skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I appreciate the point that running a software business is only 10% development and 90% business. "If you want to spend your time writing code, go work for Google."

This hits close to home as I am gradually learning that I provide far more value to the world by using my knowledge to have others do technical implementation than if I were doing it myself. For someone who loves code, it's a painful transition. But I think you can learn to love business just as you learned to love code.
But must they make it worse every time they touch a browser?
http://mycubiclesucks.com
True. While many programmers seem to think they can also do server stuff, as a 15 year veteran "server guy", I can say that I've rarely, if ever, seen a programmer who makes a good server guy. The things you need to focus on are just too different.

Programmers tend to focus on the very small details and seem to only look at the short term question of "if something is possible to accomplish". A server guy needs to think about the big-picture, with a focus on not only if something is possible, but the impact of a particular approach on the rest of the infrastructure and the long-term maintenance cost of any given action.
Bringing Lots of Liquids on a Plane at Schiphol
Download Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor
(Aside: I know many Americans consider the last option shockingly irresponsible. My ability to prevail over my employer — a major multinational — in a lawsuit is effectively nil. A contract is just a formalization of a promise. In Japan, the ongoing relationship with my bosses is the part of the agreement that provides security, not the piece of paper.)

This is one of the more important bits of advice I've seen Patrick give, and I think it applies to those of us full-timing with our companies even more. Your lawyers are going to tell you that contracts matter a whole lot, too. And just like Patrick with the company in Nagoya, your ability to prevail in a dispute, contract or not, is usually going to be nil.

This is something I think a lot of us learn the first time they get into a dispute (for instance, when we are first aggrieved by a giant business partner who breaches our carefully-considered contracts.)
Hopefully the French government does not take inspiration from that... Some of the best students at my universities were from poor countries and would have a hard time paying a tuition.
That's a false dichotomy. JSON-RPC FTW!
Who created your ad?
Now you're just making assumptions. As far as I know, there isn't a single browser that uses plugins for displaying elements defined as part of the HTML specification. With <video> as part of the HTML5 spec, any browser supporting HTML5 is supposed to render <video> tags without relying on 3rd party support. This is the entire reason for <video> existing in the first place.
I thought that was John Gatto halfway through the first sentence -- admittedly a long sentence.

It is a truth generally overlooked that gentle admonition can destroy ambition, enthusiasm, and dreams of a world better than this one more efficiently than whips and iron bars ever did.
Most acquisitions fail. Most founders end up leaving the bigger company once their golden handcuffs are off. There's a reason for that. The company they loved working at changed to be undesirable once consumed by the incumbent.

A huge part of what I love about working at 37signals is freedom. Freedom to say what I want and swear when I will. Freedom to pick any course I see fit. Freedom to try crazy things. Invariably, those freedoms would be curbed if we were owned by some big company.

If the whole goal is to just sell the thing I already have and love to start exactly the same thing again, then it doesn't make any sense to me. Why not just earn my way to prosperity rather than depending on a single golden benefactor to anoint me wealth?

Jason and I are already at the point where we don't have to work, we choose to work. The joy I derive from working at 37signals much surpass the expected joy of being able to afford a private jet or any other 10-digit luxury.
That last one isn't a bad idea.

I started out with the concept as a joke/parody, but the more I went through the chapter titles, the more apt some of 37signals' ideas related to the education concept. Spooky!

Their ideas are so universal that they work everywhere. A few months ago, some of my Twitter friends and I went through Getting Real as if it were a book about curing constipation. Most of the chapter titles (http://gettingreal.37signals.com/toc.php) work as-is:

Less Mass
It Shouldn't Be A Chore
Hold the Mayo
Rinse and Repeat
Alone Time
Meetings Are Toxic
Seek and Celebrate Small Victories
A Softer Bullet
Track Your Logs
Beware the Bloat Monster
Go With the Flow

Horrifically, I could go on..
This reminds me of a useful quote I ran across recently:

"Never make someone else your priority when, to them, you are only an option."
Problem: What we're doing isn't work.

Solution: Do the same, only more!

Why is that always the answer? (Rhetorical question.)
Bangalore College Girls Dress code ensured by Security Guards
They're already increasing the hours per day - in mandatory study halls and afterschool reading programs. Hour wise, there's not much more room to grow. Good luck convincing parents they're kids need to stay in school beyond 5:30pm.

The "good" news is that this is largely unsustainable as you've got to pay teachers, admin staff, transportation, and provide supplies for all these ambitious activities education reformers keep dreaming up. Schools are strapped for cash as-is. Hell, my old Highschool currently shuts off most building lights in between classroom periods to save on energy costs. This isn't done because the district is trying to be green: it's being done because it's broke.

