skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes. I have been doing this for last 2 yrs and worked on 3 diff startups. First one is still operational, but I m not part of it, second one failed after 6 months of hard-work, and now I'm working on Third idea since last few months. There are mainly immigration issues bcoz of which I'm not able to go fulltime, so still continuing with part-time option.

During first idea, I was a bachelor, and used to invest more time on business development activities, product planning & management, networking events, mentoring sessions, reading books + blogging. I used to spend daily 3-4 hrs of evenings for this. My co-founders were doing coding. I did this for 1 year. Then bcoz of certain concerns, I left this project and started another.

During second idea, I got married, so working in the late evening was not justifiable. I used to work in early morning from 4am-7am, mostly coding and then in the evening, if necessary, meet some potential clients or advisors for business development activities. So daily I used to work for 4-5 hrs. Unfortunately, my other co-founders were married ones, and couldn't cope up with fulltime + mariage + part-time startup pace. So naturally, I was alone at the end, and after certain time, had to close the idea.

Now I again started with the third idea. Now I spend maximum time on learning technical stuff, and coding my application. Most of the times, I am the only one on this idea, I'm spending max time on developing product rather than building business, which I did lot in previous startups. I spend daily 2-3 hrs on weekday, and 5-6 hrs on one weekend.

In general, I try to put 15-20 hrs a week. Which i know are still very less for a startup :( I think having equally entrepreneurial and passionate co-founders, who are ready to slog hard in the part-time is very essential, which was the case in my first idea.
Sure, some stories are more enlightening than others, and there is a point of diminishing returns. But I think the stories are pretty useful; they provide anecdotal evidence for various development anti-patterns. They imbue an appropriate sense of apprehension whenever someone says "Source control is too complicated." or "Then we serialize the object to an XML text field..." or "A testing environment would cost twice as much."
The response to Steve Yegge's writing about software interviewing is very similar too:

http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/truth-about-intervie...
Maybe you could check if the title of the page is the same as well, not as an automatic detection, but instead as a reason to ask "are you sure this isn't the same as foo". This might prevent most of the NYTimes dupes.
Some things I figured while working on http://thefeelgood.com

1) Move as much of the work from MySQL to PHP. Things like joins, sorting, etc. are done in PHP. Your PHP nodes are much easier to scale - just throw in a new server when you need it. It won't fix all your scaling problems, but will give you much more time before you need to scale your MySQL.

2) Use memcache for at least the most frequent queries, definitely for everything on the homepage. If invalidation of something gets too hard just use a 10-second expiration or so.

2a) To avoid dogpiling memcache, measure your peak rate of hits on the site. Then, rewrite your cache get function like so:

if (mt_rand(0,$peakRate) == 1)
return false;
else
// get things from cache

3) Think about separating queries in two steps. The first just fetches a list of IDs based on a certain condition, the second fetches the actual items. Cache both steps, with individual cache entries for each item. Make sure you use multi-get.

4) Try to design composite keys instead of autoincrement. For example, for The Feel Good, the post ID is YYYY-MM-DD-U (U = user ID), so just by analyzing the IDs in PHP, I can sort by date, filter future posts (you can schedule posts for tomorrow), analyze user-to-user relationships, etc.

5) Don't be afraid to go around the ORM and write SQL by hand, especially for tricky UPDATEs.
And a more complex one for diabetes: http://www.sugarstats.com
No one benefits from social security.The average payout is below the input.

Members pay so that more senior members may benefit and then hope that newer member will pay enough so that they may benefit as well. It functions like a large, mandatory pyramid scheme and only survives because people who have paid fortunes into it expect to be compensated.
Its about money:

Firefox has Google

IE has Microsoft

Safari has Apple

Opera only has Opera backing it.
I just wish we will remain a small community with common interests

It's interesting to see the comments in this thread while others are talking about optimal company size (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144969) and why large companies can be dysfunctional (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=144904).
Google's Marissa Mayer speaks at SIGCSE
If you need magic, it can't help you.
I completely agree. Seed financing is inherently unscalable. Investment partners need to spend a lot of time per investment and that severely limits their output.

Just like Sequoia are not a 'clone' of Kleiner Perkins, the same is to be said for competition: because both are unscalable businesses they can successfully co-exist and it certainly isn't a winner take all market. Indeed, the market is crying out for more firms, but the contraint is skilled early stage investors.

Also, Andy and Chris (who this article is about) both rock.
A boy the bullies love to beat up
This is technically true, but I believe that it misses the point.

Death is the rest state. Which is why much more energy is spent in keeping people alive, rather than merely preventing death. That is, if you want to extend your life, you need to not look so much at the causes of death, as at the prerequisites for life. Getting food is more important than preventing murder.

