skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Our first VC meetings were practice runs and a source of free high-value consulting. The very first one couldn't understand our product, so we knew we needed to edit. The second was excited but said we were in a great position to bootstrap. The third agreed and had some great suggestions that we took to heart.

We didn't need money at the time so it was not the same as your situation, but VC will often just not click with a company. It is actually a lot like dating in that they are trying to read the people and what they're saying and projecting it out over the course of the relationship.

They all came back, unsolicited, in 9 to 16 months, but by then we had reached a point where we were cash-flow positive and working with pilot customers to refine the product for launch.

VC will rarely say no directly because things can change at any time.

NB: This is Silly Valley, where VC are thick on the ground.
This is an interesting question. I submitted this link yesterday, and it did not make it to the HN homepage. Still, I was almost certain that it could start an interesting HN discussion to read. Today I chose to repost it with a clear ?repost rather than a less visible trick, and it was still upvoted (better timing I suppose): the fact that it is a repost did not seem to bother the upvoters.

I have no solution to propose, but the timing seems to be the most important factor for HN submissions, as we already know [1][2][3], and I think these small hacks are acceptable to work around the problem: reposts are not a big source of pollution, and users can report abusive behaviors with the flag button.

[1] http://hnpickup.appspot.com/

[2] http://hnbuffer.com/

[3] http://jacquesmattheij.com/How+to+make+the+Hacker+News+homep...
I'm very surprised to see so many people using aliases. Using an alias on HN is self-defeating, if you cannot stand behind your comments personally, why even make them.

Not only that but I also never delete a comment
This is the best compliment I've ever gotten.
I think you nailed it there: they obviously don't think that chronological order matters, and so much for that.
We meant zooming in the browser, using C+ and C-. And yes, I agree with the s--t part.
FoundationMade - We took your advice
I reviewed a ton of great recommendations, and came to the conclusion that I have no business telling you where you can or can't sell. So I'm offering the same commission rates to theme developers whether you sell exclusively or non-exclusively.

We're very grateful for all of the support we've been getting from the Hacker News community.

I really hope we can create a bigger ecosystem around Foundation, and I hope that this new step is a step in the right direction. We're hoping this makes the decision even easier for developers to start working on themes built with Foundation.

Thanks!
> Why have different features across multiple apps? I love the 'save to pocket' button on Twitter, but it's only available on the desktop version.

Twitter on the "desktop" (I assume she means the standard website) has a "Save to Pocket" button? I'd wager that's a an add-on or extension in her browser that's putting it there, and has nothing to do with Twitter.
I do tabata most weekday mornings before work to get my body moving. This looks much more fun, and it doesn't replace my gym time, which is after work and an hour in duration.
And as a web designer, how often the client completely derails your concept based on their own stubborn preferences.
Why is this problematic? Use it for whatever you think it is good for; don't use it for whatever you think it is bad for.
">As I said earlier, the government is fine with alternative currencies, despite the fact that it cannot print those currencies or manipulate their supply.

That's not true."

Except that there are dozens of alternative currencies in use in the USA right now:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_community_currencies_i...

">It is partly because of the government's effectiveness at collecting taxes that businesses continue to use USD, even when alternatives are available.

That makes no sense."

Well let's put it this way: what currency can you use to pay your taxes? Now, if you are a business that actually pays its taxes (as most do), what currency will you need to do business in? Even if a business wanted to use something other than USD, it would eventually have to trade whatever currency it used for USD when it came time to pay taxes.

"But that kind of thing can change quickly - there isn't anything more backing the US dollar than there is backing bitcoins."

USD is backed by the law: tax laws, debt laws, torts, fines, fees, etc. It is the currency the government deals in, and most businesses must deal with the government. That is the reason businesses accept Bitcoin payments via payment processors, ultimately getting USD.

"Of course the government is not going to allow a currency it doesn't control supplant the dollar. If that happened the US government would go bankrupt."

First of all, there is basically no chance of Bitcoin supplanting the US dollar, for the reasons outlined above. Try doing all your business in Bitcoin, and see what happens when the IRS comes around to ask why you did not pay any taxes.

That being said, even if by some miracle Bitcoin supplanted the dollar, the government would not go bankrupt, it would just start using Bitcoin. The switch from the gold standard did not bankrupt the government; why would a switch from fiat currency to Bitcoin bankrupt the government?

Despite the ramblings of certain libertarians and anarchists, this is not Zimbabwe, we are not bankrupt, and we are not expanding the money supply to avoid bankruptcy.
I agree the old saying "dont throw stones and hide your hand" applies here I think thats why blogs and comments on the internet are so nasty at times you can make some crazy screen name and lose all responsibilty for yor words and it brings out the worst in people
I voted yes. My real name is not hard to find. I have used my pseudonym for long enough to find me in person without too much trouble. I am not afraid of what I say publicly. If someone didn't want to employ me because of my views I am certain I wouldn't want to work for them anyway.
Reputation can be used to discourage rude, uncivil behavior. But it can also be used to crowd out unpopular ideas.