Ultimately sheer economics will prevent 6-day/10+ hour school days from being implemented nation-wide.
Obviously Apple needs to do that, or they're dead. But they do not appear to be able to threaten Google's core business the way that Google is able to threaten Apple's.
How are you making shit like "afraid of being ridiculously wealthy" up? I have no qualms with money -- neither earning it or spending it.

I believe that 37signals has legs to run for another 20 years. So selling for 10x todays revs seems like a poor, short-sighted investment to me.

I'd rather earn my way to "ridiculously wealthy" from profits than from some rich benefactor bestowing the wealth on me. To me that matters. I understand if others don't care, but I can afford to care.

In short, I think we'll get there. I think selling our company now would be a bad financial decision as well as a bad personal decision.

Building something from nothing and taking it to the moon has tremendous appeal. Letting some incumbent snatch up my rocket ship before it's even reached the stratosphere, just so I can build another one again with more bells and whistles doesn't make sense to me.
Looks like a good start. Almost everyone I know who works in a cubicle enjoys talking about how much they hate it.

Good call on allowing stories to be submitted without logging in. You might want to add an image uploader, but I assume it's on the list somewhere.

One thing I don't see is why someone should register on the site. Does it convey any benefits? If so, they're not listed anywhere.
If you do like using smart quotes but want to preserve code I would recommend http://daringfireball.net/projects/smartypants/
Of course there's a detrimental effect of selling the company that I've invested the last decade into. The investment is much deeper than purely financial. It's the pride of getting there, the satisfaction of staying there, and the joy of coming to work with the best people I've ever worked with.

What a shallow perspective to think all this meaningless just for another zero or two on the bank account.
A jar full of fail: Why tipping and donations don't work on the Internet
Well documented-- but enough to quit his day job and growing every month.
I would buy it as well, especially if you include your experiences with A/B testing
I realize this is OT, and I apologize, but I have to ask: is anyone else having a problem where HN has recently begun swallowing all italicized words, making them invisible? The first part of the above comment reads, to me, "not wanting to sell your business for price seem stupid and insane". I can still highlight and copy/paste "ask" and "does", but they're getting hidden in the actual page display. That's Firefox 3.6 on OS X.

Worse, any page with italics does not show up at all in Safari or Chrome (again, on OS X) - in Safari, it starts to load and render, but the moment one of the <i> tags gets hit, boom!, the whole page disappears.

...or is there just something majorly borked with my system? I'm not having trouble on any other sites...
Hm, I wonder what the opposition thinks about this. Currently it looks like they'll win the election this fall, and might reverse this (in my opionion) bad decision.
Paid news better work, cause the the blogosphere is the closet thing to an alternative.... and the best of it is just trying to squeeze ad impressions off whatever the MSM is reporting.
Who wouldn't? But that's not what he's selling...
Thanks for the feedback!
Yup the image upload is next on the list.

Yeah, right now there isn't much difference between a registered and anonymous user. One thing it does though is save your stories you submit and allows you to comment. It's mainly just for additional features that I might add in the future. I'm considering opening comments open to anonymous users as well but there's some spam protection things that I'll have to work out first.
I acknowledge the fact that a product is more likely to be successful if it is made simpler. And I face the difficulty of trying to create a complex product every day. Hence his advice:

"Are you considering starting up a business because you wish to work on wonderfully interesting technical problems all of the time? Stop now — Google is hiring, go get a job with them. 90% of the results of your business, and somewhere around 90% of the effort, are caused by non-coding activities"

But... then who is eligible to build a complex product? Like writing a database from scratch, or some other complex piece of work. I think a startup should also be able to do it somehow.
It was during the gaps in high school that I was able to get any serious learning done. I had the equivalent of a B.S. in computer science by the time I got to college. I'm not bragging; I'm condemning a system that makes this sort of thing so unusual, when in fact it wasn't that hard. All it really took was enthusiasm and some time in which the school system left me the hell alone. That last thing was the hardest to get; thank God for study halls and weekends.

Schools turn learning into a horrible grind. When was the last time you enjoyed a book that you were forced to read for an English class, even if you love reading? Or, for my fellow math-enthusiasts: it's fine to learn how to solve a quadratic equation, but do you really learn anything from doing forty identical problems instead of five?

People who care about a subject will be an order of magnitude better at learning it than people who don't care. And the whole school system seems to be based on the assumption that nobody will ever care.

