skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If they haven't spent time on an account -- create a new one!

What if they've put time into the account when they first logged in post-signup and are infuriated at having to re-do the work? Or they picked their favorite username and now it's taken by themselves, so they don't get their cool URL (like myspace.com/username)?

BTW: I think you should add a <label> tags to TOS checkbox on the front page of Weebly :-)
Indeed. However, you have piqued my interest. I'd be very interested in hearing your approach for this problem and the type of hardware you are working on.

My background is in aerospace engineering, specifically aircraft design and some knowledge in engine design. If you are open to discussing your ideas, shoot me an email at designtofly {at} gmail [dotcom].
A finely written article, and he almost had me going there for a while. The most frustrating thing for me, though, is how he implies that a default life of "ballgames," "ballet recitals," and working for someone else is superior by its very nature. Not everyone wants to not live up to their full potential and trade freedom for some veneer of security. Ultimately, this kind of thing is just more inspiring because it makes me want to prove him wrong (no offense to the author, of course).
I wish I could save this thread for future reference when buying books, like I do in reddit.
Carl Sagan's "Contact" was surprisingly good, educational, and even a bit inspirational. The movie was only so-so, so don't let the movie put you off.
Yeah, it is a good thing that we aren't in an Asimov book or that robot would probably become the leader of a revolution.
What is the percentage of success for YC startups?
What’s Luck got to do with (data center catastrophe)?
With the numbers I tend to play with, if it's enough to live off the interest comfortably for the rest of my life, sure. Then I can work on whatever I want with my time rather than avoiding projects because of the assumed inattention they would receive.

If the company has more potential than the offer, most likely no.

The real question is... will this buyout impact your life they way you want it to? ...or will you be miserable or somehow transformed into someone you don't want to be as a result?
I was one of the students to take the Java-y CS134. One cup of coffee I could have done without.
I'm a little confused why there's so much focus specifically on startups, where "startup" means a liquidity event focused venture. I thought the goal was just to make a lot of money, not do it in a specific way.

I think the highest EV is from founding a private going concern and pocketing profits over the course of ten years. Statistically the majority of millionaires are entrepreneurial sole proprietorships or partnerships. We're talking about people who bought or built a few car washes and ran a tight ship, or built a reputable private accounting practice.

I don't know this for a fact, but I bet a lot more people have got wealthy (by my standards) from software contracting and ISV work than from startups.
@Matt, You might enjoy Status Anxiety by Alain de Botton. A lot of the criticisms you attribute to startups could just as well be directed toward the entire system that ties social status to money and success. If startups are more blameworthy than other things, I suspect it's mostly because they move the locus of responsibility for success/failure closer to oneself, thus having a multiplier effect on social status.
For Scientists, a Beer Test Shows Results as a Litmus Test
This seems apropos in light of demo day:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=140628
I read one of his sci-fi books a long time ago, and yes it was insipid. Dianetics was at least interesting as an exploration of their cult's beliefs. If anyone is planning to read it, I suggest you borrow it or at least buy it used, rather than pay for it. Giving them money is a bad thing...
When you're a young, unsettled man, you don't necessarily want to "waste" time extending the courtesies that are generally required when you live with women. All that nonsense with toilet seats, over the top levels of cleanliness, not calling people douchebags or bitches for fun, etc. Now, there are quite a few women out there who can operate just like men and would be just as good as a man in the anticipated role, but the odds are significantly lower.. whereas a man would most likely just "fit in."

Besides, these guys might have personal reasons. Sexual discrimination is something to eradicate at a societal level, not a personal one. If you simply don't get along with women, you shouldn't be forced to work with them (and vice versa!) This means there shouldn't be sexual discrimination in a general workplace, but in your own home you can discriminate all you like!
If you want to learn lessons, work at the big company.

If you want to learn skills, work at the small company.
I'm definitely bookmarking this thread. Maybe one day, I'll have read all of them mentioned here.

But seriously, how has no one mentioned Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy?!

It's a great book with a surprising amount of actual theoretical science (you know, stuff that could technically work). Douglas Adams writes the way I think. I wish I could do that :(
Seems like the big company can lend you some perspective that might be handy later on. :-)
"because you will learn that inside a major corporation you are nothing but a cog in the machine"

I bet you'll learn a helluva lot more than that.

I'm not sure why there's such a negative undercurrent in this forum regarding larger organizations. Maybe negative experiences, maybe just heresay. Of course, the culture will be very different from a startup. But there's lots of good stuff, too.

I've worked in quite a few large companies, but now mostly small ones. Invariably, one of my small clients runs into an issue that none of their 30 employees has ever encountered before. So they try to figure it out. Until I say, "Here's how you do that..." Am I a genius? No. I've just seen the exact same thing handled very well in several large companies. Also (invariably), one of my small clients has to hire a manager of <you name it> who has vast experience in a large company. They always bring solutions to lots of problems that no one has ever imagined there.

