skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think one thing to be careful of is the "we did this so it must work" theme vs. "this is what we're going to do and will prove that it will work" theme.

I'm a fan of 37S as entrepreneurs, and those guys come across really well in their posts and in interviews, and they're obviously smart guys. But look at how much advice is out there these days, whether in books or in blog posts about "how we did it". How many are after the success has already been achieved? Can they REALLY tell you the secrets to their (duplicable) success? Or was it just a specific set of circumstances than might not be as easily repeatable as everyone would like to think will come from buying a $10 eBook?

Can you give an example of a company who laid out all their big ideas BEFORE they launched and made it work? How many vs. the companies that did A, B, X, Y, & Z and then told you "this is the way to did it to become successful" AFTER they were a hit? It's a bit like the stock market sometimes: anyone can see trends and patterns when looking at old charts. It doesn't (necessarily) mean anything.

Hindsight is 20/20, and it's sometimes blinding.
I code Bine in Automatic Chamber on an old Linebarger Oculon cryptangled with redundant deep-remote diamondwisp StraightRazers. Pretty standard, really.
You have to patronize at least a little bit to write something that is more than a glorified assembly language - otherwise you have no basis to build your other abstractions on.

With C, for example, there's a predefined model for the callstack based around having a fixed set of arguments for function calls and singular return values.

Forth, on the other hand, treats words as simple nested subroutines, keeps data on a global stack, and lets the data carry over from one word to the next. No explicit arguments or return values are necessary.

C can be characterized as "safe," while Forth is "flexible," depending on your use case, but in terms of pure performance both models have strengths and weaknesses.
You get 50% off future ebook editions.
Actually, that is similar to the position of a physicist, just without the words "easily" and "probably". For instance, what happened before the big bang has no effect on the current universe, which is why there's so much research into the first moments of the big bang, and not into any point in time before then.

But to address your comment specifically, I couldn't disagree more. Unless, of course you're just trolling by making a rediculous statement without any backing evidence in a discussion about pseudoscience, in which case, well done.

First, all of the parent's examples are hypotheses that are hard to test, not hard to observe. It's hard to test just how much better NoSQL/SQL is for a given task, but not hard to see that there are differences in performance if you were to, say, implement both systems. I'd like to see you change the management methodology for a company and not see a change. Same goes for his outsourcing example.

Second, I do not think there is a logical connection between your conclusion and your premise. Since you haven't given a single iota or proof for your claim, I don't think I need any proof to counter it.

Finally, even if we aren't doing "physics" (what ever your definition of that is), why does that mean pseudoscience is acceptable?
Their website says $42.99/month for new subscriptions!
Spriting made easy
MakerBot is an affordable, open source 3D printer
What about all the other facebook-replacement projects? Why didn't they "win"?
Serial entrepreneur Mike Cassidy sells Ruba to Google
Probably not now, after the lines have been drawn this sharply. But what sort of argument would Apple have been able to present against Flash if a full mobile Flash port had been up to snuff two or even three years ago?
I don't understand this sentiment. Kanji are an integral part of the japanese language, and much of it doesn't make sense without them.

You can and should start studying kanji as soon as you have a reasonable command of hiragana. Every time you learn a new word you should at least check the characters it's written with instead of pretending that it's okay to use hiragana for everything.

My experience has been that I sometimes actually understand words I've never heard before because I can connect the syllables with kanji whose meaning fits the context.

It's up to you to balance your time between learning the written language and learning the spoken language, but they are not independent of each other, and ignoring kanji in the beginning is a mistake.
Choice quote:

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself
-- and you are the easiest person [you can] fool.
http://justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/videos/

Among those: Dropbox (yc alum), IMVU, Aardvark. Their videos are pretty enlightening.
What's interesting to me is that customer development (at least the early stages) is a more commercial-friendly form of participatory design.

I did a PhD in embedded computer systems design which described "realistic" methods for designing new products with small teams through intense engagement with your future users. This was in an academic setting though, and I'd been wondering how to "sell" the idea of participatory design in much the same way user-centred design had been to companies as an alternative to traditional design methods.

Then I read Steve Blank's customer development strategies. Beaten to the punch. So I'm curious - is Steve aware of PD? What inspired CD?

Anyway, to answer the OP - working as an external designer/developer for a small dental firm, I found that our approach, which was very similar to CD in a lot of ways, was very useful for learning what truly mattered to the customer. You are able to cut away the cruft from the design process very quickly. It's hard to tell what people want by watching them, it's hard to tell what they want by having them tell you, but it's easy when you collaborate with them in the design process.

