skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When I talk about humans being meant or designed to live a certain way, I mean by evolution.

Evolution is the change of a species over time--it does not have a conciousness in order to "mean" to do things. The related reasoning in the article appears to infer the superiority of the last 10,000+ years of "hunter-gatherers" over the last few thousand years of larger organizations with managers for a specific purpose (building pyramids, aquaducts, etc.)--but these large public works projects are in fact the very hallmarks of the advancement of evolution. I'm not saying that we were "meant" to work in large organizations, but it is hard for your article to that conclusion using evolution as a reason. Indeed, the concept of evolution would seem to contradict your point. By definition, your ancient bands of hunter-gatherers were less evolved than we technologists are today, and today the large organizations (from government to google) reign supreme...therefore, large organizations are more "evolved"...
What a load of bullocks. Humans are a social species. They are supposed to work in groups, and any group needs leaders and followers - one is not more important than the other. Comparing the life of a "company man" to that of a lion in a cage is a straw man argument.

Some people, myself include, are more than happy to put in our 40 hours at our jobs (I happen to enjoy mine), and than get to go home and define ourselves in ways not related to our careers.

Your insistence that being a startup founder somehow makes you more human is arrogant and offensive.
You need to do what I did, which is what you're doing right now: Find the people online who are doing PHP and Rails, and hang out with them there. Use IRC. Join an open source project. Since you were crazy enough to mention PHP in your list of higher aspirations, let me point out that the Drupal project could really use good coders, to say nothing of good documenters. ;)

You'll always find better hackers by traveling to them online then by traveling to them in real life. The work is all on the screen. I learned web development because I started reading Greenspun's website and just kept going. Now you've got PG's essays and this site, which would have been like heaven if they'd been around when I was an undergrad. Now that the podcast, the screencast, Youtube, git, Sourceforge, and Trac have been invented you can have a flourishing career without ever meeting a teacher, a collaborator, or a customer in person. They could all be in completely different countries.

Of course, you might still want to meet your collaborators in person if you want to do a startup. You could switch universities. :) You could plan to get your first job in a startup hub where you can seek out news.yc readers. You could take some trains to NYC and attend the Rails user group there. They were still a happening thing, last I heard. Zed Shaw might turn up, and that guy is a trip.

Meanwhile, I have a physics degree, so before I say any more my guild requires me to issue this advice: "To heck with C and Java, and with PHP and Ruby for that matter; you're in college, so spend your spare time taking all those physics courses (or econ, or linguistics, or molecular biology, or art...) that you can't get anywhere else! The web isn't going anywhere, and it's better at teaching you web technologies than any school."

UPDATE: I left out statistics. You want to learn a really valuable, somewhat tedious black art that most people don't understand, to their peril? Take an intro statistics course.
Wow, I was just working with a client on internationalization, but Google's API was for research purposes only. I'm so excited!
Ask YC:  API Overload -- What are your favorites?
It seems like everyday a new API is release that's just brimming with exciting possibilities for web app builders. I have a ton bookmarked in del.icio.us and have decided I need to focus my efforts so I can actually get deep into some of the best. What are your top 5? Here are mine:

1. Amazon Web Services

2. Google Charts

3. Google Maps (yes, I'm behind the times)

4. FriendFeed (coming in next few weeks)

5. LinkedIn (release it already, dammit!)
What's a logger in this context?
And yet founders live almost exclusively on pizza...
I agree. At our annual conference, we have users that like and a few who hate our application. I think you can't have a successful product (as ours is) without having passionate users and critics in your community..

If you want to be jealous of a company, be jealous of Threadless.com - if you haven't heard of their crowd-sourcing runaway-to-a-private-island type of success, google it and weep :)
All we need now are some games for the working stiffs. Anyone know of something out there?
I did a Swing project soon after Java 1.3 came out and kept finding odd bugs where the behavior of the code directly contradicted the behavior in the JavaDocs. My experience was basically that if you didn't do things exactly as they did in The Java Tutorial, chances are it wouldn't work. Or it'd mostly work, but with weird edge cases when you did something unexpected.

I asked my QA manager about this, and he said that the word on the street was that Java 1.3 was not QA'd. They just made sure that the tutorial worked and pushed it out the door.

I've had similar experiences with Java AJAX frameworks. The basic stuff from Sun (JavaEE, JSF) seems fairly robust, as long as you use it in the intended way. But many of the add-ons like Facelets, A4J, RichFaces, etc. are made by small 2-3 person startups, and they don't QA or document their code at all. Moreover, their code frequently makes functionality in the base JSF layers break (eg. you have to use ui:repeat instead of c:forEach with Facelets, and then you have to use a4j:repeat instead of ui:repeat if you add A4J). Maybe that's changed since they were bought by JBoss, but it's something to keep in mind whenever you use bleeding-edge libraries by small teams.

