skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a concept that I call "feeding my head" (guess what I was up to in the nineties) - which is reading, listening to and playing music, films , tv and not least spending time with the family.

I know from direct experience that if I neglect this side of things then my creativity - for development and tech and for business solutions to challenges and opportunities - drops off dramatically.

You need to find a balance and do what works - don't be guilt tripped into doing something that does not make sense to you. There are always vocal extremists - people who can get by on 4 hours of sleep, people who eat 1 yogurt a day and work standing up at their desk... you get the idea. And this may well work for them but its not for everyone. Find out what works for you and don't think you are worse for not being able to keep up with the outliers - its about running a business, not about being hard or cool or showing off.

What is NOT good for your business is you burning out and not being able to go the distance. And if there is one other thing I've learned - its going to be much further and much harder work than you think and you need to be able to keep on going.
You'll productivity will go through the roof if you focus on activities other than programming. For reference, I recommend that you watch this presentation:

http://blip.tv/play/Ace1YIa8BA

Good luck!
Does anyone else ever get the desire to throw off the shackles of this Western society, renounce their possessions and go live in a monastery somewhere?
BP Discussing a Backup Strategy to Contain Oil
They can already, although only Wi-Fi: http://web.canon.jp/imaging/wft/wft-e2/index.html
ITA Becomes Hot Ticket
Actually its not misleading. That 1.9% interchange fee is a blended average of the interchange fees that an online business is likely to encounter, including debit (which is less than 1.9%), standard credit (less than 1.9%) and rewards (more than 1.9%) and business (more than 1.9%). Its a reliable estimate based on a huge database of transaction history. In the "More info" we give you the ability to modify the assumptions and see the result.

Amex is a non-issue since it costs online businesses the same 3.5% whether you use paypal or not (note - this is new as of next week, previously Paypal always gave you the ordinary 2.2% rate for Amex and lost money doing it).

Paypal is a very competitively priced product, for a lot of transaction profiles it is cheaper than a traditional merchant account + gateway.

If you get a shitty deal on your merchant account then Paypal will always be cheaper.
When intuition and math probably look wrong
The Quest for Artificial Intelligence (free ebook) [15 MB pdf]
Indeed. Meditation is kind of funny because it's dead simple - opportunities to practice it are plentiful - yet people have an incredibly hard time with it. They're going 90 miles an hour and it's like slamming on the brakes for them.

For my part, I've decided there's nothing else I'd _rather_ be doing. It's the only thing in life I can reliably count on to provide a satisfying, enriching experience. The material/hedonistic experiences are still important to me, and most of my time is still spent on them, but they're all pretty transient in comparison.
So if they were in a defined contribution plan (as in the "other plan" mentioned in the article), they'd be able to draw on the money in that plan by this point in their lives yet still work.

I'm not sure this is even morally questionable.

Sure, the state of Washington may have underfunded their retirement plan, but that's poor planning, not necessarily these guys' problem.

Couple this with the fact their defined contribution plan didn't exist for most of these people when hired, I really don't see that this is a moral problem. Sure, the state may wish to change the law to make it harder to do, but that's just changing the law to make it easier to fund the pension, it's not a morality issue.
Open Core Is Bad For Your Software Freedom
I find the assertion that the ONLY way to program for multiple cores or concurrency is to use functional programming annoying. It seems to be the default fall back of functional evangelists, as if there were no other way in the world to solve concurrency.

I recently took a course on concurrent programming, and the from what I learned, some problems are easier to deal with in erlang or something similar. But then again some aren't. And a lot of the time, they run an order of magnitude slower (though as my prof would say, correctness is sometimes more valuable than speed).

And granted my Erlang program for matrix multiplication was very concise. My MPI implementation ran WAY faster.

It seems to me, there are two schools of thought, and you can live in one, the other, or both. Certainly there are things to be learned in either.

I think all one can take away from articles like this is that it's good to keep learning.
$3 / transaction @ $1m volume shows PayPal as cheaper. I think it's an overflow error.
Then you don't know a lot about drugs. Caffeine can be extremely dangerous in certain quantities. The only drug I know of that has no effective toxicity is cannabis, but that has other possible long term issues.
This is completely logical and sensical and I can see no reason to not adopt it. Which leaves only one very important question:

What do we eat on Tao Day? May I suggest TAcOs?
Unless the bill is actually passed, in which case it would have a significant negative impact as well.
Phase-change memory.
I made the same mistake; I suppose I shouldn't have expected wireframing when it's not explicitly called out anywhere.

An additional note, though: your upgrade page doesn't render correctly when I click through to it via the account page (was looking for a Delete Account button).
Thanks for pointing this out, I really appreciate it. I reviewed some of the zones today and something was out of wack on the nameserver.
Can you cite some numbers here. Browsers are hugely optimized for displaying tables. They have tables down to a fine art.

