skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There are some really good points in his article. It doesn't deter me from continuing to work on my startup but a lot of it hit pretty close to home.

I had a high paying job, which I hated, and quit to do a startup last year. The problem was that while I was motivated and working night and day, the other 'founders' weren't nearly as devoted to it. As I went months and months without a paycheck, living off credit cards mostly, my new wife and I got further and further into debt (I quit my job 2 weeks before our wedding, that went over REAL well with the in-laws). After about 6 months I realized I was working all hours of the day for no money on a project that had a single digit chance of working out. At that point even if we did get the funding we were looking for I was still going to be paying off my credit card debt for years just to get back to the place I was before I started. So what could I do?

I got a real job, high paying enough that money isn't a problem anymore. We are still paying on the credit cards but we should have them taken care of in about 6 more months. The failure didn't stop me from working on startups though, I've seen what I'm capable of when I work for myself and after that I can't stand to spend my days working for someone else. In fact I'm already deep into a new startup, something that I'll hopefully be able to share with all of you in the next month or so.

Hopefully this time will turn out better than the last.
seems like rails:
"Server	Mongrel 1.1.4" in response headers, application.js with prototype.js in the scripts.
I guess it all comes down to one's priorities. If you put your ego and pride above all else then I don't think any amount of money will ever be enough to quench your self-obsession.

On the other hand, if you have the chance to become comfortably rich and essentially free then why not?

Of course there is a third (fourth, fifth and so on) variation. Perhaps it has nothing to do with pride or money, perhaps you enjoy the work that you do so much that being rich is not something you can enjoy with the same amount of passion.

I'd probably take the money though.
thanks for opening your home to everyone, but no ownership in code at all? It will be exactly like working on a really early stage startup for no equity, but instead of being paid with money, one just gets room and board. I think you should openly say you're hiring, give some equity and say you won't get paid, but have room and board.
A bond is a form of debt. A simple example of how a bond works is as follows: Company X needs to raise $1 million for whatever reason. Company X decides to borrow the money instead of accepting new equity holders. For mathematical simplicity, let's assume that there is only one person willing to lend the money. The terms of the bond are five years, 10% coupon, paid semi-annually, and no other provisions. What this means is in five years time, the company will pay back the $1 million they borrowed. In the intervening years, Company X will pay $50,000 ($1 million X 10% / 2) twice a year to the investor; this is the interest owed on the money borrowed.

There are many other provisions that the bond could carry. Some bonds are convertible. This means that the person who lent the money could choose to convert the bond to Company X's stock at a specified price or ratio. Some bonds are callable. This means that Company X can choose to buy back the bonds before the five years are up. Some bonds have no intervening interest payments at all. The investor gets the equivalent of interest by buying the bond at a discount based upon prevailing market rates.

The main reason given for the final breaking of Bear was a sudden loss of confidence among its hedge fund clients. The clients were afraid Bear would not be able to cover the amount the clients had invested with the fund should they choose to withdraw their money. It was the equivalent of a run on a retail bank but in the investing world instead.
potentially they can add custom domains too, I do not think reddit will let you customize your subreddits too much :)
The agreement states that, but is it actually true? What happens to your phone?
Not necessarily a minor difference. People have added blogs and message boards provided by 3rd parties and themed them so that they appear integrated with the main site. Does it follow that there might be a demand for an "integrated" niche social news equivalent? Kind of reminds me of ning too.
You will have gained real-world experience and the drive to never work for a major corporation ever again.

True, but it seems rather extreme to spend a whole summer to learn that, especially at this stage in his life.

I suggest working for the smaller company, because you'll probably have more scope for trying new things, and thus learn more.
The technology that toppled Eliot Spitzer
I didn't suggest that mac's were immune to threats, that would be stupid. Given their BSD base, though, mac's are inherently more secure than windows boxes.