(Oh, and this doesn't just apply to the top 10% of the class. One of the best classes in high school was a vocational thing where we built a house. We were expected to learn how to put up drywall, wire electrical outlets, use power tools without supervision, and so on, without having a teacher riding our asses the whole time. People rose to meet that expectation and enjoyed the class, even the ones who flunked remedial math and carried knives everywhere.)
Mostly I meant that the friction of obtaining a visa makes it inconvenient to make any trip on short notice, whether to meet investors, attend a conference, or meet with potential partners.
Did this prick ever consider that maybe my kids don't want to flush their lives away as fodder in a commercial cold war with China?
Despite that, it was cool to learn about Olin. They have some interesting practices and I enjoyed reading their Wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklin_W._Olin_College_of_Eng...
Stanford, too, was founded as a tuition-free school. Sadly, they were forced to begin charging tuition in 1920.

The good news is that, a century later, the school is returning to its roots by offering free tuition to students whose families make less than about $100k per year.

And of course, there's the excellent free online material offered at Stanford Engineering Everywhere:
http://see.stanford.edu/default.aspx
They cite better test scores from countries like China and India and Japan. The impression I get from talking with people who went to school in those countries is that the system made them very qualified to score well on the all-important tests, but that's hardly high praise.
It's a decent platform but it's an attempt to address a lot of different issues in one platform. If you're pure quant you're probably better off building something custom and plugging in QuickFIX (which marketcetera uses for FIX connectivity), particularly since last I checked its feed handlers (a right bastard to get right) aren't particularly sophisticated. If you're running a trading floor there's a plethora of issues you'll face that aren't currently solved by it. The use of ActiveMQ over AMQP also doesn't make much sense anymore, AMQP is built from the ground up for financial messaging - both orders and feeds - and has a very robust OSS implementation (RabbitMQ).
I don't really care for the article. All I have to say is listen to more Dave Holland Quintet.
Even if you don't right now, we'd love to have it. Email me privately: j@jasonlbaptiste.com
I wish more of my students would get off the lesson plan. It's more work, but damn do they learn fast when they're doing something they find interesting.
Rule #1 of stretching a budget: Shop Around.

Rule #2: Negotiate.
Wordpress should relicense as GPLv3 and nip this in the bud. Encrypting your free software certainly goes against the spirit of the GPLv2, but the GPLv3 has wording to specifically prohibit it.

The good news is that if your web browser can read the code, so can you.
Do you mean you had the functional/operational equivalent of a B.S of computer science, as in you were as qualified for an entry-level job? Or did you actually study asymptotic running time, complexity theory, graph theory, computing theory, and algorithms in your spare time during high school?
Not that I'm putting a stake into either side of this debate, but workaholism is clearly also extremely detrimental to your health; there are ways to abuse drugs while being careful about your health just like there are ways to work 70 hours a week and still take care of yourself --- it's just that in both cases people rarely pull it off.
My cubicle is awesome: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KyhLSWlfNQ

But anyway, if you are starting a site like this, pre-populate it before announcing it. The picture of your phone is OK, but the office space quote just made me roll my eyes. Hire a writer, if you must ;)
Why not just move back into caves? That would save even more energy.
Time = Wealth (Rolf Potts)
Getting deported because your business failed to meet an earnings goal is not a random disruption, and it's pretty un-American to boot.

We have laws that let you keep your home in the event of bankruptcy for exactly this reason - the understanding that failure in business should not force you to uproot your family, which is what this bill proposes.
British boy receives pioneering stem cell surgery
Smallest Linux desktop PC, smaller than an apple (fruit)
The startup scene in Vancouver is horrible. I can't imagine any entrepreneurs moving there to start a company when Seattle is so close. The talent, the market, and the community are infinitely better in Seattle than Vancouver.

Combine that with the exorbitant cost of living and it's a no brainer.
I acknowledged the quote in the comments. I just put it there so it wasn't blank.

And I didn't know it was acceptable to fake user generated content o.O
Financially it would be stupid not to sell. But for DHH this isn't about finances. Would an extra $50M (or whatever he'd get) make him happier? A little bit maybe. On the other hand he'd lose what he helped create and is proud of. He'd lose the happiness he gets from working at 37s. If he thinks of a new big idea would the $50M help him to implement more than having a 37signals dream team would? You are very much focused on the dollar amount and whether it would be a good deal from a business perspective. He is focused on happiness.

Maybe he would sell for 100 billion, because you could really change the world with that kind of money. An extra 50 million if you're already a millionaire? Meh.
I'm not sure what "extremely rare" means, and I don't have any facts one way or the other.

What I do know for certain is that credit cards have a number of federal regulations protecting consumers from fraud, and debit cards do not. I also know that with debit card fraud, it's YOUR MONEY that's stolen from you. With CC fraud, it's not.

Most importantly, I know that a CC is superior to a debit card in every way. That there is definitely more risk with a debit card, and absolutely no reason to accept that risk, unless you cannot qualify for a credit card. And because of that, I think that doing what you did here, advocating that any skepticism of debit cards is "FUD" is irresponsible. That's why I've replied.

