skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree with your conclusions but not your reasoning.

It's certainly hard to write software, but I don't agree that writing software is harder than the non-technical work for a start up. Programming is deterministic (for a smart enough person) in that effort goes in and software comes out.

Sales, marketing and PR is highly non-deterministic and getting it right only looks easy in retrospect. Hours and hours of effort goes in, and you might get back magic or horse manure regardless of how good you are - although there are people who have a decent average at obtaining magic.

The reason I agree with you however is that a lot of the 'idea men' pitching programmers are no better at the required non-technical disciplines than a blind man navigating a maze on a moonlit night with a bag over their head after a drinking session.

I suppose the only way you can tell if a prospective partner is good is to sell if they can sell something - and if they can sell you on working with them that test is passed. Self selection in action!
"We study this graphical model from the perspectives of algebraic statistics and tropical geometry, starting with the observation that its Zariski closure is a Hadamard power of the first secant variety of the Segre variety of projective lines."

Look, if you don't know what that is right away just from the abstract I don't know how to help you...

... what with me having no clue either.

I've always disliked mathematics' proclivity for naming things after people. I don't have any better solution, but I still don't like it. Even things I do understand look like gibberish if it has three or four proper names like that.
I believe Angel Investors (not VCs) contributed a lot for innovation.

http://paulgraham.com/angelinvesting.html
I feel I must be alone in this after all the Instapaper hype, but I just can't read stuff enjoyably on my iPhone.
I've been using a similar (open source) program for my old Palm M500 for years. It's called Plucker.
Why Developers Get Fired
You know, it just occurred to me: I have a flat-screen TV, an Onkyo receiver, a subwoofer, a center channel speaker and two different pairs of mains, two satellite surround speakers, an Xbox with svideo and/or component video and analog or toslink audio, a Wii which currently only has analog outs, an AT&T cable box with HDMI, svideo, and component video outs and toslink and analog audio outs, and a Macbook.

All of these components are in some way plugged in and working right now.

I would absolutely pay $130 to have someone come over and plug them in correctly.

For instance, I'm pretty sure 5.1 never works here.

I would absolutely rather spend 40 minutes commenting on HN than crawling around re-cabling my stereo system.
It will be much harder if it's not us. We've taken a lot of the easy resources, and many of them won't come back before the sun eats the Earth. (Some will, many won't.) Hard to build a technological civilization with no copper deposits left. It can (probably) be done, but it will be orders of magnitude slower.
No,

I think he means anyone who believe that a power user will use Emacs and the command-line and so believes that things like tab order, hot-keys and time-saving in general are of no importance in a GUI.

I have seen many skilled programmers and sys admins with this kind of belief system. The programmers would gleefully produce the kind of dreck which this article describes since they basically think of the end-users as sheep to be herded and occasionally abused.

The ability of produce code and an understanding of GUI standards are two different things.

This certainly isn't a Windows-only-problem. I currently use only Ubuntu/gnome and despite the fact that I've been able to customize it heavily for my purposes, the GUI just reeks of those who don't a sh*t about the GUI user's efficiency.

Every GUI app should provide minimum path from any state of the program to any other state that uses only the keyboard, doesn't flash the screen and requires a minimal number of strokes - and ideally records the keystrokes and lets you play them back. Does this sound unrealiistic or like something a novice wouldn't care about? This exactly what a web browser allows people to do with the address bar.
Excellent. Pretty sure that last graf is also why 37signals both succeeds and infuriates HN commenters.
It takes a good 20 minutes to set up a brand new 360 after you've gone through all the configuration pages, set up gamertags, created a Live account, linked your Live account to your gamertag, created an avatar, downloaded essential system updates etc. That's before it will even read a game disc, let alone creating a second profile for your kids with restricted access. You can maybe half it by not connecting it to the internet, but there are still far too many steps.