I think the difference is great enough that you can't use virus penetration as a measure of system popularity.
My big company internship was really boring and I mostly just read sites like Hacker News a lot. Make sure the match is right and that they actually need an intern. Sometimes they just hire you because you want to be hired and you end up doing mostly nothing.

Thats just my 2 cents though.
I actually read True Names at your suggestion. The concepts were worthwhile but it exemplifies the reason many consider Scifi to be a literary ghetto - that for many sf authors the story is just a vehicle to get an idea of theirs across, artistic consideration being secondary. Not to say literary ends are more valid than conceptual ones, but it seems unfair to scifi that the genre has it's artistic merits judged by averaging both.
He should have started the article by defining what he means by "success".

Me, I don't need plentyoffish money to be successful. Just give me some hope and some extra cash and I'll call it a small win.
Why don't you try one out and come to your own conclusions? For me, it was their applications. Although they are by no means perfect, they gave me the incentive to try the OS. After that, it was a no brainer.
Sir Arthur C. Clarke: The Times obituary
I don't have any exact quotes but (correct me if I'm wrong) Steve Jobs has historically been against a service like this, and said his customers are quite happy buying music per-track.

Yet just as with the iPhone SDK, where he initially did not want third party developers writing applications on it, he listened to the demands of the market. Yeah, he's still being a little up tight about iPhone App registration...but I guess my point is the man makes an initial guess of what's best for the company, but then listens to the market in the end, as he should.

Exciting stuff though. I'm psyched.
I can't necessarily say that my Mac is better than my PC, but I can say that I have never experienced a security problem with the Mac. With my PC, I recently deleted IE7 from the thing because I picked up some something while browsing a well-known German news site that caused IE to open multiple times, bringing the computer to a screeching halt.

The Mac, however, is not immune from performance problems. I occasionally get the spinning beach ball of death when an application suddenly decides it doesn't want to work anymore.
Google's riches rely on ads, algorithms, and worldwide confusion
Fannie, Freddie cleared to pump $200 billion into market
yeah this would have got me almost to the point where i could change the color of the bar !!
And that's why I got out of physics!

As far as the correlation goes - There's a clear correlation there, though it doesn't seem like they're trying to propose a causality. Though they kind of bill it as a causality at the beginning of the article, I don't think the actual study is suggesting that drinking more or less beer will directly affect how often you're published.
While this is mostly true, it's really the case against doing anything especially ambitious, not just starting startups. You could make an almost identical case against trying to write a great novel. The novelists you hear about in the press are the successful ones. Most people who try fail. It sucks up huge amounts of time regardless. The community is littered with sad, failed novelists. And are the ones who succeed satisfied? No; they just start another novel.
Exactly my thoughts as well. I am surprised they don't ask you to sign over your soul too! They don't even have to select a winner:

TextWise does not claim or promise to select any Entrant or dispense any money if, in the Sponsor’s sole discretion, none of the entries meet the Sponsor’s Challenge criteria.
Doesn't this mean they can leverage their assets even more which is what caused the credit crisis in the first place?
Thanks for the tip - think I'll pick it up.
"Steve Jobs [...] said his customers are quite happy buying music per-track. Yet just as with the iPhone SDK, where he initially did not want third party developers writing applications on it, he listened to the demands of the market."

Maybe he's just being deliberately misleading.
When you need to ask a motivational speaker (such as Guy Kawasaki) to endorse your own billion-dollar acquisition, you know you have a problem.

I love MySQL, but I'm not convinced of the headline. Remember what Sun said about and then did to Cobalt Networks...
Interesting that it was a quantity measurement, not a quality measurement (which would be very hard to do, I imagine) Seems obvious that if you're out drinking beer you're not writing :)
anyone doing something like this in Bangalore/India?
I'd suggest that $3,000 wouldn't pay for a great deal of development of any kind (except you could theoretically get three-and-a-bit Digg clones I guess ;) so maybe you should look at hacker-friendly prizes instead. XKCD goodies, 100,000 reddit karma points, something like that.