The hardest part is it takes up a lot of time, but when you're establishing a toe-hold in the market, that's ok, and it's a differentiator for your company. We made a lot of people very happy by fulfilling their needs really well.
Or maybe pace of change is increasing.
Ask HN: I'm looking for a partner
Hi Guys,

I'm not totally sure if this type of post is allowed, but I'd love to partner with a like minded person from HN.

I'll tell you a bit about the site, and my dialemma. I have run this site for 2-3 weeks, and it has just surpassed 400,000 page views. I hit profitability in the first week, and it is growing quite well. I'm making money through sponsored cases and affiliate revenue.

The problem is, I'm not sure what type of partner. Whether I want someone with good connections, PR ability, or the technical know how.

Would appreciate all input!

Cheers,
Lachy
It's kind of funny - people seem to be fairly split down the middle between our posts, even with all the up and down voting.

What I was used to before I got the G1 was a Samsung Trace, which could not be considered any sort of "smart phone". No Qwerty keyboard, tiny screen, etc. I did not actually use the original iPhone until about a year ago when a friend gave me an unlocked 2G when she got a 3GS.

I don't know much about the subject of text input, but there are two distinctly different implementations between android and iPhone. Android tends to be more predictive, but less enthusiastic about what it thinks you mean, and hence less corrective. I find the more decisive autocorrect on iPhone OS to work out much better for me. It's less about picking out words from a suggestion list and more about just banging away on the keyboard and trusting the software knows what I mean.
Yes. Giving a shit means caring. Not giving a shit means not caring.
Maybe you should share a link to your site?
First and formost, you want someone with intergerity. Someone who has your back and won't screw you over.

They may be great at coding, or business or PR or something else entirely. But you want someone you can trust by your side. Preferably someone who's great at something you're not, since you seem to have your end running just fine.

Someone who's in it for the right reasons.

At least, that's how I do it.

My two cents,
- Nicholas E. May
http://www.notjustbinary.com
It seems that somehow languages don't seem to have a lot of influence over what we might call architecture.

My instinct suggests instead that languages differ as to the standard deviation of quality of code written in them.
A successful musician told me this once: "Put 110% into everything you do, no matter how unimportant, otherwise when the time comes that it actually is important you won't know how to do it."

I see some variant of this in every "advice to younguns" list I come across. Admittedly I still suck at it.
They are selective, and it's not actually free. Prices vary depending on what you need. There are some "scholarship" desks from what I know, which are truly free, but that's yet another program. Get in touch with Ryan Spoon / Polaris for info =) They also have Dogpatch Labs in NY and Boston.
The advices they give are not recipes to guaranteed success.
Every startup, product, market and founder are different and the optimal approach varies thus a lot.

I consider these books as pertinent hints to be used as source of inspiration. Most of the advice are common sense but it is good to remind them because we often have the nose in the driving wheel, pedaling at full speed, and easily forget about these rules and start to diverge.

There are also many false assumptions circulating around or many inexperiences startup founders that take the hardest or longest path to success. i.e. less is more, is counter intuitive but so true.
Keeper of secrets
My colossal task burden
I used to use Monit a lot, but recently started going simpler. We run our entire backend / platform on Heroku, and all our processes are actually DelayedJob workers that run constantly. Using a begin/rescue/ensure we can make sure the "process" here keeps going. It's a little harder to work in a cloud environment, but doing this has saved us from needing any type of sys admin work at all.

It's great using tools like Heroku, who then teams up with awesome other services and then provides great tools to really make life easy as a developer.
God has posed many problems for me in the past. I saw all the same problems "there" saw. It would slow down our entire slice on slicehost to a standstill after a few days of running. It was using more resources than everything else combined. I'm not sure how it is now, but we switched to Monit after God and it's been awesome.

I wrote a quick snippet on how we setup the basics of Monit and also talked about God as well: http://artchang.com/?sort=&search=monit
I'm the guy who maintains that spreadsheet, and do try to keep it up to date.

But my huge disclaimer is that the exits are _my_ guesses only, and are likely wildly off the mark. But I keep it since I think my errors potentially cancel themselves out in aggregate, and it's useful to estimate the financial return YC has had thus far.
And how long do monkeys live again?

That is not to say it is a bad idea, just that you do not present any evidence that grains are somehow bad. In fact, without considering all the other variables, one could just as well argue that grains are fantastically good for humans.
http://ipadcasefinder.com/ is the site. I'm doing quite well and plan on expanding it to be a network of Case Finding sites. It may look a bit 'lame', but it has the potential to be a very big earner (We could easily make $4k profit in our first month).
Exactly. Plus, $30-$40 for an ebook doesn't seem fair to me.

