skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I sat in on the venture class at UChicago last night (I'm auditing the MBA program).

They actually talked about this and the professor referenced some study out of UVA of successful entrepreneurs and one of the recurring traits was that their investments are guided not by the size of the opportunity but by their own conception of 'acceptable loss'.

It was emphasized multiple times that you really should _not_ fund your venture on credit cards, 2nd and 3rd mortgages on your homes, etc even if you think an opportunity promises to be the next google, twitter, whatever.
Don't give money [that's restricted] to Haiti
I guess just the fact that people wear it in front of their faces while walking/cycling and can maintain good visibility. I don't know enough about fluid mechanics to understand how 65 mph winds factor into that, though. :-)
fh wrote "In short, my point is that if a new convention is clearly better, it's usually possible to switch gradually, and that this is usually done."

I'd love to see any data at all about this. Or even a few not cherry picked examples.

You also wrote: "The electric plug situation is rapidly improving".

I have seen zero evidence for this. I've yet to travel to any other continent without this being a problem.
Isn't this just a public online quiz that could be taken by anyone? Who is to say that the majority of people that took it are embedded systems software developers and not highschoolers?
Don't change a thing. The format is good, delivery great and content excellent.

Look into producing an ebook of sorts of the interviews. Better writing than just transcripts.
Can one fit this study list in a life time? Seriously, this has been a problem for me for a long time. Any one of the mentioned books would take me months to study. It'd take me a month to just read a textbook, without any toil. Am I too slow, or are there some study/reading techniques that I'm not aware of?
you're making the same assumption I disagreed with two comments ago. to me, getting banned is not the negative part of the experience. the negative part of the experience is the bad habit of coming back to engage in more fruitless conversation when I could be off doing stuff. the more offensive my tone is on this site, the sooner I'll get banned again, the quicker I'll get on with something actually useful to do, and the better it'll be for me.

I should just follow my own advice and devolve into Tourette's syndrome. fuck you, you chinchilla rapist. (nothing personal.)

anyway, ALSO, none of this has anything to do with what I'm talking about, which is that HN's karma system incubates various dysfunctions, and that anyone who sets up any kind of points system on a social site is going to be setting up the rules of a game that people will then play and be emotionally invested in winning.

curious game, the only way to win is not to play. I'm going to throw away my password to this account, log out, and see how long I can last before starting account #4.
* Every new piece of electronics had an eye-melting blue LED power indicator. This was considered extremely cool at the time.
German Government: Stop Using Internet Explorer
Those last two aren't even that mutually implicative. :)
Yep I remember reading that in Hackers & Painters. My guess was that this was his approach - be probably is, but doesn't want to draw attention to it.

Nice username btw, I'm reading that book right now too (first time) :)
I hope Bram shares his gripes about sysadmins and HR directors "of dubious ethics"!
Interesting site! There were a few Paul Graham's listed, none that looked like him though.
> The freedom of speech article is the ninth of the rights. A bit late as constitutions go (USA: first, Germany: fifth) but pretty consistent with many Europeans’ views on freedom of speech. In many European states free speech is not the same sort of fundamental right as it is in the US. Important, sure, but not quite as.

In defense of Germany: In the US rights come as amendments. The German constitution starts out with the human (and civil) rights at the very beginning. (Yes, someone wanted to distance themself from the Nazis.)
While I agree it can be annoying, would you really have read the interview had the title been: "The story of VoodooPC"?

Headlines are written that way for a reason.
Keep up the transcripts though - they are helpful.
Open Culture Free Physics Courses
>> Maybe there is decent information about starting a successful company in these interviews, but I never bother reading them because the titles are lowest common denominator.

So you ignore it knowing that there will possibly be useful information that can help you be successful? It's definitely your right to do so, but you'll very likely miss out on a lot of excellent things life has to offer with that attitude.
I probably speak for half the board when I say that the first addition for that list to come to mind was, "I was a virgin".

Let me also add to that list: recessions were mild and announced in hindsight, and most peoples' fortunes and jobs actually improved during expansions.
Not only could you, but some airports counted on it. Midway Airport in Chicago was just completing a massive rebuild in 2001 and the new terminal had (has!) a big area immediately behind security that was designed as a meeting place with cafes for people seeing someone off; the way it's designed there's no way to move security the other side of this, and so it never took off the way they intended.
1) If you click on the link, the first four words are "At 17 years old", so I think it's fair to call him a kid.

2) He used a credit card instead of seeking investors, waiting until he saved up money, or just foregoing entrepreneurship because he had not money.

3) His company was called VoodooPC (context).

4) He sold a company he started with a credit card.

That's an awful lot of information to put into a 14 word title. I just took about 100 words to describe it. I think Andrew's headlines are very well written.

There's a reason they sound formulaic - he interviews successful entrepreneurs.

