skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is important not to be dogmatic on this issue.

Startups come in all shapes and sizes and there is plenty of room in there for single-founder companies. I have represented at least one single-founder company that eventually grew to $16B valuation in the fiber optics space and another that grew to $1B valuation in consumer electronics software. Are these unusual exceptions to the rule? Sure. But they do exist and there are undoubtedly a reasonable percentage of successful startups like them that start in just this way.

The startup process is best viewed as a continuum, ranging from the very early formative steps to much-more sophisticated steps later on. At some point along the continuum it is essential for most successful startups to add other team members because, when you scale to something great, you basically can't do it alone. But no one says this teaming process has to occur as the absolute first step in the process. It can occur later and, indeed, much later (both of the multi-B companies I mention above were several years into the process before the sole founders brought in other key team players).

The key at the beginning is founder credibility, whether found singly or in a team. If someone is sharp enough, he will find the means eventually to add key people even though, at inception, he finds himself working all alone.

Having said that, I will be the first to say that it takes a pretty exceptional founder to be able to start alone and build to large success. But many such founders exist and they can rank right up there with other founders in all the qualities that count toward success. At least that has been my direct experience in having worked with a broad range of founders over many years.
Being in the right kind of company helps Stimpy in this tale. Some companies have a set pecking order, and changing processes that have been established by a higher up just brings down the fire on your head. In these companies Ren would look like the cooperative one, and stimpy would seem insubordinate.
Single founder, and damn it's tough. :)
I'm also single founder. I've spent quite a bit of time looking for a co-founder and would like a co-founder, but at this point, I figure I just need to ship something and worry about it later.
Why must a tool lending specialist live in Berkeley? Many people (like myself) live in one (cheap) city and work in another. $50k/year is probably plenty in Oakland (which, if I recall correctly, is adjacent to Berkeley).

Incidentally, most people who retire at age 50 will face a lower standard of living than if they worked until age 65. Not "Tool Lending Specialists", however, who get to retire after 30 years of service (rather than the typical 45).
For reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nail_house

Quick summary: Back when they took their communism more seriously, the PRC abolished property rights, so it was common to get property for development by simply eminent-domaining the residents off the land, usually with a "fair" compensation. Property rights are sort of entering the scene now, and it's still controversial whether someone is allowed to benefit from a rise in their property value. This, obviously, makes for a certain amount of tension between developers building a strip mall over an old neighborhood, and the one family in a one-room shack in the middle of an ongoing construction site who refuses to sell.
I also feel it's a breach of trust when you mislead the users you have implemented something in order to test demand. Never mind the ethics, it seems it doesn't always work:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=960721
This is a good, simple explanation of how event-based servers work.

However, I strongly disagree with the "good code / bad code" dichotomy the author presents. Asynchronous, callback-based code is frequently more difficult to write, harder to reason with, more inflexible, and buggier than similar synchronous code. That said, moving to event-based code has generally been worth the cost for us, yielding improvements in performance and reliability that make up for the increase in developer time required.

The problem is that it's often very difficult to refactor synchronous code to be event-based since it requires an inversion of control. An attempt at changing clear, intention-revealing synchronous code to work asynchronously frequently results in ugly, hard-to-follow callback hell. Worse, a single piece of blocking code left inside the event loop can now render all of the work you've done moot, meaning such refactorings tend to sprawl.

This is why I think attempts to bridge this gap, making asynchronous read more-or-less the same way as asynchronous code, are very valuable. Scala's delimited continuations, coming in the upcoming 2.8 (http://www.scala-lang.org/node/2096), could help take a lot of the pain out of using event-based servers effectively.
DIY Publishing: The Amazon Way
I'm a big believer and promoter in small, highly-performing teams. Teams get that way by having a lot of different skills and worldviews and still managing to mesh. So I'm on-board with your comment.

What I've found, however, is that cofounders are especially tricky to integrate. I think once you have a running app/business it gets easier, but that entire process of taking something fuzzy and making it concrete is just a very difficult process for some folks. People are really good at BSing! Heck, if there was a prize for sitting around talking about startups it'd be a big bunch of folks winning it (myself included at times). But once you move past idle talk and start feeling for a market and a problem? It's not so sexy any more. And then when you're talking about all the hours that's required? People have a tendency to melt into the woodwork.

The ones that are extremely motivated are usually that way because they're emotionally attached to some concept -- and that concept may or may not be workable in the market. Which means it's like pulling teeth trying to have an honest conversation about viability.

Then there are the technology bigots, of course, and the "idea" guys.

I don't know about other startups, but the one I'm working on now is a pretty big commitment -- big enough that my "day off" is basically taking a long lunch today and surfing HN. The rest of the week, day and night, I'm working.