Before ebook prices started coming down, I had stopped buying tech books because they're very expensive and become obsolete in a few months.
I haven't used Processing explicitly but from what I can tell the Arduino's Wiring language is pretty much the same thing (it uses the Processing IDE and from what I've read it seems to be a superset of Processing). I use Wiring when playing around with my Arduino but generally rewrite things in assembly if I take a project further than just messing around.
A cure for America’s lame and costly broadband?
It's my understanding YC does the incorporation paperwork for the vast majority of the startups it funds. So there is a per-startup legal fee for that.
Nemi Ships
I have to say, the name put me off. It'd be like calling a car the Ford Driving. Or Starbucks launching a coffee beverage called Drinking. It reminds me of http://paulgraham.com/javacover.html
I'm expecting Google to roll in and take over any day now. Social networking almost overlaps with their existing turf already. I seriously doubt Buzz as it exists now is as far as they'll go.

We're clearly moving to a more federated system and I'm not convinced that a dorm room startup can pull off an industry unification move like this. They don't have the traction.
Here's his house, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright: http://www.peterbeers.net/interests/flw_rt/Wisconsin/Rudin/R...
15 Things You Didn't Know About Steve Jobs
Great point. A lot of people spend all their time trying to earn more money, but they don't remember that money is worthless if you don't have the time or the need to use it. Time is the most valuable currency we have in our lives, it's the only currency we can't earn more of. We can only choose to spend it better.
Cool new way to update your facebook from twitter
Nike Womens Dunk High Big Pooh HOT SALE
I always use "-W -Wall -ansi -pedantic". Substitute -std=c99 for -ansi if you swing that way. I then run my code through a couple of other static checkers just to see what comes up.

This frequently results in me finding some subtle bug which otherwise could have taken hours of head scratching or single-stepping in gdb to locate.
Flagged as dup.
What are the benefits of mustache?
Please email me nnlevy at google's mail service. (For general purposes, you may want to add your contact info in your bio).
Counterpoint: Running a startup means working 18 hour days trying a bunch of stuff that probably won't work and if it does then you end up in a job you don't like. Growing a business means helping something along that will have lasting value. Just depends what type of person you are; making a blanket statement that growing a business is boring is actually pretty narrow minded.

(Disclaimer: I work at a startup, love it, and will probably work at or start another startup in the future)
How is this new? My twitter-using facebook friends used to get on my nerves with "Just bought some bananas"-style updates from a twitter-to-facebook thingie years ago, until they discovered the "selective twitter" thing and/or got more reasonable.

Here's what I think is the "selective twitter" app: http://www.facebook.com/selectivetwitter
Oh, I've only commented the title of the post. But yes,
I could've denied myself. Sorry.
The article is an opinion piece about the "decline" of dynamic languages. Skip the article (and pic!) and scroll down to comments because that where its more interesting.
i agree, and the links come alive on facebook crap wtf thats facebook not these people!
I highly recommend iconfinder.com Simply awesome resource and lets you filter by license.
That's a really clever idea.
I didn't 'dismiss it', I just said that even if it is true I don't see it as a real problem. Unless you attribute a large importance to voting. It's not like you can take your karma to the bank.

If I did want to dismiss it I'd have said that HN possibly has a better attitude towards this than a random sample used in an experiment, but I figure HN is large enough now that such an effect if established as real will be present here too.
A Late Night Froyo Treat Android 2.2 Goes Live On The Nexus One
They may have a sense of rhythm and pitch, but can they create beautiful (or even just non-displeasing) music themselves?

Clicking colored buttons in order corresponding to colored lights on screen in time to a beat != creative endeavor.
At Smartupz we are trying to do the lean model and customer development. It's much harder then it looks - first problem is that people you are trying to approach (in our case small/medium business) have no time. So you must be very clear in terms of your value proposition so they can immediately "get" your app and share their opinion.

Creating crisp/short value proposition statement is damn hard.