Don't discount a large organization. It may be weighed down by its size, but you'll be able to witness LOTS of interesting stuff that you'll see nowhere else.
Blog Search in the Spotlight…Finally
Agreed, if you understand tax law (and it's not that difficult if you just follow directions usually), TurboTax is the way to go.

I've been doing it for my personal and 1-man LLC for years. My new business partners actually went to a well-respected accountant, and they told us we should give TurboTax a try first.
Perhaps in Australia it's easier to get a .22LR "target pistol" than larger calibers.
In the beginning Jobs created the Woz and the Apple.

Now the Apple was formless and empty, darkness was over the surface of the motherboards, and the Spirit of Jobs was hovering over the garage.
This is a really, really, bad article. I got nothing from it.

I think this is a case where I would use a down-vote on an article submission. It has nothing to do with being pro or anti microsoft. The submission is just feeble, ugly, immature, and a waste of our time.
He was 74 when he sold the franchise. Maybe that had something to do with it? http://www.corbinkentucky.us/sanderscafe.htm
In the Asimov universe the Robot would probably suffer a mental break down. It would be a very traumatic experience for him.
The most interesint paragaph is at the end:

"More important, as Dr. Grim pointed out, the study documents a correlation between beer drinking and scientific performance without explaining any correlation."

So, it documents a correlation without explaining it, so maybe there is no correlation. You cann't take two facts and say there is a correlation, may be it simply a coincidence. Maybe the difference is not the beer but the time spent in bars. Maybe the scientists that get less papers publisheds are depressed and go to drink beer to forget their bad performance.

How can people publish a fallacy like that and be so happy?
I am. Here's what I'm doing:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=114568
A CIO Evalutes the Technologies Necessary to Support Telecommuters
It’s good data and interesting ground for future research. As long as people don’t misinterpret it, I don’t see the harm.
A Hardcore Developer-Turned-CIO Shares the Trials and Tribulations of His First-Ever CIO Job
Ask YC:  Suggestions for funding a small-scale open-source development project (a la the X Prize)
Greetings, YCers. I'm planning to announce a "breadpig prize" (http://breadpig.com/prize.html) but wanted to get some feedback on implementation.

Ideally, I'd like to use about $3,000 I've earned in profit from various breadpig projects (tees/unholidaycards) as a reward for creating a nifty little (open-source) app.

Is there some software you wish existed (that would be worth only 3K of motivation)? I'm thinking along the lines of a nifty FireFox extension -- the sort of thing you've always said you'd build yourself if you weren't so busy.

The other problem is creating a reward system that makes it even worth attempting. What are the criteria by which a winner is chosen and is it even possible to create something on this small scale that makes it worthwhile to developers to even attempt to be that 1 winner (you all are better than most at probability).

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.

-Alexis (the reddit co-founder who didn't know Lisp)
Seems like this might be a good Facebook app
The world forgives geniuses some bad practices. Just don’t think that you can reproduce what he did in the same manner. Apple is definitely not “Built to Last”, nobody else can run the thing but Steve Jobs.
I'd be glad to list a few of the other things I have learned while working for large corporations.

(Lesson 1) Inside a large corporation, progress is impeded not by the intellect or imagination but by bureaucracy.

(Lesson 2) Corporations will stab you in the back. I experienced my first layoff when I was 23. I accepted a position in July of 2006 and was told in September of 2006 that my job would be gone in February of 2007.
"Startups tend to be fairly binary, with you making either a very large amount off of them or nothing at all."

Like a lot of thing in life: The most popular movie/book sells 10 times more than the #2.
MS Word vs WordPerfect.
Harrison Ford vs Mark Hamill...
People like stars.
No women? - this is a true nerd speaking.

:-)
I could! Make me your protege Steve!
Efficient CRC calculation with minimal memory footprint
So, it documents a correlation without explaining it, so maybe there is no correlation. You cann't take two facts and say there is a correlation, may be it simply a coincidence.

Huh? Did you read past the headline? Listen:

The results were not, however, a matter of a few scientists having had too many brews to be able to stumble back to the lab. Publication did not simply drop off among the heaviest drinkers. Instead, scientific performance steadily declined with increasing beer consumption across the board, from scientists who primly sip at two or three beers over a year to the sort who average knocking back more than two a day.

That's not "two facts" - it's a direct correlation between two variables. One may not cause the other, but it certainly doesn't appear to be a complete coincidence
My create-your-own-social-news-site startup is live. Feedback appreciated.
Stanislaw lem.. i agree... Solaris was special.. and most purists seemed to suggest the translation from Polish was bad!... Olaf stapledon's last and first men, starMaker were both stunning...
Ursula le guin also come to mind
The next gold rush: solar power
Brent, from your own profile:

"After working for several miserable years in the banking and investment industries as a trust analyst and an equity trader..."

