skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I read some advice from a lot of people, one of them that made the most impact was Steve Jobs:

For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something...almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.
Also, ASmallWorld: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/fashion/06smallworld.html

"I need to rent 20 very luxury sports cars for an event in Switzerland on the 6th September," a member wrote recently on the Forum, aSmallWorld's popular nucleus. "The cars should be: Maserati -- Ferrari -- Lamborghini -- Aston Martin ONLY!"

Another announced: "If anyone is looking for a private island, I now have one available for purchase in Fiji."
Run 37 Signals' Basecamp Offline with AIR
Was wondering anyone from YC incubator moving into RIA or Offline support.
PBS Frontline: Growing Up Online -- Excellent Documentary
$50/mo, that's all?
From the article:

"I hate to deflate egos, but on the other hand I want people to have a realistic understanding of things. The industry a person picks to start a business has a huge effect on the odds that it will grow. If you go back 20 years or so, about 4% of all the startups in the computer and office equipment industry made the Inc. 500, 0.005% of startups in the hotel and motel industries made that list, and 0.007% of startups in eating and drinking establishments."

This ignores cause and effect. Presumably a lot of business in the hotel and motel industries are simple mom and pop shops with no intention of growing. This is almost never true for "the computer and office equipment industry" Also presumably there there is a significant difference in the capabilities of founders in these two industries.

I hate when writers cannot see beyond their numbers, and cannot distinguish between cause and effect.

That being said I found it interesting that "you have to hit the top 10% to have income as an entrepreneur better than what you would have gotten working for other people."

Maybe if I hadn't done those startups I would have a red ferrari by now ;-)
What about the freedom to donate a couple of billion dollars to HIV research or whatever else you fancy (ending world hunger etc)?
Not really; in both cases you have people who don't know what they're talking about giving unsolicited advice the value of which nobody knows a priori ...
We actually encrypted the code of dangerous tools (we wrote in Perl back then) like this one with a password so the customers (telecoms) tech people, who were mostly clueless, wouldn't be able to play around with our tools.

The program was just a tiny bit of code describing the tool, prompting for a password, tried to decrypt the code of the original program using the password and evaled the code.
I wouldn't say 'lost'.

You can somehow compare stock prices to a closed gas ballon.

If temperature changes it grows and shrinks but it doesn't loose gas.
Upmodded, but I chuckled when I read their first item where they take an obviously relational data problem then observe that you should use a relational database instead of MapReduce for it. From that, they claim RDBM is better.
0.07% seems more reasonable...
taking alli is a horror story waiting to happen
Guess what's funnier?

The back-ups were his saving grace.
Heavy stuff. Quite educational.
Presumably a lot of business in the hotel and motel industries are simple mom and pop shops with no intention of growing. This is almost never true for "the computer and office equipment industry"

Well, I don't think you can assert that without statistics. I wouldn't be surprised if the "median" computer company is a one-person consulting firm -- a services company.

Also presumably there there is a significant difference in the capabilities of founders in these two industries.

Well, there, I agree -- I suspect that the average grocery store owner has a lot more business skill than the average computer-industry founder. ;) By necessity -- the grocery business is more complex, with literally thousands of moving parts; there's more competition, and the margins are a lot smaller.

Having said that, your basic point is correct -- computer startups have a much better chance of making big money, for reasons that have been explored ad infinitum around here -- low overhead, low cost of volume manufacturing, cheap distribution, large and international markets, etc. And that's exactly what this guy is saying when he suggests that you "choose the right industry".

His argument isn't addressed to the folks around here. It's primarily addressed to the "average" founder -- the person who founds a corner store, a dry cleaner, a hair salon, or a decorating business. These are the folks who go to "entrepreneurship" seminars (featuring lots of photos of the guys from Yahoo, Google, McDonalds, and Pepsi) and imagine that any chain of hot-dog stands could lead to similar financial success -- whereas, in fact, it's likely to cost them money. Of course, running your own company also makes you much happier, on average -- a point which the author readily concedes.
How do you get traffic?
How you get traffic after initial launch? How you market your startup websites?
This was actually fairly interesting to watch. Even if there wasn't much new information, all of the kids and parents interviewed were really well-spoken.

Personally I've always felt like I was raised more by the Internet than by family or friends, at least in terms of where I've gotten most of my values and beliefs and a good chunk of my knowledge. And yet somehow I didn't really identify with the kids in the video.
That's why there are development environments and production environments.
The OCaml Reddit
Very rich people are boring. They don't have ambitions.
I don't think anyone on here is starting a hair cut business (unless its like robot hair stylists or something)
You beat me to it. This was on my "write this for myself or the good of mankind list." The reason it was on that list was I wasn't sure how to make money with it (programmers aren't known for clicking ads). I wish you the best with it and it sounds like you've got an approach for getting money.