I'm completely unqualified to be talking about this, so only to a certain extent do I even feel like I should answer this: I have simple and mere examples of what works on production sites I've prodded and nudged into working.

If talking numbers / citations is the solution:

http://www.calculae.com

No tables, pure CSS (design) working w/ PHP (calculating as per SASS/HAML). Not even any JavaScript. Site runs really fast. Even checked on YSlow, it runs quicker than most tabled sites doing the same thing.

I don't have a CS background; everything I've learned has been self-taught. I consider myself more of a CSS "artist" than a real "programmer". So YC News hates me 95 percent of the time, as I've had a hard time melding with the "set-in-stone" terminology people here like to downmod for. However, I do know, intuitively, why and how certain things work why and how they work. Most of the time, I simply prefer the large bandage to the 1000+ small band-aids on browsers. Can work both ways. :)
Yah, getting a merchant account is a pain in the butt, but I think you are overstating it a little. The jury is out on whether merchant accounts or paypal have more onerous reserves.

There is a wide ecosystem of payment processors that like to sign up startup ecommerce businesses. Note, your local bank isn't included in that group, they probably won't want you as a customer.

If you use tokenization or recurring transactions and don't store the card data on your local server (same situation as paypal, btw) PCI requirements are very minimal and won't cost you anywhere near $2k.
Ask HN: Can someone translate Alexa into unique monthly visitors?
I found a scatter graph that correlated Alexa ranking to unique visitors but it was from 2002. Anyone know how to write and where to post a script where site owners can input this information and build a more current graph to reference?
If it really is something very close to FB then I agree.

After all, I don't really like the idea of 1 or 2 companies owning pretty much all there is to own in the tech space. It's too Orwellian.
Bluehost got hacked and responded pretty badly (by lying to their customers)
21 Things You Should Never Buy New
Very true. I admire his bravery a lot. And I did relook again at that "visual introduction", thanks. If we could see an actual mini version of the lines of the text for the texs in questions, zoomed out and color coordinated, that might help too.

But you're right, that bit about the golden ratio is pretty convincing. However, is it a reach to think that the 'philosophical mean' in the Apology at around the same spot is on purpose? I don't know.

Stichometry seems much more poetic. Plato just didn't ever quite strike me as the poetic type. But maybe...
I picked Java because a) I know where to find it, b) the author mentions Java positively and c) the C++ standard costs $18.

Any formal language spec will look ugly and hard to read. That's just the nature of formal specs.
Baidu plans Silicon Valley hiring spree
The average monthly fee (including gateway) on the transfs marketplace is $16 / month, which is included in the calculation (try putting the volume slider to $0). Likewise, Paypal Pro (which you need if you want to accept payment without sending the user off-site) has a $30 / month fixed fee.

Of course there are certainly crooked merchant account providers that will hose you with bigger monthly fees, so it pays to be careful. The last thing a startup needs is extra fees.
Hobbies are a good thing. They help exercise your mind and keep you stimulated and motivated.

Put it this way: if your company requires you to be working constantly to be successful, you are probably running things inefficiently.
You'll probably make more money if you can devote 100% of your waking hours to working on a startup. But you'll probably end up pretty unhealthy, mentally and physically. (Not to mention boring ;)

Definitely keep playing music, that one hour a day is not going to make or break your startup.
Mine don't even seem to be good listeners. They just leave the room or jump off my lap in the middle of our conversations...
Absolutely.

I just spent three days in a row doing nothing but socializing after having been obsessively working for months, and wow, that was refreshing.
Yesterday, it was posted here on HN about a mass attack on Bluehost that even affected their CEO blog.

Attacks like this happen (Bluehost is a victim too) and we tried to alert them and help users fix their sites.

Well, today we found out that they were lying to their customers about this breach saying that it was an isolated incident and that it was the users fault. They even said that our article was a big lie.

As we tried to alert them about this issue, they banned us from their forum and even accused us os lying, not being honest, etc.

Very bad way for Bluehost to deal with a security breach and a security company trying to help.
The Buzzwords do for exposure what paparazzi do for the reach and famous.
Do not adopt an all-or-nothing approach. All-or-nothing thinking is a highly destructive thought pattern. Simply weigh the returns at the margin:

ex.. If I put in 1 more hour of work today I boost my work output by 10% but piano time decreases by 100% or social time decreases by 33% etc. Then, just make the most reasonable decision by how much you value each.
You really should have hobbies or you're going to get burned.
It is ok to skip it for 2 weeks, maybe even for 4 critical weeks, but don't let "critical" be your startup status all the time.
Do yourself a favor and keep your hobby.
Only half a terabyte? All these distributed options are overkill.

