skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
utterly retarded, and he will have a poor social ROI. He should have used it ( $28m ) to fund 3 or 4 hospitals in some of the less fortunate parts of the world. Instead, people ( like me ) will ask questions like "Why didn't he give it to a part of the world that really needed it?". I'm pretty sure Stanford hospital can take care of itself. Just my 2c
What should I send investors? Part 3: Business Plans, NDAs, and Traction.
wow - 28 million is serious cash -

whats up with the rest of the ultra rich valleyits?

while I agree that stanford hospital is not the needest place - its his money and I like the idea of funding local. Plus emergency services are the frontline service to the community and have been getting cut left and right.

anyway you skin it this is amazingly generous and deserves an applause.
<sarcasm> yeah what a selfish jerk. Nobody should invest a cent into anything domestic until the whole of the third world is brought out of poverty. </sarcasm>
"utterly retarded"

When you have $28 million dollars to blow, you will be free to spend it as you see fit. In the interim, perhaps you shouldn't be so critical of a billionaire donating money to a hospital; much larger fortunes have simply been squandered. Not to mention the fact that throughout history the rich have donated untold sums to cultural and arts centers, recreation, etc. All money that could have been spent building hospitals in less fortunate parts of the world, and probably most of which brought nothing but praise to the philanthropist.
All of his suggested additions can fit in a column on the left hand side of the code, since they only apply to lines, not words.
I'd say a far greater squandering to complain about would be Brittney Spears wasting $1.47m a year on clothes and booze.
very inspiring, pmarca!
with your blog -- you have given a lot
to the startup geeks!
and with this, you have given something
amazing to your local community.
Thank you.
and looking forward to your "fondest hope"!!!
Sure... there's still an enormous problem in our world in that our resources are distributed really poorly. Unfortunately, we haven't come up with any better way of distributing resources than capitalism.
yeah... it looks like the work of picasso's spiritual descendant
(a) Stanford is a research hospital, and the work they do in research hospitals improves healthcare everywhere.

(b) This doesn't preclude him from making other donations.

(c) Even if it were an unwise choice (which I don't believe), it was still a generous thing to do. No one deserves to be called names for giving away $28 million.

This seems to me the meanest (in both senses) comment I've seen on News.YC to date. Ending it with an ass-covering "Just my 2c" just makes it seem that much more contemptible.
How is this mean-spirited?

Seems pretty even-handed, especially for the wag.
Ask: Best Hack Toys
So on a lighter note, let's say it's time to create the perfect hacking den. You've got the USB nerf guns, you've got the squirt guns. So what's next? Pinball games? Billiards? Darts? Laser Tag?

What's the best hack toys to increase productivity with the team when you need to take a few minutes' break?
The YC interview doesn't test presentation skills, because YC interviews aren't presentations. We just ask questions.

We would not have guessed you could pick startups in 10 minutes either, at first. We realized this when interviews used to be longer. We noticed that we usually knew after 10 minutes whether we wanted to fund a group, and that in cases where we didn't we used to just have to sit there talking for another 10 or 20 minutes even though we'd already made up our minds.

I'm not saying we're always right; far from it; but more time would make surprisingly little difference.
Beer!

The cause of, and solution to, all of the worlds problems.
It was an article investigating the premise that the founder was an asshole.
So, how does that affect someone's chances for funding...
Depends how much cash you have. The defining feature of recessions tends to be that cash is harder to come by - it's harder to find investors, and it's harder to get people to spend money.

The flip side is that anything that cuts cost and saves people money in a recession does well. Also, if unemployment goes up, people tend to have more time on their hands, which benefits attention-based businesses. It's just that converting that to cash becomes more difficult. Advertising spending tends to drop like a rock in recessions.

If you're likely to run out of cash during the recession, don't quit, because it'll be very difficult to find more. If you have enough to make it through to the other end, you can do very well. Business activity doesn't stop in recessions, it just slows down, and you can do all the strategic aspects (building a product, getting market share, building brand recognition) just as well as in boom times. Better, really, since recessions tend to flush out competitors.
That's nothing a freezer couldn't solve.
I'm thinking pinball.

Its got enough of an addictive quality to keep you busy for a few minutes, but games usually don't last 40 hours like some video games would. Plus -- it's very physical and analog.

Of course, laser tag would be awesome too, but you'd need a heckuva big office.
Maybe you should just wait one or two years.
Rails App Performance Tweak: A Fair Proxy Balancer for Nginx and Mongrel
Those numbers are far too small to base such a life changing decision on.