The same is true with poverty. You can try to prevent war and corruption, but you won't eliminate poverty just by eliminating the impoverishing factors. You need to actually create wealth.
Inevitable, but funny.
How? Any specific advice for making sure the big employer doesn't own your idea?
One counterexample to your theory is that if bosses limit autonomy, then large universities should limit autonomy significantly; however, they're generous in autonomy.

Now on the theory underlying your essays.

If it's barbaric to work, then one should note that it's feasible to stop working immediately, without significant wealth. It can be done piecewise: many of my friends save up and travel for a year or two, or get schools to pay for their traveling. Assuming one is investing, and not increasing spending, it will get easier rather than harder to take more and more time off from jobs over the years. Of course most people shoot themselves in the foot by taking out loans or increasing spending, but that's their problem.

If autonomy is important, then why assume startups and develop lots of minor contradictions with autonomy? Why not assume autonomy, and see where this leads?

Given your value set, which seems centered around autonomy and creating/hacking, I can't see why you promote startups as a lone solution rather than promoting a variety of solutions. For example, living cheaply, moving to cheaper nations, taking years off to travel, only reproducing when one's children need no longer work (so as to make the problem of work globally and locally decrease, rather than increase), working to bring high tech to areas without it (which might give different kinds of autonomy, as well as cheap living), working contract type jobs where taking say six months off isn't a problem, working in journalism in the areas of high tech or art (more traveling, less pay), or working in academia, where the problems with autonomy go away and hence work becomes non-pernicious.

Your work with startups is really great, but I think there are lots of other options that are equally consistent with the values of long-term autonomy and creating/hacking. I don't see that you have any particular duty to present these options, but I do think that hackers should be trying to increase the sphere of jobs known to be consistent with their values, by discussing them publicly.
The point is that whatever YC loses, it's theirs and not someone else's. They do not have a fiduciary duty to anyone but themselves. This significantly changes their risk posture. It's not just a semantic quibble.
The point is every good hacker doesn't necessarily want to bother with financial/legal aspects of a business, as they're not interesting to them. I know a top hacker who's not only good at system abstractions but also knows bare metal like the back of his hand, debugging live applications with heavy OS interactions by patching running binary on the fly without needing to lookup a reference. Everyone around him is in awe. However, he's not that interested in money. He thinks he's rich enough with a few millions in options and 300k in annual salary & bonuses. And he's happy with his job and his boss, who, like everyone else, respects and pampers him. The big company can give him resources a startup or smaller companies simply cannot afford. Why would such a person do a startup?

The original article generalized too much, missing the most significant contributions to the progress of technology from people who _like_ to work in academia and large companies.
One word: Indexes. See what queries are taking the most time, and then add indexes to them. Can speed up your app by 1000x if there is one query that is running wild.
Putting a comment on the article makes more people notice it, click on it, vote for it, and move it to the front page. Whenever I see a great science article, I make sure to comment on it so it get off the "Newest" page and on the front page. It takes surprisingly little, and then once it's on the front, it usually gets a lot of love.
Yes I agree with that, I was just pointing out that they invest more than the $15,000 per company.
The benefit you get from Social Security is that if you retire before you die, if a spouse or parent who provides your family income retires or dies before you die, or if you become too disabled to work, you don't have to worry about outliving your savings, and you don't have to worry about inflation making your annuity worthless.
Too bad there's no good way to downmod it.
It goes on to recommend AIR and Silverlight. I hope my competitors are big believers in Forrester's research.
Request for some critique on our startup
Hi all, we'd like some criticism on our startup. It's Ingolingo, and the url is http://www.ingolingo.com. Be harsh, I don't mind!
"2. If your equity/salary was based completely on the accuracy of your projections, what would your forecast be?"

Is it even relevant that the entrepreneur be able to make accurate predictions? Shouldn't you just focus on making stuff people want? And isn't speculating on how the size of company X the VC's job anyway? I bet Larry and Sergey didn't see Google getting THAT big on day 1.
Great list of contrarian questions everyone should ask themselves!
As dbreunig suggests we can meet at the Blue Bottle next to SOMA for the April 16th meetup. It's on 66 Mint St at SF. Here is a link to the place: http://tinyurl.com/2tvxa7

Here is a link for Fred's office on 2nd street: http://tinyurl.com/38lkfc

Both places are pretty close so Fred, maybe you can come to the the first meetup and give us a sneak peak at your beta ;)
"About the only way to make money without creating wealth is to steal it from somebody else."

Well. Let's say you have a company M that creates X wealth and has a monopoly. And then you have companies A, B, C, D, E and F that create 7x wealth but are driven out of the market by M's monopolistic practices. M indeed creates wealth, but the market is actually getting less than it would without it. It might not be called stealing, but I feel robbed.

