the feature is ill-conceived and needs to be redone. Maybe it's done with incorrect assumptions about how users will use the problem, or maybe it just doesn't serve any purpose. Revisit whether you need the feature at all.

If you find you can't work on your startup at all, maybe it's a sign that your startup is on the wrong track. Revisit your idea. I'm actually at that stage with mine: we scrambled to get a demo ready for YC, but now that I want to procrastinate and avoid work (our market is people who want to procrastinate and avoid work), I find that I don't want to use our product. But I've got some ideas about how to backup and try a different approach, and now I want to try them out and see if they can get me procrastinating with the startup itself.
Dude, give up. You are surrounded by "testosterone driven 20 somethings ?" ;-).