skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
$40 million at 18 is mindblowing.

The "hire developers to make it" approach is not for me personally, but there are important pure-entrepreneur lessons here that some of us inventor-entrepreneurs forget all too easily:

- “When you go to market, you don’t need the best thing, you just need something.”

- “Startups primarily exist to execute faster and more efficiently than bigger companies that have gotten lazy and bureaucratic.”
A note on South Korea:

It is by far the most Christian nation in Asia: 29% in the 2005 census and the largest (vs. 23% for Buddhism and 46.5% no religion). This is going to have very strong effects on social attitudes towards women and means what happened there in reversing this problem very probably won't elsewhere. Certainly not the PRC with its suppression of religion (of any non-Party dominated mass organization) and likely not in India with its well entrenched two major religions and their focus on each other.
Candid Camera: Reputation concerns with posted video
Not to pile on, but I think you really are missing the point. The point of the current deficit spending (taking out loans) is not to invest in something that will create wealth later, it's to prevent the destruction of wealth now. That's what he means when he says it's "counter-cyclical" spending. We're smoothing out this negative GDP bump now by borrowing from a future positive GDP bump. You spend now to prevent a depression. When you pay the loan back you break even at best, probably lose a little, but it's better than not doing anything at all.

If you don't agree with this kind of macroeconomic reaction then that's the argument you should be making. To disagree with these loans because they can't possibly turn a profit just misses the point.
Re: #10

I find it much more clean and convenient to simply create a default website with blank webpage (or return error if preferred) that will respond to all non-matched queries.
You do have to wonder why people are restricting searches to their own 'ethnicity' whatever that means, in the first place.

Why not just stick with the facts:

* What color skin do you prefer [white / tan / bronze / dark ] etc
* What countries of origin are you interested in
[Africa / Jamaica / England / poland / ukraine etc etc
* What religion

I guess I just don't really understand what race/ethnicity actually means and why it's important to anyone. I don't know/care what my own 'race'/'ethnicity' is.
Random YC application videos
Found some YC applicants videos on Youtube, they're pretty fresh, up to a week old. Not sure why they'd upload to Youtube. Some are interesting, some pretty bad.
No offense but that's a terrible deal. He does all the work (in a month at that), owns nothing and gets paid after you get $400 in advertising revenue, which could take months depending on the product.
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Besides pure looks, I think it's somewhat of a proxy for a set of culture/background elements that are hard to capture. There are explicit ones like "religion" and "interests", but then there's sort of a vague, "what sort of community did you grow up in?". Sometimes something other than ethnicity dominates there, e.g. if you grew up in a Mormon community, or a socialist commune, but for many people ethnicity, for better or worse, correlates pretty well with similarity of background/experiences.
How long does it take to load? I gave it around 30 seconds (Safari/OSX).
I did wait for a bit, and I never got past the loading screen. Maybe to speed everything up you should run a cron every hour or so that creates a static end-result graphing dataset.

Loading this would be much quicker and it would prevent users from waiting around too long.
Its a bit annoying that there is no link to the actual mixergy interview (or if there is, I can't find it!).
Most Painful Toy Hack Ever 
I'm guessing this is the type of stuff you can do with your first round of VC money.
Why I Will Never Buy Another Apple Product
Interesting thoughts on reputation management. I'm not at this level, but I have a similar reaction when I've been interviewed or had someone writing a review of what I'm working on. The first thing I do when it's posted is read it hoping that it's all positive
I wouldn't worry too much about spelling. That isn't a big deal. However, you might be careful about some words. For instance, I might have to pause for a second if I read lorrie instead of truck.
I wonder if anyone has attempted doing anything like this for FP? All the recent examples I've see are OO to the max.
My Flash debug player gave a connection timeout to querytrends.php, hope you can fix it :)
I think you need to upgrade you editor. For instance both vim & emacs are smart enough to adjust for inserts and removals.
Seems to have fallen over.
Files sharers deprive labels of income > labels pay less tax to the USG > USG cannot afford armour for soldiers > troops die in Iraq of preventable equipment shortages

Voilà, file sharers are killing american soldiers overseas.

But wait, there's more. File sharers are killing american soldiers, but they're not a declared state army. Therefore they're non-soldier enemy combatants, who as we all know can be sent to Gitmo without trial! What are we waiting for?
Editorial control of ads has nothing to do with the technical serving mechanism.

Self-hosting ads doesn't mean the site pays more attention to the choice of ads, any more than using a third party ad-system means that a site doesn't pay attention to the choice of ads.

If sites self-served ads, people would develop ad blockers that blocked them. Just because third-party ad server filtering is the standard way ad-blocking works now, we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking the third-party ad servers are the reason people block ads.