I think you're solving a real problem. Google has gotten clumsier about search results, and frequently my searching yields only people with the same question, not an answer. I frequently have to use the cached search result to get google to highlight where, in the mile-long forum page, my keywords appear.

One thing I'd suggest--why use so much screen real estate for each result, but not show an excerpt in that spot? The expandable plus signs being collapsed initially are a negative for me as a user.

Good luck!
11. be the CEO of Apple
He seems to have missed one very important fact about startups. If it doesn't work, you can try again! I think the odds are pretty slim for everyones first startup but you learn from it and have another go. Its like saying that everyone has a very low chance of getting over 10' on thier first pole vault so its bad policy to have it in the olympics.

Just to offer a counterpoint. Our startup has grown far less than we hoped. We have only one large cororate account and 5-10 smaller local offices. There's only three of us and we're half-way thru year 4. BUT we've already made what we would have made in 10 years at the jobs we quit.
The suck-cut! As you can see, it sucks as it cuts...
There's something very simplistic and reductive about this guy's reasoning.
Yes, but there's a lot of marginal semi-arid land out there which is no good for producing crops, but fine for producing something like the switchgrass they're thinking of using.
I'm not sure why this was posted, but I think this is Awkward Journalistic Simile of the day:

"The 100-pound dumbbells he used to easily throw around felt like lead weights. "
JRuby meets the Windows API
Creating Web 2.0 Graphics in GIMP
They're just html list items. I'll look into the on-click event.
What is a Ruby symbol and why are they important?
Well there is a few standard things we did at our startup.

* BUILD SOMETHING PEOPLE WANT - it isn't so obvious what people want though.

1. Social Bookmarking - Reddit, Digg etc

2. Add any Feeds to RSS Directories

3. Keep a blog and update at least 3-4 times a week about your industry area. We created the first Blog Carnival focusing on Journalism. That made us friends in journalism community and we got some write ups.

Interview people on your blog.

4. Network - there are countless events in which to attend here in London so there must be more in the valley. That being said, they may be crap.

5. Get mentioned in the Press or on Blogs (best way is to meet the people face to face first). Random emails seldom work.

6. Create Facebook Group, get your friends to join. After Google, Facebook is our number 1 referring site. Get your friends to add your site as one of their fav sites on their facebook profiles. We've got a lot of traffic from that.

Create Facebook App?

7. Create a Podcast? But this is a bit of an effort, prob best focus on blogging.

8. SEO! work on it from day one!
The shy Mark Zuckerberg and Scoble
You mean the Flowbee? http://www.flowbee.com
oh damn, billion and million... ;-)
proving a point :)
I wonder who came up with that bug - I mean what application are they developing that needs a database table called penises?
I have heard of anappaday.com, what are the others?
"It shows the average new venture will fail within five years, and even successful founders usually earn 35% less over 10 years than they would working for others." --
That's fine, that's not why I'm starting a company anyway, I don't want to work for others.
Agreed--google will likely provide a bunch of traffic. Also, google is not specialized to this niche. Here's an example from 3 weeks ago where google failed to provide answers that a centralized error lookup site might. Google had little that was relevant for the first several weeks this problem was out and only showed results for an ancient cause of a similar error message. Eventually it picked up a blog post, but 3 weeks is a long time.

http://blog.ra66i.org/archives/informatics/2007/12/23/a-quic...

Quote from the person who "fixed" the google bug with a popular blog post:

There's a "problem" with the current version of rubygems that's causing somewhat of a FAQ, that as far as I can see, Google doesn't index too well...
Okay, maybe I took it too far. But if you think about it I do have a point to an extent. Perhaps I took it too far but I can't help but notice during the last year or so that I've been monitoring this thing and posting once in a while that there is definately a strong undercurrent of "look at this stupid guy and his stupid idea" here among more than a few people.

Or when a "non-hacker" is looking for someone to help out or a hacker who doesn't know a particular technical aspect looks for help, the lashing is severe. There's a difference between constructive criticism, designed to challenge but inspire the recipient, and just being a jerk who gets off trying to look the bigshot by making others feel like losers for sharing private aspects of their personal entrepreneurial struggles.

We all have more in common than differences; for example we're all surrounded by cubicle drones in this life who secretly rejoice at the prospect of us failing miserably because they're too scared to try going out on their own to do their things ... shouldn't we generally be supporting each other and keeping our morales up as much as possible?

If you don't like someone's idea and genuinely think it should be improved, say so. But what good does it do anyone to tell them, "wow your idea sucks ... it's the stupidest idea of all stupid ideas ever!"
I've just got a little blog going, mainly for fun and possibly for some minor supplemental income. We have seen a surprising amount of traffic from StumbleUpon. I'd recommend you hit that up (along with JohnN's excellent suggestions). Join it, get some friends on it, and get yourself stumbled up.
I think part of it is that we're trying to make sense of this paradox--that we really like it, but financially it isn't so great.

