skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem is that success has many different definitions, and to succeed at one of them, you often have to fail at several others.

For example, say that an entrepreneur has this burning idea for a revolutionary new MMORPG, one based around social interaction instead of hack 'n slash. They find out that very few people care, but in the course of building it, they end up building an easy way to share photos online. Should they keep pushing through with their original idea and refuse to fail? Or should they admit that their original idea was kinda useless and go with what people actually want?

This happens over and over again. The podcasting company that realizes their product is lame and invents a way to broadcast 140-character messages by SMS. The server-side JavaScript framework that nobody uses who decides to build a collaborative editing app on top of it. The guys who wanted to put art galleries online, then discover that art galleries don't want to be online and so branch out into general online stores. The HotOrNot clone that compares Harvard students with barnyard animals, then gets busted by the administration and becomes a social network instead.

Problem is that it's not usually possible to tell, a priori, which ideas deserve to fail and which ones will succeed given a bit more effort. Imagine if someone had told Larry Page that his idea to crawl the web and look at the link structure was stupid, and he'd be much better off with a web portal. And that's why entrepreneurship is hard.
I'm unmoved by the statement "Most start-ups fail", or "Most X fail/suck" for any X. Why should a bunch of people failing deter you, or make you think you are going to fail? Yes, doing a start-up means applying your personal resources in order to succeed where others have failed. So does publishing a successful book or song, or winning a medal in the Olympics, or succeeding at any "venture" or uncertain quest in life or trying to achieve any special recognition.

Is succeeding luck or skill? The article basically claims it's all luck in the case of a start-up. This is a terrible attitude for anything involving skill! Successful people are often those who had confidence in their ability and applied themselves ruthlessly.

What limits a competitor in the Olympics, their own ability or capacity to train, or the other competitors who will determine their rank? What limits a book's success, the skill of the author, or the fickle market? The more you understand the market, of course, the more you take what would otherwise be luck and turn it into an opportunity for skill. And if you know what kinds of scores you're competing against in the Olympics and have a sense of your own ability, competing in the Olympics is hardly a foolish idea.

Different Olympic sports provide different kinds of competition. For sprinting, good genetics may give you a strong leg up. For figure skating, your confidence, grace, ability to function under pressure, and hours of training will make you a star.

For start-ups in particular, it's ultimately quite silly to chock everything up to luck. A tech start-up is just good engineering plus good business (and marketing, design, etc.). If you focus just on the engineering, I'm sure it can feel like bad luck when a competitor overtakes you, and likewise if you focus on just the business side in an area requiring strong engineering. But put it all together and it's definitely something one can get good at.

That said, the knowledge and ability to "keep trying" is an asset in itself, so more power to the author. Fortunately, there is much to learn and much skill to develop!
Agreed. It's also important to point out that the timeframe was in the span of weeks, which is minuscule in the scope of typical investing timeframes.
WTF (A chandelier made of human bones): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sedlec-Ossuary.jpg
Just so you know, Google, one of the most successful sites on the Internet, uses layout tables, and so does HN for that matter. I also use tables, and I've visited popular, funded, and cutting edge TechCrunch50 websites with over 100 errors in their markup while my code passes xhtml strict with 0 errors.
it would be interesting to compare that to a file system with transparent encryption on an intel drive.

this is the best way i have found to think about what they are doing (it's a while since i read the article, so apologies if i am just repeating what is said, or get something wrong - iirc, anand hints at the below but doesn't state quite as much):

given an arbitrary, unreliable storage medium, you need to store both "raw" data and additional information for error recovery. it seems that until now there were technical / historical reasons that made it optimal / normal to store these separately, as i have described above (ie a disk stores a chunk of data and then has a relatively small checksum afterwards).

but there's no real reason why that need be optimal in all cases. for example, raid does something different. raid 1 stores two copies (ignore that each has error correction too, for the sake of argument). now raid has certain technical motivations (cheap disks fail, hopefully independently) that make that reasonable.

so what is new about ssds compared to spinning disks that is the enabling factor here? one guess is that since you can read from various chips at the same time you can do something like raid. for example, say you have 8 memory chips, then you could use a raid 5 style approach with one chip as parity, losing 12% of your space. or two chips losing 1/4 of the space.

my inference (and what i think anand implies at some point) is that when you sit down and do the maths, there's some number of parity chips (say) that allows you to start using cheaper chips (with higher error rates).

but that doesn't entail compression.

so either i am missing something, or the compression is optional - perhaps it is being used to hide the fact that they are having to use so much space for error correction? or perhaps it is just a marketing gimmick?

edit: or perhaps without compression it's actually too slow to sell? i think this may be it. and if so, putting compression on an intel drive will actually beat this.

or perhaps there's something about the approach that means the data have to be compressed anyway?
The article basically claims it's all luck in the case of a start-up

Er no it doesn't. I wrote it.

