skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let me say first of all that I have great respect for the way you have engaged with criticism on this post and on your previous ones. Even when I disagree with your approach or whatever, I appreciate your curiosity and eagerness to learn.

Some ways that you could make weaker claims but with more confidence in your results:

* Have an unordered list of companies that are growing. This was your suggestion. I don't know how interesting that is.

* Group companies into five or ten buckets, based upon Alexa ranks. (i.e. 1=low traffic bucket, 5=high traffic) Find the top three movers-and-shakers within each bucket. This makes the weaker assumption that Alexa ranks deltas are comparable within each bucket, as opposed to your original assumption that they are comparable across the entire spectrum of Alexa ranks.

There are a handful of other things you can do that are more complicated. For example, if you can correlate Alexa ranks with Compete unique visitor estimates or some other number (company's exit value). Compete estimates are also biased, but at least people have better intuition of what unique visitor numbers mean.
I think traffic for lists like these is something of a red herring. Small fluctuations for low-traffic sites are almost entirely a result of randomness or sampling error.

A better metric would be to divide the companies by traffic into nontrivial traffic(Alexa Rank<10,000) and trivial traffic for the rest. It would require some more research, but it would also be very helpful to separate consumer vs B2B companies and only compare consumer companies on traffic. Many of the companies on that list(including my company MixRank) appear to be doing quite poorly in terms of traffic until one realizes that each visitor to a B2B product is worth orders of magnitude more than a visitor to a consumer product.
There are a lot of mixed emotions with the confirmation of the rumors that have been floating around for a while now. On the one hand, it's a huge positive sign of just how desperate the dying giants are to protect their business. On the other hand, it's Elsevier.

Regardless, huge congrats to the Mendeley team.
Us Immigration sucks.
But if you're a talented engineer ... You can get down there.
But there's plenty of Canadians that would to prefer to stay.
Since everyone else seems to be finding a reason to be critical, I'll just say: I found this really interesting, and I'm glad you presented the data this way so that I could make my own analysis. It wasn't to say that #1 on the list had made the most progress (although who that was was surprising) but rather than these are the companies from YC that are growing in terms of traffic. Make of it what you will.

Quite interesting that Dropbox jumped an entire spot in a month for a non-content based site.
Elon's more of the real deal than most of the ecosystem out there.. his degree of belief is evident post Paypal. Most exits of that scale spawn VCs or incubator dons..

“There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone is trying to optimize their ass-covering.”[1]

[1] - http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/10/ff-elon-musk-qa/al...
... and an incomplete understanding of how a VPN works.
> At the end of the day, my advice to Canadian startups is to stay in Canada

I think this can apply to many cities outside of the silicon valley bubble.
You can easily synch your Zotero library into Mendeley (check preferences). Mendeley is (in my biased opinion) easier to use with a better user interface. It allows you to read, annotate, collaborate in groups, etc. Sync to the web so you can run Mendeley on multiple operating systems (and even mobile apps).
While not always up-to-date, here's a large comparison table of reference management tools: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_reference_managem...
Isn't that just a truism? Revenue growth=traction by definition.
Thank you, especially for hearing my earnestness through all the noise - I'm glad it comes through. Without revealing too much, I can tell you that I have a much varied and interesting data set to use to rank companies for the next full YC index. I expect there will be feedback on the method for that one too, but with every iteration it is getting massively better.

Crazy idea - javascript startups can put on their site to report their actual data to me?
NIST Cybersecurity Framework Workshop Recording Released
Matt,

Thanks so much for putting this great podcast out with Patrick. I was just talking with my cofounders today and saying that, just like code, it's super helpful to have examples when trying to understand and make choices for your startup.

I'm an entrepreneur in Durham, NC. I've got a great team working hard on product and a growing list of gotta-have-it would-be users. We'll be raising seed capital soon and my question is about choosing your angels. I've met with a lot of investors who just don't get our business and I can confidently say we don't want their money. There are a few local angels who are really smart, though, love our idea and get that it is big. They've been advising us to stay away from "small fry" angels that they've seen kill other companies by trying to optimize fo the short term, safe vision. That said, I think there are enough smart ones for our round and definitely enough when we count silent ones.

So, questions:

- Tips on how to vet/chose angels? How did your sense of angels reflect their actual behavior?

- I'd really love to hear your advice on whether to try to pitch Valley (or elsewhere) angels even if we feel we can get the round done locally. I know it's so tied to who the investors are but it seems a time/money tradeoff with the possibility of getting talented smart investors from the Bay.