Internet, identity and "Credit Card" fraud (including debit cards in that) is the fastest growing category of crime in the country according to the FBI.
I wonder whether news sites could continue to give away the news for free (with ads) but charge for extras (links to / copies of source material, ability to comment on stories, remind you which stories you've read in the same way that Google reminds you what web searches you've done, ...)?
What's your point? He's not saying every company should work this way. He's saying "this is a way to do it that works when you have other time constraints".

In Patrick's case, doing it this way got him from full-time job to full-time startup entrepreneur without taking a dime of money from anybody but his customers. We'll see what he comes up with after a few years of doing it full time.

Finally, writing a database from scratch? Crappy business to get in to even if you're full time!
Chess is a different game when you get to a highly-competitive level. At a casual level, like most people who play, it's mostly about experience. I know how all the pieces move and the victory conditions, but I would get burned by anyone who has played more than 10 games. At a highly competitive level, it becomes what you say: pattern recognition and heuristics. At that point, the way your particular brain works is crucial, as is making absolutely zero mistakes.

Basically any competition is like this: the game completely changes at higher levels. For example: Scrabble goes from a vocabulary contest to board control and defensive strategy.
Ask HN: What's the most simple way to accept monthly subscription fees?
I've got a web application with monthly subscription fees. What's the easiest way to implement monthly billing? Is there an app out there that handles that kind of stuff for you?

Side-question: what's the cheapest way? That is, requiring the lowest transaction fee.
If you don't feel like reading, listen to the podcast mp3 http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/audio/100127_StartUpsFail...
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1186157
Patrick has been writing about his competition for awhile. He has not cornered the market on bingo cards.
We use Google Checkout. Fees are comparable to PayPal.. documentation is much better. There are plenty of other 3rd party solutions, but GC and PP are probably the best two.
CheddarGetter.com
> Just as important, although most youngsters are self-motivated when it comes to what Kaiser terms "entertainment media," far fewer will take the initiative to learn more geometry or rules of grammar on their own.

Funny they should bring up grammar. I never paid attention when English classes tried to teach grammar at me. I just absorbed it from books, osmotically. I did this voluntarily, and so did every kid who's ever picked up a Harry Potter book to find out what all the fuss is about. After that, every English class before college was redundant. It's easier when it's fun. Schools are going about this all wrong; if they can make people enjoy reading, half their problems would vanish.

So here's a modest proposal: have reading classes in which people are encouraged to read anything, and given a selection of stuff that a lot of people like. Harry Potter, Twilight (hold your nose; it's popular), Heinlein, steamy romance novels, whatever. And make sure some of it is sexually explicit; not only does sex sell, but it's probably going to be a much more mature treatment of the subject than the kids will hear from their friends. Devote at least an hour each day (preferably more) to reading, and during this time, leave the students alone. Don't assign a schedule, don't test for reading comprehension, don't be a dick; just let them read whatever they want. I predict that this will easily do more to improve language skills than Saturday classes or abolishing summer break.
MongoDB is one of the few open source projects that I'm really excited about. I'm seriously considering flying over to SF (I'm a broke college kid in Boston) just to be a part of it.
That's a bizarre statement; MS wrote XP, and it wrote IE6. Why would MS supporting or failing to support its own software have any relation on third parties supporting MS's software?
While a good server admin or a good programmer with (relevant) generalist skills and people skills can succeed as a CTO, you need a CTO that knows your market and your goals and your organization and your customers, and that can quickly determine what works and what doesn't.

While a CTO is solving today's problems with today's shiny and with shiny duct tape, you also need a CTO that can identify and can hold both your short term and your broader and longer-term organizational goals in sharp focus. You need a CTO that establishes clear goals and measurements and trends, and a CTO that can then push, pull, poke, suggest, prod, cattle-prod or ego-stroke toward those organizational goals. And you need a CTO that adapts.

If a server admin or a programmer has the requisite adaptability and people skills and technology skills and presentation skills and has an indefatigable focus on making your market, hire him. Or her. But you're not selecting for and not hiring for server admin or programming skills here.

You want somebody with the technological skills of and the focus of the Borg.
You could try strong typing--in the sense of ML and Haskell--for a while.
Google To Newspapers: Experiment, Experiment, Experiment
What I heard is 'I can't build a company better than we've built 37signals. And nobody else could run 37signals better than we can.' If you accept that premise as true, then why would anybody sell?

I'm skeptical about a lot of things you say. But this one strikes me as common sense.
JQuery UI is now using Google Closure
I'm curious of the size and speed benefits once the change was made. Any data on this?