The PS3 has fewer steps but they're hidden in obscure menus and the downloading takes at least 12 billion times as long.
Meta: I think it would be very helpful if "rate my startup" posts would include a short description of what the startup does in the title.
Type Classes With An Easier Example
I was slightly confused about the design of the front page until I realised you had nicely pointed us to the FAQ.

I'm always slightly sceptical of companies that are 'just like X, only with an innovative ownership scheme'. What made you decide to go down that route?
In what possible world would the "share" assigned to each user ever be amount to something big enough to be visible with the naked eye?

Sorry to be snarky but this idea seems so ridiculously silly that I just can't comprehend how anyone could entertain it for even a second. What am I missing?
Angel investors are now, and always have been, the engines for innovation. Bankers - the old angels - funded Henry Ford. Back in the day, you could get a loan from a bank for a new venture. You can't any more; this, more than anything, is why new innovation is so concentrated in geographic areas.

In the old days, New York banks would give money to an engineer in Detroit. Now, if you want angel money, you need to be physically near the angels. You can raise VC - follower - money from outside your area if you 1) have traction or 2) are a known quantity with a past exit. But a new team in a new market with a new idea? Get thee to the Valley or Route 128, cause that's where the angels are.

EDIT: I should say networks of angels for first money in. SV and Mass have enough angels to syndicate a deal. You're restricted to sugar daddies doing $200K by themselves outside those areas (and maybe NYC). First Round led Mint, but they syndicated it in the Valley. Same deal with iSocket, where Tim Draper of DFJ led, but the deal was syndicated to angels.

And, of course, if you're Shai Agassi, you can raise a ton of money for Better Place, even though you have no experience in battery tech or distribution, because you're Shai Agassi.
yeah, it's convenient but I get eye strain pretty easily. if you happen to have a kindle, hatchet does the same thing for it. it's a much better platform for reading text. it costs $0.15 per use via Amazon's conversion charge though.

http://hatchetapp.com/
Maybe when your tantrum dies down you can revisit the fun fact that the founders' visa isn't a VC idea at all. I was going to spell out the details, but they are so obvious that I felt embarrassed.
Can you suggest an edit that would be useful?

Here are some that I can think of:
iter8r - A community operated social news site
iter8r - Because transparency is not a just a plastic film :-)
iter8r - We are "Open for business"
Too much focus on who's gonna get what part of the money, before you're making any money whatsoever.

"Iter8r is a social bookmarking website that enables users to post and discover interesting articles and have discussions around them."

Don't mean to be dismissive, but that doesn't really sound like such a compelling proposition. How is this better than HN? Or Delicious? Or Reddit?
This would have been more impressive if the authors had used other profile data to infer sexual preference.

As an example, consider those Facebook profiles that are relatively complete yet leave the "interested in" field blank. People not inclined to advertise their homosexuality might feel compelled to be honest and leave the field blank as opposed to outing themselves or posting a lie. Thus, one might infer that a person with a conspicuously absent "interested in" preference is actually gay. (Of course, there's also the chance that the profile owner simply feels that the idea of the "interested in" field seems a bit juvenile, so this particular example might be misleading.)
I just finished sprinting for 40seconds. Had to slow down with my ears pounding and hands shaking. Gotta improve on that :)
manure meaning fertilizer so you can make more lettuce, YUM!
Exactly, if I don't have time to read it now then how come I'm browsing around finding links. And if I do have time to read it now but am choosing not then I will probably continue to choose not to.
I hope you're right.

But syndicates of VCs are willing and able to invest large amounts of money in startups in emerging industries (eg CleanTech) and I liken them to promoters who hand out steroids, hoping for a win in the next Mr Universe. The steroids could mean ultimate success or ultimate failure. (edit: actually it is always a failure if you want to IPO or stay private but instead a buy-out offer comes in beforehand - eg Mint, and your investors are impatient for their 'exit event')

Also, the more corporate R & D decreases, the more startups will be in demand for corporates to take-in in order to stay ahead, either by integrating the startup or burning it if a threat.
Not a very good article. Ill-informed, juvenile, short-sighted, and trite. Pandering to the masses instead of actually trying to understand or explain something.

