skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ah, but if you have managed to make yourself ridiculously employable by proving yourself at a few high-profile companies, then you suddenly have "little to lose" again.

One of the reasons I feel like I can safely Entrepreneur myself down to a few grand in the bank before looking for a contract to top up the finances is that I know I'm pretty much a single Twitter post away from a good job offer.

Had I not first established a bit of a reputation before taking off on the startup track, I wouldn't have that safety net, and might be a bit more quick to grab any contract job that came along.
Well someone had to do something, good work!
"People can and will learn to program if it starts to seem like that's a valuable skill."

That's basically just a restatement of what I said (more people will learn to program if there are greater rewards for doing so). The thing is, there aren't greater rewards for doing so. Startups aren't any more profitable now than they were ten years ago, and programmers at big companies don't make more now than they did ten years ago (inflation-adjusted).

"I'd say the upper bound on the number of startups is the number of people who are determined and smart enough. That's probably between 1 in 100 and 1 in 1000."

Few could argue that, say, investment bankers are quite smart and extremely determined (and very good at sales besides), but there's extremely little overlap between investment bankers and technical startup founders, and that doesn't look like it's going to change. Same for corporate law, management consulting, etc. Plenty of i-bankers and consultants and corporate lawyers go into other fields, including non-technical startup positions (eg. Jessica Livingston). Indeed, one of the primary reasons people go into these industries is for the exit opportunities. But very few seem to learn how to code.
Would you allow cameras into your whole operation?
A lot of their service runs over IM and other non trackable tools. But it does seem like a high valuation. I assume its a talent + technology acquisition and not a play for eyeballs?
Yeah me too, and that was fast! I'm already so much more connected with a few people than I was a couple days ago. It's the difference between cool and warm with some acquaintances.

I used to be a hater toward FB and the like, but it's actually worked to make things a lot warmer with a lot of people, and I've really enjoyed it.

I see a lot of people still struggling with it, and of course others for whom it's just not interesting. I think more people should step out and try it though. It's social network virginity, and learning to be more open online is nerve-wracking at first, and fires up self-consciousness bigtime, but the outcome has been much more worth it than I expected.

Especially for those of us who've done a fair bit of contracting and city moves for jobs, that's meant a lot of upheaval and loss of friends and closeness, and it takes a long time to replace. I think that gets easier, and less valuable relationships are lost.
Logorama - a video entirely made of Logos
No, I contend that it is you who is confused. There is only one type of profit, and I am correct that profit may be derived from demand exceeding supply irrespective of the number of suppliers. This has nothing to do with speculation, it is a basic concept of market economics that holds true in an "open market" as defined by the original commenter.
wonder if foursquare will snatch them up
While there is definitely a bunch of talent on the team, I'd say this is definitely a technology acquisition, but specifically a UI acquisition -- Google could build the back-end to vark tomorrow, but the user interaction is something they could never have come up with.

This is also why they should acquire Yelp -- it's not about the tech (in fact, Yelp is built on Google maps). It's about the interface.
I don't have a rule of thumb, but my actual number is usually more like 2/3 of gross saved.

It helps to have the car paid for and not have a mortgage or apartment lease though.
The Semantics of Dictionaries, Maps and Hashtables
I voted for my favorite.

Your name is a tangible noun, "top hat monocle", so there's no need to re-iterate that in the logo. Also it doesn't tell me much about the product, which is ok, but the logo could be an opportunity to communicate a bit.

You might want to go a little further outside the box for the logo, be less literal. Play with letterforms and theme a little more, and drop the text from the logo. That will help avoid the clip-art look, as well.
Fyi: people eat grass fed beef because cows are naturally meant to eat grass, not corn. Cows that eat grass do not get illnesses that require antibiotics, etc.
Oh yes, I agree completely that wikipedia is not a horrible place to start. I do use the Notes / References whenever I go on wikipedia to double check the reliability of the information. But I do also notice that many times the references will point you to books. They don't always point you to this great primary source entirely online; at least my experience is that this is hardly ever the case, others' might differ of course.

So yeah, I do use the internet a lot to search for information. But in the end, the internet still take me back to the library.
Health insurance is $89/month if you're young. That comes in on the monthly budget right alongside beer and hosting.

Housing and Car payments are the thing that get you.
"The notion that the reason people are having fewer children because they don't believe in the future is pure ideology."

It is true that this idea dovetails nicely with Catholic ideology. But might it also have some truth in it?