Who are the entrepreneurs everyone respects, and how would you tell their stories in 20 words or less?

College dropout writes software for PCs, makes billions.

Ex hippie makes PCs more stylish, then does the same for music, makes billions.

Two college braniacs use research project to find all the world's information, make billions.

Wannabe artist helps people sell stuff online, then helps start startups.

They all sound trite compared to what we all know about Gates, Jobs, Brin, Page, and pg, but for these less well known entrepreneurs, it's helpful to get a concentrated dose of context.

For what it's worth, I think Andrew's interviews on Mixergy are some of the most useful content on the internet.
This is the site I wish I had know about when I started to learn JavaScript: http://eloquentjavascript.net/

It's all online and free. There's also a nifty firebug-like console at the bottom of the page.

[edit] You may also want to take a look at http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t... and http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/startupswiki/Ask_YC_Archive#t...
Have you seen the garbage results that are returned when you google for "learn javascript"?
Eloquent JavaScript - online guide to javascript for beginners
I think there is some slight sense in amongst this, if only slight.

(Assuming we can drop any argument of copyright being right/wrong for the moment.. for the record I believe it is broken)

It makes sense that sites like Youtube (who after all are actually the ones making most of the money here!) are given some of the responsibility for making sure whatever rules we insist on are not broken.

As I read it this law goes too far; but I think it is more a misguided move in the roughly right direction more than anything else. If we can get a really serious revision of what copyright means (this is important, and I think it is coming if slowly - but it has to be done next I think for the rest to work) and force the content hosts to take some culpability for whatever rules we eventually decide on then I think things would be on the right track.

edit: Im not shocked at the downvote: but Im interested in hearing counter arguments / what specifically seems illogical?
It's unfortunate that he had to use such a link-bait headline on an otherwise very insightful essay. A more accurate title would have been "Don't give money to only Haiti".
That's what it is, yeah. Some parts are just wrong, such as:

> On first seeing R2, Obi-Wan has a twinkle in his eye and calls him "my little friend". Well, he is. However, when Luke wakes up and says that R2 claimed to be owned by an Obi-Wan Kenobi, he blandly says "I don't seem to remember ever owning a droid." Ben has in fact owned several but the remark is aimed at R2 and translates as "You keep quiet. I'm not about to tell him everything just yet."

No, he's smiling because he's engaged in a classic Jesuitism - something that is true from a certain point of view - and denying it because technically the droids were never his; as a Jedi, and hence modeled on Catholic monks, his possessions belonged to the Jedi Order or were on loan from Amidala.

It's fun, and it's a trenchant criticism of the movies' scripts, but it's not actually correct, any more than the correct interpretation of _The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya_ is that Kyon is the actual God and not Haruhi.
On a motorcycle, wearing a helmet, at highway speeds, if the visibility problem is due to water droplet buildup on the face shield, you can simply turn your head to the side, and the wind resistance will push the droplets off to the side.

One brief turn to each side every 30 seconds or so takes care of it. Now, if it's torrential, the problem is likely not 'static' interference but 'dynamic' instead -- not much to do but find a place to stop.
No Idiots
"Digital music pricing has such small profit margins that only offering a discounted item is infeasible."

This doesn't make sense to me. Since there is no physical distribution — thus less material cost and middle-men — digital music can be sold cheaper, while still maintaining the same or similar margins.

So a discount just means a smaller margin. As a temporary way of boosting sales and getting your name about, it makes sense.

Also, with music there reaches a point where all the costs of production are covered after X amount of sales — depending on pricing and recording outlay. Thereafter most of the cost of music is profit, making larger discounts entirely feasible. Of course this can be complicated by things like marketing costs, but the point is that it's workable.

Even in the case where production costs haven't been recouped, a discount can be a good way of boosting sales and just getting an artist's name and music about. In that sense, without any profit the discount becomes and exercise in marketing, without being pure cost like other marketing pushes.
This is why I follow HN... people post a lot of stuff that I wouldn't give to hoots about but every now and then you find something really cool. This 3d projections onto buildings is freakin cool!
I can't disagree with that. It's a reasonable point.

But when I left school, I used tens of thousands in credit card debt to build my first business because I just HAD to be an entrepreneur and there was no other way.

- I didn't want a side job, because I felt it would be an excuse to procrastinate when the going got tough at my startup.

- I couldn't raise money, because I didn't have the slightest clue where to begin. (All the books I bought on how to raise VC money were useless. My family didn't have the cash. And my family friends kept telling me I should get a job.)

I would have given anything just for a chance to start a business. My kid brother and I actually talked about me selling a body part to raise money. Sounds ridiculous now, but it shows how determined (desperate?) I was to be an entrepreneur.

Losing my money, credit, house, etc, all that meant nothing in comparison to a shot at being like the people I admired.