Ugh.
I don't think we're using Twitterifics logo, but I'll check as that wouldn't be right. Thanks for mentioning that.
I believe the better question to ask is:
If a community had to distribute profits what is the most equitable way to do it?
LVMH In The Recession: The Substance Of Style
The only way for me to read backlogs is to just keep them open in tabs, at some point I get frustrated by having 50+ tabs open and just triage, read & discard.
I'm glad you didn't mean what you said. But you did say it.

That's more like it. You'll pick up trolling in no time.
That's a fair point, and I agree. However, this would be a dream world if you expect geek squad to come over and fix everything correctly and quickly for $130. The service is notorious for charging quite a bit of money for just showing up to your house. That said, I can absolutely see them coming, having the same problem installing it that you would have had, and charging $300 for their service at that point.
Not in Canada, not soon anyway. You can't buy anything off of Amazon when shipping to Canada. I still only think of them as a book store.
The very fact of the continued existence of VCs for software technology businesses is a sad testament to the inability of the geekdom to capitalize on their knowledge. Perhaps we are unconsciously worried that we will suffer the fate of the Templars, but at least that last group of disruptive geeks managed to squeeze a few centuries on top of the Pyramid from their collective knowledge base.
Another example of what happens when supposedly rational monkeys prove to be completely irrational and base their actions on unsubstantiated emotions.

This doesn't just happen in the third world.
What profits though? The profits of free collaborative news site with adverts are always going to be very low on a per-user basis. How much money can you get for showing ads to 1 person?

Unless you're saying that it should just be the very very top submitters who get paid. But didn't Netscape.com already try paying "top submitters" to come use their site?
Are you trying to say that debugging weird network problems with your PS3 is as fun as playing the game?
I have color coded an image for you.

http://www.bingocardcreator.com/blog-images/hn/iter8r-review...

Do you need me to elaborate?
An Interview with Ivan Sutherland [pdf] (1989)
Who isn't outsourcing to China anyway? :/
If startups believe that Web 2.0 is all about users, then we must find a way to really engage with them. Web 2.0 users are savvy, have a strong sense of community. Then why treat them as just passive consumers. Debian (spi-inc) allows users to graduate to board members. We would like a Web 2.0 company to do the same.
You seem to be rather arbitrary about what is a dubious metric. Why would you count issues instead of pages? I think that is a stupid metric. Obviously price/page isn't perfect, but is also obviously better/more relevant. You should also check http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf (PDF) this open letter of Knuth regarding publishing.
Anyone who has a problem with this service should come over to my mow my yard for free. Since you must believe time has no value you wouldn't want me to pay the neighbor kid to do it for me would you? I must tell you my mower doesn't work very good so it's going to take a long time. If you want you can bring some tools over and fix the mower before you get started. I must insist you cover your own travel costs though because hey, I'm doing YOU a favor here by not paying someone to do this for me.
I think you're leaving out a very important aspect of graduate school, which is simply the ability to experiment and find out what you truly love to do. You can be pigeonholed into a business you don't particularly like, just like you can with a graduate project. But I feel like graduate school offers you much more flexibility and time to figure your shit out, at which point by the end you atleast have a solid credential to back up your work ethic.
That remark, as well as the phrase "a business person who can’t code anymore" made me a little suspicious of this guy. But I agree that there is unmet need at the lower end of business investments.
Gobbles =/= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Goebbels

Anyways, it's nice to get a different perspective. Don't worry about the downvoters.
okay... pot, meet kettle, blackness.

That's irrelevant. Graham could still need economics and business instruction even if the writer here was being snarky.
Most people are buying a Touch because they don't want to get involved in a long cellular contract. Otherwise you might as well just get an iPhone.
Maybe the NVCA statistics are somewhat bogus, but there is a pretty compelling way to answer the question empirically: how many tech companies have made it as far as an IPO without taking money from VC funds?

