skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: How would you approach a potential co-founder via email?
First I'd like to thanks everyone here at HN, for the support and advice I've been getting since I starting posting questions. But I need your help again...

I found a potential candidate, that may be interested in joining me as co-founder for my new music start-up. I believe this gentleman is about twice my age, and so far seems approachable. I am thinking of sending this candidate an email, but I don't want to screw anything up.

So, I wanted to ask you all here at HN...

How should I introduce myself?

Should I just jump straight to the point (What my start-up is about)??

If you have any other suggestions, please leave your thoughts; they are all welcomed.

Thanks.
I find your abundance of faith disturbing. I've seen several stores that have search kiosks in the pharmacy to help you find items. It's only a matter of time until retail customer service goes the knowledge base style of online customer service.
Unfortunately, all the large companies - Microsoft, Google, Yahoo etc. have demonstrated their willingness to obey censorship commands from the Chinese govt.

A few years ago, yahoo, microsoft and google were all criticized for censoring search results. Their defense at the time was that self-censorship was the only way they could operate in China.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship_in_the_Peop...
[Attempting to search for censored keywords in these Chinese search engines will yield few or no results. Google.cn will display the following at the bottom of the page: "According to the local laws, regulations and policies, part of the searching result is not shown."]
You should call it "Captain's Log"

I'm not sure I'd ever have a use for it/remember to use it. Fairly elegant idea though.
If YC is funding many companies that are already at this stage, they are pretty far from what I understood the company to be.
I talk with God. the computer nerd community is militant atheists. I used to be, until I discovered God. I don't feel that obligated to share -- God likes hiding, doesn't He? You know the story of Exodus? Nasty shit happened and the Phareo still didn't listen. I don't expect anything that dramatic by way of convincing people, so it seems hopeless.

On this site, it was asked, "What do you take on faith?" I said relativity. Someone can prove it, but not I. God was not found by philosophy, but by mysticism -- empiracle evidence.

I can share God's words, but it seems pointless.

God says...
predict evident fallacies undertake shady descend Not our
simply fornications
I find this comment remarkably insightful. It's such a simple concept and yet that idea never occurred to me - but yet it just feels right! The slot machine example is dead on. Awesome.
Where Are All the Female Web Designers?
If only there was some sort of organization dedicated to helping young companies mature and raise VC money...
That is what I meant - your 'products only' approach eliminates the posers in favour of those who get stuff done
No useful advice for you, but as a noob, I was under the impression YC gives everyone the same standard offer to everyone. Has that changed?
Look, I understand that any good movement needs eyes, but it's infuriating when you hear people state "nobody knows what we're doing, we're just running around and chanting." It's just plain irresponsible when people who have nothing to do with this protest, and moreover people who condemn the protest, are forced to suffer from the opinions of a very vocal group. The situation is akin to that Mitch Hedberg joke "I'm against picketing but I don't know how to show it." A large portion of students really do not believe in this cause. And an even larger portion, myself included, is willing to sympathize only a valid argument is given; an argument that has yet to surface.

Does California need reform? A resounding YES! But nobody here at Berkeley seemed to care until their tuitions were raised. Prop 13 is 31 years old (no palindrome intended) but it's only now that people think it was a bad idea. Hell, 6 years ago Arnold almost had his campaign derailed because Warren Buffet dared to question California's sacred initiative. Of course prop 13 is awful, the prison system is crowded, and California's finances are a mess, yet none of my peers deemed it prudent to protest in Sacramento.
I like all the enthusiasm you've got for your idea.

It's an easy mistake to look at things from a purely rational standpoint and mentally check off all of the traits that you're looking for; but you really need to spend some time working with someone to know if it's going to be a good fit for sure.

Trying to reach out to someone to ask them to cofound a company with you isn't that far away from emailing a woman and asking her to marry you just because you think the two of you like the same things.