- Advice on terms, both on the gotta have em and definitely don't do this side? Seems like everyone has a story here and there seems to be a resurgence of advice to do a priced seed round over convertible notes.
I've been able to make some pretty cool things with Access as the backend, and Excel as the frontend. Add a little VBA/SQL and you're looking like a rockstar. Access and Excel provide a versatile infrastructure to quickly prototype different and effective ways of using/presenting your data.
This is a fair point. I actually can't stand that too.
And the high cost of the Mac Pro, plus its target market's relative price insensitivity, can help finance the early volume until the price comes down.
No, that is not a truism. It is a falsism if it is any kind of ism.

Instagram has yet to make a single dollar, for an extreme example, and yet nobody would argue it has gained insane amounts of traction since in the mobile photo sharing space since launch. I would use Facebook as an example, but they had small revenue generating efforts early on so it doesn't make as clean of an example.
well, I hope he didn't burn his lungs with all the acidic vapor he inhaled :/
The data does indeed suggest white men work one hour/day more than black men (women work about the same). Your theory seems to have some merit, though I'd love to see more than just one data point.

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t03.htm

Another data point - poor people work very little (by choice).

http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswp2009.pdf
I run an internship program placing Canadian interns in the valley, and have interviewed plenty of students from US schools.
There's some amazing students coming out of Waterloo and UBC in particular.
Waterloo grads are as competent and hungry as grads from MIT or Stanford.
I've been amazed with them.
Those are terrible news for me since we were considering moving to Toronto, and what you mention is exactly what I was afraid of.

Now that nepotism sounds more like something that happens where I live, funny that there's the same cronyism over there.
The weakest link in this system is only the actual sharing of torrent files.

We didn't focus on candy security only (hard on the outside, soft on the inside). Even if you are trusted, and inside a cluster, you're still limited to active attacks only--that is, refusing to relay messages you don't like (but not editing them!). You still have no idea (hopefully/usually) who has requested a file, who has offered the file, and you usually won't even know what the file was unless you've already obtained a copy of the torrent file.
Same experience for me when trying to access government funding programs.

For one, the people you are talking to have zero experience in running a business, let alone a new one. They do have, however, extensive experience in drawing out meetings, death by powerpoint and producing forms in triplicate.

The grants generally come with a lot of reporting and strings attached, and generally require very large investments to be worthwhile.

We can get R&D tax concessions which are quite useful but the amount of money you need to spend in order to qualify excludes any sort of early-stage tech venture.

The entire process was a giant waste of time for me, and I get the impression they are political operations rather than genuine ones. In fact in my research I found out that infrequently do the funds ever actually give out all the money, but a good portion of the advertised spend (ie, $x00 million in new company grants) actually goes to the departments that spend their days handing out the money.

Not to say that the guys weren't genuinely trying to be helpful, they were. But they are hamstrung by their own reporting requirements and lack of understanding as to what people need money for, and when they need it.

My ultimate conclusion is that special economic zones with, say, 10 years of a tax holiday for a new company starting within that area would be a much better way to go about things. That would spur local investment and employment, have a specific end date and be much easier to administer. It would also favor bootstrapping as opposed to trying to capture large starting funds, which IMO for the outside-the-valley world is a better way to go.
Splitting out consumer vs. B2B companies is definitely on my list in the near future
Yeah, but then you're still working in PHP.

I cannot state clearly enough, PHP will not help you. Neither in your project or in your career. If you are doing PHP, do everything in your power to switch to something else. There is no use case for PHP that is not better served by something else.
The satoshi is divisible. The software just doesn't handle it at the moment.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#How_divisible_are_bitcoins.3F
What would happen if HN were split into sub-communities like reddit?

Also saying reddit doesn't have quality discussion is a bit unfair to the minority of subreddits that do.
John Carmack at Quakecon 2012: http://m.youtube.com/#/watch?v=wt-iVFxgFWk
that's a good point...thinking of some edits...
Thanks a ton for this content. It's super helpful. The rapport that you have with Matt is definitely something we want with our Angels. If we could have only individual entrepreneur-angels who were investing because they believe in our vision, team and product that would be ideal for where we are right now.

The stuff you guys went over at the end regarding Angels vs VCs and VC fund sizes vs target exit sizes was very concise. It took me a lot of reading to learn all that stuff over the past year or so, and there it is all in one go :)

Thanks again.
The problem, as I see it, with a browser bytecode, is that bytecodes are generally tailored to a specific language. A bytecode designed for JS, for example, is not necessarily something you'll be able to implement Python or Ruby in particularly efficiently. With asm.js I'd be willing to bet that a general purpose bytecode would not let you run any of these languages more than, say, twice as fast as simply pushing the interpreter through emscripten.
I would also like to point out that Category 1 (maybe not necessarily your "average" small company) may include extremely early stage startups that are still in pre-series-A funding.

