skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This happened to me around 1½ years ago, and I just thought I'd post a follow-up to a very negative story here.

After this whole thing fell apart I sat down and thought about what I could have done differently, and how it could have made our chances of success better. A lot of the things that happened (break-in, heart attack, etc.) were black swans that probably can't be avoided in the future. I did learn some important lessons though.

- Make sure your co-founders are as engaged as you are. I would even go as far as to say that if you can't find someone that really believes in the idea and is willing to put some serious work behind it it's better to go it alone.

- Make sure expectations are squared off, and you don't oversell the promise of riches. Most startups fail, and your co-founders need to know this. Otherwise you'll end up with broken friendships, which is never a good thing.

- Learn to code. When I looked back I saw that if I had been able to code I would have been a much better manager and founder, and would probably have been able to do a lot of the stuff that gave us so much trouble myself. I've since become pretty proficient at PHP, MySql and CSS. And I'm learning python and javascript.

The stuff I'm working on now is coded by myself, and I'm doing it alone. Not because I don't want a co-founder, far from it, but I don't want to have a co-founder that drags the whole venture down.
Dumb question time. What are the aughts?
Right on. That's one of the things I learned from this.
Malcolm Gladwell on spaghetti sauce
Yes, and that's not a contradiction.

The problem comes with the set of all sets that don't contain themselves. Does that set contain itself? Both "yes" and "no" lead to contradiction. That contradiction is the basis of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, the Halting Problem and others.
i am? i thought that is what i was saying...

what's confusing me is that this is being sold as a "high end" drive. it's not. it's a drive engineered to be as cheap as possible, using lower quality components, that's being sold as "fast" only because it has compression. put compression (eg with zfs - i don't know what other file systems have transparent compression) on an intel drive and it should be better.

but the review hints that the two are linked. if they are, then perhaps it's not as simple as that.
Are you really sure that's what you mean?

If this is what you call talentless http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3pUItwVxyc

And let me tell you, musical talent alone will not get you very far in showbusiness.
Yes, or even just figure out HOW (you're going) to measure it.
There's nothing wrong with you downvoting comments you disagree with.

However, there are people who will downvote a comment and then downvote comments that have nothing to do with the one they disagree with.
I think he actually means well. Sometimes his ideas are interesting.
I agree, the rhetoric is over the top, but it is true that if I GPL some code I write, then that uses copyright law to limit what other people can do with it, and states can and do in extremis enforce their laws with violence.
f I buy some high status item, but then actively work to downplay it?

Is that not a completely hypothetical scenario? You might buy a highly functional item and downplay it (e.g. I wore my expensive dive computer as a watch for a while because my regular watch was off for repair, but I didn't intend it as a means to start conversations with people about my last dive trip) but the only purpose of a high status item is to telegraph high status - there's literally no other reason for it (to continue in the same vein, no real divers wear Rolexes!).
That seems a ludicrous suggestion. I for one don't read HN every hour, why should I be prevented from downvoting something just because I'm not an obsessive reader?

And any suggestions such as

"You can only down-vote for up to two hours after
your first activity that follows a pause in your
activity of up to three hours, unless ..."

are too baroque to be worth considering.

So ask - why are people down-voting you? Are you saying bad things? Are you saying things of no value? Are you saying things of value and people don't appreciate how insightful you really are?

If you think it's the latter, perhaps you need to learn how to express yourself clearly for your audience. There was a discussion very like this elsewhere recently, and here's something I wrote:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1021504
Aught 3 = '03
Twenty Aught 6 = 2006
Cherry-picking the data set for the most radical examples you can find proves nothing. It's like saying that Christians are contaminated because the Westboro Baptist Church is crazy. You can't extrapolate from a single data point and unaided reason to actual reality.
Yahoo Answers and Yelp are the ones I would pick.

I think the issue is more about providing a meta-experience as games do rather than the particulars of the game mechanics.
This looks unofficial, but Github has a version that has updates over the past few years:

http://github.com/ato/nailgun/tree/master/nailgun/
Hacking in Excel is much like hacking in any other language. I love the power it gives me and the fast development of analysis spreadsheets.

The graphs are ugly by default though, but 2008 made strides to fix that.
On the last but one page, there is some discussion of this issue.
You need to look into YUI. It satisfies your requirements and is nicely cross-browser. Their datamodel is also built so as to support tables going against a server for the data etc..