And of course once you break down the barrier between content and ads you have a much more serious risk of conflict of interest. Major TV stations, magazines and newspapers will often avoid news articles that are disparaging of their major advertisers, something that doesn't occur when there's a complete separation of ad sales and content provision.
The problem with laptops
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That looks fun, someone should design a whole line of shock-punishment products lol.
Same, I remember playing that turtle game on a mac in primary school!

I think it is awesome that it is such a small download, and that you can publish to the web too! :)
http://smallbasic.com/program/?FHZ097
I don't get it either.
Partially coherent rant laden with unnecessary expletives and irrelevant tangents. There are many good arguments against using an Apple product as a platform; none were covered here.

The article could be summarized to "I bought an iPhone with a broken screen for $60 and didn't like it."

edit: Seriously, who is voting this up? Did you actually read it? It's drivel. I'm disappointed in you, HN.

edit 2: Article is dead. I'm proud of you again, HN.
I apologize for my interjection on this response, but...

@neiljohnson ABSOLUTELY curse if it is in your nature to communicate as so.

--Write as you speak and speak as you write--

I don't appreciate censorship of any sort. If @neiljohnson curses and certain audience members do not wish to read material with such language, then they can just not go to the blog and set their search filters to ignore such writing.

Are you [anyone] reading my comment and happen to love comedy?
--Could you imagine saying to George Carlin, Chris Rock, Richard Pryor and so on to "please be funny, but don't curse."? Sure, there are comedians who do not even whisper a curse and are hilarious, but they too are allowed to be themselves.

Such language can be implored in speech without being vulgar. I also do not buy into the notion that using such language shows the limited vocabulary of an individual. I have been in the company of great minds who know how to properly use a "curse" word for impact, humor or emphasis. These people include published scientists, authors, politicians and priests.

@AnneTheAgile I'm sorry. I believe you had no intention of censorship and this is in no way about you. Of course your comment was a suggestion and personal preference. It is that your comment brought up a great point of discussion.

In summation, @neiljohnson, be yourself, write as you speak and speak as you write. And may I suggest a very near future post titled "Look At The Shite I Started".

Cheers!
You would probably ask for country of birth in Germany. I’ve seen that, I have never seen any questions about ethnicity. (Germany is of course relatively homogenous.)
LaTeX, please!
Oh yeah. Drop the value of the USD by 50%, I dare you. So tell me, what doesn't the USA import?
I read this argument before, in a paper by the author I think. I thought it was nonsense then and this article doesn't change my opinion about it. The purported explanations are really unconvincing, the analogies very strained.
Summary: dude buys busted iPhone, decides to use it to record voice, can't figure out how to convert AAC to other formats, rants on the web with a load of swear words, bitching about how he won't buy another apple product again. Right, whatever man.
There's a really detailed FAQ about the United States categories here,

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/85867...

with considerable discussion about the edge cases of the categories and the policy behind categorizing at all.
"But with the UX failures of OpenID ..."

I see this often, and I don't get it. I go to a site that accepts OpenID and click the button. If I'm already signed in to OpenID, I'm in. If not, my OpenID provider's page pops up, I sign in, and I'm in.

Are other OpenID experiences not that simple, or am I so out of touch that I don't recognize that "OpenID is hard!"?
It's better to be consistent. If you try to Americanize (Americanise?) your text, you'll probably miss something, and it will look like a typo.

That said, in some professions, affecting British spelling will make people trust you more.
The real question is whether any of these features actually matters.
That is a good idea. I set up a customer's portal to use FBC last year and as impressed by how simple this was. It would be easy to implement your secondary login idea, so I'll probably do this in the future (or at least suggest it).
Got any examples of sites that do this right?
This is an example on how a flashy title can bring a substance-less article to the front page.
It installs a dozen localised shortcuts as well as English, any of which may pop up when you press the start button. Look in all programs in your start menu to find the English version.
Yes, but what about if I want to insert a few figures? I don't want to have them all bunched up one side of the page or to have a tiny bit of a paragraph show up before one or etc etc. I just want to say "put this figure here and this one here" but this is LaTeX so tough.

(I should add that I use and like LaTeX, it does let me produce beautiful documents from Emacs. But let's not pretend it's the answer to everyone's problems)
The vast majority of OpenID sites require people to type in or copy/paste a URL. And most people haven't set up or don't know that Yahoo and Google and whoever else can provide OpenIDs.