I don't see that combination of willingness to work on something that might not be hot at first and also being able to pivot when needed as being very prevalent. It's probably just me, though.
Ask HN: Resources for Mentoring a Coder?
A friend of mine asked me to mentor him. He started coding PHP several years ago and is now doing Ruby-on-Rails. He loves coding (like most of us) but doesn't have the foundational knowledge of algorithms, data-structures, and computer architecture.

I'd like to help him get started on that foundation in a way that's fun. Originally I thought we'd go through SICP together - the book and lectures are both freely available and the fact that it came out of the freshman lecture series at MIT make me think it might be a good place to start. On the other hand, it seems like it might be a little too much for the time we'll have (roughly an hour a week together and whatever time we spend working through it on our own). The "Little Schemer" seemed like it might be a good alternative, but I haven't read it so I don't know.

I'd love to hear recommendations for engaging books that introduce some of the more foundational CS topics while not straying too far from the actual writing of code. Or, if you think some other format would be more beneficial, please let me know. An alternative idea I had was to give a coding problem (for example, "Sort this list") and then work on refining it together while examining the runtime attributes.

Thanks!
How To Become A Hacker
Unusual Software Bugs
Ask HN: Try my new reverse crossword puzzle database
My dad has gotten me into crossword puzzles lately and after seeing similar clues and answers across puzzles I got interested in the symmetry.

Long story short I put a ton of puzzles in a database and made a simple interface to browse them. See an answer and easily view all the clues that have pointed to it (and vice versa).

If there are any other crossword puzzle fans out there you may enjoy looking at things from this side. I have to say it has helped improve my speed.

http://crosswordtracker.com/
But very useful for laughs.

I doubt anyone on HN is really basing hiring decisions off of this one anecdote. Lighten up people, it's a funny story.
Study: Youth have more mental health issues than previous generations.
We have a mac-mini in our office hooked up to our tv and we use Apple's wireless keyboard and a generic bluetooth mouse. Everyone in the office with an iPhone also uses Air Mouse, Remote, Boxee apps too, but they're mostly for novelty over function. Without the keyboard / mouse though, screenshare from our other macs works best.
Probably credit cards as well.
Unfortunately for the thesis, we have a well-established counterexample.

http://www.jwz.org/hacks/why-cooperation-with-rms-is-impossi...
You can thank Arthur Rosenfeld for energy savings
I'd rather start my own ;)
Complaints greet Google Nexus One phone
Light Touch - instantly turns any flat surface into a touch screen
Yea I've never even tried this on windows, if I wanted to use windows with it I'd set it up on a linux box and route my windows machine through that in which case you wouldn't have the issue you described.
EDIT:
Ah I just realized what you meant about windows and packet reordering. It's actually not an issue with tunnel splitter because all packets will come in order. Tunnel splitter uses N standard TCP connections to tunnel through. The actual data will come to tunnel splitter out of order and it will deal with reconstructing the data, not the OS.

As for the 6 15Mbps connections those were just arbitrary numbers I picked. I'm currently stuck with sucky slower connections which is what I'm using it with. And DSL not cable. I'm not sure what you say about cable is true though since most cable modem speed cap is on the modem itself not at the ISP. At least that used to be the case. Also if you were using different ISPs that wouldn't be an issue, as long as they aren't sharing their network.

In terms of the pure linux routing solution, that is pretty interesting... Does it require that the remote machine has two physical interfaces or could you do the same with virtual interfaces like eth0:0 and eth0:1. Either way there are a few drawbacks with that solution. It will send 100% of your traffic through it rather than being able to selectively proxy. Also it only round robins so there is no intelligent load balancing as there is in tunnel splitter.
i like the improvements; good work. also like the scholarship contest idea.
But he's also unusual in other ways. He never quit his day job and he doesn't live in any of the major technology areas.

(He's also remarkably forthright about his experiences and finances... something I find really motivating)
The least assholish method would be to src the Craigslist posting page in an <iframe>, and pre-fill the form via javascript from the containing page.
I did the sketches (pencil+paper+scanner), my co-founder did the music + video compositing of the commercial, and we paid $100 for the voiceover. We're DIY people so we had to give it a shot ourselves first. :-)

You can see an earlier version here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aScFQhwHfyE
with a totally different feel...
Secure DNS with BIG-IP v10.1 DNSSEC
I think the Smart Bear guy was a single founder too.

(edit: His name is Jason Cohen)
So the conclusion you think is obvious changes after you get more data, but you still think the data are not important for reaching that conclusion?
Didn't mean to sound that heavy. The daily wtf is in my rss; I read them all. (That's why I know the formula so well.)
There was a discussion here recently on the Chinese perspective of Avatar:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1039121
Rackspace vs. EC2: Performance Analysis
In the middle of a conversation about, among other things, not taking things too seriously, someone downvotes a comment of obviously lighthearted intent (comes with a convenient emoticon!). Sometimes I suspect there's a secret HN Cabal dedicated to the smushing of any hint of levity.
I found this today and am going to take the course as a refresher. It's a crunchcourse for SICP, all free. And since other folks will be doing the same thing, it seems like it may have an active community paced along with it.