I wonder if you can make it without that kind of determination. I wonder if someone who thinks rationally about not taking on too much debt can have the irrational passion to be an entrepreneur (or to do anything exceptional).
It’s about the order of the fundamental rights, not so much where they are in the constitution.

Well, considering that the US bill of rights is freaking 158 years older than the German constitution, it wins always, anyway. Never mind the order :)

(Full disclaimer: I’m German and quite like our constitution. Just not so much when it comes to free speech. The article and how it’s been interpreted by the constitutional court is quite good, but I’m quite a fan of US style freedom of speech.)
This would be even more interesting if applied to the area of making money. But wait, he wrote a book, so he is probably using his strategy in that very problem right now :-)
These are all overlapping fields, but now I'd like to see a list for data mining! (OLAP + Clustering + frequent pattern ... etc)
I use Linode for my primary site and prgmr as the backup. Both are excellent. Prgmr is not for newbies, you submit a public key with your order and get back a login to a XEN console. My hosts there seem to be fine, no problems yet.
I agree with the unrestricted donation part. My money went MSF primarily because they had a staff of more than 700 people before the earth quake struck and knew how to help the country.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is an example of why I left my country back in 2003.
You must not have looked as closely as I.
(Maybe this was supposed to be a reply, instead of a top-level post?)

Anyways, as little as 20 years ago, you'd routinely need adapters when traveling from one European country to the next. That's hardly an issue anymore, and I consider this a vast improvement.

You say you have problems when traveling to "other continents", without saying which continent you start from. I'll assume you're from North America, because then you're indeed a bit out of luck, as this map shows: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/WorldMap_... However, that's a North American problem, not an international one.

As to your other point, I didn't cherry pick the examples, I addressed the examples from an article that argues the exact opposite.
Holy cow how i got over 2000 hits on this blog in a few hours
Welcome to Hacker News (non-sarcastically!). Comments are threaded here, so you could have replied directly to fh's post.
Self-Teaching:  30,000 computer-literate kids, 100 computers, 3 months
Woot (Matt Rutledge's brilliance) has tapped into impulse shopping. You don't really go to Woot wanting to buy a "Sandisk Clip 2GB MP3 Player", but you go there out of curiosity and if it seems interesting enough, you buy it. Many others are trying it: Amazon, EBay and many smaller fish, with limited sucess.

Why is Woot successful? They have painstakingly built a unique brand and successfully kept it alive with the irreverent style, the bag of crap, two for Tuesday, the occasional woot-off and now over 1.6 Million twitter followers. Social sharing had probably very little to do with the success of the model and that's why new upstarts and established players have not been able to replicate the model.

Will this work for music? I don't know and, really, nobody does. Ask yourself: is music prone to impulse buying? When you say "heavily discount" how much room is there to play with?
Never in a Hundred Million Years Will You Ever Sell Your Game Idea to a Company
Anyone have any idea how this works? The images are very bright, and there don't seem to be any issues with the buildings casting shadows on themselves.

If this is just a projector in front of the building, I've never seen a projector that powerful. And the effect will break down at any other viewing angle.
I wish this book had existed when I began programing JavaScript.

I also like the firebug-style console at the bottom of each chapter.
has the cheapest prices out of any VPS by far

This is not accurate. There are many VPS's which are cheaper, many of which have much greater capacity for the money. Some are fly-by-night scams. Others have several years of stability with good support. Check forums and VPS review sites to find the best match.

That said, I have nothing against prgmr or linode and would use them if I needed a super-reliable VPS. (My main VPS is Linode, my secondary is with Kerplunc Hosting)
MSNBOT must die
I don't like any of those MIN macros, and that question irritated me. Until C overhauls its macro system, the only good MIN macro is the kind that's actually a function. A good compiler will inline that for you anyway, probably, and most compilers let you declare functions inline in C.
Well it started as a better UI than Google's (I said too much here), so I started designing the UI with search as a focus. Than later it evolved.

As for the usable thing, most of UIs I design are usable from the start, in the sense that they don't suffer the designer syndrome.

If you want to see a scifi that suffers usability

Mozilla's Aurora Concept http://www.adaptivepath.com/aurora/
I agree, but perhaps there is a way of extracting the influential triggers and replicating them in a scalable way? I dno.
Alternatively, if you'd like to help Haiti specifically don't give money to large international charities. They are the McDonald's of humanitarian assistance: big, generic, and predictable, but not necessarily the best available.

My family has friends who lived in Haiti for many years, and they are holding back on donating to the large charities on the basis that the real need for funds will be at native Haitian organizations, which will take a few months to get back on their feet and be able to accept donations.

