skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Brilliant beast! Wonder if my local liberry has the book (a library card is highly recommended to you frugal, bootstrapping types as the cheapest entertainment).

Regarding Wikipedia, I agree. I'm disappointed by the behind-the-scenes manipulation and gamesmanship, but believe the sort of topics I tend to be interested in are less likely to be manipulated.
this schedule is coming to the big corps too; i work 4 day work weeks with wednesdays off at an electric utility companay and it's fantastic
Congrats guys - traffic graph is fabulous!
I have very fond memories of my sumer of 1991 listening to [Pretty Hate Machine]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Hate_Machine ) while doing a road trip that ended with an unplanned stop at washington's [Lollapalooza 1991 ]( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lollapalooza ) with NIN playing. To see that particular band be one of the rare ones to act like "real" artists make me happy.
First ask yourself these questions:

Do you have any responsibilities?

Are you young enough such that you can go into something more stable if things don't "work out"?

If your answers are "no" and "yes" then go for it. You'll be better off for having done something different. It might set you back some years if you were to pursue your career like everybody else (in case it doesn't work out as planned), but when you're stuck in a cubicle looking back you will know what it's worth.

I hope you make it doing whatever you are aiming for so that you don't have to look back - and that brings up another point: don't look back if you choose to do something risky. It's do or die!!!

YAY!

----------------------------

Now for the real answer to your question:

If you need to ask somebody if you should or should not, then you probably shouldn't.

Until you believe in yourself to be able to make it then don't commit. The fact that you are asking is telling me that there is some self-doubt, and this will be your biggest obstacle. When things seem darkest, your mettle must be such that you stick it out and see it to the end, no matter what the results are to be.

First overcome your self doubt and then see if you need to ask anybody your question. The choice to do one thing over another must come from within yourself, not from the advice of others.

I'd rather be brutally honest with you instead of sticking to the line above my real answer...if you had the courage to go for it, then you wouldn't be worried about "breaking the news" to your parents because there would be no question in your mind about your success. Yes, I'm being harsh, but this is NOTHING compared to what you might encounter out in the wild, or from your parents... ;) If you believe in yourself, then nothing I could say would change your mind.

I'm not advising you to be pig-headed or stubborn but rather seek a state of mind called "self-confidence". Your question is indicative of the fact that self-confidence to pursue this direction is lacking. I would rather you reflect upon this fact instead of responding because I'll only tell you in response: you don't need to justify yourself to anybody but yourself.

Read "The Unfettered Mind" by Takuan Soho. If you can understand "immovable wisdom" then you have taken the first step in a long journey towards becoming more confident with what you want to do.

Being at peace with the outcome of your action (both good and bad) is a totally separate issue!

EDIT: First step to becoming more confident: capitalize the 'I' in any sentence that refers to yourself. It speaks volumes when you capitalize other proper nouns but don't do the same for yourself!
It sounds like you've already made your mind up. You want to pursue the arts, and are going to try and do that. By all means, you're young. Life is short.

There are many of us that tried to make a go of it in the arts scene, but ended up going in to technical fields. I think that there is a correlation.

I've had a day job as an ER nurse for 15 years. I knew it was not what I wanted to do for a living, but it paid the bills. I, too thought that vocational happiness was to be found pursuing the arts, so, I studied art formally and on my own in a lot of different forms: interior design, sculpture, painting, photography, computer graphics, video editing, animation, 3D modeling and animation.

Any one of those things can be done to pay the bills, and there are career paths for each one of those. But, at some point, I found that I had to trade my passion to someone else for cash. And, doing that was impossible for me. I wasn't able to stay sane and edit the industrial video about the history of SmallCo's dialysis machines. I wasn't willing to create the logo like the client wanted, because I knew that what the client wanted was aesthetically wrong and ugly. I wasn't willing to put in 16 hours x 6 days a weeks just to be a visual effects artist in Hollywood.