Maybe the world is changing. Maybe now that it's cheaper to start startups, some will start to make it all the way to IPOs without VC funding. Obviously I would love it if a company we funded could make it to an IPO without any further dilution. But that seems like insanely wishful thinking.
Scientists Concoct a $2-Trillion-Per-Year Plan To Geoengineer The Sahara Desert
That limerick is a disaster.
PyOpenCL lets you access the OpenCL parallel computation API from Python
The other killer iPhone app is Tweetie, a $3 Twitter client that, if you’re a Twitter user and have multiple accounts, is as indispensable as a needle to a heroin addict.

Oh, Wired. Continuing to destroy your credibility by insisting that a single client among dozens is a killer application if you use a certain website in a certain rare use case.
I am guessing the study didn't include YCombinator!
Mint + dynamics = lite wallet
Day by Day my wallet makes me look like I have a huge tumor on my behind.

These two companies should hook up and make our wallets liter.

http://money.cnn.com/galleries/2009/smallbusiness/0904/gallery.Rice_business_plan_competition_winners.smb/

and

www.mint.com
If he makes the data API truly open, as he says he will, it is incredibly enabling for a wide variety of 3rd-party applications to build on top. I'm not saying this will happen necessarily, but iter8r could potentially see a whole ecosystem built on top of its platform. That is, of course, if people use access to all the data.
Agreed. I really wish the Amazon.ca site would come to mirror the US version.

Anyone knows if they've announced plans to do that?
How much money can we make showing ads? Good question.

But how much money can be distributed if the objective is to be truly equitable?

Maybe its sustainable, maybe its not. But we had to ask this question. Who else would be this foolish? :-)

Its not just submitters who share the profits. People who read and vote are helping to filter and sort content. They are just as important.
Gender and sex are the same 99+% of the time. The rest of the time, it's impossible to tell from Facebook alone. It's not like Facebook has an "I'm a transsexual" checkbox on your profile.

Identifying a closeted gay person from the proportion of openly gay friends they have is indeed an obvious approach. The surprise is how well it works.
There are no French programming languages, not even Pascal
or Eiffel uses French words for the syntax, and all the
documentation is in English.

OCaml is implemented by le French, and I've seen code that uses French variable names. I haven't yet seen the camlp4 hack that lets you say laissez instead of let, though.
how many tech companies have made it as far as an IPO without taking money from VC funds?

Any particular reason you are looking at an IPO as a milestone? Somehow I see the YC companies more like SAS.
I would love an invite, but the invite request link is broken.
Could you please email me one? I have an idea I'd like to share with you.
Maybe I haven't been clear enough, sorry.

The title of this post implies that if you're a programmer automatically you are a poor user interface designer.

To me this is offensive to both programmers and designers.

These are just narrow-minded stereotypes, perpetuated by narrow-minded people.
You can submit your patch :-)
This is something I thought about a lot. I'm currently a grad student at a great school and even though I sometimes get frustrated with classes, I've never regretted it. There is a lot more to grad school than just taking classes and doing research.

For me, the main attraction and benefit of being in grad school was being immersed in an environment filled with smart people wanting to "do more". My school's heavy emphasis on entrepreneurship has also energized me about creating a startup. The caveat is that one must find a way to attend grad school for free (which actually isn't hard at all).
Another suggestion: Take the ads down for the time being.
Venture capital is just the fuel that is required to keep an innovative enterprise running. Can oil industry take the credit for bringing industrial revolution? No.

Education, innovation and hardwork of entrepreneurs is what keeps the VCs alive. VCs depend on entrepreneurs not vice versa.
SEO is all about the things you do to make your website optimized to show up in the organic (aka free) search results. In email, the equivalent is "reputation monitoring and management".