I work with another guy who has an EE MS, but is going to code for our startup (he's a cofounder). So we're going to do this course together, so that I can help bring him up to speed. Essentially, I'll be his more experienced study buddy, but there will still be a forum I can go to when I have questions.

URL: http://www.crunchcourse.com/class/structure-and-interpretati...
The mysteries of Venn diagrams
Maybe they'll finally implement an Amazon AppEngine service, but this looks suspiciously enterprisey.
"JavaScript: The Good Parts", built-in object augmentation and namespacing
My first startup I was the sole Founder and I had a number of early employees. I was the prime mover and I was the one who had the most stock. Until we were funded, their salaries were paid with my savings. My second startup I was the Founder but I had a bunch of early employees who were called co-Founders. I was still the prime mover but no one was getting paid until we started to ship products. We basically had equal amount of stock even though I started the company first and I took risk when no one else would. My experience is that it was a lot harder to get VC fundings when there were large number of co-Founders. VC's are not company builders and in order to ensure timely execution towards a financially successful exit, they would have no problem firing the Founder(s). So in some way, having a large number of co-Founders is sub-optimal (for the VC's).
Very true. We show our uptime report to our customers. That in itself is probably worth more that what we're paying Pingdom.
That looks really cool, thanks for the link!
Clarinet FTW :)
Agreed. Also probably the only way you won't get shut down by CL. I've heard that they monitor their usage pretty closely, so if you were to do something like cross-post from your forms or use CURL on your server to retrieve the forms/CAPTCHA they would find it pretty quickly.

The most recent issue was CL blocking Yahoo Pipes access. They unblocked those IPs, but for a while had banned YP due to resource concerns.

So yea, you probably should make sure that the user's browser is the one to make the request to the CL servers. Use JS to help prefill those values.
Одноклассники.ru
Conversations About The Internet #5: Anonymous Facebook Employee
It's important to note that LPG (liquefied petroleum gas, mostly propane) is very much not the same thing as CNG (compressed natural gas) from an engineering perspective.

CNG tanks have to keep much higher pressures and are therefore quite a bit more expensive. As a previous commenter noted, $2k-$3k just for the tank is about right, at least for a new, light unit. If you're willing to go the solid steel route, you can probably still get something old and heavy [1] for under $1k, but good luck finding capacity at under $100/GGE (gasoline gallon equivalent).

Lastly, there's the safety question. Currently, CNG cars have remarkably good real-world crash experience. I don't believe there's a single tank burst or fire in a collision [2]. I'd be curious to know if other countries, with more lax regulations, have as good safety statistics.

TANSTAAFL

LNG (liquefied natural gas) is also quite different from LPG. I've looked into it, if only as an emergency reserve fuel tank. Turns out that to store it indefinitely requires refrigeration (or, presumably, absurd amounts of insulation), else it'll boil off, escaping out the pressure relief valve installed in the tank for just such an eventuality. Fortunately, like a pot of water on a stove, it doesn't all boil off at once, so there's little risk of leakage if one always uses enough vapor to keep the pressure down.

[1] To the tune of hundreds of pounds. This is less likely to be a concern for converting trucks, but I notice a fuel economy difference carrying just one adult passenger in my Civic GX.
[2] I haven't looked this up in the last 3 years or so. Corrections/updates are appreciated.

Edit: added paragraph on LNG.
I play drums proficiently.

I also play guitar, but not so proficiently....
Lycos was not a single founder startup. It was a weird deal where CMGI bought the technology, turned it into a company, and then hired someone to run it.

Nor was Amazon, really: Bezos had a de facto cofounder called Shel Kaphan, who wrote all the initial code.
Green Sea Slug Is Part Animal, Part Plant
I play several, but not necessarily what I'd call proficiently.
I had a similar experience outsourcing to India. While the English wasn't as broken, and as far as I could tell, the code was clean, the one week project took one month to finish with bugs in the end.
I'm now a single founder (again). I also was a single founder with the first three startups I did. I keep trying out cofounders, but they all seem to lack perseverance. Most also have difficulty understanding the tech. I would welcome a business cofounder any day. Email me if you are interested.
Passwords Aren't As Secure As We Think - How to Fix That
> Linux tried “free” but their efforts were unfocused and uncoordinated.

As if linux ever went head to head with anything.

The whole strength of the thing comes from the fact that it is 'unfocused' and 'uncoordinated', it is the proverbial grass roots movement. Slow to get off the ground but longer term in my opinion unstoppable.