All that being said, you should definitely get in touch with this person and say that you've got some things going on that you think he might be interested in, and maybe try to meet up or work on a small project together or something like that first.
Yes. Be American and Buy American (including the crude oil). This way American economy will recover.
A) When a macbook is about to run out of power it suspends to disk. Then when you plug it in and turn it on it restores in seconds. I honestly don't understand why linux and windows laptops don't behave this way by default. Closing my linux laptop lid, having it go to sleep, run out of battery over the weekend and then just die loosing everything is stupid.

B) Yes I have to install mac updates. But that is a few times a year.... And the update takes longer then the boot so again the boot is moot.

C) I find closing the lid the normal way I 'shutdown'.

D) The first time I boot a new computer it doesn't actually boot up the desktop because it immediately prompts you for language, make a user, etc. So again booting the desktop doesn't matter in this case either.
Is there a Mac version of the Happy Hacking keyboard? I had looked at them before and really liked them, never bought one though.
Hollywood: Sexy Hot Bebo New Promo
As genius as he is, doesn't everything seem to boil down to a battle of wits or a vendetta with Dave? Wouldn't be the first time ( http://workbench.cadenhead.org/news/2881/letter-dave-winers-... ) or the last.. :-) Similar rows broke out when Atom wasn't even called Atom, but Echo.. http://news.cnet.com/2009-1032_3-5059006.html?tag=fd_lede1_h...
The value of the presidency of the United States is far more than the salary. College football usually pays for itself and then some.
Send Flowers to India on Christmas
Did they really need to have a f'in plane crash into a building?
Telligent Systems is hiring several QA engineers, DB engineer, and tech writers, for C# and SQL Server. Most jobs are in Dallas, but likely consider remote candidates as well (I work remote from CA).

http://telligent.com/about/careers/
RMS is not as diplomatic as Linus.
I'm playing with it, how do you change the root password?
"I cannot understand why foundries don't just give free downloads of their fonts anyway."

And that makes it okay for you to use them? If you object philosophically to their position then don't use the product they produce; justifying your desire to use their product without paying them certainly doesn't indicate high moral standards on your part.

"The idea that you can incriminate yourself merely by copying a file, no matter what that file is, is abhorrent to me."

Because information has value and without a way of getting recompensed for that value nobody will take the time to create the information.

What do you do, and why should you get paid for it?
Bliss indeed was perhaps the oddest of the lot. The specific instruction that he might have been talking about was the variable-width bitfield pointer that the Dec 10 hardware had that was available in bliss-36. This, interestingly, has found its way into lisp.

So far as I know, there were three Bliss languages--Bliss-11, Bliss 32 (vax) and Bliss 36 (Dec 10). It was the first expression language that I had used; not quite functional.

And those were the days that they knew how to make nice instruction sets. PDP-10 could just be my favorite.
Perhaps it might be useful for you to think of a business broker as an analogy.

A broker takes 5%-10% of a deal. They can charge that much because clients with the broker they can get more then 5%-10% more on the sale. In residential real estate, it's the same sort of idea with smaller percentage.

There are two numbers that mark the top & bottom limit for any price. One is the maximum buyer would pay if he had no alternatives. In a business environment this equals the total amount of return he gets for it. The second number is the minimum a seller would accept, this is usually cost of production.

In a competitive market, the price is usually close to the second number. We are used to prices being like that in our normal lives as consumers.

In a broker situation, the price has less to do with the second number & more to do with the first, the value to the customer.

