skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To clarify: (1) Your scenario = don't trademark, use open source license. (2) What Mozilla does = trademark, use proprietary license. (3) What Mark thinks should be done (afaiu) = trademark, use open source license.

I don't know a good way to reduce the impact in scenario (1) through legal means, but if you are worried about this, why not choose scenario (3)?
I read this and figured it was as good a time as any to have an RSS feed clearout. Down to 52 from 302.
Similar things:
In Cambridge there is the Cambridge Innovation Center(CIC).
Also in Cambridge is Betahouse.
Hard to draw any specific conclusions, but the cost of a sales team can be fairly easily determined. A lot of that stuff is really more science than art, and there are some good resources to help guide you.

Plenty of companies have been successful with an app that is sold through a sales organization.

I've done some of the math before, and have run/developed tech sales organizations. Email me if you have more specific questions that you don't want to post publicly.
(an honest question) -

For the people recommending WAMP setups, I'm really curious why the typical dynamic startup would even want to use Windows. The license costs and hassles alone don't seem worthwhile (to me), when you're really utilizing very little of the OS, and more relying on the components you load (Apache, MySql, etc).
Interesting history of Wang Laboratories
I'd rather have a sales team than sell to enterprises. Selling to enterprises (which I do a bit in my current job) is so painful that I'd definitely recommend staying away from it. Sell it to the individuals in those enterprises and maybe one day it'll be worth the hassle of selling to the whole enterprise.
Could someone make a nice printable version of this? I'll vote you up up up big time!
From Oxford to Silicon Valley (Auctomatic)
Kulveer Taggar moved to Silicon Valley in California after graduating from Oxford and working as an investment banker. Now after months of preparation he sees whether his hard work has paid off.
Not that I know of, unfortunately. I'd definitely be interested in hearing them.
The main reason it looks better is the white background, which I've been thinking of switching to. Otherwise it's a net lose. That productish look wastes a lot of space at the top of the screen. The current page looks the way it does partly because it works better on small screened mobile devices, which is an important factor for a news site.
Color scheme repels. Going back.
Speaking of mobile devices, the current tiny arrows don't work well at all on a mobile device, especially on the iPhone (since there is no stylus). I have to zoom way in to make sure that I press the right one.
I would say English is far more tolerant of "mistakes" then any other language. So much so that it changes radically over a short period of time.

By mistakes, I mean mispronunciations, using the wrong words, or made up words or words from other languages. As long as there is some sort of context that the meaning gets across, in the "mainstream" it is acceptable. This then flows on to more formal writing.

In that sense I think it has become a very flexible and international language. I would think of French as the polar opposite. No idea about spanish (it seems a bit flexible). Japanese was strict, but these days they seem to like throwing in all sorts of words (as long as they can mangle it with katakana then they will say it - at least the kids will).
It's in my profile. I try not to post it out in the open too much to minimize bot harvesting.
He's been smiling for a long time :)
i actually dont really even like the color/button changes that much at all.

what i do like is having the threads and the news side by side.
Yeah, I noticed that too. I'll fix that.
Sounds like you should consider selective style sheets for mobile devices. That way you can accommodate small displays and not at the expense of regular users.

While the white background helps, I tried to pay a bit of attention to type size and color contrast as well. The result of this effort is that you immediately know what's important, vs. what's not.

Two other things to consider:

1) Utility pane on the right, which I consider to be a big usability win (thread comments when you want them; your own comments when not on a thread)

2) A visual distinction for discussion threads vs. link threads
Yeah they are, considering the release was already considered a success.
Windows Server licenses through an ISV program are not that expensive. Obviously Microsoft knows Linux is a big competitor. More costly are other server licenses like SQL Server and Exchange.

One reason to use Windows could be because you like .NET, Silverlight, etc. Another reason would be because you know Windows well. If you develop on Windows it may be easier to also test and deploy on Windows and administer the servers. It is easy to set up an Ubuntu server in a few hours and use apt-get for updates, but an internet facing server will probably not be very secure if you or a coworker does not have a few years of Linux experience.

In the end an OS is just a tool. I would say pick the one you are most experienced with or the one on which your chosen techology works best.
Hehhe.. glad you have some use for the stuff I dig out :) I'm actually researching a ton of stuff for out current development so when I come across something cool, I post it here.
The Renaissance Man
The future is drying up
Scam Czars
Correction: I meant to say _CIC_ in Cambridge (as someone else already pointed out).
I think nowadays the best solution is to be a sparse matrix. You can't do everything anymore. But you can do, say, eight or ten very different things.
I've done some enterprise sales as well, and I think it depends a lot on what you're selling vs. what they're buying.