Fit one machine with 5 160GB SSDs. Use anything. Classic BerkeleyDB or BerkeleyDB-JE should do.
If you were to refine cannabis down to pure THC, I'm sure it'd have a toxicity level as well. Cannabis, like iceberg lettuce, doesn't have a toxicity level because of chemicals contained in it. And cannabis, like iceberg lettuce, could have stuff extracted out of it which would be toxic in large amounts at high concentrations.
That page definitely slipped through the cracks, I'll fix that, thanks.

We don't have an automatic way to delete accounts yet, could you send us a note here and I'll make sure it gets taken care of:

http://help.mocksup.com/support/
Quite informative, especially their stats page:

http://www.ecstasydata.org/stats.php

32% of the street ecstasy tablets they tested were pure MDMA, and 50% contained no MDMA at all. 29% contained stimulants, so you're just as likely to get a dose of unknown stimulants as you are to get pure MDMA. Yeah, drug lottery? No thanks.
Ask HN: What's a good tool for private group communication?
I want something that I can use to communicate with just the friends I usually hang out with, for project groups, for dorms and even with my own family.

Email is the current solution but email's really disorganized and not fun. Google Wave is too complicated although I feel that it's close to the right solution. If you could build your own solution, what would it be? Do you know any existing solutions that are great for something like this?
Right. I was referring more to the whole "Unions tend to go more towards some sort of combo of blackmail/ bribery".

Or they just end up being controlled by a few union leaders, and then we are serving another middle man (union leader), who is probably only making himself richer in the process.

I have this feeling that usually unions tend to grab attention of more cunning people, who know how to play that system in their favor mostly, thereby hurting both the employer and the employee, in a even more hidden manner.

Of course, I have never been part of one, so this "opinion" of mine about unions is what I formed from hearing about 'em.
Correct me if I am wrong.
Of course they forgot to add an "I'm outside of the USA, and PayPal doesn't work in my country" checkbox which would always make PayPal the looser.
I put together a google docs spreadsheet that is similar but built for subscription startups:

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AumfOxrn5FGtdEN5U21L...

You enter your subscription tiers (3 by default) and what percentage of users will choose each tier.

It spits out projected revenue, Braintree fees, paypal fees, and then adds Spreedly/Chargify into the mix so you can switch seamlessly.
A really incoherent article that's wrong in a lot of ways. The title is misleading because the author's main beef is with the idea that functional languages are the "solution" to the concurrency "problem." He admits that he's tried to learn both Erlang and Haskell and given up because the languages are too hard, too complex and "absolutely full of academic shitheaddery" and points to the reference manuals of Haskell and OCaml as proof (edit to add: Erlang is the opposite of "academic shitheaddery". Totally born and bred for business!). I might come off as an asshole for saying this, but if attempting to learn and then giving up on Erlang and Haskell is your only experience with functional languages then you're not in a position to comment on it. Keep digging into Haskell until you run into a Monad Transformer stack a mile long or spend some time with Clojure.

The author then conflates Actor based concurrency with functional programming in general. Let me lay my bias on the table right now: I'm sick to death of hearing about Actors. Erlang put them on the map and I think Scala made them popular, but Scala missed the point. Erlang's actors are only one piece of its distributed-ness; there's a lot more to Erlang that lets it scale as well as it does: a VM tuned for a large number of green threads, a transparent network stack, the supervisor model etc. Scala has none of these. Not only that, but actors themselves only solve one tiny problem in the world of concurrent (really, for actors, distributed) computing. They do nothing to address shared state. Finally, neither of these languages is really, truly functional.

If the author has titled the post "Actors are Overrated" I might have agreed with it.
I had this idea of a real social event, say on campuses, etc. that would be called "Quit Facebook Party". It would be a themed party where people delete their accounts permanently, the process being projected on the wall for others to see. With the social validation people would find it easier to get over their addiction and stop wasting time on FB. Once it became "cool" to not be on FB, it could spread just as fast as being on it did earlier.
I'm not surprised at the news actually. And I'll put my money on Google Me being based on the OpenSocial framework. Wave, Buzz, iGoogle, Google Friend Connect etc. looks like MVPs which would fit into this new social network. Part of the master plan.
by @eston, formerly of Spymaster & Facebook.
Tesla Motors stock is at $18.31, high $18.61
Double Dipping is a menace on tax payer dollars as well.

The same thing happens with Fire departments, Police Departments, Elected and City workers. Its a complete mess and a huge waste on tax payer dollars. You would be UTTERLY surprised how much of YOUR money goes into schemes like this.

We are not talking small dollars here either. For every Firefighter that does this, we are talking over $200k over the course of the life of the pension. Now multiply that by how many people that actually do this in one city. And its not just the cities. Its the Counties and state officials as well. Its a horrible thing they do, but they get away with it because there are no local checks and balances. People(citizens) just don't care...