You need to figure out if what YC has to offer is worth 7% of your company. If we assume that your goal is an exit, this could be making an exit ultimately happen more quickly, at a higher value or more likely. It doesn't actually need to be that much higher, faster or more likely to be worth 10% of your company. YC might be getting an awesome bargain, but that doesn't mean you loose.
The money they give to everyone is the same, but the percentage varies: "We usually invest $11,000 + $3000n ... in return for between 2% and 10% of the company. The average is 6-7%." (http://ycombinator.com/w2010.html)
Ask HN: Language/framework recommendation for a once-upon-a-time coder
Dear HN:

I used to code a few years ago (Bachelor's in CS) and then moved to Technology Management. I want to come back to my roots again and "develop some web apps" (just downloaded Aptana) - I know it sounds silly.. What's the most clean, easiest to learn language/framework should I start with? TIA.
OK, got it from
http://www.engadget.com/2009/11/20/how-to-run-chrome-os-as-a...

Ctrl+Alt+t opens up a terminal, sudo password is chronos
One more thing.

Thinking in terms of valuation here is slightly problematic because it is only based on the money being invested, not the other things. Since you are already profitable I assume that if it was just cash, you wouldn't be considering it at all. If YC offered you $0 for 3.5% of your company, you'd probably prefer that deal. This values your company at $0.
True. Whichever way that temperature appears to be changing.
I twittered that Linus is more deserving of a Nobel than either Obama or Carter.

But Ronald Reagan though freed something like 125 million people and he never received it.

Bill Clinton single handedly has raised over a billion dollars for the third world poor and he hasn't received it.
That's not news, though, or at least it shouldn't be. RC's moderation policy of deleting or not approving things they don't want to deal with is well-known, at least to me. I believe it is within the rights of a site owner to do that. If you don't like that, take it into account as you read the site. We didn't need any leaked emails to tell us that comments can be deleted on RC.

(Though it probably is fair to point out that there is nothing neutral about the site, any more than the talk.origins faq is neutral. Doesn't make it wrong; does make it not neutral.)
In the past, PG has said that YC doesn't negotiate funding -- that it's strictly a take-it-or-leave-it offer.
It depends on the person. I like only having one primary computer that I use regularly -- I have a laptop that I plug into an external monitor and keyboard at my desk. A mobile device may not need everything a desktop has, but it is nice to have your whole desktop available wherever you want to carry it.
It didn't work for me. Thanks for trying, though.
PG is low-balling you. A 200k valuation for a startup that has already earned $1m in profits (I'd assume over several years) is absolutely ridiculous. He's trying to capitalize on his name.

I assume you're not pressed for cash. The $14k you would get by PG/YC buying in is a drop in the bucket compared to the $1m you've already earned. The main value is the YC/PG brand name.

This is not a traditional VC deal where the main benefit of the startup is cash to survive/expand. Instead, you're giving up 7% of your multi-million dollar company to get the PG stamp of approval.

Not sure what industry you are in and whether the name would be worth it. I'm leaning towards no though.

If you want to seriously consider it, get a valuation done and see how much it's actually going to cost you in lost equity. Test the waters as well with angel and VC groups.
My startup is a little over a year old and has earned a more than $1m in profits since its inception... Now I know the logic of rational decision making and how if an option seems like it is likely to benefit more than it's likely to cost, you should go for it. But at the same time it also seems like an unfair valuation.

I'm clearly missing a big part of the picture here: What do you expect to get out of being a YC company?
I agree. The only solution I see is not to use a title provided by the submitter. When I design my own system...
The real horror is how much thicker the C++ standard is than any of the thick documents mentioned in the speech. If people like Knuth, Hoare, etc. were working towards a dream where programming has the rigor of physics, the modern situation is more akin to alchemy.
This looks fantastic. Thanks for writing it.

How would you go about restricting access to channels to a specific user or users? My first take would be to issue an unguessable id upon successful authentication and use this id as the channel id -- a shared secret. Only those who should know the id do know it.

