skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"which was more like 7-10 VC firms giving meaningless "yes, soon!""

In theory by doing that they were raising the potential price for those that would end up investing. Their competitors. If you felt you had "plan b's" you'd be less likely to lower your expectations on value than you would be if you had 7 firm rejections. 7 firm rejection might mean "take what we can get".

Here is an example using car buying.

If a car is sitting on the lot and has nobody expressing any interest the dealer may possibly want to unload the car and take whatever he can get. Otoh if the dealer feels that he has 2 or 3 people interested in the same car he will then be less likely to take a "short" deal from the 4th person who walks into the dealership. He will feel there is potential and it is worth the gamble to wait feeling he has a few plan b's.

(Forget for a second whether this actually happens with car dealers I am only trying to illustrate the theory of what I call "feeling fat" which I have seen many times in business).

Of course as a group it's hard to explain why all participants would act this way or that this even happens. However I don't feel individually they are disadvantaged by this behavior at all. While there might be a reputation disadvantage to stringing someone along unless they are absolutely sure they will not invest why not string someone along?
Ha. You know the same concept applies to talking to girls?

I'll never forget the day I went out exclusively to meet a girl. I was rejected by maybe a hundred girls I approached. The worst one's were the ones that just stared at their phone, like I wasn't even human.

I was tired. It was 8PM... around that. I go up and approach girl inside of a clothing store. Please God speak english. She opens up with perfect english, smiling. We went on a date right there. Huge confidence booster.

Frankly, people are a complicated bunch. You don't understand their learned behaviors, position and internal politics. There's no way you could understand the whether a girl is grumpy, just broke up, open to meeting someone new until you come up to her.

We need more posts like this. Not just for VC's, I'd like to see comeback stories for freelancers scoring gigs / job interviews.

Good job OP
Hmm. None in particular, though you could just look around for some of the older resources on progressive enhancement - that's what it's called, and it used to be a recommended practice everywhere.

There's also this post, that goes into it somewhat: http://allinthehead.com/retro/367/why-is-progressive-enhance... - also, Brad Frost has some posts about this.
I'd prefer it if companies were not significantly disadvantaged in fundraising outside the Bay Area because VCs had some of the ability to think outside the box they are supposedly blessed with...
When I first started using Ansible, the fact that you replied directly to many of my Google Group posts was what really sold me on it. So, from a users perspective, the time you spent on that was well spent. Thanks for that! Ansible has saved me a ton of time spent on tedious and annoying tasks.

Personally, I think the balance between giving good user support and spending enough time on actual development work is really really hard to figure out. But one way projects could help it work better, is make sure it's very clear how users should get support, and how much they can expect. And I have yet to see any project do that. If it was clear, then you could politely point newbies who just don't know better at the support doc. People like me who spend a lot of time making sure our requests won't waste time, would have solid guidance on how to do that. And jerks who are just wasting time could be politely pointed at the doc and then ignored when they don't follow it.
Reminds me of BVP's anti-portfolio: http://www.bvp.com/portfolio/antiportfolio
His point is entirely consistent with Brian's point. Brian's saying "consistent rejection doesn't mean you should give up" and the VC is saying "even consistent VC rejections can be wrong because VC is hard".
For databases here is a decent comparison: https://www.scriptrock.com/articles/mysql-vs-mongodb. Mysql is heavily used at Facebook and Google and at most traditional companies. They start having scaling issues at around 1 terrabyte of data but there are known ways to scale further. Mongo and other nosql databases are rapidly being adapted. I know Squarespace uses Mongo for some of their analytics.

Javascript + Nodejs/Ruby + Rails/Python + Django - The main difference between the three is the language choice. Javascript/Nodejs offers native asynchronous support and can be faster but can be difficult to maintain large codebases in. The other benefit of nodejs is that you don't need to switch languages when working on the front-end and backend systems which can be a major boon in small teams.

React/Angular - Made by Facebook and Google respectively. Comparison https://www.airpair.com/angularjs/posts/angular-vs-react-the...
That phrase comes from the inventors themselves in the TED talk announcing the technique.
Yes, highly interactive applications are an exception. But most things people build on the web (except for games) aren't highly interactive.

A forum, for example, isn't highly interactive, whereas an online spreadsheet editor is.
For Brian:

On Dec 13th, 2012, I wrote the following email to you, after having applied for a “Head of Community” position at AirBnB. I didn’t get any reply either.
Note that I cannot claim I became the big success that AirBnB has after these “rejections”, but it still surprises me that you or your org didn’t even wanted to talk to a Technology Evangelist from AWS.
I guess you did a similar type of mistake with me.