So I'd amend that: start by assuming you're wrong, but if you can't find anything in your code, look at your dependencies in order of least-used -> most-used. Chances are, software like Python or Apache or Java has been fairly well-exercised, and most of the bugs have been worked out. But there's no reason to believe that JPartTimeOneDeveloperLibrary is any better than code you write yourself, and if you use untested projects like that, you should budget time to look through their source code and debug their problems and send in patches.

Unfortunately, sometimes managers get it into their head that a 3rd-party library is more reliable than it actually is, often because the vendor has the chutzpah to charge a hundred grand for it, and they mandate you use it. This should be considered a bug in your manager, but unfortunately there's no fix for that...
Check out the one right above it -- super cultish:

"The four worlds of the Metaverse Roadmap could also represent four pathways to a Singularity. But they also represent potential dangers. An "open-access Singularity" may be the answer."
"A webcomic of romance,
sarcasm, math, and language."

Notice how only one of those is math. I think it is by design that only ~1/3 of them are HN material.
Common Traits of Great Managers
Camcorder Brings Zen to the Shoot
Interesting info, thanks
Money quote, albeit tangential to the article: "But Hawkins, a brain scientist, knew something about people: if you're successful at something the first time you try, you fall instantly in love with it."
On rare occasions I still find myself falling into the "I'll get it soon" bug-seeking trap. That evil state can keep you spinning your wheels for hours.

I've a rule to help recognize it: If I start spouting frustrated profanity, I have to step away from the screen for at least an hour. It's amazing how obviously simple the solution is on my return.
Ask YC: I enjoy my cage
I work for a large company in decline. I see all my smart colleagues leaving for better opportunities, and there are many storm clouds on the horizon for the company. I have all kinds of ideas for startups and I'm itching to try them.

But my team is currently kicking at least reasonable amounts of ass, and is well-supported by management. While there are some alarmingly dumb ideas imposed on us from above, for the most part I am getting to implement my ideas. I have a pretty great salary. I believe we're helping ordinary people. I would be really annoyed if I had to leave it now, because I think we're maybe a year away from having a really great solution in our market.

Now what?
This is silly. First of all, ExxonMobil doesn't control "most" of the oil reserves; they have only a very small fraction. And if the US federal government forcibly broke the company into several pieces (like Bell Telephone) the resulting smaller companies would still have no greater incentive to increase production.
New Google visualization API
You're on it now.
Well I wrote this long note about staying at your job, saving, and not using credit cards but deleted it all. I figured its your life and why not take a chance!

Goodluck! I will be following your blog along the way.
Theres a view in economics that you 'can not play market' within the boundaries of the firm. That is to say if there is an overseeing committee that can end a project prematurely then you are not really having market forces operate 'within' the firm and are doomed to failure. There have been a couple of companies that have tried to do this. It is documented in the following book by Nicolai Foss:

http://www.amazon.com/Strategy-Economic-Organization-Knowled...
Intel researchers stretch Wi-Fi to cover 60 miles
White House Taps Tech Entrepreneur For Cyber Defense Post
Or it implies police like to scare you (like it's their job).
Brilliant! For sometime now, I have been contemplating working for a big company or starting something myself. This is if not anything more, a trigger. Thanks for all that u write!
Amazon EC 2 - What you may not have known
Before reading "O(1)" I thought it would be written "Priceless".

However I think that's the idea, but using programmers currency.
Many criminals are intelligent people with good heads for business and healthy appetites for risk
This is quite promising and impressive.

However, you need someone to work on the English right away. "Opinion Analizer" is... not quite what you think it means.
I assume most people here have at least heard of The Starfish and the Spider, but I'd also like to put in a word for his two Braintickers books. The first is a book of questions for the year 3,000, like "When we can match or exceed many or all human physical and mental skills with computers or appliances, how will we define our reason for being?" The second is a book of questions for CEOs. I think one of the best ways to measure the intelligence of a person is by the questions they ask, so I'm really glad to see Rod get the post.
How do you define price-gouging? Are you suggesting that oil companies should voluntarily sell their products at a price lower than what their customers are willing to pay?
What are stressful times? Times are always stressful for someone, somewhere.
What are unreasonable profits? Do you think the government should arbitrarily limit total net profit for any particular company? Or perhaps they should limit profit margins or return on capital? And any profit limits that apply to oil companies should also apply to software companies, right?
You can find consumption statistics here.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/
That's excellent! How long has your friend been there (one issue with Bridgewater is that I have met many people who worked there, and very few who worked there for more than a year -- I think it's pretty jarring for most people).
> The problem is the same as with visas: the government's definition of work is a job working for someone else.