I used to run a fantasy football league in a school and there was massive interest just for the fun of playing and the kudos of winning. The only prizes on offer were a team shirt, a pair of boots and a wooden spoon (for the loser, natch). If you could find similar things which would appeal to hackers, you'd spend less, get more interest and get to keep some cash for next year.
Second Egan, for 'Permutation City' and his short stories (in 'Axiomatic', especially).

Also, Greg Bear's 'Blood Music' inspired me both with its vision and its jumbling of genres, especially given its publication date (1985).
Possibly a stupid question:

When you say Javascript, you don't mean server side Javascript do you?
Thanks a lot. I was looking for a book like that.
One of my favorite texts about the SemWeb:

http://blahsploitation.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-always-figured...

Computers are symbol processing machines. All the hits of computing. All the mega-applications. All the applications that have actually made a difference in the world. They are all examples of this same principle : identify an interesting syntactic commonality and create a tool to support working with it. Without worrying what the data means... Relational databases? The web? Blogging tools? PhotoShop? Java? All of them are widely adopted, generic solutions, because they make interesting syntactic generalizations but are semantically uncommited.
What you can learn from Arthur C. Clarke
Yecch, I fat-fingered that.
This article is very well written - might not reflect the truth of how everything HAS to be in a startup but definitely reflects how most startups end up being. Also, and as I have been lately figuring out, the reason most startups end up being like this is because most startups have a misplaced understanding on how things are supposed to work.

A lot of them try to do too much or try to compete when they should be ideally figuring out the business.

Good mentorship goes a long way of making the startup work the right way.Getting good mentors who have done startups is really the harder part.

Startups are good for society and hopefully good for the individuals who do them - but they need to be done the right way. Matts article serves as a cautionary tale to every startup entrepreneur. If he describes your startup really well, you are probably doing it the wrong way.
CiUI - CNET iPhone UI
Too good to be true?

Anyway, if this comes to pass I can imagine playlists being a hot commodity. Kind of little out-of-band time-shifted radio stations. Downloading will stop being "try before you buy" and will become, well, "just try this".

A plan like that would make me consider buying an iPod and putting up with the iTunes DRM.
alright, we can be the πλ chapter.
The Next Programming Skill You Should Learn
Some kind of cute parlor game.

Does the theory work for countries other than the USA?
I guess then he'd need a motive to be misleading. Off the top of my head I could see him doing it to enforce his love for surprise in his demos...any other ideas?

I don't know how I'd feel if he was being deliberately misleading. He is still a CEO of a large publicly traded company...and should be somewhat upfront about what they're up to. I mean to hide is one thing, but to deliberately mislead?
If they just said they were hiring, they would get the same lookover as everyone else who's hiring. If you're going to take the time to do something different, why not highlight that and use it to draw people in - there wouldn't be nearly this much discussion if they had just said "Hey, we're hiring and we can't pay you except in room and board."
Hmm. Are you storing our passwords as plain-text? It's always disappointing to see my password emailed to me after I've registered on a site. I picked it out, I know what it is, but now I have to wonder how it lives in your database since you don't seem to care about security at all.
He’s Baaack! Quattrone Starts Qatalyst Partners.
MPI Cluster with Python and Amazon EC2
Memory usage comparison: Rails 1.2.6 vs 2.0.2
Treasure your blog? Tell the world about it.
Very nice, well done, I have to agree. Reminds me of Basecamp.

Was very easy to get started that is for sure
I think this article is a great read... but just as he calls success in startups binary, so is the definition of what a startup actually is. Some aren't looking for that payoff in the end, and the lear jet. Some people simply just want to work for themselves, and can lead a simple lifestyle.

The idea that you have to 'go big or go home' in tech is getting more outdated I'd say. If I have to choose between being a corporate toad or a work-enslaved zombie, I choose neither. We live in a free-market economy, which gives us the flexiblity to make what we want with it. Isn't that what entrepreneurism is all about?
I used to think that I needed to make enough money so I would not have to worry about working.