Hacker News is probably the online forum on the net that I wouldn't mind having my real name visible.
I was really confused by that too. First thing I did was open up the color picker and what have we here, #fff
I think they released WPF with the understanding that WinForms has very Windows-specific features that were preventing people from adopting .NET for cross-platform development. WinForms is Java AWT, WPF is Java Swing. WinForms is meant to be a basic wrapper around GDI, WPF is a completely different rendering engine separate from Windows. I think they were hoping people would choose appropriately based on their needs.
After 15 months, you should be able to evaluate where you are. Have you launched yet? If the answer is no, then you've likely let the project spiral out of control. After 15 months, if you don't have what you consider an MVP, then you need to stop, and take a hard look at what is really needed and not. I don't know what you're developing, but it's probably time to strip out any half-developed features, and release what is left as a product.

If you have launched, then you need to have a talk with your other founders. Not about raising money (because that may never come).. but about the financial goals of the company; revenue growth rate; profit; etc, etc, etc. At what point are you going to meet those targets? At what point will there be money for a paycheck?

If the only financial goals you guys have is to raise cash for a project that will never pull in a dime, then forget it.. it's not a business.. it's a toy. Businesses exist to make money. You should have a solid plan for how you're going to do that from the very beginning.
I read it twice and concluded that it must be a joke... pretty funny now either way IMO
Move on. Move on. Move on. Move on.

Move. On!

Your founders aren't necessarily idiots. Sometimes businesses fail due to a myriad of other issues, including market timing, product-market-fit and more.

This one failed. That's OK.

Time to move to greener pastures. No, you are not abandoning anyone. This business is dead. Unless a pile of cash shows-up and a major pivot happens it is likely not to survive. I've seen businesses implode even after getting piles of cash thrown at them. Money doesn't magically fix it.

Go find something that appeals to you and make some money.
I left a start up despite dumping countless hours into it. I just didn't see it really going anywhere because our business side just wasn't well fleshed out and I knew I'd never really have the control I wanted based on the personality of the other founder.

A year later he's still at it and has made no progress. I gave up my founder's share for a more modest share. If the company ever goes anywhere I'll take my paycheck, but at this point I just consider that time to be a financial loss.

There are many ways to leave a company and still maintain the possibility for a payout for your work if it ever comes to that. If they're the types that would try to screw you over when you leave, then you probably should have left a while ago.
The internet is a reflection of the physical world and last time I checked the physical world isn't perfect. Welcome to reality.
I'm going to assume this is a serious comment because I am familiar with the concept of people with multiple identities know a couple. For such people, the question may not make sense for the reason you state. However the question is not so much about identity as it is about ownership and responsibility for a persona and their utterances. Many of us have different personae; I am sure my family, cow-orkers and friends interact with different aspects of me. In each case, however, I own that persona and am that person. Perfectly "normal" stuff. The question really is; to what extent, on the Internet, are we willing to disassociate our identities from our personae? Especially when doing so allows us to say things that we would not in a meat space public forum, for various reasons.
"mindcrime" is, of course, not my real name. But my Real Life info is in my profile, yes. Over the years I've leaned towards a policy of generally being pretty open about my identity online. I find that since I'm the kind of person who doesn't give a shit what you (the abstract "you") thinks about me anyway, it doesn't much matter if "you" know who I am. And to whatever extent I do care, choosing to post as "real me" forces me to be a little hair more thoughtful and helps avoid the temptation to occasionally stoop to trolling, or saying caustic/hurtful things that I might be tempted to say.

Very rarely I will delete or edit a comment due to regret over what I said, but not terribly often. However, I do now find that I occasionally hold back on saying certain things about the government / government agencies / police / etc. out of a pragmatic desire not to wind up on a "no fly" list or something, when my $DAYJOB entails a lot of air travel. I feel sick everytime I hold back on saying something of that nature though, as it runs counter to my nature. I try very hard to live a principled life as much as I can, and restricting myself from speaking freely causes a lot of cognitive dissonance.

Edit: Also, just to throw another thought or two out there... I prefer having my real info here, as I see this forum as still largely being "Startup News" and I think of this as a place for business talk. And it's more awkward to do business with people when you don't know who they are, or anything about them. I also throw in the occasional self-promotional reference to my startup[1], and it would be hard to keep my identify secret, even if I wanted to, and still be open about the startup. I also like helping people, and to the extent that I have any useful advice or wisdom or knowledge to share, I feel like people will find it more acceptable if they know (or can find) the person behind it.