If you have the right product, the enterprise sale is a rigorous, but also fun and rewarding process. If you have the wrong product (as in the case of my last company), the enterprise sales process is like trying to push a boulder uphill against a headwind on a mountain made of teflon.
What's your funding situation? Do you know anyone in an HR department at any decently sized company that might be willing to try it out and provide references to future potential clients?
"... How could your soul be so dead that you want to spend your precious 20% hacking time to evangelize a Methodology? Can you imagine such a person? ..."

Also laughed at this one. But not for the reason you might think. The engineering guys are google are smart right? I think the reason why some take up the "evangelism hat" is out of sheer necessity. Google has what 15,000 employees. I'm not sure of the numbers for those at the sharp end. With this number of smart people working on their own projects. Fierce competition for recognition would be required to get your project above the noise of others all competing for a place in the google platform, process and dollars.

Therefore it's not unreasonable to expect someone figured out it might be a good idea to market or spruik. Anything to let those above, beside or below consider that my process, product or idea is better than the next. In startups this process is essential and is turned into a real art form by the likes of Winer, Spolsky and Graham who write, blog and speak where required ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70863
Radiohead management:

"a promotional tactic to boost sales of compact discs."

"CDs are undervalued and sold too cheaply."

http://www.colortonemedia.com/blog/?p=63
I've talked to the Director of HR at GM before--wouldn't say that I "know" her, though.

I emailed her about this, but she hasn't gotten back to us yet. I've just started trying to get in touch with some other HR directors that are local (e.g. WSGR) to get their thoughts.
Reverse Engineering TechMeme (out of necessity)
Pretty bizarre to be so right, and yet so wrong.

Thom Yorke is so anti-establishment, I can't believe he would let his management say this in public...
Google. Who's looking at you?
I like the part near the end when he says to keep all of your email in one big stream (don't waste time deleting) and it seems like people are a little shocked by the idea. :)
"Oh, and I gotta admit that TechMeme is kicking my behind. I'm reading more than 900 feeds and TechMeme usually picks stuff I would have picked to put on my link blog and does it 24 hours a day and a lot faster than I can"

Because "humans don't scale as well as software". The same applies to tech blogging. Is Scoble blogging for money or making money off blogging? ( the distinction is here ~ http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70863 ) If you are a "Scoble type" who blogs for money and generates "meta-stuff" in the form of tech commentary that is time dependent, this is what happens.

Software in the form of http://techmeme.com is displacing http://scobleizer.com. Now if Scoble could hack or was a bit more entrepreneurial he might have come up with Scoble platform/api to do this and licensed it.
I think I spend too much time reading social news; honestly, I misread that as "dugg this up"
Sony pleads with developers not to abandon PS3
That's not that bad. Considerably worse are the people who think dig is actually spelled with two g's.
What if Microsoft wasn't a screwup?
Each to their own, I guess I'm a hacker who's not keen on doing sales. Enterprise sales seems to be an ugly dance of feature comparisons and bs, which I hate.
The idea of dealing with SAP sends a chill down my spine, and my billing rate up an extra 20/hour.
UF scientist: Brain in a dish acts as autopilot, living computer
LLC vs C-Corp, What should a startup go with?
Danny, I'm Romanianian too; click on my profile and shoot me an email if you want to talk more. I understand your point exactly; I have 2 family members who are programmers there in Bucharest and when I called them up half a year ago to join me in my startup efforts, their first response was "You want to do WHAT??!?" Hang in there, send me an email -- emailadrian "at" inbox "dotcom". Things are changing especially since EU integration this year. Don't forget that Romanian programmers put UbiSoft on the Map. Look at that as an example, it's not much, but it's something. A company started by french farmers to make video games programmed first and foremost by Romanian programmers. If it can work 15 years ago, much more can be done now.
This completely rocks. I'm not sure how much it has to do with Rails per se, but it rocks nonetheless.

Hopefully the connection of person and machine will come to be recognized not just as art, but the objective of software design. Think this is a dumb tautology? Use a Motorola phone for awhile.
These mashups are without a doubt beautiful... it's like watching the world tick.
Programmers are maybe a little sheltered, but there are these people called "salesmen" who are sometimes quite good at dealing with the problems you'll have. If you genuinely fill a "big need", then it's just a matter of hiring the right person.
Most cities have these (almost) free office spaces called "Starbucks". You can meet there until revenue starts coming in.
Ed, you da man! I just loaded it up and it looks amazing! Amazing what Greasemonkey and an awesome hacker can do! Thank you again!
Nobody but news.yc admins can see the email you enter in the 'email:' textbox in your profile. You need to put it in the 'about:' box too.
By far the most annoying "feature" on this site. There needs to be a simple checkbox next to the email field where you decide whether or not to make it public in an spam proof way, like an image or two random characters instead of the . and @.
Do you want it enough to buy it? Depending on what printer you have, the hardcover might be cheaper than the ink/toner (504 pages, $38 used at Amazon), and it will probably be more comfortable to read.

http://tinyurl.com/34tyhr
LLC is probably cheaper and easier and more flexible and better for you tax-wise if you plan on having revenue and profit. It does get expensive quickly to do anything complex with your corporate structure as an LLC.