Good stuff.. there's a learning curve there for sure, but it is well built and free.
Since I'm mentioned in the post I'll put my $0.02 in the bag here.

The you'll probably fail comment was meant as a reality check because I think that the commercial success of that particular project is doubtful, even if the project itself is a success in terms of execution and use.

Simply because it targets a niche. But I'm really happy Daniel bit the bullet and built it because I think it is a useful thing to have.

The 'Failure is not an option' mentality that some seem to bring to the start-up scene always has me in stitches, because it is really terribly naive to think that somehow you are different and bullet proof. After a couple of failures you begin to get the hang of how to avoid failure in the ways that you've already seen before, and you find new, interesting ways to fail.

But everytime you 'fail', you also simultaneously succeed, you succeed in learning, in educating yourself. Three failed start-ups is probably the equivalent of a badge of merit and positions you very well for a possible success the fourth or the fifth time. It's not just luck, it is a combination of a lot of factors:

- idea

- timing

- team

- execution

- luck

- interaction with customers / audience

- market development

All those have to go your way to hit one out of the park. But at the same time you could be defining success as for instance building a site that attracts more than 'x' visitors per day, or being ramen profitable, or being able to live comfortably of your product.

If I look back across the years my own score is a mixed bag:

- successful consultancy business

- successful license business

- homerun on the webcam stuff

- a string of 'moderately successful' (as in lots of
users but not much $)

- two major losses

- a string of failures, most of them small ideas
worked out over a period of days, weeks or months.

If you're not prepared to 'take your lumps' the success will also never be yours, so plan ahead, know that if you start a project you can skew the odds a bit in your favor by manipulating those factors that are directly under your control and if you fail make sure you get the maximum mileage of your 'failure' in terms of study points.

Then try again, with the odds more in your favor because of your increased knowledge. One day you will succeed.
2009 Ruby Survey Results
Sorry JacquesM -- didn't mean to "out" you. After all, I left off the M!

As usual, you are dead-on target with your comments.

You are also going to owe me dinner for your prediction it won't be a commercial success. Once it is, we're going to sit down and have a nice meal of roasted crow prepared for you to eat :)
dating service with genome sequence? like ratemygenome.com or what?

23andme does allow two partners to predict what features their child might have though.
Ask HN: In terms of the economy, are we any better off than in Sept of 2006?
The Nasdaq is currently at the level it was in September of 2006. In 2006, due to dividend trading and loose regulation, low interest and great speculation in the housing markets, we were driving 80 miles an hour towards an economic cliff.

.

It is now 4 years later. We just printed a bunch of money to bail out the banks. We have lowered interest rates rock bottom.

.

My question: Have the laws changed regarding dividend trading? Has any thing changed regarding all the other factors that led to this?

.

My mom is getting a lump sum of money from her pension, she wants to buy a second home. Isn't this a big gamble. In another 2-6 years isn't the market going to crash but only larger?

.

HN what are your thoughts?
Virtually no one will even notice, except iPhone users, who probably won’t notice either. But the ones who do notice will smile quietly and thank you for making their web experience just a little easier

Yep: I have to say I always notice and say a silent prayer of thanks when this happens :)
Political calling is one of few areas you could build something like this and get away with it.

In any type of business-to-consumer calling you're going to need to hire a lawyer before you even design the system because of all the telemarketing regulations (at federal, state and local levels) that have to be followed. There's lots of documentation to be prepared that you have to make available to anyone that asks while you call them, there are rules about how predictive dialers can be used (such as maximum drop call rates and dead air times), etc.

Politicians, when writing these telemarketing regulations, purposely wrote clauses into them excluding political calls. Ya know, consumers don't want to be bothered by telemarketing so our politicians actually listen and pass these laws, but it's OK for them to bother us with telemarketing still.
the 00s for people who aren't comfortable saying "two thousand [1-9]"
re: seeking

SSD's are block devices -- the operating system sees them as a pile of uniformly sized blocks on which it lays the filesystem. When you read() or seek(), the os always fetches the entire block that the read or seek falls in into memory and takes it from there. Any compression on the ssd will necessarily happen per-block, so seeking is not really any more difficult than on more normal systems.
> This was voted down why, exactly?