[1]: http://www.fogbeam.com
> if you cannot stand behind your comments personally, why even make them

Experimentation?

> Not only that but I also never delete a comment

I delete regularly, particularly if on re-reading the comment I realize I'm a total idiot, or being unnecessarily rude or whatever. I guess if you're unwilling to experiment with new opinions you might never need to delete them..
If you're not part of the solution...
I upvoted your comment but I also note that your background and training is very different than mine is. I look at things from a human nature point of view mostly and by my gut feelings which makes me think the way I do. That has tended to work for me based on past experience. As an aside I don't have a degree in psychology or anything special that qualifies me as someone special other than just plenty of experience and observation over the years. And I happen to be exceptional at negotiation and strategy (not that I can or will prove that so take that for what it's worth). And I've certainly frustrated many attorneys over the years as well.

As a tangible example I had a case where someone wanted something from me and my lawyer said "they have a good case and you will have a really hard time etc. etc.". Legally he was right. However in my view the company that wanted the "something" also had a new facility that was opening in 3 months approx. and I realized that they would rather pay and acquire the item then they would follow a legal route (regardless of outcome or cost).

So while I am not disagreeing with the method to which you look at this it isn't the way that I think.

That said it's entirely possible that the strategy of putting up a fight each and every time could work to the advantage of someone being trolled. But I've seen enough cases of people following different legal strategies to know that it must have drawbacks because not every top legal mind seems to go that route.

As they say ask 10 get 10 opinions.

Lastly, I'm sure you would agree that a lawyer is at least somewhat biased in wanting to follow a "fight everyone" strategy as it (for lack of a better way to put it) lines his pockets.
I always find it funny when I see something like this:

<a href="mailto:me@example.com">me at example dot com</a>

As if spam crawlers always render the site before harvesting email addresses.
>> I've invested too much time and energy to bail now

Economics would tell you to ignore sunk costs. I sympathize with your emotional attachment to this project and like you, I would feel like I was failing if I "gave up" on the last 15 months. But that isn't what you're doing - you're just facing facts. If you can no longer make ends meet, you either need take a salary, or leave. Be honest with your co-founders: remind them that you were willing to take a huge gamble on the business and that you've gone 15 months without a salary. Give them an ultimatum: either they make it possible for you to get a salary now, or you go on your way. This way it's not a unilateral decision to leave, and if it's possible for you to stay, you get that chance.

Again, I sympathize with your situation and I wish you the best of luck!
Doesn't "Harvard undergraduate" give a significant bias to the whole study? I'm not disagreeing with their claims, but claiming universality doesn't seem appropriate.
Yeah. I've completely abandoned what few hobbies I've had due to my distressing employment situation.

Not only are many hobbies expensive, I feel guilty having fun when I'm in this situation. It's a rather self-destructive and unreasonable line of thinking but it happens.
His suggestion that he and Koller co-teach the course is a cop-out. She should call his bluff, but then design a course of instruction that isn't cherry-picked to support the conclusion that state college professors ought to have complete job security.
No, I never like using my real name for things other than contacting people I've physically met or have been in contact with for several years.

I have a nickname I've been using for over seven years. I consider it to be my virtual self but as honest as my real self. I feel that real names are too "official" when used. I fear things I do, things I say, would stick to my person and would cause more harm than good in my professional life. When I tinker things and post them, I'm not doing them as finished and clean as I would do in a work place, it's less official, just to have fun and figure things out, and I don't want that to serve as a proof of how I work, because that's not how I work.
I commented earlier that I had a hard time figuring out the chronological order of the posts in the stream. I've learned since that Google doesn't want us to care about that. Fine, that's their prerogative. But now I have a new problem: I don't know how to read this thing at all. I can't read it "by column," that is, one column after the other, because it's infinite scroll. But I can't read it "by line" either, because there are no lines, given that the posts have different heights. This is mildly annoying in two-column mode, and impossible in three-column mode (to which it switches automatically if the space is there). How do you read this, particularly in three-column mode, and be reasonably sure not to miss a post?
Did it use .mobi books? If so, it's doubtful anyone actually lost anything they paid for or spent time on.
^^ this. And now its Bo not Bro.

eg. Chea bo
I voted yes. My name is not actually in my profile, but I've used the same username everywhere since the early 90s, and the briefest of searches would pull up my real name pretty damned fast.
Michael's room still exists. I think most of the stuff is still in it (including the exercise bike which plays sade).
This has pretty pictures. I built a command line version:
for i in `seq 16`; do echo -ne '\007' && sleep 30 && echo -ne '\007' && sleep 1 && echo -ne '\007' && sleep 10; done
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/dec/20/google-sell...
Scott's gauntlet throw down: "Now, as for the difference between the 128-qubit machine and the 512-qubit one: based on the results Troyer explained to me (some of which, unfortunately, are not yet public), I see Geordie’s bet and raise it. Give Troyer and his postdocs full access to the Vesuvius-based system. If they can’t outperform it classically within a year or so, I will eat my words."
NASA and Google team up to buy into quantumish computing
Mapping the Twittersphere
Show HN: Image search engine I built and subsequently abandoned
Same philosophy here. I do use privacy settings in FB and G+ just to avoid spamming folk - I'll post things to public which I think anyone who follows/finds me may like, then use privacy for "audience targeting" as sharepoint folk would call it.
I notice no mention of sales. Are your cofounders able to sell the product, if raising investment is not going well?