The point is that knowledge and skills are incremental, not pivotal. Startups are like baseball -- you play the numbers. Every time-at-bat isn't a home run, no matter how many skills you have. But if you take that to mean you shouldn't work on your batting skill then you've read something in there that I never intended.
Palindrome Day
Palindrome Day of the century! what is a Palindrome Day anyway? no Palindrome day occurred, Palindrome day of the calendars, Palindrome day of this century was on 2 October, 2001.
Ask HN: What does your workflow look like?
Please share your routine and workflow.
Let's learn from each other.
Clay Shirky on institutions vs. collaboration
Using nginx as a load balancer
Nothing new, all is in the documentation. I just tried to make the things simpler for noobs as I was few hours ago on this subject.
I agree with everything you say, but I didn't get the sense that the original article was about iteration.
The popup only appears the first time any given detail page is loaded, even if javascript is disabled. Reloading the page should clear it. The close button on the dialog now does this if there is no javascript.
Not a fair reply, Zynga today makes >90% of its revenues from virtual goods (and above 80% of that is from Farm-ville) that was not the case when Fred invested when they were makeing >75% of their revenues came from offers.
The GPL is a copyright license, based on existing copyright law and precedent. Yes, it is possible for a copyright holder to make absurd claims about the license, but to enforce it, they'd have to convince a lawyer to take the case and a judge to rule in their favor. For what it's worth, the GPL explicitly states that aggregation in that way does not imply that it's a derived work. MySQL (or Sun, or now Oracle) would be laughed out of court.

Note also that using code licensed under the (for example) BSD or MIT license does not protect you from some loony suing you for copyright violation.
So, the object in the URL is b64 encoded. It says "resolution-tracker" followed by something, then Resolution followed by something.

Also, make error messages pretty, please:

http://resolution-tracker.appspot.com/view?id=d
Creating value through negotiation
Ask PG:  Could you please reduce multi-downvoting by same person?
Multi-downvoting here refers to downvoting a comment and then looking for other comments made by that person and downvoting those also.

Perhaps there could be a time limit for voting on a comment?

Another possibility is to show a record of recent voting so that this practice can be more easily identified and others could upvote to negate the downvotes.
Back in 1980 K&R didn't really work well for me beyond the most basic things, the Lions' Commentary on UNIX 6th Edition, with Source Code did the trick, and it will teach you some basic operating system and UNIX things that are still quite useful. A classic, it's a copy of V6 UNIX with (the first really widely distributed one) including a few device drivers with lots of excellent commentary. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lions%27_Commentary_on_UNIX_6th... for online copies.

The best reference manual is C: A Reference Manual by Harbison and Steele, http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Manual-Samuel-P-Harbison/dp/...

If you like Guy Steele style language reference manuals (e.g. Scheme, Common Lisp, Java) you'll like this; they wrote it for the CMU compiler spinoff Tartan Labs so there would be a rigorous reference.

Bluesmoon's suggested books are also excellent.
Rumored Chrome OS Tablet
> i said in my etsy/san telmo post the other day that more tractors are sold every day in farmville than are sold in the US every year

The supply of real tractors is limited by a large number of things that cost real money including raw materials, labor, and so on. The supply of virtual tractors is not really limited by anything (marginal cost is pretty much 0), so the cost ought to be 0 or awfully close. Granted, there are costs to 'develop' virtual tractors, but those don't limit the production of them once they've been created.
I heard an interesting story that Yahoo pays LinkedIn lots of money to figure out which of their employees are looking to leave in order to offer incentives to get them to stay.

Certainly, employers could do the opposite with that information and let you go, but that's about as simple of a way to get a raise as I could think of (assuming your the type of employee they want to keep around).
That, and also optimizing code that later gets thrown out entirely because requirements or other factors change. There's no benefit to optimizing code that goes in the bit bucket.
I'm using FreeSWITCH on EC2, without any issues. There are kernel images with 1000HZ timing.
Using Rare Words to Estimate Search Engine Index Sizes
If Linked-In ever wants us to connect more often, first they should lower their subscription prices. At $25/month, it's a rip-off, and without a subscription the site looks useless and is not worth visiting too often.

I'm currently subscribed to the rival social networking site Xing.com at about 5.5 EUR/month and satisified with the service being provided.
Please include more useful info in the rss feed. Currently, it only displays the submission title.
There already is. If you go back and look at people's submissions you'll notice that you can't downvote them.
It wasn't. It was just about being able to accept that whatever idea you started out with either is going to fizzle or "evolve" so much that you can't be thinking that one idea will somehow get you through. Instead be prepared to have several ideas, perhaps in many different fields.