And this kind of risk to the baby is not nearly as serious as a risk to the mother. You can always try again. These are the stats you should be considering.
Innovative New Rails Host: Online IDE, Web Console, Instantly Live
It's a well-known fact that high-profile organizations and events get an excessive amount of funding. It's always been that way.
It reminds me of something out of Dr. Seuss. I generally like it precisely because it is so ridiculous.
The Mysteries of iCal, Revealed!
I'm a big fan of Guitar Hero. I can confidently state that I will beat everyone here. I am really looking forward to getting moved into an office so I can sit there and play Guitar Hero all day. Productivity is very relative.
MySpace Overcome By Severe Phishing/Spam 'Epidemic'
Cool Rails Log Visualizer Built Using AIR
"These things are complicated, and they involve a lot of people, and you never quite know where they went wrong, (...) A building goes together with seven billion pieces of connective tissue. The chances of it getting done ever without something colliding or some misstep are small."

That's a blatant lie.

Civil engineering it is a precise discipline and a margin of error it's always part of the calculations. Sloppy structural analysis? Bad materials? The contractor didn't follow the specifications? You can know exactly what went wrong.
Dilbert on recursion
Multics open sourced
The weirdest hardware you can find a web server on
MJD: Surprising reasons to use a syntax-coloring editor
Developer efficiency myths and truths
CellWriter: Open source handwriting recognition for Linux
Here's what I want. A social place for self-employed folks to work. Coffee shops these days are full of laptop jockeys. Proprieters hate it when we hog the booths, and we hate it when they charge for wireless.

Give me a place catered to the entrepreneurial types. BUT maintain the social+creative coffee shop vibe... I'm thinking along the lines of Diesel Cafe, not the Cambridge Innovation Center.

Charge membership fees, serve healthy meals, be open 24 hours, whatever. Start with Cambridge, then franchise around the world.

Naturally, there'd be an online component... your Hackspot account gives you access to the network, job board, etc etc.

Anyone know anything about starting a company in meatspace? =P
An indoor remote controlled helicopter, a yo-yo, a tennis ball are my current distractions. I've seen pinball, foosball, ping pong, and pool all work well in an office setting, but video games are generally too involved for the casual 15min distraction. Unless, of course, you're making video games.
Steroid bust shows Feds can still get at "private" and "secure" e-mail
random character strings aren't really all that hard to remember, so long as you don't have to change it every month. The problem is that people won't choose random passwords on their own, and if you have someone (or something) assign the password then it's not something only the user knows.

I think one of the things that pisses me off the most are challenge-response systems that only let you pick from 7-8 different questions. One of the sites I use a lot just started requiring you to answer your security questions every single time you log in (or at least once per month, which is how often I use the site). And there is no way to fill out your own questions, and several of them would clearly only apply to subsets of people. (Married people, people with pets, etc).

The best security questions, in my experience, are the ones I fill out myself. I could, for example, use a pattern of always answering the question wrong in the same way. "What was the name of your first crush?" Your answer is her favorite band. When you can't choose the question, that sort of thing gets a lot harder to do.
Wait a second! So he donates $28 million to a hospital and you are complaining? You can't be serious.

When you donate $28 million to a better cause I'm sure we'll all like to hear about it. Until then, I hope I don't run in to "people like [you]".
Caja: Capability Javascript
Story also covered by Damn Interesting: http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=829
I Like the C Preprocessor
Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and others are spending the bulk of their fortunes working in Africa and other developing nations. You would be naive to think that there aren't poor people in the SV area that could use better health care. Like it or not, ER's are the frontlines of care for the majority of the uninsured in this country.

I think it is very noble to try and equalize care in your hometown - especially one with such wealth disparity as SV. I think he hopes to inspire other rich technology tycoons to do the same.
Bay Area Functional Programmers - David Pollak on lift: Videos & Slides
Modern Lisp (with support for concurrency) based on Java Virtual Machine
I think this is a neat idea to capture all those PHP refugees who saw the outdated "Make a Rails Blog in 15 minutes". This may well be the start a whole bunch of Rails applets.

... it's just that I hate writing code in the browser. No vi shortcut keys. Plus all those other little tools I've accumulated in the past couple years.
Perhaps the U.S. government is smart enough and coordinated enough to do such a thing but...

Who's to say that this isn't a fantasy spun to enhance the reputation of the U.S. intelligence community whilst providing a coverup for some poorly-written software?

I certainly wish I had the option of saying "The CIA made me do it!" when a bug is found in _my_ code.
Yeah we never really had a chance to explain how we planned to solve the problem. They just compared us to Yahoo, yet we were completely different than yahoo or anything yahoo was trying to do. They seemed to think that we were just doing another portal with a more user friendly interface, and said that why would anyone switch from yahoo to us. It's unfortunate that we couldn't explain the real vision.
So do you agree that it's ugly on the outside? If not, then people who think so might not want to take your word for how it feels inside, either.
Good god, pay attention to the world around you people.

1> different kinds of businesses do well in recessions vs. boom years. adapt your start up plans to be "countercyclical."

If you're not sure what kinds of businesses are countercyclical, are you sure you're old enough to be doing this?