No, the equivalent is getting the email addresses of people who are interested in what you have to say, writing kick-ass subject lines, and only sending them an email when you know they will be happy to have read it.

You can spend 5% of your time / energy / effort in SEO and email marketing on the stuff Fred mentions in this post. It's essential (in both categories) not to be a spammer. But there's a big gap between non-spam marketing and successful marketing, and that's where the other 95% comes in.
Sorry.

Can you use the about/contact page?
The banks properly can't legally loan money to something so dangerous as a new business. FDIC could never afford to cover _that_.
The potential of the iPhone/iPod Touch platform is something I think everyone underestimates. What these two devices do is to give developers programmatic access to a bunch of things that have never been available before. Find me the other voice recorders with APIs or the other cameras with APIs. It really is the first truly portable computer.

The iPod touch makes that all available (camera coming soon I'm sure) at a minuscule price point. Meaning they can be widely deployed. Apple needs to put more focus on the security of the devices but once they do I could see iPod touches being deployed in hospitals, law offices, construction sites and just about anywhere that values portability.
The issue with IPOs as the marker of "success" is that public market investors are much more hostile to companies without the VC stamp of approval - they're relying on the implicit due diligence of the VC firms to make sure that there are no issues with the technology, the patent landscape, and other various hangups. (This applies much more to health care companies, where my VC experience was, but the mentality is the same as the public market investors are the same regardless of industry.)
It strips content down to plain text, removing any advertising, promotional links, social networking buttons, etc., and it does so without the permission of the originating site. Digg tried to pull something similar when they introduced the Digg toolbar (embedding original content in a frame) and people got hopping mad. But I guess on the iPhone anything goes, since Apple owns the copyright for rounded rectangles.
VCs are clearly exaggerating their contribution but it is easy to forget that they are the only long-term investors in the current financial system. Who else will commit to eight years of involvement with an unknown entity? Do they need to restructure - yes, but their disappearance will not be good for startups.
Rule 110, or, how a little orange dot becomes a universal computer
Is this necessarily a bad thing? Let's take the gas pump for example. I care far more about me getting out of the gas station and on my way then the attendant. I also don't have to help a particularly whiny customer before starting my car.

I can tell you I get done a lot faster when I jump out of my car and pump my own gas, versus waiting for the attendant (Except I technically break the law every time I do so, thanks NJ!)
I think the hardest thing for a site like this is ramping up from nothing, and the invitation-only / revenue split is an interesting way of approaching that problem.
The FDIC insures deposits of depositors, not loans made by banks. Loans are where banks (traditionally) make their loans, and the banks themselves bear the risk (traditionally) of those loans.

(I hate having to add the "traditionally" thanks to the insane securitization practices of the last decade. shakes fist)
Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this
It's unequivocal. You could also use a revenue threshold.
not really, I don't want an iPhone, I like the Blackberry much better, but I bought a touch for other uses.
The reason VCs are tied to technology is because a VC is generally formed to fund rapid growth companies. The whole point of being a VC is to get in early on something that's going to explode and hence make you a lot of money. It's hard to do that with a company dependent on physical assets.

In general companies that need physical assets to operate and grow get funding from private investors who are in for the long haul or banks who grant long term business loans.
QA, support and probably a lot of pre-sales support kind of roles?
I don't like your FAQ. It reads very hokey. Apologies.
We will open any aspect of the company- the data, the code, etc as long as it does not affect user privacy or cause us to run afoul of the law.

When we say Open, we really mean it.
It works. I just tried it:
http://iter8r.com/about/contact/
Next thing you will be telling us that no Egyptians drink alcohol either...
Domain experts?
I think you're missing the point. The people that are likely to use this application for articles are likely the kind of people that either (a) regularly visit your site, (b) are new to your site but presently don't have time to read the content, or (c) the kind of people that would say "tl;dr" and have moved on.

By encouraging use of InstaPaper (or its ilk) with longer articles on your site you may just find that it improves your readership.