Similarly, I'm pretty sure the value the spammer is creating for the companies they advertise for is largely offset by the value it's destroying for the masses of people they advertise to. Besides, the kind of "products" sold by "companies" via spammers is not exactly friendly neighborhood or good quality (if there's even an actual product at all).

edit: "Typically when somebody pays you for something you did, it's because they'd rather have your service or product than the cash they paid for it."

Sure, but maybe there's another service/product that could give you much more for the same money but you don't know about it because of propaganda (marketing, FUD) or simply because the company has been driven out of the market unfairly, as I said earlier.
I'm not sure how interesting this number is: I'd hope to see it go down as more start-ups can be self funding.
I am a parent, so I can answer your question with respect to children: raising your voice does not do anything except escalate the discussion into an emotional melt-down.

With respect to people you deem to be idiots and trolls, we have known the answer for a very long time. One of the more amusing bits of advice about the matter came from Mark twain:

"Never argue with a fool, onlookers may not be able to tell the difference."
Calculate Your "Digital Footprint" with New Tool from EMC
Both of the problems could easily be solved by replacing SS with an ordinary savings account. Not to mention that Fed loans to SS aggravates inflation greatly.
Union bylaws obligate me to point out that with a similar expenditure of effort and planning, you could "raise" more than twice as much money as a YC "round" by consulting for a month, and then simply start your company.

The market does not care whether your friends are "top quality players" who make important contributions. You are not a unique snowflake. If your product or service offering works, you will win.
This is a woefully ignorant article that fails to include any piece of evidence to back up these claims.

Take, for instance, many countries in Africa. What prevents these countries from not rising in the poverty ladder is not the lazy, dumb people of these countries.

First, they can't sell products to other countries because the majority of countries are land-locked, meaning they have no way to ship their goods out at a reasonable price. They don't have any ports in their country and the neighboring countries with ports are hostile or unsafe.

Second, wealth is not a stable commodity in these countries due to coups and constant political restructuring and military action. Even if you were a very hard ambitious worker, there is nothing you can do about external forces (read: rebels invading your home/shop and stealing all the wealth you have built up).

Third, little of Africa is actually arable, and Africa can't even become an agrarian society because there isn't really the resources for them to do so. And the resources that are valuable to the rest of the world that could generate money for African countries - like, oil and diamonds, become hotly contested and a source of conflict and instability, furthering reducing the value of storing wealth.

Take some time to learn about the world if you have a strong opinion on this matter.
I also believe it helps to have an accent of some kind. PG loves accents.
There's a quality to super-heavy ajax webapps - they reach the uncanny valley of similarity to desktop apps.

Just like an animated human starts to look really creepy as it approaches realism, there's something strange about web-apps that approach the style and complexity of desktop apps but don't quite reach it.
Why Video Is Changing The World
Good read, but misses the point that big (and especially public) companies became big by optimizing for profit and revenue growth, and shareholder returns. Employee and customer satisfaction are pursued only if they help drive those two goals.
I always voted up good stuff from the new page. I have since stopped, of course.
Horrible Interface Design, Found in Over 20 Million US Homes
I agree that yelling at children doesn't help. But I'm wondering if you would debate with a child, or try to persuade him with good ideas, or would use some other sort of approach that isn't yelling or persuading?
Agreed, but to say PG is a VC is not technically wrong. Under the "real" definition, all Angels are VC's too.

That's why I'm suggesting it's all semantics.
Time for Catholic school, maybe.

At any rate, you will see this time and again in any institution that has an internal disciplinary system. The effect is twofold:

1. Small infractions are amplified in importance. Thus, it is possible to be socially humiliated for...writing on a desk, talking out of line, chewing gum.

2. Large infractions are covered up. Thus, beatings, which in the real world could result in prison, are punished with 3 day suspensions.

Both of the above are designed to preserve the power structure. Minor infractions are punished for the sake of exercising that power, reminding people of it, to prevent cracks from forming, etc etc. Meanwhile, large infractions are covered up so that the outside world doesn't realize that it needs to intervene.
Don't require users to sign up. Let the users start the process and then decide whether or not to sign up. I don't like having to type in all that information just to try out a service.
Abbreviated Parody of Paul Graham's "Boss"
"The 3 months is just the beginning. After that, you will continue to build your product, find investment, hire employees and create an actual business. This process will take years!"

Read that over a few times. By putting your name on that application, you're starting a commitment to your co-founders that you should take seriously... Life can take a turn, but for the most part, you should be prepared to set aside a couple of years at least-- losing a co-founder early on can be pretty deadly.
Here's the issue with these kinds of studies: They take examples of building apps using build 0 of a toolkit or technology, then by the time the study comes out, that same toolkit or technology is on build 100.