Sorry you have had such negative experiences with large organizations (although in that industry, I'm not surprised). Welcome to the hacker's life. I sure expect that this career will go a lot better for you that that one.

My experience is obviously very different from yours. I have worked in many large and small companies, and each has had its own pros and cons. I have seen some of the coolest technology in very large organizations and have also seen the worst office politics you can imagine in 20 person companies.

I understand you sourness; just try to not let your negative experience turn into a false generalization that could limit opportunities for yourself or others.
Evolution of the smart phone
The tool I’ve been waiting for years
GitHub - Rails-based Git repository hosting
I figured the hackers around here would understand that these things are more a function of popularity, with one of the variables being the core security design. Thinking you're "safe" using any popular software is pretty much living in denial.

Apple software is certainly not immune to this:
http://www.builderau.com.au/news/soa/QuickTime-evil-pink-box...

Software systems are so incredibly complex and market forces and technology changes require lots and lots of new code to be written. Today we can secure a lot of problems discovered as harmful "yesterday", but every new day brings new clever tricks that chip away at our old assumptions. It's a cycle that no one is immune to as long as technology keeps moving.
Best Ever.
Grey Lensman by E.E. 'Doc' Smith

I still believe that a radical (slightly mad) scientist tucked away in his garage lab will come up with the Inertialess Drive and we will all be off the planet at will.

More pragmatically I doubt I could get through this book now and it would be just old hat to anyone post Star Wars.
Labeling of xen images with SELinux
It could be because this is a rather self-selecting group. People who'd be happy at a large organization tend not to spend all their time on startups.

I interned at a large (~6000 employee) company in high school, and a mid-size (~150 employee) company as a freshman in college. I found that the people there were generally happy - quite a bit happier than the average person in the startups I've worked at, actually. I also found that I would not be happy at a big corporation. I did well enough at my projects, found the work itself reasonably interesting, but it was not fulfilling in the sense that I could do it for a long period of time and not regret the time spent on it.
Sun and MySQL: Few Acquisitions Make This Much Sense
Is the big company a "brand name", i.e. something that the general computing public has heard of? If so, I'd definitely go big-company: it's an additional credential on your resume that can open doors for future internships or employment.

Otherwise, it depends a lot on the companies involved and your specific situation. I agree with other posters that you should, at some point, try a big company and see if it's right for you before jumping into startups. OTOH, you'll learn many more skills at a startup, and will probably have a more exciting time. If you plan to do hobby or open-source programming, a startup is also more likely to improve your chops.

Something else to consider: at a startup, you'll often have access to the full existing source code repository, and the tree will be small enough that you can understand most of it. At a big company, you'll probably be silo'd into a single project with its own repository, or worse, use no source control at all. Some of my best programming lessons have come from reading other people's source code; I got lots of that when I worked for startups, and very little interning for large companies.
what HP doesn't count as fantasy? ha ha.

Interesting point about WOT -- one has to wonder how much does this have to do with book contracts and RJ's vision.

I think in reality he may just have had so many stories, so many characters, so many people groups it was becoming hard to innovate while wrapping the series up.

I'll have to check out Malazan
great series
plot summary?
give each player a "karma budget" and have them earn more if other people give karma similarly, and you've basically made a news.yc futures market.
guess i should have askd for a plot summary in the text.
Maybe I missed the scary part of the article. It made me want to succeed even more.
I'm skeptical, but as a non-drinker, I can't say I'd be sad if avoiding drinks has some upside.
In Most Species, Faithfulness Is a Fantasy
Apple to offer unlimited free iTunes music to iPod/iPhone owners
I Like,
I love the design, the colors works well for me.
The layout also pleases me:) KISS ( Keep It Stupid Simple)
I feel like a mix between Jottit and Digg
Create your little Digg site with the ease of creation like Jottit.

I recommend.
i've always had the feeling that the author, leander kahney, doesn't "get" apple, despite how often he writes about the company. and this article suffers from the usual dumbing-down given to material intended for people who don't understand the technical details.
Wow... just... wow.

Something tells me that the women applying to be live-in-hackers are not going to be the same ones that bitch about toilet seats.

I'm sure he has his reasons for only wanting guys... and it's his house, but seriously man, you sound like a walking stereotype when you say that stuff.
FYI: If you up mod the thread it's saved.

Click on your name then click on the number next to "saved:"
How is this different than user created reddits on reddit? The only difference I see is that you can change the colors here.