2> prioritize international markets. capital bleeding out of the US because of inflation and currency shrinkage is going somewhere. those people are your customers too.

3> Flint, Michigan. Yes, it can happen here. Entire classes of businesses can just vanish. Programming jobs go abroad eventually (yes, yes they do - your professors are not the only smart Indians, Chinese, Japanese, Russians, Koreans, Israelis etc. in the world.) Which business are you in? Being smart guys? Or serving a particular customer base better than your immigrant professor's cousin who stayed at home can?

Do a bit of reading about the Great Depression. Now re-run that, maybe 50% as extreme, but this time with the internet. Where would you like to have been positioned in 1927 or 1928 to survive in good shape?

If you want a closer example, examine the Argentine Economic Collapse (1999).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_economic_crisis_(1999-2002) - you will have to cut and paste that link, including the bracketed dates.

We don't know that is going to happen but it's a scenario that should be examined in your mind because if a funder asks you "so what's your plan if the dollar drops to be 20% of it's current value against the Euro and the Yen?" the answer should not be "what are you talking about?"

In short: get beyond marketing to the American consumer, because there's a 5%-15% possibility that they're going to be entirely wiped out within the next couple of years. Think Former Soviet Union style conditions (relative to where we are even now.) Now try to imagine keeping your business going. Note the percentages - I don't think this is what will happen, but I'd say it's improbable-but-possible.

As a business person, it's a systemic risk that your business plan should take into account. If it doesn't, you're still in the little leagues, assuming that the relatively stable economic conditions that have prevailed during most of your life time are baseline reality. They aren't - that's summer. Winter may be just around the corner. Say 1 in 6 or less.

By the way, I also do children's parties, weddings and Bar Mitzvahs.
That's the only downside of Firebug -- a memory leak. It's worst on sites with periodic ajax requests, like Gmail.

In general, it's best to leave Firebug disabled by default, and only enable it for specific urls when you need to use it.
I wonder if "puneetht" got the message? I hope so.

--Denny--
Philanthropy is not the same as investment.

Andreesen is among those who have created markets, companies, and industries more or less out of thin air (by implementing an idea on a digital device that doesn't produce tangible physical goods like a steel factory or something) in a few years. He's giving back in a very generous way. Let's all just recognize how amazing the entire situation is, shall we?

What would he know about developing countries? There's no harm in dealing with what you're familiar with.
The beauty of it matches the beauty of MIT's culture. The building matches the university's quirkiness. I visited for a few days and everyone told me I had to visit the cool new CS building.
best news i've herd all week.
DHH: Why OS X and not Linux?
Free online Barcode Maker
How google detects click frauds !
Show how google detects clicks frauds!
Thanks. I had a parsing error.
You do have a point... there could be a much greater need in developing countries. But I think generosity is in short supply in this world. Any charity should be applauded loudly because it helps someone.
If it works smoothly, this will be awesome. I can literally travel the globe and work from any internet cafe.

However, I suspect there will be a lot of growing pains and bugs along the way. But it's a great idea and I'm looking forward to their release.
Use the current session history to do personal recommendations to users that aren't logged in.
As a user browses through the comics he will generally click the things that interest him and a single great on the spot recommendation can be a deal sealer for a new user browsing your site.
Maybe he donated to a US hospital because he couldn't find anyone outside of the USA who wanted US$. :-)

More seriously, the quality of health care available to Americans without health insurance is comparable to that in many third world countries; so funding US hospitals (which provide a disproportionate amount of their services to the uninsured, who often don't seek treatment for medical issues until said issues become life-threatening) can be seen as providing assistance to the disadvantages.

Finally -- as other people have said, it was his money. Up to him to decide what to do with it.
Head for Merseyside to get your ideas funded
And let me just add factually and completely unemotionally that Liverpool has an exceptionally high proportion of females ;-)
This will make little apps -- restaurants, dance studios, newsletters -- insanely easy to build and deploy.

I doubt it will do much for bigger ones, though. Scalability, performance and QOS are matters of system administration -- precisely the matters that Heroku takes out of your hands.
Daylife, a startup that proves that news that really matter
"Scalability, performance and QOS are matters of system administration"

I think Heroku would say that that's exactly the point.
Cheering On the Tech Stock Crash
VertrigoServ: WAMP from one file
You don't have to use a browser to write the code.
That's a very nice point and thanks for making it, but based on the empirical evidence I think that you're wrong. There are many very good programmers who don't use syntax highlighting. But I don't know anyone who is not using indentation. So there has to be an important difference between the two.
I'm not too worried. Weak dollar, rising oil prices and a credit crunch for mortgages isn't really going to affect the tech industry much. We're not a petroleum, credit or real estate based industry.