The usability of web apps (specifically speed) is improving faster than we can develop our non-trivial apps for this platform. In short: time your version 1.0 with the assumed capability of the host platform at the time of release, plus two years. If you commit to spend a year on AIR development, because ajax or js execution or whatever is not where it should be right now, you're making a mistake.

That's what's bad about pre-obsolescent technologies like AIR - they distract from the future in favor of right now.
Wow, this is bad. But it gives me an opportunity to counter her main point. I actually talked to Wayne of Zenter about this very thing - I asked him whether he felt any remorse or negativity about going from starting Zenter to working for Google. I was really curious about it, personally. He emphatically refuted any such notion! He told me he has been very happy there and was impressed by the way that google works and the process they have. I anticipated that response but it seemed very heartfelt and emphatic. I suspect that Google probably doesn't fit in to many of the big company stereotypes... I think that would've been obvious to anyone who'd done even a little bit of homework on the topic.
Although I fall in the camp of agreeing mostly with the original, this was just too funny to resist posting.
"Business processes are often these gnarly heaps of rules with massive omissions, contradictions, and bits where what people say they do has no relation to what actually happens."

Exactly!

Which is what makes analysis so important even though it's (usually) so overlooked. Put the right people in a room together with all of their paperwork (actual, not samples) and keep asking questions until everyone agrees THAT's how it works. Feed them if you must, but nobody leaves the room until we all agree. Then go to the office, warehouse, showroom, factory floor, or whereever and verify it.

It doesn't matter how well you can code or how fast you can code if you're not writing the right program.
Just because I upvote something doesn't mean I want to save it!
Extending Python with (almost) anything
> (not (hacker-news-p))

T

:(
DefCon talk: No-Tech Hacking
The site looks very wordy. Even if you're in the business of teaching language, you're users still don't want to see that many words on one page. Try breaking up all your benefits into separate pages like a tour.

I really like the idea and the interface once you get logged in, although I don't really like the background color, except for the purple on the bottom of the front page
Slide: Are these widgets worth half a billion?
I only seem to make serious progress on my project when I work for 4 or 5 uninterrupted days. So that's what I do. Thanks to you, nostrademons, now I can describe why. I think you nailed it.
Interesting question, but let's take it somewhere else: Are we describing programmers as children, idiots, and/or trolls? I hope not...
How I Blew My Google Interview
Bad voters, bad.
I didn't mean to be, although certainly a programmer could be any of those.
I'm not sure about applets, but full Java applications deployed through Java Web Start have been a win for us.
Why not just compare the content at the other end of the link with the contents of existing links.

It wouldn't be that hard. Whenever a link is submitted, YC's server would visit the link, get the response, strip all html tags and white space from it, then hash whatever is left. It would then store this hash value with the link. Whenever a new story is submitted, it is likewise hashed and then a check is made for an existing link with the same hash value. If it exists, it's a dupe, if not, allow it.

This would be an extra check to the existing dupe URL string of course. It still wouldn't catch every single thing, but it should eliminate quite a few easy dupes.

If that turns to have a low success rate, try hashing the page title or maybe the http headers.
That strikes me as a really good idea, even if it only went to people already designated as editors. My guess is that there are borderline stories that editors are close to killing but ultimately don't because of (perceived) community support and wariness of out and out censorship. Giving them a less extreme negative option could help.
A pretty good test is to ask each side to summarize the other side's position in a way the other side would endorse.

If one side succeeds, and the other fails, that reveals who understands both positions, and who doesn't.

Of course they can still make excuses, such as saying that they don't understand the other guy's position because he didn't explain it clearly. And they can say they asked questions about it to try to understand, but he still didn't answer well. That could even be true. But it usually isn't.
Oh, there are absolutely people who are not interested in founding a startup, for many reasons. I'm just trying to say that hackers interested in becoming founders have the skills and hopefully the drive to master the financial and legal aspects. At least enough to avoid some of the major pitfalls. If they aren't willing to face these aspects of founding a business then they should definitely seek some other avenue of fulfillment. I think that hacking is a necessary but not sufficient skill for becoming a successful founder.
Is this for real? For some reason looks like spam to me or an April's fools bad joke.
This doesn’t invalidate the observation that it would be an interesting topic for a proper study.
I wish it was that easy...

Raising money beyond bootstrapping is very difficult unless you are referred by a credible source, which is what YC is. Its about the referrals and connections and the associated attention that comes along with them, not so much the money. I'd give up 6% of my startup if I could personally connect with all of the important angels in SV and Boston, probably even if no money was involved.

But, like you say it all really comes down to the product. That I'll agree with.
Maybe time to add down-arrows.
Be more front and center with what it is you're doing. (Which isn't about "improving your vocabulary") It's about learning another language!

Once I farted around a bit, I liked your site. I should get that interest within 1-2 seconds though.