Certainly, if people do not believe in the future, it is natural to assume they are less likely to have children. The converse is not so obvious, of course. (People might be optimistic for the future, but don't want to make the sacrifices inherent in having children, for example.)
Ask HN: Can I use a credit card service that isn't PCI compliant?
I've been checking out chargify, recurly, spreedly and cheddergettar - who all seem to process credit card data in their environments, with some even storing it, but none are on Visa's PCI compliant list for service providers at http://bit.ly/dbKhu . Can I send my customers credit card data to a company that isn't PCI Compliant and on the list?
In other words, there was no repeatable sales model; knowledge about what the customers want and how to sell to them was not converging.
If you don't have a treaty then you are part of the axis of evil - or at the very least they don't let your soldiers play with their soldiers and your politicians don't get to stand on the Whitehouse lawn looking like a world statesman.
Alternate title: Lure redditors to HN with steak.
When listening to Sergey talk about Google Buzz ten minutes into this video he brings up the value of using buzz to ask questions to his contacts with the recommendation system directing the question to who best can answer it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_W6Qbob2mg#t=10m10s

I was like "this sounds like Aardvark".
It is true that most early startup employee will not become financially independent if/when the startup sells.

However, if you take away this dream, I suspect a lot of non-founding, startup employees would not risk leaving a stable job to work at a startup. They know they're too risk adverse to startup their own company, they're not interested in being mentored or eventually funded, and they prefer stability over excitement.

What leads them to working at a startup is the promise of making it big someday, maybe they know people who have done it. Or read about it.

I'm not really judging this, but more so just pointing out what I've seen. I am not recommending that you, as a founder, lie or deceive them,. However, the truth is that if you take away their hopes and dreams (and people can be very imaginative), you'll have a much smaller talent pool to choose from.
It kills a potential rival that could one day grow into a threat. Yahoo didn't acquire Google when they could have. Google has in its DNA the desire to prevent the same embarrassing disaster. IMHO.
There was a time I believed all corporate activities were based only on merit. Anything not completely merit derived would be illegal. That's what we're made to believe with all kinds of anti-descriminition laws (you can't ask age, about kids, etc during interviews for example).

It turns out, everything is friend based. Know rich people? They'll help you get rich too. Have a project you don't want to do inside of Google? Just quit, make it anyway, then they'll re-hire you with a $5M per head bonus.

I'd find it delightful if I were in such a position, but I'm not. Not only am I not, but the more technical side of me doesn't want to play social games to become ingratiated to the decision makers. Deep down, I still believe the world is merit based -- and that's one reason why I'm still a nobody doing nothing going nowhere.

I'd be better off not reading HN most days.
100 Top CSS Tools For Web Designers
Feds push for tracking cell phones
Aslo check out
http://devthought.com/wp-content/projects/mootools/textboxli...
http://devthought.com/wp-content/projects/jquery/textboxlist...
I am partially motivated to have children in order to make the future better.
Saving money is certainly a good goal - perhaps after hours contracting with related technologies is the efficient way to build up a cushion for your startup.
The fact that gmail being a email service is blocked by several corporate firewalls while facebook and twitter are still accessible, I don't see buzz ever catching up.
To get "per year" instead of "per however long a programmer remains in the industry". Suppose there are X programmers in the US who could plausibly start a startup. All X people can't start companies when they're 22, and again when they're 23, and again when they're 24, etc. (the vast majority of founders only ever start one company). So, if you assume that 1/15th of the programming population starts when they're 22, 1/15th starts when they're 23, etc., the total fraction of people who start in any given year is 1/15 * 1/15 + 1/15 * 1/15 + 1/15 * 1/15 + ... = 15 * (1/15 * 1/15) = 1/15th.
I'm in Beijing, I'm in the food industry, and I'm surrounded by entrepreneurs who almost never go online. I turned down the posh jobs out of college and my partner quit McKinsey to found our company. A friend just bought a million dollar factory for his t-shirt and pants company. Entrepreneurship is not just online and the notion that entrepreneurship is in decline feels very wrong to me. I'd like to see data.
Flagged. This is not Reddit.
From Petr Mitrichev, one of the best programming contest programmers in the world, if not the best.
Ask HN: Please review our app (update) - Trending Topics from people you follow
Cadmus - http://thecadmus.com

What is it?

Cadmus is a real time service that manages your stream (Twitter, FriendFeed and RSS) by displaying the most relevant content since the last time you checked in. It helps you get caught up on what you have missed. We track trending topics and conversations between your friends.

Feedback

We just rolled out the Trending Topics feature and would like to get some feedback from the community. Currently we show you the trends from the last 3 days. We would really appreciate it if you guys can check into it over the next couple of days and let me (jay at anomalyinnovations.com) know what you think.

Thanks!