Second thing - throwing at people MVP or just a presentation with the proposed functionality works fantastic! We get tons of great feedback without actually having to write a single line of code. When we eventually start writing code - functionality is much more "down to earth" and customer is willing to test it because it's partially his baby.

cheers,
Jarek.
Clarifying SourceForge.net’s denial of site access for certain persons
Or we could be experiencing the future…
Everything is a monad.
I'm in grad school right now. That sounds about right to me. "Trivial" means "someone already did it, while "easy" means "my graduate student is working on it." :-)
It's weird to see how less prevalent prepaid phones are in the US. Here in Europe, they're everywhere, hell I bought my iPhone on prepay. I wonder what lead to this difference.
so i tried it for a couple of days, and the speed was the thing that impressed me the most actually. the rest is not that dissimilar, but i didn't dislike it as much as i thought i would :) - our workflow assumes mq already so a git add is a qnew, or qref, a git diff --cache is a qdiff, a git diff is an hg diff ... so on. most commits i make are usually a qfinish, which is comparable to a git commit (no -a).

how do you manage patch queues in git? we need them because we are constantly backporting to different versions of our app. branches will mean n merges for n versions. stacked git? or is there a git native way to manage the same?

what about something like tortoisehg? gitk is pretty crude in comparison.

i assume one can glue a diff/merge tool like meld. is the experience similar when resolving conflicts?

thanks for any feedback.
Beautiful Blinds and Curtains for your Homes
Blinds are ones where you can pull the strips of cloth up or down through a string attached with the clothes. Curtains and Blinds fall into something that the visitor definitely looks at and forms opinion about the house and about ourselves.
Android 2.2 Froyo OTA now available for the Nexus One
Don't call a your product 'lame' just because it is simple.

Making it good as you did is nothing but 'that' simple, maybe your experience make you think it is the natural way to go but not everyone follow that way.

And don't be ashamed that such a product doesn't trigger any real technical challenge. Be proud of it.
I know two iPhone owners who carry two phones for just that reason. An iPhone for for all the app and internet goodness and an old phone, which can easily go at least a week without needing to be recharged, for when they actually have to make calls.
>systematic explanation

Yes. Too many scientists aren't trying to explain things; rather they wander around looking for new correlations. There's an abundant supply of correlations wherever one looks.
Armchair founders and lawyers would be one group, cowardly attacks are a problem but less so, I've so far had exactly two directed at me, one through mail and one here on the site. I've seen a few others and for the most part the attackers find themselves at -4 or banned pretty swiftly.

The only real 'celebrity posters' I can think of are PG, patio11, cperciva, tptacek and jgrahamc and their reputations are well established and deserved in the fields they write most about, for the most part their votes seem to reflect the quality of what they write on a case-by-case basis.

For example, it's rare to see PG downvoted because most of the time what he writes makes very good sense (and I've been on the receiving end of a couple of 'you disagreed with PG downvotes' but it does happen, and that, as far as I'm concerned proves that the problem if it exists is not that large.

So inspite of the research referenced above and personal experience, even if it does happen we don't have a cult of celebrity worship here as far as I can see, but at the same time we're talking about a bunch of counters in a disk file somewhere, so assuming that we do it still isn't a problem. Maybe ask the posters I mentioned above if they feel 'worshipped' in any way?

> Btw if anyone downvotes this without a bio I'm calling you out.

Hehe, that was funny :)

And I'm just a startup founder with a typing diploma and a driving license.
Office Chair Yoga to Reduce Stress
It is available in Nexus One http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/22/android-froyo-nexus-one/
Language, framework, hosting for an ecommerce site?
folks,
I am going a build an ecommerce site. Amazon competitor. Can you suggest me some language (PHP or python or ruby or ..) , framework (satchmo, spree or ...) and hosting solution (google app engine ?) , so that I build the site faster.

thanks..
The second life expectancy takes a big jump the pensions industry will implode. There's no way they can support people for dramatically longer lives than they already are.
T-Mobile prepaid works well in the US. Just get a used T-Mobile Samsung flip phone and then get a prepaid SIM card. You can order the SIM card from T-mobile.com or walk into your local store. Initially, you should put $100 on your phone to enter the 'Gold' plan. Then your minutes and phone number will last for 1 year from the last time you added minutes. Talk time is about $0.10/minute.
How did you come up with the idea?

Also, according to http://danielbru.com/2010/05/03/announcing-my-next-venture/ you made Daring Fireball...nice.
Yeah, I am quite proud of it, I just think most will underestimate it. I really do appreciate where your coming from. :) Thanks
I had a look at the benchmarks. Could someone confirm -- larger values (bars) means better. So RoR is the worst, and Snap the best on both benchmarks.
Amazing 3D Projections on Buildings
Thanks! Just to be clear, Daniel was a partner, he's now just an advisor. I'm not Daniel :)

My dad basically told me that I should be making some passive income, and a few days previous my friend dropped and cracked my iPad (without a case). Thus, iPCF was born! Hah!
Paul Graham: Design for person who has their finger poised over the back button