"Hi Brian,
I know you’re busy, therefore I’ll keep it short.

My name is Simone, I work in San Francisco for Amazon Web Services, and I’m interested in becoming the Global Head of Community at Airbnb.

I think I have what it takes to be successful in that role, and I’m a big fan of Airbnb.

Let me know if we can discuss, or if you want more details.

Have a great day,"
But... why? I don't understand why an entrepreneur would prefer crowdfunded money to venture capital. And if he can't raise venture capital with the glut of money in venture right now, that's doubly worrying.

The only thing that makes any sense to me at least is a marketing angle -- by getting lots of people as "shareholders" you now have a base of evangelists to advocate for your car.
I think you are reading too much into it. Different investment funds, angels, syndicates have vastly differing strategies, goals, and funds available.

A smaller fund might invest across a series of funds, but not have deep enough pockets to follow the money even if they have pro rata rights. In comes the larger investment firm with lower risk tolerance (potentially) for the series A. Win win win.
Were you buying AAPL in 2001?
You'd be surprised how commonly used terminal browsers are.
Thanks Tal!
The only thing to be warned about here is the blowback effect. This is a form of confirmation bias, whereby the victim uses rejection as a means of confirmation.
My fault for not checking the video (I knew this site for some time and didn't check it now - especially as I expected people to go straight to "Play"). Would it be to bad to repost it, providing a direct link to the game (http://www.depressionquest.com/dqfinal.html)?

EDIT: OK, I did it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9875014), with a full disclaimer.
I've seen this in the European-focused subreddits lately. Places like /r/europe are usually pretty "normal" discussion boards considering that their demographics are English-speaking, internet-using young people of those regions. But periodically the comments (and comment scores) end up very uncharacteristic in a thread or sub-thread, especially if it has to do with immigration, Islam, or nationalism. Not just in the sense that some people have conservative or nativist views on those subjects, but that suddenly the discussion seems to be totally dominated by extreme versions of those views, anything vaguely liberal said about the subject is downvoted to infinity, etc. And the reason in that case if you dig around usually turns out to be that someone in a far-right/xenophobic subreddit linked there and caused an influx of people with those views.
On one hand I'm ok with more and more dudes being taken out of the game because they're too busy fapping to increasingly more realistic pornography. At the same time, it's not obvious that the kind of men that are happy to fully migrate their sexual needs to VR porn weren't already out of the dating pool in the first place. They likely were already consuming regular porn as surrogate for their sexual lives.

On the other hand, I realize that women aren't going to sit still, and they're probably going to have to adapt to this new world, meaning they'll possibly follow along and slowly dating might become mostly virtual.
You're forgetting the (admittedly, somewhat uncountable) number of people who are substituting porn and masturbation for sexual relationships with real, live human beings.

Yes, people in relationships, with sex lives watch porn. Good for them. They aren't the ones we should be concerned about; they aren't the ones whose behavior is (or risks becoming) maladptive.

I think you're drawing a false identity here — between people who use porn to supplement their sex lives, and people for whom porn is their sex life — and treating the valuable and well-warranted concern for the latter as criticism of the whole.
I believe the GP was trying to say that while your first sentence sounds reasonable, your second one sounds surprising and needs some justifying.
Loneliness is like a gaping wound, anything you try to fill it with just seems to make it hurt more.

Masturbation is fine, but that longing for real human connection, that is something that I don't think is replaceable by any of these forms. Even conversations spread across strangers, it just feels like trying to fit together a jigsaw puzzle with the wrong pieces.
Just from an investor/trader point of view, it's shocking that they would even subscribe to Buffet's style of investing which is suitable for non-tech stocks. There is a great deal of false confidence in an unusually high risk high rewards investment. Rather, wouldn't it make more sense to make optimize tiny bets on as much startups regardless of the industry? At the end of the day, it's not much different than investing in penny stocks or early stage mining companies, I'd find it hard to justify investing so few.

I'd subscribe to Taleb's black swan model, except the complete opposite of what he did which was making small bets that market would crash.

Capture unexpected, phenomenal returns without introducing any personal beliefs or bias and making equally sized small bets across as many startups as possible. If you can get like 60,000% ROI then the model becomes sustainable, unlimited upward potential with a limited and tiny risk.
In my terminal I usually have several tabs opened by default in fish, but have another open to the python repl, and sometimes bash if I need something. Easy enough to do.
According to their error message, they sent an email to "branduse@oronto2015.org", not "branduse@toronto2015.org".
> hey these guys missed out on the deal of the century

When you figure out how to determine that before the fact I'm sure there are plenty of VC firms who would love to hire you.

> who else did they reject?