Details about the Trends feature - http://blog.anomalyinnovations.com/2010/02/cadmus-trends-get-personal/

Previous submission (I hope its not too soon to ask for another review) - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1061136
Holograms don't work that way. It's a bit like a fourier-transform: One pixel on your holographic display does not correspond to one tiny feature in your image.

(Perhaps you can find more answers in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Generated_Holography and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holography for the basics.)
Compare Adam Smith's analysis in Wealth of Nations:

"The time and study, the genius, knowledge, and application requisite to qualify an eminent teacher of the sciences, are at least equal to what is necessary for the greatest practitioners in law and physic. But the usual reward of the eminent teacher bears no proportion to that of the lawyer or physician; because the trade of the one is crowded with indigent people who have been brought up to it at the public expence; whereas those of the other two are incumbered with very few who have not been educated at their own." - http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN4.html#I.10.94
What exactly does it mean for a country to go bankrupt?
Do the creditors get the assets?

If a chinese construction company is owed money for a government project do they get part of the country?
I initially just downvoted you, but reconsidered and thought I'd reply instead.

No. Please do not split up essays like this one to benefit the ever-disappearing attention span of the average reader. There's an important difference between something being as long as it needs to be, and something being long for the sake of filling space.

The presentation on this was just fine.
The article ends with this sentence:

> Now, Gotti Tedeschi confirmed, "the only way to rebuild economic-financial balance [in America] is austerity."

From wikipedia:

In economics, austerity is when a national government reduces its spending to pay back creditors. Austerity is usually required when a government's fiscal deficit spending is felt to be unsustainable.

Development projects, welfare programs and other social spending are common areas of spending for cuts. In many countries, austerity measures have been associated with short-term standard of living declines until economic conditions improved once fiscal balance was achieved (such as in Canada under Jean Chrétien, and Spain under Felipe González).

Private banks, or institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF), may require that a country pursues an 'austerity policy' if it wants to re-finance loans that are about to come due. The government may be asked to stop issuing subsidies or to otherwise reduce public spending. When the IMF requires such a policy, the terms are known as 'IMF conditionalities'.

Austerity programs are frequently controversial, as they have an impact on the poorest segments of the population and often lead to a wider separation between the rich and poor. In many situations, austerity programs are imposed on countries that were previously under dictatorial regimes, leading to criticism that populations are forced to repay the debts of their oppressors.
Can alternating mouse input help? E.g. click over to your google-search box, type in p455w0rd, then click back over to your password box and type in your password, facebook.
Heh, interesting, I'd say it definitely was made to jump start off of Gmail users, works well for everyone I know, but looks like there are exceptions.
It's hard out there for a venture capitalist... Cry me a river. Let engineers choose the life that it best for them.
Minimalist Steps Towards Passive Income
Congratulations, Suhail.
This will most certainly be a setback for tracking and disrupting terrorist/rogue state/criminal financing operations. I personally know someone who used to use Swift data (among other financial transaction tracking data) to track "bad-guys" doing very, very bad things. They are out there, they are gaming the system, they are hiding behind loop holes and they do mean us harm.

Hopefully the privacy concerns can be worked out asap.
People can and will learn to program if it starts to seem like that's a valuable skill.

But they won't tho', not really. In the dotcom boom there were plenty of such people who learnt HTML and were (well) paid for it for a couple of years. But they didn't or couldn't make the jump to possessing a skillset that kept them in the industry after the meltdown. The guys with C++ or Sybase or whatever under their belts, just kept right on truckin'.
It's already a sad state of affairs when being a "nerd" is a bad thing.
Hey, all we did was ask. Your guys keep saying yes, so we keep asking.

I would love to see the EU keep the US in check by saying "no" to us more often. (The US has no trouble telling the EU "no", after all.) China does it, so why not the EU?
That's 1000 dollars per user (that created content). Isn't that too much? Is this value important?
I'm sorry, people are free to post right-wing propaganda, but not free to comment on it?
Derek Sivers' 3 Minute TED Talk (Video)
Snowmageddon - Out of Booze
If you're frying or baking them, you salt them before they set, rather than after they go on the plate. If you're poaching, you salt the water. If you're doing the crazy poach-in-the-shell stuff, I imagine you do something with the shell porousness, like the sibling comment.
BS. It's the UK. They have international standing regardless of what the US thinks.
it's a tautology to argue that smart people who value the life of the mind need to go to graduate school to hang around with smart people who value the life of the mind

no it's not.

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

in this case you have, on one side, "smart people who value the life of the mind", and on the other side, "go to graduate school to hang around with smart people who value the life of the mind". the two are not equivalent: on one side the people are isolated; on the other they are in a supportive environment.
moving your head doesn't change the picture.

another limitation: the surrounding light of your living room doesn't influence the screen.

This would be the only current limitations, right?