It's one of the reasons that Hackers and Painters made so much sense to me. There is a creativity in programming, and in hacking that is very close to the creativity that one gets while painting or sculpting. Especially when the hacking is done on your own business.

It's the reason that I'm not going to work for someone else as a programmer, too. Why should I create value for someone else, when I can create value for myself? Why should I spend 8-10 hours a day at a desk so someone else's company can increase in value, when I can spend 8-10 hours a day on my own company making something that people want.

As an entrepreneur, I get the creative control. I get to be the decider. I set my own hours. I financially benefit from my own work. And, I get to do a bunch of different things. That's why I'm going to be a founder instead of an artist. It's a lot of the same benefits and risks, and a lot greater upside. At the same time, had I never knocked on the arts door, I would have never ended up being an entrepreneur.
An employee will cost anywhere from 20K/year to 500K+/year. I think it is worth spending 2 minutes personally reading each resume.
I guess D&D falls into the "do your own thing" category of entrepreneurship. It may have been inspired by an existing product (war games), but ultimately became a new type of game and had no guarantee of an eventual payoff.

BTW is anyone else a bit surprised by the light tone of the articles about Gygax's death? All the headlines I see seem to be jokes, and I wonder if that's because he was a geek and not, for example, an athlete or musician with "devastated" fans. [Just a somewhat cynical observation.]
A Litmus Test for Entrepreneurs
Ask YC: Dubai - future Startup Hub
In paul's book hackers and painters he talks about wanting to be where the greatest wealth is. Paul, and others what do you think about the potential of starting a company in dubai?

for nationals?

for foreigners?
Our company works on a half-day Friday system. We work for 8.75 hrs M-Th and 5 hrs on Fri. It seems to work well and the work days are short enough to prevent burnout.
congrats!! good to know you are sticking it out and doing well.
From the article: Solve failed OCR inputs

That can sometimes have unintended consequences because the words are unknown: http://www.makeuseof.com/tech-fun/rape-now-facebook-captcha-...
That's a pretty interesting notion, actually. I'd never do it, but it's nice to have the option.
Someone needs to make it easy for artists to do this. They want it, and users want it.
thanks! it was definitely difficult at points so we're really glad we stuck with it. paul's essay is right on.
What you don't mention was (a) this wasn't the first time you'd done this, and (b) that before turning off voting for your account, I tried sending you an email asking you to stop, and you replied basically telling me to fuck off.
Normalized data is for sissies
Your job does not necessarily make you happy but your salary from your job may let you do the things that make you happy.

Credit for this piece of wisdom goes to a very smart kid who I knew when he was wee tall - delivered as part of his HS Valedictorian address.
Ah, my old friend whose name is here. Your comment is absolutely true.

If I may ask, are you mentioning it because you think the post is suggesting otherwise? Or are you just mentioning it??
Earth's rotation may account for wayward spacecraft
> "If you love music, find yourself a job which doesn't involve playing music."

In my experience, this is just as true of programming.
A Wave of the Watch List, and Domain Names Get Pulled
For smaller web projects? http://webpy.org/

It's very simple, yet powerful enough to let you do pretty much anything you need to.
The interesting point in the article is that in the response to the first and the last question Zuckerberg says that Facebook’s goal is to "help everyone in the world communicate more efficiently." I’m not sure if the users would articulate the company’s goal in those specific terms, if they were asked. I’d probably say that their its goal is to connect everybody.
Phun | Great Physics Program for Kids
Disclaimer: I have never been to dubai or silicon valley

BUT, I have a feeling that the wealthy people in dubai are not very accessible to the average american guy. You aren't going to meet them at parties and they probably won't take meetings with you just cause you have a cool webapp.