You need to be a C-corp to raise money from a venture capitalist.

Do it in Delaware or make sure your home state doesn't have an enormous franchise fee.
Unless he has access to a printer someone else pays for.
Graph Theory with Applications (Full Book in PDF)
Are you an American citizen or a legal resident? Are your co-founders as well? If both answers are yes, go with S-corp instead of C-corp initially. Why? Well, it allows you easier filing, pass-through taxation (you won't get taxed twice like with C-corp) and best of all, you can easily convert S-corp into C-corp by filing a single form (if you ever raise VC funding).

No VC will ever invest into LLC and converting LLC to a C-corp is a pretty involved (and expensive) process.

If you're a foreign national or have a foreign national as a co-founder, you should go with C-corp.
heh - thats how I work ! (although probably not to do with time management, more just always did it that way).
I think it would have been more disturbing had he got a second chance because of money offered.
Metric trees (sometimes called ball trees) are a simple generalization of this to arbitrary metrics. They're also useful for points in a high dimensional euclidean space that have low intrinsic dimensionality.
i dont quite understand a lot of this alarmism over google.
Most startups i read of here, try succeeding in getting famous with a service known by millions of people. But, the market for startups trying to pitch products to well-established companies is not only big, it's also quite worth the effort, compared to direct-marketing. In most of the cases, startups don't have financial resources to reach out for residential customers, no matter how interesting your product might be (ok, you still might dream about succeeding like $youtube, $facebook, $whatever, but reality is you need some revenue to pay your rent, regardless what enthusiasts tell you.. and they won't pay your rent, unless they sign some investment thing - at least, here in Europe we tend to think like that).

However: large corporates often either lack innovation, or they try to lower costs by implementing something which is open-source. There is your chance. Go implement something based on open-source which is competitive to some commercial product, and you'll see you can sell for 1/5 of the price of big vendors.... and a lot of companies are really sick of being dependend of big corporates like Cisco, Nortel, whatever... you "just have to get your foot into the door" of such companies... and for this task, you have to have a great sales person.... you don't make it as a technical kind of person... I tried it... forget it... it's a completely different world... the important thing is: respect it... these sales-guys sell your late grand-mother, but they keep you going...
No-one on the street will ever recognise you, and no-one on the street will have heard of your company, but does that really matter if you deliver to a big corporate which pays you some ten thousands of dollards a month to satisfy THEIR customers? Think about it, before wasting just another 10 men months to something RESIDENTIAL customers might like.
I'd say there's nothing wrong with this. I work for a small company that solicits specifically to one specific kind of organization. Our entire business model is based on targeting and sales, not open registration or enterprise solutions. The company was started around 2000, so it's worked well for almost 7 years now.
Don't feel too bad. I did the same thing :(
"... The attraction is known as the Casimir Effect, named for its discoverer, who, 50 years ago, was trying to understand why fluids like mayonnaise move so slowly ..."

Mayonnaise and tomato sauce are my favourite types of "Non Newtonian fluids" ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Newtonian_fluid
The biggest challenge here is getting ideas in this space, since most of us are at small companies (all software companies are small in the big picture). If you are someone working in the IT department of a large company, you have an advantage. A huge one if fact - you are probably the target market of your product.
The question remains - should someone go work for a large company for the sole purpose of generating ideas?
how does the right hand pane work? I can see my user threads, but I cant get it to display an articles comments.
http://www.rhyolite.com/anti-spam/you-might-be.html#e-postag...
Yep, that's one of the broken features I mentioned below. The whole script is admittedly over-reliant on YC's markup when finding DOM elements.

When I wrote it, the script was nothing more than a dirty hack. I'm beginning to think it might be time for a revisit. (Considering I'm already distracted by the Sox ALCS win...)
"... i dont quite understand a lot of this alarmism over google. ..."

Because you can join the dots. From HackerNews ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=70454 ) to Facebook ( http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5381210911 ) to google (
http://www.google.com/search?q=joe+guilmette+Santa+Cruz,+CA ).

It's not so much the fact it's google it could be spock or facebook. Public companies that keep everything you pump into it via the Internet can be considered harmful. Listen to this talk by the Eben Moglen talk, "Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy" [0] to understand the implications.