Seriously, Facebook Connect and Sign In With Twitter (not as seamless, but decent) are much, much better flows than any OpenID implementation I've ever seen.
Good article but the author concentrated just on great output quality. There is another huge advantage: it is easier and less time consuming to write using Latex. I have used Latex, OpenOffice.org, and Word to write books in the past. Using Latex has the smallest overhead because it is so easy to move chapters and sections around, etc. Another advantage, which I am using now, is that I am writing 2 editions of the same book (using different programming languages for the examples), and using Latex greatly facilitates using common material.
Our site http://www.wildlifenearyou.com/ does this - I wouldn't say we've got it completely right yet (we don't make it nearly easy enough to find the feature, and it's pretty ugly) but you can associate multiple OpenIDs with a single account, or set a password for it, or both: http://www.wildlifenearyou.com/account/associations/

We don't support Facebook Connect yet - I've been holding out waiting for them to provide a non-JavaScript dependent option.
LaTeX gives you great defaults and can yield truly beautiful results if you put in some time: http://www.duo.uio.no/sok/work.html?WORKID=81971&lang=en

Edit: source code of this thesis in LaTeX can be found here: http://bitbucket.org/uggedal/thesis/src/
FWIW, open source AAC encoder/decoder: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAAC
Some random-ish thoughts:

Cambridge is expensive to live in even if you aren't paying tuition.

All other factors being equal, going off to college elsewhere is both more expensive and logistically harder to arrange than going to the local college where you happen to already be.

I happen to think there is a little truth to the "birth order" theories. My first born older sister has always been more interested in getting societal validation of the sort that sends people to Harvard than I have been. But then I also believe in astrology. :0 (No, not "sun sign" astrology.)
Agreed, the author just doesn't supply any strong evidence for her thesis.

Would it be impolite to point out that she's an "English Major"? Then again, her A Levels might have given her a far better grounding in math than is the norm in the US.
Much of this is due to the fact that many companies are now hiring contractors instead of full-time employees.

In many cases, the contractors were previously full-timers at the same company and either started their own firm in order to bill their time or banded together in order to bid on work.

Laid-off workers, especially those who knew each other professionally, are discovering it's better to collaborate than to compete for the same job and it's no accident they have leveraged Linked-In and Skype.

I don't believe this is a short-term phenomenon but a long-term paradigm shift. And there's a valuable lesson in this for the current 16-35 year-olds reading HN.

Today's 35-65 year-olds are scrambling to raise kids, pay mortgages, taxes, healthcare, college tuitions, etc., all the while working to rebuild what's left of their retirement accounts.

There's an enormous amount of angst and creative energy going into this right now of which entrepreneurship is playing a part. A means to the end if you will.

A true worldwide economic recovery (the movement of goods and services) will be born of individual initiative based upon need and self-interest. Age is irrelevant.
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Interesting thought. Loebnitz, Newton, Kepler, Fermat, Pascal, Euler, Laplace, etc. were all wealthy. Their wealth came from their rich families though. I think they were just bored and had a passion. Have a passion.
Have you tried Lyx?
I watched the Mixergy thing and read these notes, and have read other stuff about this guy. I was in Silicon Valley when he built and sold his startups. At the time, I did not understand what his startups did, and I still do not understand how ad startups like this work or make money. I especially don't know why they make $300M instead of $3M or even $3000. How does the product work? How is it sold? Who buys this service? Does it require heavy hitter sales people or are customers just entering their credit card number in to a web form? Do you just make up the prices as you go along?

Sadly, I believe my lack of understanding means that I'll probably never be successful as an entrepreneur. I'm still trapped in the "I must build a better iPhone to succeed as an entrpreneur" mindset. Obviously one can build an ad network instead. But I just. don't. get. it. Please advise.
I never learned about ligatures in school, and have only recently been introduced to the idea of them. A couple weeks ago a buddy was putting together a logo in photoshop and the 'fi' ran together. I had never seen that before, and opted to keep them separate, because I felt it would be confusing (or distracting) for people. I had no idea it was the correct way of typesetting (though I still think it would be confusing).

As an aside, I learned Latex doing my thesis (though never noticed the ligatures), and fell in love. I recently wrote a patent application in it, but my attorney had never heard of it, so I (unfortunately) had to put it in Word for her to collaborate. Much less elegant.
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Eesh, it is obnoxiously slow isn't it? It was working this morning, but isn't now.

I'll export the data anyway, just in case anyone wants to do analysis.
Nice article. Older people (I speak from experience since I am in my 50s) have some real advantages in starting businesses: likely to already have some degree of economic independence, have many business and social contacts, usually children are independent so little financial responsibility for others, and possibly have more empathy with potential customers.
My parents are in their 70s and 80s.

One of the things I've noticed is that a lot of older people get together in large retirement communities, especially in Florida. People come and stay mostly for the winter months.

While they're there, there are all sorts of activities: woodworking, singing, crafts, etc. It's the hobbies that many of them have had in their life, and now they have time to fully explore them in a cooperative setting with lots of other people who are also interested in their hobby.

It doesn't take a genius to recognize that in another 20 years or so, a typical "hobby" is going to be web programming, application creation, or online business.