Every time I download a new distro, be it knoppix, redhat/centos or (k)ubuntu I'm amazed by how much better and more polished it is than the previous version.

Give it time. Linux is already more pervasive than most people realize, in the embedded world especially.

That google chrome os the article mentions is based on Linux.
Yes, one, proficiently in my opinion. (drums if it's any help.)
Soprano recorder, occasionally.
ojbyrne would take issue with you calling Kevin Rose a single founder. ;-)

A bunch of the other ones seem suspect too. Wikipedia lists the founder and first CEO of Lycos as Bob Davis - Michael Mauldin invented it as a research project, but if you go by research project inception and not incorporation, Larry Page is the sole founder of Google.

Be wary of information from random blogs. ;-)
I've recently wondered, is the common knowledge that kids pick up languages quickly and better than adults really true?

The question is insufficiently precisely formulated to be answered. Unreferenced BS follows.

As you pointed out children don't actually pick uplanguages that fast. It takes a motivated English native speaker about 600 hours to achieve near native fluency in German if they have any gift for languages. That's just classroom and home study, not talking immersion. It takes on the order of 10,000 hours for children to learn a language with native fluency.

Even for children who started learning a language by immersion before 14 (approximate cut-off point for native fluency) there's a decent statistical relationship between vocabulary and the age at which they started learning. Obviously if you moved with your parents to X at ten and are a voracious reader you'll beat the deprived kid from the slum estate, statistical relationship.

Learning a language that's closely related to one you already speak isn't that hard if you are totally immersed. Grammar books, vocabulary lists, dictionaries, helpful native speakers all help tremendously. It is possible but incredibly hard for an 'adult' (14+) to learn a foreign language natively, unless they're a biological freak (hyperpolyglot, remembered from SciAm, treat with appropriate caution)
This is why the iPhone/iTouch is so powerful: it's not just a device, it is a hardware platform for anybody who needs to build a small, mobile device. Not just the universal remote control: we've already seen apps that turn the iPhone into a medical device, a musical instrument, and a barcode scanner.

This is also where Android, being more open, has a potential edge -- it should be possible to make even better things given the greater freedom allowed, but at present the massive market share advantage of the iPhone means we're going to continue to see innovation primarily over there in the short term.
Trolling the neighbors isn't particularly hard. Just about anything with religion/politics/sex will do.
Seth's Blog: The lesson from two lemonade stands
Scheme from Scratch - Bootstrap v0.7 - Symbols
Think about Gödel numbering or Cantor diagonalization.

Let's assume discrete, rectangular representations of images (width, height in pixels and colorspace of #000000-#FFFFFF). Here's an injective mapping from natural numbers (the indices of the vector of images) to actual images:

# In a C-like language where ** is
# the exponentiation operator, and
# ints are unbounded.
int colors = 0xFFFFFF + 1;
int i = 0;
vector images = new vector();
while(i++) {
for(int width = 1; width < i; width++) {
int height = i - width;
int area = width * height;
int pixels[area];
int combinations = colors ** area;
for(int c = 0; c < combinations; c++) {
for(int p = 0; p < area; p++) {
pixels[p] = c % (colors ** (p + 1));
}
images.append(new image(width, height, pixels));
}
}
}
some of my music http://three.bandcamp.com
Please, would experienced someones address this question?

For example, the essential difference between a co-founder and employee #1, and why you might want the one to perform some set of duties rather than the other.
This emotional resonance is still pattern matching, but of a different kind. Rather than match patterns between notes you're matching patterns between note patterns and the emotions they created. The awareness you're talking about, in my view, is way of emotionally visualizing the reaction. In a similar way we try to visualize something before actually building it.
Short answer: because it has a lower carbon:hydrogen ratio.

NG is mostly methane (minimum 88% if I recall the stickers on the PG&E "pumps"), with 1 carbon and 4 hydrogens. The rest is made up primarily of also fairly short (2-4 carbon) chain hydrocarbons.

Traditional gasoline is heptane (7 carbon) and octane (8 carbon).

Methane's ratio is 0.25.

Heptane's ratio is 0.4375, and octane's is 0.4444. (Longer chains asymptotically approach 0.5).
I'm a single founder. I fall in the "tech cofounder" and would welcome a "business cofounder" any day. And, speaking of which, find me if you'd be interested.
Semi-pro bass player but somewhat able on guitar and keys.
I've never seen someone say it's technically superior. I don't think any PHP dev in their right mind would even think of making that claim and I've certainly never seen such claims on here.

And definitely not in this post. And, yes, you are a troll.
Joking aside, if you are in a place, or are in a situation where the legal system is not likely to provide much recourse if someone doesn't pay or tries to rip you off, I think some sort of backdoor isn't that bad an idea.