Some (smart or stupid, but capable) risk-takers are willing to join the first 10 members of such teams for equity and/or becoming founding members for far less than "commensurate pay" for their role. That "role" itself may be something blurring the lines between many things, they may have to take up lead positions in departments they know little to nothing about. The rigid policies around authorizing people to work in this country is an unnecessarily and ridiculously high barrier.

Now this would all be understandable even for legal immigration if the United States was suffering a massive population problem (like most of the countries these immigrants may be coming from), but that is far from the case here. The worry is that the immigrants will do more harm than good.

Given that I believe I'm a person willing to pay my taxes, contribute to the economy positively (possibly hugely), support myself (and be responsible about any dependents I may take up) and not be a criminal, I feel the machinery in place just prevents innovation and entrepreneurship and holds the economy back.

Or maybe I'm just really stupid and don't understand how country's and economies work.

Source: I'm yet another H1B applicant, currently the 4th member of a tech startup and looking into starting another venture with my technical background, while being threatened to be deported every 6 months.
A single current generation Thunderbolt port runs two separate 10Gbit channels. Each channel is a mux of PCI-E data and a DisplayPort 1.1a stream. Two displays (each up to DisplayPort 1.1a's 8.64Gb maximum bandwidth) can be driven on one chain, one off of each channel. This can either be two Thunderbolt displays or one Thunderbolt display and one pass through raw DisplayPort display at the end.

Some restrictions apply due to the need for one Thunderbolt controller chip per display to do the DisplayPort demuxing. A Thunderbolt monitor will typically have one Thunderbolt chip and will use its DisplayPort output itself. A DisplayPort display can't be daisy chained directly after a Thunderbolt display (but can after a non-display Thunderbolt peripheral) for this reason.

It sounds like (according to the OP article) that the 2013 Thunderbolt chips (Redwood Ridge) will allow DisplayPort 1.2 pass through only. In this configuration the port could either be run as a Thunderbolt chain (with the above limitations to 2xDP 1.1) or as a DisplayPort 1.2 port. In 1.2 mode Thunderbolt peripherals couldn't be used, but DisplayPort 1.2 features (in particular 4k support and MST) could be used. Presumably the 2014 20Gbit channel Thunderbolt could allow 2xDP 1.2 as that tops out at 17.28Gbit.

Edit: yes, this means that devices sharing the chain with two Thunderbolt displays will have constrained incoming bandwidth. Probably even more so as the only Thunderbolt displays in existence also sport USB, speakers, a webcam, FW800, and Gigabit Ethernet, which together could easily eat up the remaining bandwidth on the TB channel. This may also be part of the reason why Apple hasn't released an updated Thunderbolt display with USB3, 2x10Gbit doesn't go very far with a pair of 27 inch displays hogging most of it.
Your view of the marketing department expressed in this strip is why they are likely to avoid involving you in their decisions. People can tell when others feel contempt towards them, and it is not a trait that attracts people. There is a reason Jimmy Fallon had a tech-guy skit on SNL for so long.
check out startupthreads.com
Nice presentation. In the description of back end modules, you mention payments as a future capability. What kind of payment service would you be able to work with? (I don't see how you could handle card details in the Hoodie architecture). Thanks.
Reading this & the OP I am stuck with one question. Upon purchasing your Smart Tv and experiencing that it really was rather stupid why did you not immediately pack it up and return it?

Not returning the tv tells Samsung et al that selling junk is acceptable.
Being in Toronto has nothing to do with seeing (or not seeing) a TC article about your company.

TC covers plenty of Toronto based startups, including the last two that I've worked for.

Also, seeing your company on TC isn't all that useful anyways...
How much "computation" is Facebook doing already on those 300MM+ photos that are being uploaded every day? I'm sure they are already performing a number of actions when each photo is uploaded. Is running a quick check for hidden messages on those photos really going to add that much more "processing"?
Why a Cease and Desist Letter (for your domain name) Can Be a Very Good Thing
If you're tired of hearing from armchair entrepreneurs, why are you posting your blog posts to Hacker News?
I've seen Access used decently as well as abused.

The good: it is actually not a bad tool if you're familiar with database concepts. It even has some nice features, like being able to see a graph of all the pk relationships between tables (and use that graphical tool to create relationships and rules). You can seamlessly switch between list view (rows)/design view (GUI aid)/SQL when you're working on queries, allowing you to test things quickly and get rapid feedback at different levels of detail. It has a not-completely-insane tool for generating custom reports from tables or queries. It is extensible with VBA (trust me, I know -- that's not really a ringing endorsement). And like many MS products it has wizards for common tasks that make them surprisingly painless. And above all, because Access is part of the office suite, a regular user might actually have the program installed and be allowed to use it in a BigCorp or Government setting.