[0] ITConversations, "Eben Moglen, 'Freedom Businesses Protect Privacy', mp3, 18Mb, 40min" ~ http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail1897.html
Auctomatic Launches 2.0 Tools for eBay Power Users
I get the impression that it's a generational thing... overall, people of Generation Y and the younger generation seem less concerned about the personal information abundance on the internet.
What are your big concerns? Taxes or liability protection? If liability protection, the answer will vary by state but the corporation will usually give you better liability protection than an LLC.

From a tax perspective, the IRS doesn't recognize the LLC as a business entity type. If you own a single-member LLC you'll be taxed as a sole-proprietor by the IRS & pay income and self-employment taxes on the net taxable income of your LLC. If your LLC has more than one member you'll be taxed as a partnership. An LLC can elect to be taxed as a corporation, either C or S.

An advantage of the S Corp is the losses will flow to your personal return. This is likely to be most beneficial in the earlier years when you're pumping money into the company. As long as you have sufficient basis in the company, the losses are deducted from your ordinary income on your personal tax return.

The taxation of LLCs vary by state too. Some states have a low franchise tax on LLCs. CA, on the other hand, has a $800 minimum tax on LLC (and corporations). The franchise tax in some states is based on gross revenues so be aware of that if you expect to have low-margin product.

Take a look at http://www.biztaxtalk.com for more on taxation of various entity types.
Forming your LLC or corporation in Delaware will not protect you from the $800 minimum state tax if your business is located in California.
Endless Pageless Ajax Pagination: No More Next Page Links
I am an American citizen. Thanks for the info, its really confusing and there seems to be a lot of conflicting arguments on this matter. I am looking for outside investment not specifically VC, but probably eventually.
The byline is inconclusive, and Mediratta doesn't use the first-person until about a third of the way through the article--the first time it's clear that we're hearing from an insider.

Anyone who reads the whole article will realize by the end that the author works at Google. The thing that annoyed me was that this article differs in no way whatsoever from what you'd hear in a Google recruitment video. When a publication wants to tell its readers about something--even if that thing is good--there is an obligation to explore the issue. Literally letting your subject write the story is an abdication of that responsibility.
thanks for the tip, but dont want it that much.
As Apple Gains PC Market Share, Jobs Talks of a Decade of Upgrades
In millions of Windows, the perfect Storm is gathering
Universal shuts down a site that shared only public domain music
"... people of Generation Y and the younger generation seem less concerned about the personal information abundance ..."

Could be. I get the impression that "geny"'s (I'm a "genxr" http://flickr.com/photos/bootload/227128232/ ) are sort of adapting to posting personal info and are work out strategies to blunt the side effects. It's personal choice to add a blow by blow description of your youth.

There are implications for individuals and groups however. To me its about "Power" of who has "Control" of memory. In historical past this was public. Technology that captures "private memories" of useful information that can be "shared or withheld" and abused. The real danger is inference and prediction from the data that leaks, often voluntary into private/public databases through bailment ~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailment
Inspiration: Fail to succeed.
Millions of other single men didn't do anything either.
i think you both are kind of missing the point.

facebook knows when my friends get together and have a party. it also knows who my friends are, how we met, and where we grew up.

so what? i put all of that information up there intentionally. if google wants to collect such information and use it to help me, and maybe put ads in front of me that may even be helpful, then great.

i'll give them more information.
I don't know that much about architecture so I'll take your word for it. Thanks for the conversation.
Tips for founders doing their first tech startup (from a YC founder)
Right. I think modern information abundance is great too but I'm the same age as you. This makes many older people, especially much older people, fundamentally uncomfortable.
Journalism 2.0? Mitt Romney is doing a podcast with Techcrunch
Rejected from YC? Justin.tv still loves you!
If it is, its not very subtle ;) So probably not.
Yeah, the data set is really, really incomplete -- it only includes 7 startups in the Bay Area, for example. Plus, the UI is such that even if the data set were more complete, it would be hard to get a true sense of the density of startups in certain areas.
Not only could Woz not start Apple without Jobs, he would NOT have started it at all if his friends didn't convince him to join Jobs as a co-founder. He didn't want to leave his job at HP (although he may have left partly because HP refused to develop his ideas), or being anything more than an engineer at Apple even though he co-founded it.

Don't get me wrong -- Woz was certainly an engineering genius, but he didn't have any of the vision that Jobs had for building something great. To Woz it was just something interesting to do. Jobs saw the potential of what Woz was able to create. Those two as a pair were the perfect storm that ushered in a personal computing revolution.
From a different part of the world, at around the same era:

- Do not think dishonestly.

- The Way is in training.

- Become acquainted with every art.

- Know the Ways of all professions.

- Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.

- Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.

- Perceive those things which cannot be seen.

- Pay attention even to trifles.

- Do nothing which is of no use.

-- A translation of Miyomoto Musashi's Book of Five Rings (http://samurai.com/5rings/ground/)