I don't see support for streaming; the connection to the long-polling client is closed after consuming. Are you planning on adding support for streaming new messages as they are published?
I rowed in college, we experimented with different riggings (including arrangement 'a' from the article) and found that, indeed, bucket-rigging and others seemed to yield good times. There were other variables though, strength of the current, wind, how intense our hangovers were... so it's hard to attribute it to just the different arrangements. I will say that sitting in an arrangement where the guy in front/behind has his oar on the same side as you leaves very little room for error. If you don't get that oar up and out at the finish you'll hit oars and crab for sure.
I think this is sensible, and a good analogy. Once you've done a few startups, you'll realize that choosing a partner, or partners, could easily make or break you. Partnerships are easy to get into, the good ones are easy to get out of, the bad ones are impossible to shake off.

From your post, it sounds like you're worried about getting this guy "in" with you. If you've got the idea, and are driving it, you offer something very few people do, don't give it up on the first date! You might hate this guy, or he might hate you. OR, he might want something you can't offer.

I'm still learning about this myself, but have in the last year or two begun to strongly prefer trial-period type situations, ones that could last a while. We recently invited to people to join our board, and they are on one-year probationary terms. They were happy to join on those terms because they want to help.

I'm happy to try them out, without worrying about giving them equity now that might be the wrong amount later.

I could say a lot more about this, but I think overall to find a partner in the very early stage, you should generally: pitch the IDEA and business hard, be cagey about promising equity participation, and make CERTAIN that the person will be able to contribute by asking them to contribute for free, or cheap first.
Love it, and thanks!
You can limit the JVM heap size.
Ooyala is hiring! http://www.ooyala.com/about/careers ; We're looking for additional talented and experienced developers and operations team members to work on scalable systems using cloud computing, RoR, and other hopefully interesting buzzwords!

If you'd like to join a company thats growing, and helping to change the face of video on the web, apply within.

Tell 'em the pool boy sent ya!

(Engineering hiring is focused in Mountain View, CA)
BackType is hiring developers to join the founding team of two in San Francisco:

http://www.backtype.com/jobs
If you're earning a million in profits, then why do you need additional investment? You're wildly successful with your current capital structure.
So... how many RubySpecs _are_ there exactly? They pass over 28,000 and they aren't done. How much ground is left to cover?
How is that unfortunate? Do you really think that I'd be poised to launch the next Earth-shattering blogazine, if only I understood the subtle point of this article? Or were you just trying to be clever, without demonstrating any insight of your own?
I believe it's necessary for me to find a cofounder that understands music, so that we can understand each other on a common level. Having a common understanding and goal is very important to the sucess of this idea(startup.)
I'm sorry but being of a minority race is completely different than being bullied because you're a nerd. It's amusing to me though that people on YC have upvoted this view so much. For some reason I'm getting the feeling that there are a lot of white nerds on YC and not many minorities and women.

"Better to just get on with building things."

I perceive a religious undertone from this. Racism and sexism can be solved by the PG/"Hacker" mentality "building something".
Deadly Labor Wars Hinder India's Rise
Nice.

The only question is how to replicate this model in the United States in the face of tremedeous political obstacles. (The AMA cartel, almost certainly lot of paperworks and complicated rules, the FDA, etc)
Addtoany - Bookmarking & Sharing Service
Try a benchmark that uses a lot of blocks and I bet the results are more interesting.
As someone who presently owns five very different bicycles and has never even had a driver's license, I welcome this computing future.

One of the things that Google appears to be focusing on most intently with ChromeOS is syncing the state of your workspace environment. If they can deliver on that, it'd make it worthwhile to own devices in dissimilar form-factors: like a 1280x800 laptop, a 1024x600 Touchbook, a 800x480 Pandora, and a 320x480 iPhone 3Gs (the latter three all ARM-based!). I'd even use it on a 1920x1200 desktop if they implement a decent tiling idiom.

All I really need is a very nice web browser and some clever NaCL ports.
Five ways of building a development team
As a scientist why would I invest my time in providing additional support to someone that will simply twist whatever assistance is provided to support his own agenda?