If you'd like to help Haiti specifically, that's still an admirable impulse, but your money will be better spent if you give it to actual Haitians (and it will require some effort to work out which ones).
Personally, I've never been interested in twittering to the world or reading hundreds of tweets a day. I just use it to keep up to date with a few friends.
I agree. I was reluctant to change the author's headline, but I've just edited it to include [restricted to]. It does seem like an important story to anyone looking at donating.
Click&Clean v3.6.5.0 extension for Google Chrome
New options:
- Erase Flash LSOs
- Delete local Web-databases
- Prevent deletion of extensions preferences when deleting cookies (issue 30226)
For some browsers you will need to use: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=tl%3Bdr
It might be desirable in the short-term, but as an expanding middle class and the one-child policy begin to shrink the population (and that is a very good thing, the world can't support a billion Chinese forever), then China's going to have to learn how to solve its problems with methods that don't involve throwing people at them. Not to mention that the West is probably going to end up paying for this, when the currency floats and suddenly all those factories in China are making $600 iPods instead of $300 ones.

Also, let's take your parking example. Putting aside the Chinese disregard for all road signs and instructions, let's imagine that they install coin-op parking meters. (Yes, I know, with the coin shortage in China this isn't realistic, etc. etc.). Your uncle now has the much easier job of cleaning out the meters, rather than running around all day. And maybe someone gets a skilled-labor job as a parking meter repairman?
You might be able to pull a decent niche market for independent/small label music, but large labels are notoriously conservative. The value would come from the curated music - if they like your tastes and trust you, they'll be likely to buy. As such, I wouldn't worry about the value perspective as much as the quality.

Then, the problem becomes the vast amount of music you have to filter through. It sounds like a low ROI and hard to scale, but a lifestyle business possibility.
Lawyers can be and often are invaluable advisors to startups.

On the other hand, bum lawyering can come in all shapes and sizes. Some examples to watch out for:

1. Insecure (and particularly green) lawyers who are so bound to doing things by the book that no hint of common sense can be found in their advice or in their actions. They will tell you all you ever wanted to know about what the "tax law says" or what "judges do" but they have no idea how to give you custom advice that is practical for your situation. They will tell you they need to "look it up" only to bill you for many hours of research time that you had no idea you would be expected to pay for.

2. Arrogant lawyers who have become so imbued with a sense of their own self-importance that they actually presume to become actual decision-makers for their corporate clients (yes, this does happen, much to the chagrin of the clients involved). This is the point noted in the title of this post. I would say most principals will no longer put up with such nonsense but it still happens where lawyers with dominant personalities deal with deferential-type clients, sometimes from cultures where extreme deference can be common (e.g., Japanese clients).

3. Tin-ear lawyers who have no sense for a deal. This differs from #1 above in that the lawyers are secure in their abilities, as opposed to green young lawyers, yet they are so rigid on how something must be done that they effectively impede (or, in extreme cases, destroy) the deal they are supposed to be facilitating. This is the type of lawyering that tries to impose a 50-page contract upon a deal when a short and simple contract would do. Why? Because it "covers all the risks." Of course, most of these risks have no practical significance for the size or scope of the deal, and the contract itself, being unduly complex, causes the parties to run up large costs and to incur significant delays, all to the detriment of the parties involved.

4. Disputatious lawyers who have an insatiable need to "win" at every turn even when this is off-putting and alienating to all concerned. Some principals think this is a good thing, to have a lawyer who concedes nothing in doing a deal. In reality, this tends to be a disaster, either killing the deal or causing the other side to close with such a bitter sense about it that future harmony between the parties is not possible.

I love my profession, and love what I do in practicing law, but the abuses and shortcomings in this field are enough to make one scream.
Oh no! A useless iPod will now cost twice as much because Apple can no longer exploit an entire nation! I think that's a step in the right direction.
Baidu already uses Hadoop's HDFS and MapReduce. They also support Hypertable. I would guess that they could probably put "something" together over time.
Does anybody have any third-party video of these? I would like to see what the effect is like when not viewed from exactly the right angle (and also proof that it's not just fake).
How Pair Programming Really Works
The most spot-on description of the benefits I've ever read. Balanced and scientific treatment of the subject.
Cool, didn’t know we had something like that: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Office_for_Information_...

(Uh, and it’s one of those government offices still in Bonn. Just around the corner, for massive 5km amounts of just around the corner.)
Actually, the best strategy on Oink was to troll the latest uploads, download them, and then make sure to seed for a week or two. The trick was guessing which ones were likely to be popular, but there were some obvious freebies and as long as you didn't download really big torrents you never took too much of a hit.
I don't know what they are talking about neither. I love those sci-fi movies from the 70s though...
For me, MSF's draw has always been their great accountability, much lower overhead and coverage that extends beyond those 50/100/200-year natural disasters.
Misleading title, the recommended stop is only until a security fix.
Hopefully this will force _some_ of the companies to rethink their policy on insisting on using IE6 to support outdated software.