But anyway you should always produce (See pg essays). So the thing about money is not to solve the problem now, but to be able to have enough resources so you can have more freedom on deciding what to work on. If I am lucky, I should be able to work until I die.
Bad decision. You should diversify it is economy 101.
I'm a fan of The Diamond Age, myself. I found it inspirational that nanotechnology could make the fulfillment of basic needs effectively free, that creating programs could translate into creating real objects, and that an interactive device could amplify learning.
everyone keeps saying jobs/apple changed their mind about the sdk. i don't believe it. i think it's that they knew they are in entirely uncharted territory here, and they wanted to take the time to do it right. and apple typically never pre-announces anything, so it wouldn't be like them to say "we're working on an sdk, it'll be ready in a year."

they pre-announced the iphone itself, but that was due to fcc issues. if they hadn't done that, the world would have known anyway, due to the paperwork they had to file.
"90. Standardize link colors. Make sure that users know which links they've visited and which they haven't."

Yeah, your red links that stay red when followed are so very standard.
What’s The Next PHP Stack?
Nice job. Have you thought about how you'll monetize it?
I'm more interested in his points on the server component of things, comparing Mongrel for Ruby and also mentioning nginx.

I dont have any experience with nginx but have heard good things. What are your guys' thoughts?
My junior year of college I lived with a guy roommate of mine, and we both always put the toilet seat down even though there were no girls living there (and rarely visiting). We also showered and kept the house clean. It's really not that hard and should have nothing to do with gender.

As for the toilet seat, I put both the seat and the lid down. I just think it looks better that way.
Ars: iPhone apps can only be deployed/tested on 5 iPhones before going to the App store
Thanks for posting your thoughts on start ups. This was very encouraging to read. See, we do need to hang in there!
I agree. When I lived with my girlfriend, I had a bit more money and she had a bit more time, so I paid the utilities while she did the stuff I wasn't as good at (read: didn't like), like laundry. That worked out pretty well, I thought.

If it had instead been the case that I just paid extra while she did nothing to make up for it, it would have been awkward, like she owed me something. I think it's important to make sure that everyone feels they are contributing their fair share to the cost and upkeep of the house.
I absolutely agree... If you can't read your code, it shouldn't have been written in the first place. Otherwise, there's no way you'll be able to debug it when something goes wrong six months from now.
It seems to be available in German, but comments on Amazon say the translation is abysmal. Hope you manage your translation soon ;-)
@njoubert - could you email me please? I'm about 120% certain I can help you a lot w/ this decision. Email is in my profile.
MySQL is not the world's most popular database. Berkeley DB is, by a long shot.
my uncle is a prof there. I guess they partner with MS.
5 Tools to Track How Much Time you Waste while Online (including YC 8aweek and RescueTime)
Dollars tough to sell on streets of Amsterdam
The degree is going to be in CS. I chose to do a second undergraduate degree because I didn't want to do a PhD in finance or economics. I found myself more and more wanting to write code. I can get lost in a good problem for hours and not even realize it. I've always been fascinated with computers, but I have only started to see what is truly possible when one is able to create a service rather than just consume one.
It sounds to me like it was just a really elaborate, remote-controlled gun, rather than a robot whose AI decided to shoot him.
startup. it will allow you to express yourself more, be yourself, enjoy a more relaxed and motivated environment. I work at a major corporation that was more of a startup when I joined and I prefer it the way it was years ago.
It sort of reminded me of a scene from Family Guy where Peter sets off this Rube Goldberg breakfast machine and in the end it just shoots him.