People like telling the story of the team who started going one way and ended up somewhere else, successfully, because it conforms to their idea that some kind of attribute must be a discriminating factor (in this case the team is that factor). But I simply don't know if that's a true statement or not. I'd bet that many times it's just a dice roll whether team X can handle as many pivots that are necessary to make it all in one go. That's from my observations of lots of teams, but it's just a guess.

GP hit the nail on the head: good entrepreneurship means knowing when to hang on and when to iterate. And there are no books for that one.

I think that because our brains love order, and because we're always trying to put order on everything we see even if it's not there, we take lots of cognitive leaps to build some kind of mental model on "what it takes to succeed". With the "great teams succeed" model, the brain has a field day because selection bias and circular reasoning is in full-force. Whatever your model is, however, it should include the role of chance or you're likely to be really disappointed. And life is too short to get so distraught over the part that chance takes in getting started.
What's the time limit?

Maybe it could be reduced to two hours say?
I'm probably just struggling to disagree at this point. :-) On the other hand, there's already a lot of information "out there"; I spent years considering the idea of starting and running a business before doing it. Other people don't. To each their own.

If your post was intended to be about iteration, I didn't get that from it. I read "failure" -- especially since the post linked to the whole sordid affair over fundable.com, which has failed in pretty much every sense of the word -- to imply the demise of the company (and the demoralisation of the founder[s]).

For failing quickly -- and iterating, and hopefully learning from the failures -- there are numerous proverbs from Go [1] (the game, not the neophyte language). I also recall reading a very good essay recently, something along the lines of "fail as quickly as possible", but can't find it now.

So, the advice is already out there, for those that would heed it anyway.

[1]: e.g. http://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPossi...
The article reminds me of a Go proverb: "Lose your first fifty games as soon as possible." (http://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPossi...)
I thought there already were controls on multi-downvoting. You can't downvote anything other than the most recent comment by looking at the user's Comments page. [Edit: it looks like it's time-based, probably 24 hours]. Moreover, if you follow the links from the comments page to the actual posts, you still can't downvote them.

I believe there're also rules in the software against downvoting responses to your own farther down in a thread.
Everyone knowledgable about nginx (that I've talked to) says not to use it as a load balancer though. Best practice seems to be to front haproxy with nginx.

I've personally encountered some pretty serious issues when a back-end server isn't responding (nginx hanging); the _balancing_ aspect is non-existent, though there's a third party nginx module for it (upstream_fair); but it generally doesn't seem like there's motivation to encourage/support using nginx as a load balancer.

It's a pity, because nginx does SSL much better than haproxy does. We're still using nginx but we monitor it _very_ closely.
Just use HAProxy.
I had the opportunity to recently watch an Akira Kurosawa film called Ikiru. A beautiful, not overly sentimental film about what someone can do with their life once they are determined to make something with it. Reading this article saddens me because it's positioning failure as an inevitability - but what is really failure? Isn't failure just part of the learning curve?

As someone wiser than me said, it's:

you -> failure -> failure -> success

not

failure <- you -> success
Storage and caching are two different problems so it's reasonable to assume two separate solutions.

In this case, MongoDB is a leap ahead of MySQL; Redis is a leap ahead of Memcached. Both solve the core problems very well and include additional freebies (MongoDB's high-performance aggregate functions and Redis' atomic increments and set and list functions).
While on the topic of nginx, is anyone using nginx to split the groups for performing a/b testing? It seems like a sensible place to randomly place visitors in groups with cookies.
"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."
OCZ's Vertex 2 Pro Preview: The Fastest MLC SSD We've Ever Tested
The Zombie Cookbook - Dia de la muerta
The death metal collective from the damned city of Amsterdamn brings you a mexican intermezzo. Great ringtone.
The idea is that the techie may have more insight into the value of a company, because of their insight into technology. A techie may value Google over AOL and Apple over Dell, instead of just seeing "two web companies" or "two computer companies."

However, a techie isn't in a good position to judge whether a company is overleveraged, etc. if they can't read a balance sheet.
Of course, but that's irrelevant to the utility of git branches. In subversion, yes, you don't go through the hassle of creating a branch for all these reasons. In git though, branches are most commonly used within one developer's workflow. The vast majority of branches are never seen by more than one developer, they are simply an organizational tool to be used at your discretion without imposing any overhead on anyone unless you have good reason to.
I think you can post three links.