They rejected countless startups that have since failed (and surely some other that have succeeded). VCs are human, you can't expect them to have the clairvoyance required to only invest in eventually successful companies and only turn down eventual failures.
These numbers are totally irrelevant to this situation. We're talking two small companies here.

If there's no leverage, the chances of negotiating a better deal than described above are relatively slim.
I suspect that the PDF states the authors' positions when the paper was written and the SSRN page states their current positions.

According to http://www.michaelmakowsky.com/about/ Michael D. Makowsky is currently a professor at Clemson University (as listed on the SSRN page) and was previously a professor at the Center for Advanced Modeling at Johns Hopkins University (as in the PDF).
The more thought and due diligence you put in, the lower the probability you will get screwed. However, how much effort, time, and $money into finding, hiring, talking to lawyer(s) do you want to put into this?

If you are at all worried about whether they are negotiating in good faith, then before you go any further, file one or more patents asap. This provides you with at least 2 things:

1) increases what you have to put on the table

2) if talks dissolve and you find they were in it to get as much info from you as possible (e.g. to use in their product), you have some legal options. Whether you need this recourse AND whether its even feasible, is left for a later time.

Business is war, expect no less. And in this case, the more they give you (cash or equity), the more they lose.
> and thus can have no effect but to shed users—which of course is Reddit's only asset

Yor're assuming that all users are equal and the important thing is raw eyeballs.

There are users and behavior that are driving people away. The whole 'we support FPH' and sexist comments about Pao in every story about her is turning people off.

Further more, if Reddit is an advertising supported company they're going to have a big problem selling ads against /r/coontown. It doesn't matter that's one little corner and you can turn your ads off against it. The story in the news will be 'P&G paid 30m to advertise on a site full of hate speech' and the story will be correct because it DID go to THE SITE not the sub.

And that's going to play really poorly for P&G (chosen as a big brand, don't know if they advertise).

Same thing applies to celebrities doing AMAs. The next time a democratic candidate does an AMA and Fox starts trumpeting the... ahem 'anti-PC'... elements of Reddit to make everyone look bad do you think that candidate will be happy? "They used to host child porn too! It was called /r/jailbait!"

They're getting a reputation that's going to make buying their ad platform untenable for many large advertisers.
"Graceful fallback" is what came before progressive enhancement, and is considered obsoleted for good reason.

Graceful fallbacks tend to be maintained as a separate version, and neglected over time. Progressive enhancement means taking a basic page and adding snazzy functionality to it - eg. ajaxified page loads. The latter is what you want.
It's about taking educated risks to the best of their ability. Otherwise there are a lot of people selling bridges...

This advice comes straight from the oracle of Omaha himself, "Never invest in a business you can't understand."
I'm not sure how... pass it around is 'better' than global scope. Meaning not sure what problems you're avoiding here. If the scope is a single thread, no problem. If it's accessed from multiple threads, you have problems whether it's a global, singleton, or passed by reference.

Not actually completely true, you can still have races in single threaded code. Consider two state variables that are effected by a shared variable. Not hard to have the two state variables in disagreement over the shape of the world.
I don't know. It's like we're running a giant experiment on everybody, using powerful digital technologies , without even a safe process for estimating and controlling the risks and optimizing for positives.

And we do this without even achieving a scientific consensus on regular pornography and it's impact - without even understanding the results of the previous technology, if any. Maybe we should understand that before?
Agreed on all points, and thanks for weighing in from the VC side of the table.

For clarity's sake, I've sat on tremendously effective boards at the companies I have either run or had a senior role at, and I think there's incredible value to be had from a good VC relationship. The economic realities of raising can be frustrating, but it's a reflection on the industry rather than the individuals, I believe.

Early stage investment is just plain hard, and I think your point about the quantity of deals led is key.
Looking at that (and Pharo) it seems like all applications run inside the development environment. Is that correct?
At $6800 this will make for a good transplant of a poor mans t-rex[1]. Swap in a zx14r motor and you've got yourself an animal.

[1] https://www.campagnamotors.com
Well, how could be cheaper?. Soil and light in deserts are practically free, and you can build an insulated underground room, live in the same building and go to the work just walking. Not need to spend gasoline moving a ship and also spend electricity in air compressors.

This is agriculture without polinizators; not correct light spectrum; much higher production costs that earth based companies for the same common products in the market; and high probability of losing the harvest. Not telling the investors that thousands of marine organisms will cover any external transparent surface in a few months (blocking all the light if not regularly removed); or that their investment could end just buried by sand; or that the master plan is based in obtaining permits for eight different organisms (and explain them that you need to jump over most current marine laws). It seems that they not even asked a oceanographer what are those thing named 'water masses' and how they move.