Whereas in silicon valley, you could run into some random guy at a barcamp or lecture with a couple mil in google options.
Right. Users of ourdoings.com would be less efficient communicating their real-life doings via Facebook, and users of friendfeed would be less efficient communicating their online doings that way.
Pretty Simple
Here's my thought process when reading that comment:

"...raganwald fatigue" - ? No one ever complains about raganwald. Who wrote this comme... oh, Reg, you rascal!
I couldn't find the words "fitness" or "exercise" anywhere in the article. In my opinion any discussion of sleep habits should include exercise (if I was a doctor that's the first thing I'd ask my patients about). The writer does mention coffee and caffeine, which is another good indicator of potential sleep issues.

I used to work vampire hours years ago while an independent. It was fun in some ways, but waking up at lunchtime made me feel like I missed most of the day. Now I'm up before the sunrise and accomplish more (it's also somewhat necessary in my commuting environment).

Find what works for you, but mind your health (says grandma)!
By my estimates, assuming $20 per user (which really varies), that's over $200,000! Congrats!
It’s funny how, to add drama to the article, the author writes, "Investors and Apple fanatics from as far as Wyoming and Pennsylvania and at least one child packed the company's auditorium." Is the "at least one child" comment necessary?! She does talk about Al Gore in the next sentence. Maybe that’s who she is implying. Hmm, I guess that reference to the child is really just political commentary.
The grandparent comment gives my definition of the difference between a startup and a company:

Startup: "...pre-revenue cash burning startup."

Business/company: "...solid profits, plenty of users..."

By this definition, most YC companies would be startups while 37signals/Fog Creek/Google would be companies. Incidentally, Facebook is still a startup by this definition, despite its size.

So like you say, the startup has to do whatever possible, because as I say, they're on borrowed time. They onus is on them to demonstrate that their idea and execution is accepted by the market ("Make something people want"). In a business with customers, profits, etc, they've done that and it's just a matter or managing what has been created. When you get to that point (especially when hiring non-founders), you have room to be flexible.
Three Jeers for Frustrating Gadgetry
This is Hacker News. I'm sure many hackers don't care about SEO techniques and how to improve click-through; this is not a website only for web 2.0 entrepreneurs.
This is the magic pattern that means a startup is probably going to make it.

Incidentally, while 10k uniques a day is not a huge number for the average site, it is for this site. These visitors are per capita about as valuable as you can get. They're not just checking out the latest pictures on their friend's profile; they're all looking for electronic parts.
Programming Language Stories
i get to lose double the karma because i have 2 comments they can downmod. makes sense to me.

edit: hey, someone is now downmodding my other recent comments. -6 all at once. <3
What is the ratio of retrieving (reporting) to updating? You just may want to ask this question before you decide how far to normalize your data. Got 13 instances of the same thing? EVERY ONE of them must be updated simultaneously with EVERY update (including all the necessary locking, committing, etc.)

Calling people sissies is what sissies do. (Oops, does that make me a sissie?)
Semantic Web Search Engine Roundup
Unlike traditional search engines, which crawl the Web gathering Web pages, Semantic Web search engines index RDF data stored on the Web and provide an interface to search through the crawled data.
You need more than money. Where the money came from also matters. So Miami, for example, has a lot of money, but few startups. I'd expect the same pattern in Dubai.
I've never been to Dubai, but it seems to me to be much closer to Orange County than Silicon Valley.
Poll: How smart are you?
Top 5% of news.yc readers
Smarter than the average news.yc reader
Less smart than the average news.yc reader
Bottom 5% of news.yc readers
Why The Debate Around Global Warming Is Irrelevant
I was in Dubai about 6 weeks ago, visiting some old college roommates.

While there, I met a guy who had started a tech company in Bahrain, and does work in Qatar and Dubai.

Pros: Lots of money down there, probably too much (they're often desperate to spend it and want "the best" regardless of price), low (or no) tax rates.

Cons: The obvious friction of being a foreigner, frequent need for bribes, incompetence due to lack of economic pressure (easy to fuck up if you have tons of oil money, and don't need to worry about it), lack of local skilled labor (you have to bring them in).

I also stopped by the CMU campus in Doha (I'm an alum of the Pittsburgh campus). They're doing some good stuff there, and there is potential. One big surprise was the high percentage of women in the program (above 50%).
Cause/effect?