Those devices could change that:
"Towards Passive 6D Reflectance Field Displays"
http://www.mpi-inf.mpg.de/resources/prfdisplays/
Yes. This isn't a bad idea in itself; it just didn't seem a good idea for this specific group of founders. It was the same with Reddit's original plan for ordering food on cellphones. That would have been an ok idea for founders with $1m in funding and connections in the fast food business, but it wasn't such a good match for a couple college grads with (at the time) $12k in funding.
I'm guessing that you're not very familiar with the history of the airline industry.

The problem is that there are too many competitors, someone fails, go into chapter 11, with the competitive advantages they get from chapter 11 they become healthy, there remain too many competitors and another one fails. At this point most of the major airlines have been in and out of chapter 11 multiple times, and the airline industry still has structural problems of too many airlines. But with every round life has gotten worse for the employees. To such an extent that pilot has gone from a good job to a piece of crap job that people only stay in because they have already sunk the cost of their training and love to fly.

If chapter 11 wasn't there then this cycle would never have caught on. But the artificial boost for companies that are ready to go away is artificially distorting the market to everyone's disadvantage. And it has stayed distorted for a period of decades.
I'm not sure the comment was about valuation it was about the purchase price. The buyer has to pay what the company is willing to take and part of that equation is how much the VCs that gave them $6M want for a return.
It not the simple for folks with congenital health conditions or who are can't function due to a medical disorder without some prescription which is easily affordable with insurance, but impossible to afford in a "ramen profitable" san insurance context.

An easy example would be someone with severe adhd. The relevant sort of medication can cost as little as 30 dollars with insurance, but total around $400 dollars otherwise (apparently there can be a nontrivial difference in efficacy of generic versus nongeneric).

Such a person, working at/on a startup, would need to be able to functionally transition between working on a variety of tasks through out the day, ever day, irrespective of how engaging each task is to work on. These are precisely the circumstances where that person's adhd would be most problematic.

And thats a simple example, what about say a person with Crohn's Disease (and need to be able to cover the expenses that happen whenever it becomes problematic), or someone with bipolar disorder who with the right prescription and monitoring at worst has on vs off weeks in terms of productivity.

Yes, these examples are relatively sparse, but nonetheless there are certainly easy to construct examples where the absence of insurance to cover certain regular expenses makes "ramen profitable" untenable
I learned that one by accident. I used to do open mike standup (really) and would amuse myself by composing bits talking out loud during long commutes. I couldn't write them down so I would end up composing/practicing a piece 40 or 50 times the week before a show, tuning every little word and intonation. When I got up on stage they rattled off like magic, and I had several words/tones to choose from right in the moment, depending on the mood. The illusion of spontaneity takes a lot of practice.
Yeah, I got that after a bit. Heh, it seems you replied at the exact moment I deleted my post.

For the record, the question was, "Why did you divide by 15?"
It just means they default on the loans. The creditors only get what the country chooses to give them (if anything), which is usually negotiated with some eye towards balancing the country's interests against the harm to their future ability to get loans if they screw the creditors too much. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_(finance)#Sovereign_def...
http://23moments.com/dont-you-dare-waste-your-fucking-time
I disabled it specifically for this reason. Don't need more distractions. Then there is also the whole issue of people being able to see who you are following. Fine for social sites where I have to add people, but not fine when it's automatically based off of my private emails.
A lot of people say they can detect an "off" flavor in table salt, maybe because of the anticaking agents, maybe because of the iodine. I wouldn't write off the difference between table salt and kosher salt, even if you're salting before you cook.

Using expensive salt before/during cooking though sounds crazy to me.
Maybe I should clarify what I mean by "upper bound". "Upper bound" means "how high could the number go if parameters X, Y, and Z are allowed to vary", but neither of us specified what X, Y, and Z were. The hypotheticals I was considering were "suppose the startup community all acted in unison towards increasing the number of startups". For instance, if the startup community exerted enough collective pressure, we could plausibly get Sarbanes-Oxley loosened, or force VCs to become more technically competent, or make it easier for founders to immigrate. But we can't just decide to increase how profitable it is to learn to program or start a startup; these things are driven by consumer demand.
I really hope this is a step they mean to extend through their browsers. Opera have always struck me as the most innovative of the browser developers and I often look to them to see what will be commonplace next.
Having been able to see it both formats, I found that I was able to shift my gaze and focus on something in the foreground or background in a well positioned imax seat. The other 3d format (RealD?) was far more locked to a chosen foreground object it seemed to me. YMMV
If you quit a company, do a successful startup, and then get re-acquired by the company you quit in the first place, chances are that you don't want to go back to work for them again. If you did, why did you quit your job in the first place?