Considering the full potential of the web (cheap storage and easy access) why is LinkedIn still limiting itself to just textual information? I'm not expecting them to do it, but it would be a natural extension to their current business.
This still feels like the sort of statement that comes from having not worked with a (D)VCS that does branching well. There is no "inherent organizational complexity" in me having a private branch that I share with no one and which is only used for an hour or two while I work on a critical bug fix.

What you're talking about seems to be multiple, long-running development or release branches. Those are hard to manage and generally a bad idea in any VCS. But, with a system like Git, you don't tend to have long-lived divergent development branches. Typical branch lifetimes are more like hours or days, rather than weeks or months. There are exceptions, but by-and-large, branches are just used differently in git.
You're confusing two separate features. The improved error correction allows using cheaper flash. The compression/dedupe is what improves performance and endurance.
%g tells you the year (modulo the century) in which the current week's Monday took place
That doesn't really answer the question they were trying to ask, but other replies do.
Disagreeing is good :) That's the benefit of the blog+HN approach. You can write an article and then do Q&A in a public forum. It is the best of both worlds. Hopefully by disagreeing we'll explain what we're talking about more.

I remember reading Founders At Work. One of the points that one of the founders made was "don't try to read too many business books" His point, I think, was that it was really easy to fill your head with lots of great ideas. And executing was more important than all of them.

There was a saying I heard once: work on sales and all your other problems will take care of themselves. It doesn't mean that other things aren't important, just that there are some key metrics for any business.

I've spent a lot of time reading a lot of books (and HN) about startups. I think finally it's all congealed with me -- I got it. Perhaps I am sadly disillusioned, but I don't scratch my head like I used to any more. When I read an article like the one I read today, I don't think "What kind of idiots wouldn't invest in such a cool idea?" Instead I think "Wonder why the community has failed this person such that he expects something much different than what he got?"

I'm done commenting, though. We've probably beaten this horse to death by now :-)
Agreed wrt to SSL. I use Engine Yard Cloud which uses HAProxy + nginx, which breaks X-Forwarded-For for SSL requests.
More coverage of this at http://lalawag.com/great-moments-in-google-groups-with-john-...

with some unpublished emails from the original Google group
If you failed Ethics 101 (sociopaths, raise your hand) or are not one to philosophize, you can safely quit reading here.

Or if you value your time or don't like being hectored.
A familiar friend - always worth re-reading:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=229067

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=852405

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=915515

http://searchyc.com/you+and+your+research+hamming
Thanks for this comment, I didn't know about it.
After your comment I google for more infos and find that :

http://affectioncode.wordpress.com/2008/06/28/another-compar...

http://brainspl.at/articles/2007/11/09/a-fair-proxy-balancer...

I'll have to make a try
This was a reasonable post until it got into how "free" software advocates use the powers of state violence to enforce their crooked ways. That just seems a bit far-fetched to me.
Would you stop to consider that a trend of people downvoting each of your comments in a thread is more reflective of your behavior than theirs? You have the lowest batting average by far of anyone on the leaderboard: 0.48! Your comments are downmodded more than they're ignored!

I can remember having downvoted you in this manner several times in the last few months, and I wasn't alone in doing so at the time.

You troll this site pretty frequently, usually in deep threads where you make a bunch of comments expounding upon differently disturbing facets of the same churlish idea. The way you go about doing this is naive enough on the surface that it's believably undeliberate -- you're either completely unsocialized or an expert troll.
What's sad is, even if we continued our "boom" year trajectory , there'd only be a decade of modest job growth: better than 0%, but still less than the 70's, 80's, and 90's.

We need to start rethinking our assumptions about creating jobs: it's not as simple as tax cuts and/or spending programs.
I've never seen Excel used that way, and I'm interested to hear that it can. As a programmer I've usually just fired up an interpreter and run scripts - can you suggest a tutorial for Excel being used as a Mini-OS ??

Thanks.
There's no legal precedent for MySQL's argument that simply using their database is linking.

There's not even legal precedent that linked code creates a derivative work.
it seems like all this tech would make random lookups abhorrently expensive

SSDs are virtualized (like virtual memory), so there is a mapping table from virtual to physical addresses. This is needed for wear-leveling, so you might as well also use it for thin provisioning (aka trim), dedupe, etc. In the worst case, one read command may require reading several pages of metadata from flash to find the data. Because flash is fundamentally so fast, an SSD can tolerate a lot of overhead and still be faster than a hard disk.
If you have an idea but not the skills to execute it, you will most likely need a company (with contract and all) to deliver the product. Hiring friends as designer and as programmer to work remote and for shares of the company has a high chance of disaster, especially if you are not a developer yourself.

One thing that might help could be setting up a schedule where you work together at a co-working place or your local hacker club, etc.