That is an awesome site.
This article is really gross and creepy.

It's a stretch, but a defensible one, to report that Jobs concealed a dangerous treatable illness for 9 months.

But what possibly justification can Fortune have for reporting about Jobs' children "out of wedlock", the antics of his absent biological parents after he was given up for adoption, the lack of license plates on his car, or the contents of his secret address book?

It's hard to feel sorry for a billionaire public figure subjected to takedown pieces like this. So I don't feel sorry for him. But this reporter embarassed himself and his publication. This stuff wouldn't even pass muster on Wikipedia.
The section on "Do you have the patience to start small?" reminds me of pg's recent comment:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=116280
Channeling Richard Florida's "The Creative Class"?
Can't I be just be the average news.yc reader?
We use CentralDesktop, we post a number of GoogleChat and SkypeChat transcripts there as well. CentralDesktop has a search engine that can search each workspace, attachments, EditGrid is embedded for spreadsheets, and a good contention management system (when you are working against a deadline you will run into more than one person trying to edit the same page, most wikis don't manage this very well). We create separate wikis that we use to work with customers and partners so that knowledge can be compartmentalized and security maintained.
I'm pretty sure they thought of all this, and I'm pretty sure they're profitable enough that no one's taking a pay cut to implement these ideas.

From one of the first reply comments by Jason Fried:

"Why not just pay a higher salary instead of ‘funding passions?"

"First, this isn’t really about the money. It’s about encouragement."

"We want to encourage and motivate people to find something interesting to explore. Most people can spring for their own photography classes, but how many people actually do it on their own? Most don’t but many would if they had a bit more encouragement and support."

Someone below that said:

"As far as funding passions, I’m sure there are tax benefits from having your employer pay."
We did some sourcing of hardware parts in a previous startup, so I know the field a little. I think octopart will survive simply because they solve a problem that hasn't been solved well before. Sourcing is a pain...

I'm glad to see these stats, and I think they will definitely make it.
Exactly average
Some people troll because they know better but they are tired of explaining it. They say the truth(tm) when the crowd does not want to here it. I like them.
No, you're not suggesting otherwise. But using "Bayesian filtering" (or whatever variation of it) is best on huge data sets. Working manually, I could tell you with near 100 percent reliability which email is spam--better than any filter. It's inefficient for a human to do it, so a process that can remove 95 percent instead of 100 is acceptable. Inefficiency matters less as the data becomes smaller and more important.

Real life example: My current manager has some twisted filter on his brain, whereat he is convinced that a mastery of certain things (like design patterns, or "OO architecture") are extremely important. We were interviewing a while back, and some kid said his 'proudest achievement' was a Pac-Man clone he made. Well, my manager's filter did not include the words "Pac-Man clone" and so we never even looked at it.

Every good candidate in a creative field is going to go outside the bounds of any filter you can come up with, training or otherwise. The better they are, the more likely this is true. A tool that is suitable for flagging "V!agr3" is not necessarily the tool for...identifying good pharmaceutical researchers.
"Think of it as Napster for education"
I agree. I think the best strategy is to start with a normalized database, and only denormalize when you measure a problem that can't be fixed by adding an index.
Choice added.
Channeling Paul Graham - http://www.paulgraham.com/siliconvalley.html
This could produce misleading results if there is a difference between voters and lurkers, because voters are only a few percent of visitors.
I really don’t know how to compare myself to YC readers. I imagine the population is quite intelligent, and I am quite intelligent as well. I guess that I would be within a standard deviation of the mean.

Didn’t vote.
Not wanting to threadcrap, but what is the point of this poll? Are you compiling these stats for something?
This is interesting. In fact, interesting enough that I'm gonna try it out. Thanks for finding this.
Don't let that stop you. The rest of us don't know how to compare either.
There is also the case of being forced to do things incorrectly...