It's not quite that. At least some governmental oratory states that entrepreneurship is what drives the American economy. Verification of 'work' is just a hell of a lot easier if it's for a known company.
Excellent article. I am a lifelong corporate IT guy who has a life long fantasy of working in a startup company. In my most recent job in which I have been on for 13 years, the IT shop consisted of about 30 people when I started. We were very entrepreneurial when I started and used to be rock stars who would crank out solutions for the business. Now we are 200 people moving at snail speed spending most of our time on compliance projects, infrastructure upgrades, and mindless enhancements to monolithic systems. It is hard to promote change because the status quo is rewarded. As I walk the halls, many people look like they are serving time. Management (which includes me) is always trying to foster innovation and new ideas. But only the newer employees participate. They have not assimilated yet. I am sure after they hit the wall a few times, they to will walk with slumped shoulders.

So your article hit home and was a great read. The next time I go to the zoo and look at the lion in the cage, I will realize that I am looking in the mirror.

http://blogs.ittoolbox.com/eai/madgreek
Guns are ubiquitous in Canada, but violent crime rates are dramatically lower. The US murder rate is 2.5 times greater than Canada's.*

I'm sure there are several reasons for this. There are two differences between US and Canadian society that I suspect could be important.

First, the wealth divide is much greater in the US than in Canada (or the UK). Social programs look out for the poor and reduce their desperation.

Second, the US almost uniformly rejects drug treatment as an alternative to long incarceration. Sending drug addicts to prison is just going to train them to become proper criminals.

*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_Canada#United_States
I find it hilarious that the absence of system-raping software that occasionally stoops to the level of rootkits is a feature now. I have been out of the PC gaming loop for quite some time, so this is one thing that I am glad I avoid with console gaming.
Google chart API - daily limit lifted
I may have missed this before but the updated usage policy is:

"There's no limit to the number of calls per day you can make to the Google Chart API. However, we reserve the right to block any use that we regard as abusive, an apparent denial of service attempt for example. If you think your service will make more than 250,000 API calls per day, please let us know by mailing an estimate to chart-api-notifications@google.com."
As a victim of several such team building ordeals I totally got that.

I imagine a sort of confused purposelessness with a touch of embarassment, all concealed with forced cheer.
63-year-old solves riddle from 1970
As a test I looked for "lenovo x300" as I know that similiarly named products exist, but one of the first opinions came back as "The Dell Latitude X300 is a very good choice for those who want prime performance with premium..." so while I think it's a great concept (and it will definitely get better!), I'd take a good look at the model you're using to ensure that it indeed disambiguates as necessary.

Overall, I really like the idea, and I think it's visually implemented very well. It packs a lot of data on to one screen (nicely).
My friend's dad is Exxon Mobil manager for the Balkans.

My dad has worked in oil & natural gas industry for 28 years, including a long standing working relationship with Exxon Mobil.

While what you are saying sounds nice ("So I certainly don't think they are holding off on projects simply to leverage higher prices in future.") ...

I know for a fact it is certainly not true. Some people wouldn't touch the company with a ten-foot pole, including relatives of country managers.
This relates to a recent idea I had - "true social software" or perhaps "locally social software".

Many people comment on the irony of how the modern world makes people feel isolated despite giving them more means of communication than ever before. For example, I don't know anyone that lives in my neighborhood, and I think this is common. Social software doesn't help with this, typing "A/S/L" into an AOL chat room doesn't really enhance my social life, neither does posting a pic on Myspace.

Now think of the appeal of geographically local communication tools. For example, maybe a chat room would be localized so as to only cover a local coffee shop. People in the chat room could leave away messages about what they're reading, and others would comment on it. After a good IM conversation, people might walk a few feet and have a conversation in real life. I might meet someone everytime I go to the coffee shop, whereas now I might meet a new person every few months. "True social" software facilitates socialization in meat space and helps to break down the social barriers that prevent us from knowing our neighbors.

Another example, I would like to have a bulletin board that only covered the community where I live. Then I could post messages about the barbecues we have and I would finally be able to meet people that live around me.

Craigslist is "true social", and so are dating sites today. I would like to see the genre expanded.
Entrepreneur vs Wild (Bootstrapping)
I posted a blog article based on a cool panel discussion that Bootstrap Austin had at SXSW this year.
Thank you Mr. Graham.

Your essays never cease to inspire, delight, and amaze.

I feel VINDICATED upon reading them.

Always precise, yet loosely coupled.

Ideas and concepts that seem to exponentially expand within the mind of the reader.

I have personally experienced feeling like an entirely new being after going to work for myself . . . and I am going on my sixth year.
I posted a blog article based on a cool panel discussion that Bootstrap Austin had at SXSW this year. I think its an interesting way of looking at your venture in the pre-profitability stage.
Isn't it ironic that you say Amazon's strategy is "doomed to failure" at the same time that you link to a book for sale on Amazon?
Where in the UK are you? You can always quit and move if theres nothing available
movie recommendation (and accidental pun on parent poster): King Corn (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1112115). Enlightening.
Good summary of politics on the Internets:

"Could such a game augur the outcome of the next presidential election? Probably not. The armies of John McCain and Barack Obama have already been routed, and Hillary Clinton’s forces are trapped in New England.