What? No one told him the oldest cliche in the book, that money doesn't buy happiness? Is it a mystery that so-and-so would be happier making 40K and owning a business than another person doing inventory at WalMart for 50K?
He can play NFL football as a vegan, but could he start a start-up eating like that?
Tyler Cowen (Marginal Revolution) on why it won't work:

"The very smart Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres are behind the idea. I've long predicted this won't work; one group of potential customers doesn't really want to change, the other group is unwilling to give up control. It's not exaggerating to say that human nature is on the line here, and that if I am wrong this is probably the most important idea you will ever encounter."

From (which has additional interesting comments):
http://www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2007/12...
Nice tutorials, IMO Inkscape is much easier than Gimp for those graphics.
what do you think?
JavaScript Client Library for Facebook API
Sure he could start-up a startup eating startup :)
PS3 Cell Programming at MIT
Scheme and Lisp on .NET
Unintended consequences: What do a deaf woman and an endangered woodpecker have in common?
Unusual Software Bugs
My favorite: Schroedinbugs
After showing my girlfriend this thread she said wants to start a news.yc girlfriends club...
"I wouldn't be surprised if the "median" computer company is a one-person consulting firm -- a services company."

This is one thing pg has been very clear about: a start-up isn't about taking away a monthly paycheck. It is about scoring big.

If your start-up is helping pay for your apartment, that is good but hardly the goal of your start-up. Founders know that.

When your consulting firm is helping pay for your bills, the end goal is reached. Little growth happens once you reach that goal.

There are exceptions--and almost any business can be transformed into a start-up(doesn't mean it will succeed). Infosys would be a good example of starting out as a small consulting firm and transforming itself into a start-up and now a giant.
Let alone methods like:

has_many :penises

or

has_and_belongs_to_many :penises

I'm sorry I went there, but someone was going to say it.
Depends on the site. Google AdWords is a good place to start.

If there are small niche sites that your customers may visit, buy banner ads and post on their forums (but obviously don't spam).
I don't think the apps are exactly done. I looked through the source code a little, and saw a (rather amusing) todo note.

def htmlize(text, language):
from pygments import highlight
from pygments.formatters import HtmlFormatter as Formatter
if language == 'Python':
from pygments.lexers import PythonLexer as Lexer
elif language == 'Perl':
from pygments.lexers import PerlLexer as Lexer
elif language == 'Ruby':
from pygments.lexers import RubyLexer as Lexer
elif language == 'PythonConsole':
from pygments.lexers import PythonConsoleLexer as Lexer
elif language == 'PythonTraceback':
from pygments.lexers import PythonTracebackLexer as Lexer
elif language == 'RubyConsole':
from pygments.lexers import RubyConsoleLexer as Lexer
elif language == 'HtmlDjango':
from pygments.lexers import HtmlDjangoLexer as Lexer
elif language == 'Html':
from pygments.lexers import HtmlLexer as Lexer
else:
from pygments.lexers import TextLexer as Lexer
"""
Todo: I cant get this to work.
lang_lexer = str(language + 'Lexer')
Lexer = __import__('pygments.lexers', globals(), locals(), [lang_lexer, ])
Or
from pygments.lexers import get_lexer_by_name
Lexer = get_lexer_by_name(language.lower())
"""
htmld = highlight(text, Lexer(), Formatter(linenos='table'))
return htmld
A little more economics and a little less statistics would've helped his argument immensely.

Entrepreneurship flourishes when there are diseconomies of scale and dies when there are economies of scale. It's not hard to see why: if things get cheaper as you get bigger, then the first company to get big will gobble up all the smaller companies, and you end up with a monopoly or oligopoly. If things get more expensive as you get bigger, then no firm will grow larger than a certain limit, and after a certain point the most productive employees will leave and start their own businesses, because they can make more money that way. (If costs stay roughly the same, as in most professional services, the industry trends toward many small firms because of the psychological benefits of working for yourself.)

Software is the perfect example of a business with diseconomies of scale. Every experienced software engineer knows that adding people to a project makes it go slower. The only reason why a large software company might be more efficient than a small one is if there's an additional factor of production that has large economies of scale: for example, data centers (Google/Yahoo), logistics & warehousing (Amazon.com), buyer eyeballs (E-bay, Facebook), or retailing (Microsoft, Borland, Ashton-Tate, and all the boxed-software manufacturers of the 80s). Other than that, there's no economic reason why big software companies should exist.

Big companies buy little companies when there's a market that they want to get into and apply their economies of scale to. They can't develop the product in-house, because small teams of programmers are more productive than large teams of programmers and so the startup would continually outpace them. But the resulting merger would be more economically efficient, because the startup could take advantage of the large company's datacenters & warehouses. So they trade money for product; the small company's founders get rich, while the big company buys a product that can make more profit under the large firm than as an independent firm.