And bosses that make the job uncomfortable or have a negative attitude

Lastly, you may love programming but maybe programming the stuff you think up or like, not someone else's vision or tool or w/e.
Think about allowing multiple existing communities to run their own local crowdfilter as an add on to an existing website. The single sites grow and end up with "lowest common denominator" issues. You don't mention slashdot, but they did a lot right early.
I've got a few spare invites. First 4 replies with an email address to this comment can have them.
What's so odd to me is that reading through the working knowledge section and others on the site is that the Harvard Business School just doesn't seem to get a lot of things about web business anymore.

This article comes off as being written by someone who, while incredibly credentialed, just seems like an outsider. It seems like an article my parents would write and they dont necessarily have a great grasp on the way business is evolving.

I'd much rather read certain blogs than the stuff coming out of hbs these days. Its odd but they're missing developments almost as badly as traditional media.

Note this semi-rant is directed on the whole at hbs' working knowledge site and only a little bit at this specific article.
That was the main concern I had about the Bayesian resume filter - would it work at small (or even mid-sized) companies? Sure, with Google getting 10K's or resumes a month, they could mine some monster data out of it, but if you hire a couple people a year and get 100 resumes, do you have enough data?

I guess Reg's point was that even if it isn't perfect, it gives you some data, which is a heck of a lot better than no data.
To see if the results come out heavily skewed or not.
Nike and iPod Teaming Up On the Treadmill
Featured on TED.
How do we compare? What's the metric? - I guess this poll needs to be more specific.
Pointing out a single aspect of this poll that "could produce misleading results" is a form of humor so subtle that only the smartest 5% of news.yc readers will get it.
Anyone else underwhelmed?
You end your article with 'Bayesian filters will not outperform a human in hiring'. But that's not the point.

A classifier, and especially a supervised classifier, is really just a tool for intelligence amplification. Make a dumb man perform smarter, and a smart man perform better than almost anyone without the advantage. Similar to providing physicians with a checklist for common procedures which has been developed by iterative analysis of outcomes. It's very hard to become a physician if you're dumb or lazy, but it's quite easy to get fatigued on a 36-hour residency shift, or get complacent if some 'trivial' procedure interrupts your microsurgery specialty. And the stakes are far higher in most surgical interventions.

Naturally, many doctors resist. But the best figure out how to use this to their advantage. It increases the efficiency of the system. Likewise, having the 'advice' of a machine that has been trained on a corpus of good multiple-human-actor decisions, over time, can provide individuals with better judgment than their experience alone. This is more apparent with a larger corpus and finer-grained classification -- eg. multidimensional classification with a huge corpus and eigenclasses of suitability. Game that, and you're smart enough to be in management, most likely ;-)

So, I don't believe you should let your detractors off so easily. Maybe a talented human will outperform an filter with a small corpus. But I'd bet dollars to donuts that, for someone who isn't a full-time interviewer, the assistance of a well-trained filter will increase their acuity and throughput, allowing them to get on with their real jobs and worry less about dumb hires.

You can't really avoid the enthusiasm of junior employees who haven't been burned, and this is another scenario where a filter can help them gauge their judgment by providing a historical perspective. "You know the last guy we hired who interviewed like this, one of your coworkers spent 2 hours a day for 3 months training him, and then we fired him!" That's something you want to avoid, and I have seen this happen at places like Google where you might think they'd be immune. But once you let the dumb or negative folks in, it's all downhill from there.

So -- replace humans? No. Augment them? Yes. It's what computers (and statistical analyses) are meant for!
Awesome! Keep it up, dudes...
No, Dubai will probably not become a start-up hub: "The Top 20 Reasons Not to Move to Dubai"
Like the experiment that shows that most people consider themselves to be above average?
Ah-Ha Moment: I wrote my first program with eval and lambda!
I've 'understood' what eval and lambda were for in Ruby but I hadn't ever had a real reason to use it for anything, until today.

Now I REALLY get what they are for and I can definitely see how you could use them all over the place.

Just wanted to share my Hacker Joy ;)