Have you actually launched? Are you close to launch? Real sales and real feedback from real customers is really the only way to validate what you're doing. A year is a long time to build something without real customers - if you don't have customers who believe in the product, there's no reason you should either.
You can switchback to one column in the 'more' menu.

>> "How do you read this, particularly in three-column mode, and be reasonably sure not to miss a post?"

I think that might be your problem. Maybe Google doesn't think many people want to see every post in their stream. Personally I just skim through it and see what catches my eye. I much prefer this design (2 column, my 15" monitor apparently isn't large enough for three regardless of the lagre whitespace to either side of the two columns).
Dart's Web UI is built on top of Web Components. At least in the case of Polymer and Dart, Web Components are the "framework" :)
Making a post by debating two products
That's brilliant (irony directed at Google, not billnguyen, whose posts are great).
Yes, and for the internet in general.
Gotcha. I foreground == can't use the phone while the app is updating. Seems like it uses a similar mechanism to Android app updates then.
Totally agree that it's a very rough concept. And that it's full of flaws. But I hope that it's a bad idea that gets people thinking about better ones.

And it wasn't really coming from a place of a negative view of an employer. I'm sorry if it came off that way. I was more of the mind that it gave a target for employees as to determine "how much good can I do here before my time is up?"
So, I know Google is putting out a lot of these Web component specs--how likely are they to get certified/widely accepted?

Is Mozilla/etc. on-board with all of it?

I can't tell if it's an industry-wide movement, or just a bunch of the Google AngularJS guys having fun writing up W3C specs.
Perhaps /newest should show 30 random items submitted in the last 24 hours.
I think it's implied that lunges and side planks are alternating; at least I have a hard time doing much more than 15 secs per side plank.
Did your A/B testing lead you to the conclusion that the all caps text in your legal docs was losing signups?
Right. I don't really use most of those things, but they're there.
I just checked. Perhaps it's my circles (which have a heavy tech bent) but I really don't see meaningful stuff there. Mostly images are I/O related stuff that I don't honestly care about (do I want to see an animated image of someone giving a preso?)
They could. But Amazon is pretty well loved in the developer community, I doubt they'd jeopardise that and risk hurting AWS.
Yes but the majority or people just use the top stories sort and are happy with it. I think people who want everything in chronological order are the type of people who don't want to miss a post - even though most posts on Facebook/Google + aren't important enough to matter if you miss them.
What really impressed me about Groupon was how it created 12k jobs without really stealing jobs from an existing industry (make your crack about putting unprepared businesses under water here)

When I usually think of tech, I think of it cannabalizing existing industries, for example travel agents.

Andrew created a new take on the advertising industry, and brought work to tons of people. We talk a lot about big ideas- I'd like to see more ideas that send their profit into a large volume of employees, rather than making fortunes for founders or increasing investor's wealth. Humanity sure needs it.
Yes, couldn't agree more. Being in control of how I spend my time is the key to being free. And yes, you're also right in the fact I have accumulated enough cash that I never have to work again, if I don't want to.

That brings up another side to this conversation about success, I hate talking about money. It's embarrassing when you're a 30 y/o with $1#M and trying to maintain a modest life (I'm not flashy but I'm no coupon clipper either). For the most part, I surround myself with (upper?)middle-class people with student loans, mortgages, credit card debt, and maybe some young children. So when a friend finds out I am a millionaire (usually another friend tells them, right in front of me), they get this weird look on their face* - and I have no idea how to react. So, I usually just say "yes, it's true" and try to change the conversation.

If I could change one thing, I would have kept my success a complete secret. As it occurs, it's exciting and you want to share and celebrate your successes ("drinks on me!"). Unfortunately, the long-term consequence is other people tend to feel this is public information and that sucks.

* It's something in their eyes, almost everyone does it and it reminds me of gollum and the way he looks at "his precious." Like, as if by instinct, the first thought in their mind is "how do I get my hands on that money?"
I am me throughout the internet.

Even my gaming nickname is connected to me, as awful as it is (hornicator)

I am what I am and I say what I say. I want that to mean something.
What is G+?
They need a lot more then that to beat fb!