"Owww! It doesn't make breakfast at all. It just shoots you."
All discrimination is at the personal level. Discrimination in society is the integral.
If my guess at what this "big" company's identity is is correct.... The standard advice that is true for google/msft/oracle/yahoo/etc doesn't apply.
I also liked Fredric Brown's shorter, funnier (and earlier) version:

http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm

(For some reason, I had thought this was one of Asimov's as well...)
Company closed its source because: "Open source is a wash"
"Wordpad and Paint are sufficient, and don’t tell me you don’t have those."

I don't have 'dows.
Add comments (or use disqus) and allow people to use their own domains.
I have the same feeling which is why I've held out buying any Apple stock. I might change my mind if at MacWorld Steve Jobs introduced a new product and a VP that had almost total control of the design. I want to see that someone else can run the company and keep Apple at the forefront of innovation before I invest.
So get a masters in CS. It's not a Ph.D. in finance/economics, and also avoids the BS required to get a BS.
I had always confused "The Last Question" with another Asimov work... "The Last Answer".

I had first read TLQ many years ago, and had recently tried to find the story online, only to come across TLA. As hard as I tried, I couldn't come across the original story about the Multi-Vac (which, of course, is TLQ). I became briefly convinced that I had never actually read TLQ, but had made the story up in my head... until I read this post. Turns out I'm not actually genius. Kudos!

http://destructionoverdrive.blogspot.com/2005/06/last-answer...
Ask YC: What do people use for test environments?
What other environments would you recommend? I have some experience with XAMPP.
Heh? Got some numbers? I can't even think of anyone who actually uses Berkeley DB, but can name several using myISAM or InnoDB off the top of my head.
> while she did the stuff I wasn't as good at

Ever heard Click 'n Clack's (CarTalk show) theory of planned incompetence for husbands?

The first time your wife asks you to do something you really don't want to do - do it so badly (e.g. laundry - turn everything pink) that she would be remiss to ask you again... Brilliant
Songkick’s concert recommendation engine: It goes to 11
learn to write? i try hard for long time but me still don't does it right.
Based on my location and cost constraints BGSU was the only option I have available, and I did not meet the requirements for the masters program.
speaking of slickedit, it's a very good editor. it has all the source editing stuff you could want like intellisense and tagging and whatnot, along with emulation for a bunch of editors like VS, emacs, vim. if i didn't use so many of the advanced features of the official vim i would use slickedit
Or, you could just tell her you don't like it and negotiate a different arrangement. I think honesty with your wife is probably the way to go. If you can't be honest with her, why did you marry her in the first place?
Really? Stranger in a Strange Land. Lots of Heinlein is harmless, but that one really made me hate the guy.
It's too early to tell, because it takes 4-5 years to say for sure if a startup has succeeded, and YC is only 3 years old.

I'd be happy if it was a third, and delighted if it was as high as 50%.
This is "free" as in "pay a fixed fee up front for a license that lasts until the hardware breaks".

Interesting dilemma. The labels will want to make it for some tracks only and make others be pay per track. Apple will probably want "all of the artist's tracks in iTunes". That could make an incentive for the labels to keep material out of iTunes.
I'm not married. But I think you could tell.
This is why outsourcing to India is a bad idea.
Philip Greenspun in Founders At Work (p. 325):

The people who were really good software engineers were usually great writers; they had tremendous ability to organize their thoughts and communicate. The people who were sort of average-quality programmers and had trouble thinking about the larger picture were the ones who couldn't write.

I posted this before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127743), but that thread was already old, and it's relevant here too.

Edit: I'm not sure I agree with the (slickedit) post, though. Saying "Learn to write" is more like saying "Learn to think" than "Learn to drive". One can improve and refine, but by the time a person gets to be a professional programmer I don't think one is likely to see order-of-magnitude improvement.
I created one
http://justnews.slinkset.com/
For anyone who is tired of all the stupid news commentary, and just wants new.

It would be nice to be able to increase the font size on the Hacker News ripoff design.
12 Essential Rules to Live More Like a Zen Monk
I agree. The design is very nice.
1 in 5 undergrads is constantly stressed