Rising oil prices mean that commodities that are distributed via oil based transport will be more expensive. Shipping widgets via plane train or truck just got more expensive. Our products are distributed electronically, so relatively speaking our products are going to be cheaper, and might be considered a better value.

Credit crunch and defaulting mortgages means that the banking and finance industries are going to be taking a bath for a bit. It's going to be harder for you to get a mortgage. I don't see that affecting the software biz much.

A weak dollar means that internationalization efforts will pay off. There are going to be more people in Europe, Canada and Asia that will be interested in buying American goods because American goods will be cheaper. It's time to make friends who know other languages to translate your site, and be sure that your programming language of choice has good Unicode support. Outsourcing just got more expensive, however because of the exchange rate differences.

Finally, that bottle of French champagne that you were going to drink at your liquidity party just got more expensive. That's a bummer. :)
If I don't use the browser, I might as well use the rest of the development suite on the laptop. If I don't use their editor, I assume I'd have to upload the files somehow. The whole reason I'm using git now intsead of Subversion is because I cannot guarantee my internet connectivity. And I hate to admit it, any little interruption like that often serves as an excuse to not work on code.

If I use their import functionality to update the app, I can do it quicker by typing 'cap deploy' on the command line.

Don't get me wrong -- I think this is a pretty neat idea, particularly for folks who don't have much time or money invested in their own equipment. With the Facebook and Google social APIs out, I can see this as the preferred tool for sketching out an idea, and getting some users.

But for someone like me who has the infrastructure setup already, it would have to be insanely better than pounding away at my laptop, using my own version control system, the various versions of Rails I can use it with, running tests, the occasional need for BackgroundRB apps. Yeah, it does make me feel as if I weren't keeping up with the times, but then again, I have a hobby of finding gems in obscure ruins of antiquity.
Inside the Process (How a VC Fund works a deal, from 2005)
Rails 2.0: Release Candidate 1
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farewell_Dossier
Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb: Two Separate Copies Of The Guitar Solo 15 Seconds Apart
David Gilmour is one of the most expressive and clean guitarists from the sixties and seventies. This is a cool example of how organized he is
Evaluating Tech Startups: The Risks And Rewards
Ongoing Experiment with Digital Signatures
Creating a Personal Research Agenda
The Talent Myth, by Malcolm Gladwell
This was neither private nor secure. By definition, if someone else has access to your account, it's not private. Laziness did this person in. He half-assed it.
HRex Robot Can Conquer Any Terrain with Manic Thrashing
The Web That Wasn't [video]
Completely off topic, but can we all stop using the word "humans" to make ourselves sound objective and scientific? Unless it's part of a comparison with other species, the word is "people."
Template Insanity
Or angry blog owners would hunt down the sploggers for revenge.
Startup releases amazing 45 deg maps of Stockholm
Pyke - a knowledge-based inference engine (expert system) written in 100% python
Too Much Information? Ignore It.
It's interesting that this is in the Fashion section. I think the reason is that it's a PR placement, and the Fashion section is much easier to score those in.
I Am, Therefore I Rationalize
Admitting that functional programming can be awkward
Ask YC: did Hacker News really achieve the objective?
"The focus of Hacker News is going to be anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes a lot more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Do you think the current Hacker News fully achieves this? and the main question here: do you think this site really achieves keeping a good hacker community together?

(I'm not a native English speaker, sorry for grammar)
Although poorly articulated, I don't think his intention was to come across mean-spirited. I think he meant this money could have more positive impact by doing y instead of x. At the end of the day, since the money was earned through honest work instead of tax revenue, none of us have a say in how he chooses to use it, as many people here have already stated.
Curvy moms have smarter kids
I'm cautiously optimistic. A lot of hackers I meet say that they read it. And traffic continues to rise: we now get about 6500 unique visitors a day, and about 65k pageviews.
Manager Vs Programmer
Well, by definition, public key crypto and proper key management can let others have your encrypted data and it'll still be safe.

Of course, this is not what the hushmail bastards were providing.
Title's a bit misleading. The study actually found that mothers with a low waste-hip ratio had smarter kids. That translates to big hips (and narrow waist), not the image of rolls of fat and a gigantic gut that normally come to mind when you say "fat moms".

Also, I'm curious if they actually measured polyunsaturated fat levels and correlated them. I've heard other studies that suggested big hips lead to healthier, smarter children because they lead to easier childbirths and inflict less trauma on the fetus during delivery. They could control for this by testing a group of kids delivered by caesarean.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/11/16/...

According to this article, you'd be doing the world a real favor if you avoided kids altogether.
Nice. There's also a service in Norway with similar photos:

http://tinyurl.com/275ftv
Thanks fantastic. Many, many thanks for creating and nurturing this community.
You could pay McKinsey $500K for a bunch of BS or you can get real insight from pg for free:

http://paulgraham.com/gh.html

Your choice.
Models @ Runtime