It might be from the combination of proof-by-assertion and people disagree with you. Take your first comment:

"The fact that women are even capable of conceiving of short-term sexual relationships is a sign that our society is impotent and dying."

See, I'm not sure that's quite right, but I'm always open to being convinced. If you cited, for instance, the fall of Rome when making your point, or GDP per capita growth in traditional/modern societies, or population growth rates, well you might make a point. Instead you're just asserting that you're right.

> Everyone knows I'm right.

Like that. That doesn't work so well. Data, evidence, argument, counterargument. You've actually got some good arguments on your side - replacement rate in population growth, birthrates of the Islamic world vs. the rest of the world, and so on. I just got a copy of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and I think Gibbons points to changes in Roman family life as one of the big causes. So, you could probably make a really interesting and nuanced argument that challenged our beliefs and made us think more.

Now, it goes against a lot of people here's base views, so it would likely receive mixed feedback, but it would definitely get some positive points and discussion going. Heck, I'd be up for reading and discussing with you if you made those arguments because I'm not sold either way on what's going to happen to modern society 100 years out - it's a fascinating and interesting topic. I think data, citations, research, books, and a more flushed out argument and you could really make some interesting points and get some good discussion going.
You're on ;)

The crow will taste really good, because I really hope that it will work out. Whoever modded you down needs to get a sense of humor installed, or their current one fixed.
BSD and Linux Differences
1. no need to post every week to point out that Gruber is wrong (a lot). you may also head to Fake Steve Jobs and find out the same almost every week.

2. don't see any hate speech
Why don't I even see an option to down vote?
Hey, I know, let’s open a data haven on the Moon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terra_nullius (Oh, the joys of Wikipedia :)
That's just, like, your opinion, man...
Cost of Health Care By Country, as Compared to Life Expectancy
Getting Things Done: An Entrepreneurial Prerequisite
Wow, this is a gross misrepresentation of CopyLeft licenses.
Google and India Test the Limits of Liberty
There is a karma threshold for downvotes which your currently below.
The system will never work perfectly for all people. Suggesting ways to improve it is fine, but in this case, I think your situation is too specific, and your suggestions would just complicate things.

Personally, I think complaining about karma is worse than the issue you're unhappy about. You often post questionable content, and I don't see people jumping all over you, so a few downvotes that you don't agree with doesn't seem to be a big issue in the grand scheme of things.
You Don’t Mean Average, You Mean Median
I don't think that precludes him from having to follow the same social mores as everybody else, does it? He shows an amazing lack of empathy, and just about zero ability to comprehend what other people are saying. His comments on this very entry are further proof of that.
I accidentally upvoted you, so now I have to comment (I hate that)

I don't like publicly talking about people's behavior on HN. If you have to criticize, at least do somebody the decency of generalizing your comments first.
If we could answer this with any degree of certainty, we'd all be rich. ;-)

I think there're some areas that we're better off in. Banks are no longer making those crazy subprime loans. People are saving again. A lot of the "walking dead" companies that were going to go bankrupt have gone bankrupt. Lame web startups that are nothing but Rails or Django frontends aren't getting started. Pretty cool web startups that actually take use of some technology enablers (say, cloud computing and mobile) are getting started.

In other areas, we're worse off. Now, people aren't just losing their houses because they should never have bought them, they're losing them because they lost their jobs. There's a shitload of extra money out there that's bound to come out as inflation sometime. The government has added something like $2T of extra debt. We've lost the confidence of the international community, who we need to finance our debt. The government has basically blown its wad as far as fiscal and monetary stimulus goes.

So I dunno. A lot of the excesses that led to this have been trimmed, but things are so much more fragile now that it takes a lot less to set us off on a downward spiral.
> Adapting from incremental failures is critical to success.

That's an absolute gem. Because that is exactly how it goes. My luck was to be involved in two companies that simply paid me a wage, they had a reasonably good idea at the time, they were good enough in their execution, one was 10 years ahead of its time (the idea has since been adopted and is now common practice), the other failed because of terrible planning and marketing.

My gain was as much or more looking from the position of a salaried employee and to learn as much as if it was my own company that failed.

If it hadn't been for those two projects I wouldn't have stood a chance in hell with my own business, even today I benefit from that experience.