And don't think that this doesn't happen in your city or your county. It happens EVERYWHERE.
Cross-browser kerning-pairs & ligatures
Google should buy Twitter.
Nothing is permanent, of course, and on the web things can change in a flash.

That being said, they are making obvious moves to continue to add to their defensibility. Their understanding and manipulation of the network effect is unparalleled by any other company out there. It will be a long time before they go.

I would suspect the thing that replaces them is nothing we can quite imagine. I do think facebook has probably "won" social networking in the browser space, the company that beats facebook will have to have a product that connects people better, and I would argue one that offers an experience that transcends what is possible in the browser. Within the current browser-based paradigm facebook is extraordinarily competitive and I do not expect them to lose there, but of course that goes without saying. The key to replacing a company like facebook is finding a new space where it is too big to pivot to compete in, and dominating that space. Right now facebook's organization and processes are setup to completely dominate the browser and innovation in that sector (from recruitment to product design). You'd need to force them to shift gears more quickly than they could, and I think a new platform would probably be the best bet.

But anything anyone says on this thread is wild speculation and should be taken with a grain of salt.
So from the responses, it seems like the idea is that you need to convince your current employeer that you want to work remotely. That certainly seems like a good option, just not so good when you are trying to switch companies.

Thanks for the feedback guys, hopefully this will sort itself out in the next couple of years(when it actually becomes an issue)!
While I like the idea of using LinkedIn more often the privacy implications put the brakes on that. The good old saying, don't put anything on the internet you don't want everyone to know still holds true. I know my employer is actively using it to recruit talent, I even get requests from colleagues to "link", but you don't know how that other person uses your information once you share it with them.

Honestly, using LinkedIn is like using the office fax to send out resumes. Except for recruiters and jobseekers I get no benefit from putting my career on the line.
With PayPal PayFlow Pro you can set up PayPal so that the customer never even sees a PayPal logo. They just go through the payment process as if you had a regular merchant set-up.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_payflow-pro-overv...
This seems rather excessive. Extraordinary results require extraordinary efforts.
Saying that, I see no problem taking the odd weekend off or leaving work early to play a round of golf. In moderation. It's easy to slip as have an unproductive month if you have no one working with you.
Family, religion, friends.. these are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business. -- Monty Burns

Piano is not mentioned, so it's probably ok.
They have firmly situated themselves as the dominant social network, and I don't see this changing for a long time.

But even now, Facebook's influence on our lives is fading away. As nearly everyone starts using it, and as everyone starts forming connections with anyone they have briefly met, it's power becomes greatly diluted. In many ways, it is becoming LinkedIn - a sterile place where everyone only puts forth their public persona.

It's certainly more complex than that, to do a real analysis you need to go feature by feature. Some become more useful as everyone connects (market place, events, causes, messaging, chat) but other things clearly suffer. Facebook used to be a place to share the kind of personal photos only your good friends see, but no longer. Your status used to be a very personal microblog, now you have to be much more careful.

Facebook used to be about your personal life, and more and more it's about your public life. Most teenagers will probably reject using Facebook in meaningful ways because of this. And that's the beginning of the end for Facebook as we know it.

Soon it will be nothing but infrastructure for our public net existence. Sure they will continue to make money, but I do expect the people who used to spend hours a day on it to start channeling their attention elsewhere.

If you want to compete with Facebook, become the tool that lets people follow each others' personal lives again. Let Facebook continue on it's trajectory to become a digital address book.
People stress out about random number generators too much.
DC Startup Weekend (August 13th to 15th)
A simple test for consumer Internet startups
My Yahoo
Do you honestly believe that? The history of programming is littered with failed attempts to do that. For example, does "Microsoft Acess" ring any bells?

The future of programming is definitely not to turn users into programmers.
No offense Sunir but why would you want to outsource your projects. Your a small company in Toronto and you have plenty of talent. Either a) your looking to hire on the cheap in which case what out Freshbooks customers! or b) you can't find talent in Toronto which i can't believe is true.

Why don't you start a wing here in Vancouver and maintain your Canadian Talent?

Paul
THIS is why tools like adblock exist.
Link Building = Team Building
Don't worry about it.

The hobbies to watch out for are the ones that use all the same skills as your startup idea. I.e. the other programming projects that will drain your focus.

You're not going to accidentally spend 8 hours playing piano instead. Also, playing piano will help you maintain your focus.
He outright says, "I would not suggest mimicking this approach," and not to even try "unless you limit angel investment funds to 10% or less of your liquid assets." Which at 120k of angel investments would make you an accredited investor.

The point of his post wasn't to push people into becoming an angel investor, but to push people to be willing to invest heavily in their own education and dreams.

For example, take Mondays off, with a pay cut, and pursue a writing career.