As a programmer I wouldn't certainly not waste my time assisting someone who merely intended to smear my project in his blog to meet his own political ends.
An open letter to Cupertino about the App Store
Actually, yes. It'd just look like the country is on fire then. There've been similar charts (mostly for foreclosure rates or house prices, and for obesity) that use red->purple, green->red, and all other sorts of color combinations, and they all look similarly ominous.

The units are the real issue here. If they'd set the top bracket at 20%, this chart would be ho-hum. You'd have some splashes of color in Detroit, the Rust Belt, and Central California, and most of the country would be a moderate yellow or orange.
I agree, it's a wonderful article.
I couldn't agree more. I almost wonder if we're getting trolled..

1. Maybe the poster is confusing profit with revenue?

2. Either way, it sounds like a bad deal..

3. And whatever the deal, you never want to discuss publicly until a contract is signed.

4. And of all places, especially not on the forum run by the VC..

The whole story is almost too crazy to believe.
I'm loving mcsquare.me
(5) overeco on Get Glue
Politicized science is not good science.

Please support the claim that they "hid" their data. Note that citing an unqualified politically biased source is not adequate support for such a serious scientific claim.
I think there are a large number of people who are not necessarily a drain on society, but have taken positions that aren't tangibly productive because easy credit has meant that that's where the money is. I know a lot of financial professionals, real estate agents, insurance salesmen, and corporate lawyers who are very bright and hardworking, but just shuffle money around all day instead of building things people will use, because that's the path of least resistance to a well-paying job.

The financial industry in particular is filled with incredibly brilliant people who spend their days trying to figure out how to outsmart each other, the government, and the public at large instead of inventing things that make peoples' lives better. Wall Street could easily support another dozen Googles or so, but rather than organize the world's information, they prefer to use it to siphon off the world's money.
sigh none of this is new information. I've owned Macs for 23 years.

Less complexity, less power consumption, faster boot are all plusses. You got me on game-changing, but that's it.
Damn, a year and a half since it was announced and it still doesn't run Rails?
Gmail - Recibidos (1406) - guzmanjhonny@gmail.com
Wow. MacRuby sure looks awesome. I've always used Python for most of my scripting needs, but it's impossible to ignore the kind of work the MacRuby guys have done. No GIL, GCD, JIT ... fun :)
The idea has been developing. They call them ambulatory surgery centers in the US. Regina Herzlinger coined the phrase "focused factory" if memory serves. Of course they're nowhere near the cost of the Indian model but from what I understand there's something called the Texas Heart Institute that performs surgeries at costs dramatically lower than their more broad based peers (http://www.texasheartinstitute.org/)
Bradley Lockhart on oprah - Gvke
Make Keyboard Response Faster in OS X
Google results including ESPN swap URLs for links to site's category model
Not talking about 'Sitelinks' here...Search for, say 'Georgia Tech Football' ESPN, the 2nd or 3rd result, instead of a URL below description, they get espn.go.com › All Sports › College Football (all individually linked). Anyone know how to nudge google to index like that?
Especially since the Dark Side can afford to hire a LOT more lawyers, who are second only to politicians in their ability to make your life a living hell.
There's dip switches for mac/PC modes.
FreshBooks is hiring for a ton of positions in Toronto. We are looking for PHP and Python developers, designers, marketing, community developers, database administrators, product managers, and support specialists.

http://careers.freshbooks.com

I'm especially looking for hackers. I'm looking for developers who love building the Web. The Integrations team is working hard on OpenID, OAuth, and OpenSocial, and we need people who get off on that sort of thing.

http://www.freshbooks.com/careers/integrations-developer.php

If you're wondering what it's like to work for us, this video is a pretty good indication of how we roll.

http://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2009/11/20/our-newest-support...

-- Sunir, Chief Handshaker, FreshBooks (sunir splat freshbooks dot com)

P.S. We're growing on revenue, so you can feel confident you will still have a job here as long as you want it.
Usa news issues damages trends
Just had a look at flixel, and... well, I'd like to have your babies. Unfortunately medical science isn't quite up to it.