All that being said... Access is abused just like Excel by people who don't really know what it's for. What's worse, you get monstrosities made by people with just enough knowledge of databases to make them dangerous but without the wisdom to consider normalization, maintainability, or anything like that. I have so often been asked to "take a look at" an Access database that was thrown together 10+ years ago by a mildly computer savvy amateur that is still used in production, and without exception the insides are horrifying. (Side note: usually I have had to fight my instinct to take these on as a pet project because nothing good can possibly come of it, and as soon as you change it you own it).

TL;DR -- You already know shit. You might actually be surprised how not-bad Access is. Sadly you are not the person who is using Access in 99.9999% of cases.
At least XLSX is an open and documented format. Are the rules for Excel CSV parsing written down anywhere?
Cash will be dead before you know it. So will ATMs and bank tellers.
Given the culture of Microsoft, Excel is exactly the tool that its users need it to be. MS isn't going to take chances with a major profit center like Office. I challenge anyone to make Excel as good as it is for all of its users.
30 Excuses Why You’re Not Starting Now
How To Survive a Ground-Up Rewrite Without Losing Your Sanity
VimDrills #9: Repeating Oneself
We fought off a complete re-write for a critical component in one of our products for many months due to knowing the amount of effort/complexity required, however in the end it was not the best decision to delay. The decision was to work on product features rather than fix the known scalability issues as we believed we still had enough headroom.
We grew faster than expected and ended up in a position where we had exhausted most of our software optimisation options, database tweaks and even hardware options with upgrading to SSD's, RAM etc.
In the end the component was re-written around the clock by a few engineers to leverage redis and msmq in a couple of months and it solved all our problems thanfully - a very stressful time.
Lesson learnt. It was a difficult call when managing a limited set of resources deciding where to focus the attention.
IMO, bitmasks are a more interesting and useful example of "bit level" programming. This is all because of this statement:

"Most compilers realize this and change our code to something like:"

I agree that it's important that we know, and keep in mind, what is going on behind the curtain, but using bitwise operations that would otherwise be performed by the compiler introduces uneccessary complexity.
You can argue about which kind of traction is better, revenue or traffic, but there is no doubt the traffic and users == traction.
I remember one user a decade ago who I set up a process for that was basically, "Run this report, verify that it looks OK, then send it there" who was unable to do so. Repeatedly.

Turns out that she was opening a CSV file in Excel, saving it, and then it couldn't be parsed.

It took a surprising amount of training for her to understand that this really was "changing something". When she eventually got it she asked why she was supposed to be able to look at it at all. My reply is that that was the spec, and someone higher up thought she should see it.

She stopped looking at it and the problem went away.
I like this game because I won it the first time I played :)
> Sony's solution is called Homestream[1] which is just a transcoder.

Sony's Homestream is just string replace s/Serviio/Homestream :)

Serviio: http://www.serviio.org/
Firefox 23 does not have TLS v1.2, but Nightly will very soon.
During March there have been very active development in NSS for TLS v1.2 and they are AFAIK checking in bit by bit now.
Very cool :).

A few questions. What is the strategy is for concurrent modification of data? What are the consistency guarantees for the sync operation?
They are always lawyered up.
We rented games once a summer.
You could go to a job boards to show the technologies your learning are marketable for getting a job.
I agree with this, but there's definitely a market for it. I currently have dual monitors with my laptop on a docking station at work, and I'd love to get an ultrabook. I think right now you have to use the laptop monitor + an external, but it does it all via a USB3 docking station. I'm never going to get any kind of render performance out of a USB3 docking station that's handling everything else for me in addition to video.
While I understand your point, I disagree with the conclusion. Simply because a system is complicated that doesnt mean that we should give up. You create a first order approximation and then iterate (very much like how it seems dmor is trying to do). If you know something about how the Alexa ranking system works that we do not, then by all means share it. Simply saying that the author does not know and therefore all conclusions are useless is unhelpful and probably incorrect. To be honest, this reminds me of the elderly who dont understand computers and just give up without trying.
Everything Sucks and Nobody Cares
Debug 11: Don Melton and Safari
This is a great point too. Excel is hard to lock down and easy for non-computer people to use. Access is easy to lock down and relatively harder to use.

If you know what you're doing, you can use Access (scary program that people don't really know what it's for) to lock down the data and enforce business rules and that kind of thing, then give coworkers Excel spreadsheets with pivot tables from an ODBC connection to the Access db that they can "do their thing" and mess with and email around.

The true worst of both worlds though is when somebody creates an amateur Access db, locks it down so you have to do everything through a 1995-Visual-Basic-looking switchboard, creates horrendous forms with garish colors and giant bitmap images that have no coherent UI... and ... I can't even go on, these are too painful to remember.
Activision Reveals Animated Human That Looks So Real, It's Uncanny
Agree. I slogged my way through it a while ago, and I wish I had this Go translation at that time to help me along. It is much clearer to me than the notation used in the paper.
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