However, I will say that the colors are nice. :)
Or Lambda

Edit: To show my unicode credentials... λ
Well, one of my favorite science books ever is Molecular Biology Made Simple and Fun, and it reads kind of like this.

The science in the book is 100% serious, too, and at the approximate level of an intro course in college. I faked it for three years as a biophysics postdoc with the help of that book. Admittedly, the molecular biologists chuckled at my understanding of their field, the way you would chuckle at a precocious four-year-old, but at least I had a vague idea of what I didn't know.
I am thankful that he was so prolific, because he doesn't really have to leave.
Voting-Machine Maker to Princeton Researcher: 'Hands Off'
Yes, but remember to subtract inflation from the expected return! 5% interest means you get like 2% post-inflation.
3. ASSIGNMENT OF RIGHTS: Upon entry into the Challenge, Entrant shall grant TextWise an irrevocable, royalty-free, perpetual, non-exclusive worldwide right and license under its intellectual property (including without limitation patent) rights to use the entry for all uses throughout the world. If Entrant is selected by Sponsor to receive the award, Entrant will irrevocably assign and transfer all rights, title and interest in their entry, including but not limited to their copyrights, patent(s) rights and all other proprietary or intellectual property rights to the Sponsor.

So is this the Publishers Clearing House of business plan competitions? String along a bunch of people, pay one that happens to be 78, then run with hundreds of good ideas?

Interesting ploy, but seems a bit spammy and underhanded.
For a large prize, you can get a small amount of experts to work for a long time on something straightforward but technically demanding.

For a smaller scale, flip everything. Get a large amount of dabblers to work for a shorter time on something that might be hard to quantify but is not really hard to do.

So maybe you should reward inspiration that has just enough execution. That is, enough that people get it and it will sustain the project, but not too little that someone would have done it without the prize.

Now, I'd say get some more specific goals than "nifty" because otherwise we're all going to say "libraries for Arc" which is nifty to us but maybe not yourself.

Plus if you pick some criteria that inspire people, are clever and/or people really get behind, you can get a lot more exposure, which will increase the expected quality of the winner. And then maybe you can hit up some people at Community Next or something to add to the prize pool.

But if you really do want merely nifty, you could just set up a restricted subreddit for judging... although I'm sure I didn't have to tell you that!
What technologies did you use to create the site? Is this Rails based?
Staying employed and slowly building your wealth is not a riskless proposition. Past 20 years have been very nice to the tech sector and to equities in general. What are you going to say when your employer suddenly collapses and takes your pension/stock wealth with it (Enron, Bear Stearns etc)?

Even more extreme -- what if the whole economic cycle reverses, the currency devalues and inflation eats up your savings? Hard to imagine, but economic systems have this capacity for extreme events. I know the whole generation of honest engineers in Soviet Union who have not built a capital to retire on (obviously) and who were left desolate in their 50s-60s without pensions or jobs when their state companies/research labs collapsed.

Startup offers an option to strike it rich. If you hit the sweet spot of some business 'fitness function' - then you're set for life. If not, the most obvious strategy is to try as many startups as possible in your lifetime. This is like having a venture fund spread in time. One of your holdings should make it, the rest of them you expect to fail. It's nice if the winner comes when you're in your 20s :) But not necessary.

However, focusing on a single make-or-brake business idea and betting your farm (life) on it is a stupid idea. It is sad that many engineers are actually one-idea phenomena simply because of their specialization. Venture capitalists are in the best position, as they sit on the portfolio of options (startups).
Man I love the interweb. Pre-YC: 10,000 trades executed. 24 hours later: 75,000. Maybe PG wishes he had that phone call back. Just kidding :)
That was my impression, too--the article seemed to focus more on the VC path to success, which is like making it big as a professional athlete or entertainer.

For contractors and ISVs, I suppose you have to find a profitable niche.
Interoperability by Friction (re: the Spolsky article that you're probably sick of reading about)
This looks very dubious. Basically, if you start a startup for them, they'll pay you $100k in salary, plus up to $900k more. But that is an upper bound. It's only a million dollar contest in the sense that no matter how valuable your work, they will not pay you more than a million dollars.
CIGS and III-V aren't very practical because the global indium supply is only enough to create about 4 gigawatts worth of electricity from these technologies. Whereas in 2007, ALL photovoltaic solar combined produced 6.6 gigawatts of electricity, which accounted for less than .05% of electricity generated.

source: Earth:The Sequel, p. 16&30
Top 5 reasons why “The customer is Always Right” is wrong
Pleasing Google's Tech-Savvy Staff
I think I get it. Well, maybe killing yourself with a robot is no different from shooting yourself with a really elaborate gun. But somewhere in that elaborateness is a line to be crossed; otherwise convincing someone else to kill you would be the same thing. Unless being made out of bio-parts somehow makes you irreducibly different from a robot?