It's not going to happen soon, but at some point 20-40 years out we're going to see an explosion of highly-educated older people with lots of time on their hands and lots of life experience competing with the 20-something startups. That should be very interesting to watch.
gWallet raised $12.5 million, 2 months after launch

You mean after gWallet's second launch? I find it interesting that G never mentioned that gWallet initially launched as a coupon website (similiar to retailmenot.com), totally unrelated to virtual currency.

Mentioning a few of Gurbaksh's failures would have been enlightening.
Whilst we're all here... can anyone recommend a piece of software for writing a thesis?

I'm struggling with MS Word at the moment as I seem to be locked into a fight to the death with Styles.

I've tried Scientific Workplace but actually found it to be such a non-intuitive interface that I consider it a substantial obstacle to overcome.

Currently I'm:
Using MS Word to:
* Layout the document, keep track of references and figures.
Using MS Excel to:
* Produce charts
Using MS Visio to:
* Produce images of graphs
* Produce images of database schemas

It works, but it's clunky and those damned Styles are driving me nuts.

I'd love:
* A LaTeX engine for Windows that makes things very easy to get started and very intuitive.
* A way of generating charts and having a lot of control over the precise layout of the charts
* A way of producing tables (database schema), vector graphics (graphs, and also relations for those database schema)
* Keep track of my references in a way that can automatically update the master document and produce the bibliography

In my mind this should be a LaTeX application and perhaps something else for the references. But I'll be damned if I've ever managed to find something that makes adopting and using it as easy as I want it to be, and so I stick with MS Office.

Please help! Before these styles ruin my day again.
The American West was "Wild" until women started showing up in adequate numbers to provide wives for men instead of just whore houses.
Phones, or API levels?
Create a simple site and publicize it :) AdSense or Sell Links and you will earn more of $300 a month.
Be careful with Google penalty ;)

This is my experiment: http://www.readthislink.com
You'd think at least a hacker website would refrain from using random as a synonym of "stuff I found".
Actually, this is good general advice! After my wife and I moved from living at the beach (exp$ensive) to the mountains (equally nice, and much cheaper), Carol was able to stop working except for a few fun jobs and charity work, and I can afford to turn down more consulting jobs and spend more time writing. We have several people in our social network here who write fiction (ouch, a tough business!) and I'll ask them tonight if it helps them live in a less expensive area.
I wrote my thesis in LaTeX under Windows. My tools were:

1. http://www.texniccenter.org/ Great UI to get you up and running. You still type in LaTeX markup, but you can compile to PS or PDF very quickly.

2. OpenOffice to produce the images, which are exported as PDF. LaTeX has a way to include PDF files directly into the output.

3. For anything else, get a PDF printer and generate PDFs that way. You might need a PDF editor to set the bounding boxes properly though, so it will take some hacking.

4. For bibliography, I used a very hacked up system. EndNote allowed export in a format that LaTeX understood, except that it had a bug in the output markup. So I wrote a quick PHP script to fix that and add a unique, deterministic, ID for each reference so I can refer to it in the text. Worked a treat.
I recommend LaTeX for typesetting and emacs for editing (it's not WYSIWYG, though). I found the MIT thesis templates to be extremely easy to use and produced excellent output with minimal hassles. (My thesis was just an undergrad thesis, with a relatively small number of figures. I will admit the figures were the most difficult part, but even there they were totally manageable and I never considered myself locked in any death fight.)

It was 17 years ago that I wrote my thesis, but I quickly googled and found some samples online: http://web.mit.edu/olh/Latex/Sample-thesis/index.html
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Reminds me of The Alliance by Gerald Lund. Pretty soon we'll all be implanted with these things to inhibit bad behavior like over-eating, unsightly public acts of nasal cleansing, or being stupid.
Just a small correction to the article: LaTeX is not only free, it's also Free Software!
okay so the premise is that the government spending prevents a depression. this is based on an aggregate demand theory of the business cycle. since i'm supply side I doubt a debate would be very productive. neither one of us is going to budge the other from their axiom. I've tried to understand demand side economics and I can't.
I had the same with the person editing my thesis. Ended up exporting it to RTF, saving it as .doc in openoffice, and copying all changed back into latex by hand.
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I used Mendeley for my bibliography, which I can really recommend, and it exports to bibtex as well. I ended up rewriting most of my bibtex (and a custom bibliography-style file), but it was nice as a start, regardless.
I disagree. In a country with no form of social security, the closest thing to keep you from starving in old age are sons [1]. The older generations would riot if China started waging a war that took their sons - and thus their old age pensions away.

China's current massive population is the consequence of Mao's belief that the Chinese could outbreed any nuclear war. The one-child policy is an attempt to get China back to a sustainable population size, which, for China's land and resources is about 1/2 the current size.

Notes:
1 - Women marry into other families, and so one would lose the support in old age, as the resources earned by the daughters would go to the family she married into.
LaTeX also makes it easy to write big documents. MS Word becomes painful to work with when you get over fifty pages or so.

Also the final output is much, much prettier.