Jockeying for control of the rest of the country are the armies of Representative Ron Paul of Texas and the comedian Stephen Colbert."
The other point I didn't see mentioned in the article is that reverse DNS lookups look a bit horrible, and you can't change the reverse DNS :(
There's a huge difference between the sense of ownership that comes automatically from small organizations and the 'incentives' that a paternalistic committee chooses to bestow on a few in its largesse, while bleeding motivation in all the other ways large organizations do that PG talks about. I don't interpret any of those studies (including Herzberg's in the sibling post) to mean 'socialism isn't so bad'. Yes it is so bad. But that doesn't mean you can't implement capitalism poorly.

Capitalism isn't about profits, it's about motivation.
Thoroughly Modern Do-Gooders
How is this the semantic web?
The first thing you notice working at big companies is that they take away your admin rights on your workstation. You can not be creative with a restrictive environment. You are forced to use the tools everyone at the company uses and force to think like everyone else.

For those who are working at small company, stay where you are. It is true you don’t learn much at big companies. It is not much about how well you do things, but it is how well you are connected and how well you can exaggerate.
Floors on Losses
One reason is portability, especially for applications running on both UNIX and Windows. The Windows system event logger is so awful I sometimes think it was made for robots rather than human programmers. It's just useless.

Why not UNIX syslog? It's a powerful, universal logging tool, optimized for performance, and it can take care of concurrency, repeating message "storms", automatic archiving, etc. It can also store messages pertaining to a particular subsystem in a separate file, and that's what most developers want. The problem is that system configuration must be changed for that (presumably when installing your application) and this is not portable across all UNIX systems, AFAIK.

Why not some widely available libraries then, like you said? Most of them are overcomplicated, don't support concurrency or lack some other very basic, simple features you might need in your project.

So, there's always a temptation to write a custom logger because it looks simple in the beginning - just take the string and write it to a file, right? And it is, in fact, not at all simple if you think of concurrency and performance.

I usually take UNIX syslog as a basis and I write my own syslog emulator on Windows whenever I need to maintain portability of the source.
Politics aside, there's an idea I like in here:

"Bankers operate under a system that provides stellar rewards when the investment strategies do well yet puts a floor on their losses when they go bad."

The market that is available to mere mortals two sorts of bets: buying long and buying short. Most people do the former, because you can only lose as much as you put in: there's a floor on your losses.

But some folks buy short, in which case you can lose a whole lot more than you put in.

Do folks have ideas of how to constructed (financial) executive compensation to reflect a similar "buying short" reward matrix?
Joost to launch a web version this year
Credit card debt is foolish... credit cards themselves are great. Definitely prefer to swipe plastic rather than carry around pieces of paper.
How to be a premiere blogger
How DIYers Just Might Revive Western Innovation
Make a choice. Any of your ideas started with them are no longer yours.
I would understand that, as it 'looks' easy to write a logger, and other people's logger 'looks' complicated.
how does this compare to Kirkland North?
Welcome to 2008! Semantic is the new Web 2.0.

This is going to be the next most overused term ever, suddenly you will have sematic widgets, semantic dating sites and semantic platforms. sigh!
I highly recommend watching the actual lecture. Those are just Vinge's notes.

http://www.wholeearthfilms.com/vinge_vernor.html
Bernanke's own home lost 260k in value
MBAs bearish on Bear job offers
Funding using lines of credit and credit cards? Unbelievably high exposure here. Best of luck to this person, I truly hope they succeed and do not have to deal with the consequences of having a massive debt load with suffocating interest rates!
Aren't these the same guys who developed, built, and leased a fully electric car, only to repossess and crush them all, to the dismay of the otherwise-happy owners?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Who_killed_the_electric_car

They already have a design that they know works and will be popular... It seems that they are putting up this "we'll lose our shirts" argument as a possible escape route if the back-room politics don't play out correctly again.
Try www.taprootfoundation.org.

Sripathi
What Motivates You?
Oddly the thing that stood out in those comments was the discussion of living expenses, and specifically health insurance.

Everyone is quoting things like $700/mo and $1100/mo. Even the guy with the high deductible plan alluded to paying $116/mo for a $5k deductible.

Am I the only one that pays $55/mo for a $1k deductible plan? I must be lucky or something. And that aside, seriously, you buy insurance for catastrophes... not to save $150 on a doctors visit. Why the heck would you spend $1100/mo on insurance?

No wonder these people think startups are hard. They'd need a VC round just to cover their insurance premiums.
An answer to PG's Boss essay