Do they want to use copper sulfate for potato fungus? Is super-toxic for marine forms of life. Do they want to use lots of manure? Is not legal to deliberately dump manure in the sea and a risk of faecal bacteria contamination for beaches. Is their plastic fabric covered by tasty green microscopic algae guaranteed against sea urchin's mandibles?.

Bad interest conflicts with local fishermen, algae harvesters, ecologists?. How they plan to deal with this?.

Insurance or private security? This is a high risk activity for the workers. Aquaculture companies need often to hire private security for marine cages (because the risk of thief).

Either they can provide a reasonable anwser to this questions or they are not serious players (or is just a scam).
Nest.vc Launches in Africa
Only if the software in question had an AS detailed plan as these guys had before they started building it, maybe..
I'm wondering why the downvotes - can someone care to explain? I'm honestly curious on why.
As mentioned previously, I finished up some preliminary Java coursework. This was around the time our quasar and pulsar work took off in popularity.

I see you as a hero and hope for a 1/1000 of your productivity when I peak.

Glad to see you were a Schemer too.
Yes, that is exactly the case. The idea is to let 3rd parties use the data without ever having direct access to it. They can't reconstruct it, and only get the result of the computation.
Shame, I'm just trying to have the red cross stop calling my house about blood donations.. ill give blood, just stop calling me.
How? Serious question.
Starting to get tired of all these people complaining about Reddit, and yet when I put it out there to build something better I barely get any responses.
Exactly. The op doesn't understand reddit.

I read a lot of specific reddits (sub-communities) like /r/programming, /r/cpp, /r/math, etc. Honestly? I'm completely unaffected by the "biker gangs" he's rambling about.
Don't fancy product validation? Build your audience first instead
Seems pretty dubious, at least the mini ice age bit
I swear by subshells. They solve so many problems. People object that they don't let you do environment autoloading on `cd`, though (which I also hate, so... Yeah).
That's ultimately the lesson IMHO. You gotta keep hustling and doing what you think is right but not get hung up about any particular connection or rung of the ladder.
You may feel better to know that the web server is not part of the shell itself. It's a separate Python script that does its work by invoking fish and sending it commands. Its source is here: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/blob/master/share/t...
While that makes sense for established markets like the stock market, I don't think the same can be applied to the early stage tech market or reading into fundamentals. Certainly trying to capture all opportunity in the stock market can lead to mediocrity (over diversification) but when one bet can produce returns that more than makes up for all the other tiny bets, hard to fathom why that isn't a much more attractive strategy.

For example, make 1% stake bets stretched across 100 startups vs 20% stake bets stretched across only 5 startups I "understand" or feel comfortable with. Isn't the risk inherently bigger if you chose the latter? If one of those 100 startups end up producing low to mid 5 digit ROI, shouldn't that cover for the 99 other bad bets? The probability increases since you are not introducing any personal biases and exposed to more upside potentials.
The "traditional" answer is to identify the VCs you're interested in, and network your way into an introduction if you don't know them yourself. Accelerator programs can also be a way to become involved.

Have a clear, clean pitch deck. Know your unique value proposition, understand your competition, be able to demonstrate that there's a market and that it's significant. Show traction, team, and ability to execute.
If that's the case, the backstory to Airbnb indicates to me that around this time they had still not adequately figured out how to tell their story in such a way where it seemed like a big deal. At the time I believe, it was about:

- People having strangers stay on air beds in your homes, while you were there, and then serving them breakfast in the morning
- It was ONLY targeted at conferences where people would become so desperate for space that they'd stay anywhere (that's how the company got started - big design conference in SF. Here you can see they were focusing on the DNC and RNC).

This is a really implausible idea for one, a really small market (constrained by hosts but also conferences that fit the criteria) for two, etc.

What the story became when they broke through was about turning the excess living inventory hundreds of millions of people have into a place for people to stay. This has benefits for both sides it turns out and is widely applicable and massively scalable.

Those are really, really different stories. Like, startling different. But if you can't not only tell the second one but also show some evidence that it could be so, your stuck with the shitty first story. When they started seeing the behavior during YC that pointed them to the second story, they focused the company on it which caused it to grow, investors better understood the potential, and slowly over time it became trivially easy for them to raise money.
Depression Quest – an interactive (non)fiction (2013)
Surrender fiscal sovereignty in return for bailout, Merkel tells Tsipras
A simple way to make your site more secure
It's hard to not view this as whining about the failed gentrification of Reddit (especially with the biker bar analogy).

I'm struggling to think of any successful social network sites that are heavy-handed with moderation. Certainly twitter, facebook, ect. get the same accusations of harboring "unethical" groups.