The most important thing you can do if your project tanks is to really sit down and mine it for what its worth with respect to the lessons that you can learn from it. Then it's time well spent, otherwise it is wasted and you will likely make the same mistake(s) again.

Especially in a world that is moving so fast that during the lifetime of a single individual no single strategy will continue to work this is absolutely essential.

The days when you could invent a gadget and live your life long on the proceeds are pretty much gone, you are most likely not going to see many people be handed out golden watches for 50 years dedicated service to 'the company' in the future.

And that will only get worse, as product life cycles shorten and new inventions build on previous ones at an ever accelerating pace.
This brings up an interesting problem for me. I've written a number of compilers where operators were not defined at parse-time, but handled via macros that can be defined at any point. This makes the logic for transforming infix operators very difficult. If a change was made to make all operators operate left-to-right, this issue would go away. What do you guys think about this? Would it cause you serious problems while writing code?
And thusly the "problem" is not one of Linux but a funny characteristic of our universe.
50 Things we know now that we didn't know this time last year
I'd probably disagree there: dancing round a potential issue always frustrates me. One thing I like about HN is it is a little more direct in it's criticism. Though the OP is probably a little more stinging than is probably necessary.

(If I'm ever being a douche please take this as open invitation to tell me :))
A disputed matter. No one is going to bet his business on that issue, when alternatives exist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Link...
But if you give it for free, neither Linus nor the FSF will lift a finger (like the NVIDIA drivers) ;)
Yeah I thought it was just my Netbook and Firefox..
This is how Smalltalk does it. "Operators" are just binary messages that are evaluated from left to right.
I would ask: do you have proof of this happening a lot? (or at all)

it could be that lots of people just disagree with your comments... I know I've read occasional threads in the past and down voted pretty much all of your comments on their own merit.
That would be an even better article if it linked to the original research for those items.
That seems a weird standard. I could see why you might not trust his money or those he ended up investing in.

But this is a discussion of areas he thinks will be big in 2010: how does distrust invalidate his thoughts there?

----

As it stands I disagree with part of #6 [I don't know anything about the energy areas so pass on that]. Being in a family of educators and with a family member working in large scale education software: It's a dud arena at the moment. 2010 is unlikely to be the turn around (though I think he is saying it is one he will be watching in 2010 for future investment - on which point I would agree)
it tends to be quite logical and internally consistent too, because the guy keeps obsessive track of every damn thing

Hmm, one rather glaring oversight was that Michelle Rodriguez mutinies during the attack on Hometree and doesn't end up in the brig with the other traitors. The plot hinges on this, and no explanation was given.

Another is that Jake Sully is only there because his brother's Avatar was so expensive that it's still worth taking 5 years to ship it to Pandora even without a trained operator, yet 3 months later the same company says "fuck it, let's just shoot them".

Which is not to say it isn't beautiful to look at, but the script is really inconsistent.
Wouldn't that be a cool firefox plugin? Highlight text and click "Find Original Research." Opens a new tab/window and shows search result for key terms.
To an anarcho-captialists, this is quite a reasonable view.

You just need a different perspective.
Cross-cultural study shows us that monogamy is required for a stable, future-oriented, low-violence society. No non-monogamous society has managed to achieve a fraction of what predominantly monogamous ones have, and civilizations become more monogamous (by necessity) as they develop.

The danger of accepting and encouraging casual sexuality is that it inexorably leads to strong-man polygamy and the subjugation of women, which most people would consider a regression.
It wasn't me that made this about Amichail, it was him.
Charity: Who Cares? A Visual Guide to Giving
From where do these beliefs originate?

As you say it is extremist. Most of us "really free" advocates simply worry that GPL sits in a weird place of presuming that closed source/commercial is inherently bad.

It seems to take the approach of saying "we have to stop Evil Corp from using our code commercially" rather than the, IMO healthier one, of "lets make some free and open code".

I personally can never handle the restrictions of GPL; if I can rewrite and release as BSD I do so.
Either you're deaf, or your standards are very low. Sorry to burst your bubble, but I personally know tens of musicians, and most aren't even that talented, who make Lady GaGa look like the proto-amateur she is. Her talent is to sell, not to make music. Last but not least: she's ugly as hell. But then, so was Britney Spears 10 years ago, and that didn't stop her from becoming "successful".
The problem with that: retain meta-info when copying from machine to machine. Otherwise: yes.