It's probably also worth mentioning that technology developments can fundamentally change the structure of an industry. Intel single-handedly destroyed the minicomputer industry, because those firms had relied on their economies of scale in manufacturing to justify their size, and Intel brought greater economies of scale to the thousands of ISVs who could then produce software more cheaply than the big proprietary vendors. The RIAA held a distribution lock on the music industry for years, but when the Internet came along and made distributing music free, power shifted to the independent bands who have significant diseconomies of scale. The Internet looked like it was heading towards a universe of big firms with large datacenters, but then LiveJournal and Flickr published their scalability approaches and made it possible for everyone to scale out for free.
I believe BigTable implements the kind of indexing they like.

Re the point of scalability; while we don't really know how well MapReduce scales, usage at Google provides good hints that it does so well. Further, I don't think relational databases scale linearly either, and it is notoriously difficult to implement large DB clusters.
There are two kinds of businesses. First, there are so-called "lifestyle" businesses, like bars, restaurants, B&Bs, etc. that people start because they'd rather work for themselves than someone else. Most owners of these types of businesses aren't interested in expanding or getting rich -- just doing what they enjoy. Then there are "growth" businesses, like (most) technology startups. Many people who start tech startups are interested in working for themselves, but they are more likely to be interested in expanding the business as well... not to mention the most important fact, that technology companies can expand much faster than other types of companies. As demand increases for, say, a website, it's much easier to scale up the infrastructure by adding new computers than it is for a hotel chain to build new hotels, or a "brick and mortar" retailer to build more stores.
You can make 50K doing inventory at WalMart? :) (But you're exactly right, money isn't everything.)
Just as important as getting traffic is converting it and retaining it, track your conversion statistics along each step of the way, find your major pitfalls and fix them.

Split users randomly so they see different landing pages for example and track the changes in conversion.

This will improve your virality as only active users spread the word.
The median startup is a business that's capitalized with about $25,000. The financing of that business comes from the entrepreneur's savings. The business is a retail or personal service business, a hair salon or a clothing store, that kind of thing. The founder doesn't have expectations of a very high growth business, in fact [the entrepreneur is] probably thinking a goal of $100,000 a year of revenue is a good goal.

The economist guy isn't wrong -- it's the article's title that's misleading. It is hard to bootstrap your own gas station or hair salon. I'd argue, though, that developing new technology is a fundamentally different undertaking.
You honestly think that the focus and commitment to do something as unpopular as shunning meat in the NFL would serve him ill in a startup?

Execution matters -- and he did finish out the season by setting a new NFL record. And shunning the cheeseburgers.
See this link:
10 Simple Steps To Social Media Success In 2008

http://searchengineland.com/080108-134105.php
Of course I don't agree with this guy, but I think we need to dissect the common entrepreneurial statement "I don't want to work for others". Now I am sure that we all agree that entrepreneurs do in fact need to "work for others", namely the customer!

But yes there is something different about doing it in the role of supplier rather than employee. I think in general what entrepreneurs are after is about "controlling their creative outputs and at least having the chance of being highly rewarded". Sure you can do that to an extent as an employee, but putting your heart and soul into something as an employee makes one feel like a chump. Especially when you are surrounded with all the loafers and parasites within the common organization. (Sorry if that sounds harsh)

Since the guy in the article didn't really make any concrete policy recommendations, he could consider suggesting reforms within larger organizations to reduce alienation.
Wikipedia promotes cargo cult social science. It's like the whole thing was written by macro expansion.

Someday, I think there'll be archaeologists who collect this stuff and use it to study human thought processes.
It's not a paradox. The more unpleasant a job is, the more you have to pay to get people to do it.
Indian telecom company to rollout massive WiMax network
I'm in school now, and this is new information to me. Where do you go to learn about the envelope of what's possible in biotech? EDIT: Preferably without having to digest the whole curriculum.

Also, how do I get one of those giant metal birds, and what do you feed them?
Smartphones Patented... Just About Everyone Sued 1 Minute After Patent Issued
Well, they also made the Rage and FireGL gaming / workstation 3d cards, they just weren't very good. The FireGL did a little better because there wasn't as much competition in the professional graphics world, really just the Quadro and, to a lesser extent, Matrox's cards. Wow... until I just wrote that, I had completely forgotten that Matrox ever even existed.
No, I'm pretty sure he meant suck-cut:
http://www.free-press-release.com/news/200509/1125942792.htm...
Caps Lock is more valuable as the Control key.
http://www.biologynews.net/
hmm,
i have started a news site http://newskicks.com but its not receiving much traffic and spamers are attacking it so i m wondering how to fight with that as most of my time is goin in deleting the unwanted posts rather then addin new features :(
which, on Mac, doesn't require a 3rd party program.