skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
“#3 (a richer source of new ideas) may be even more important than #1 (emotional support)”

As a single founder, I don’t agree with that. Once I passed a few hundred signups, I found that people were willing to write in and tell me what they liked and didn’t like about my service. Now, I find myself with a list of things to get done because that’s what my customers want (not to mention what I personally want). Like the author, I “never feel at a loss for ideas (and have more than I know what to do with)”.

Emotional support, however, is hard because it’s not something you can take care of on your own; until you have people validating your work as worthwhile, it can be difficult to believe in yourself.

I think that “two (or more) heads are better than one” for solving issues, whether they be technical or with regard to how an idea should be executed.

Otherwise, nice essay (although I was hoping for a discussion on why single founders use “we” in their text instead of “I”).
This sort of thing is an assault on the mind. I wouldn't say it's harmless either, it's potentially depressing.

It might be -- or you might lack the background to digest how writers and scholars are using technical phrases with long histories behind them. The idea of "being" and its cousin ontology go back at least, most notably, to Hegel (consider Oxford's "Very Short Introduction" series if you're interested), and various philosophers have been dealing with the idea ever since: Sartre's Being and Nothingness being one example a century and a half after Hegel.

In any event, "this sort of thing" might still be "an assault on the mind," but it's hard to judge it as such unless you have the context to do the judging.
Trying to get to any C level or senior decision-maker is arguably the hardest part of a sellers job. Have a look at our latest whitepaper on selling to the C-suite here:
http://blog.huthwaite.com.au/c-suite-selling
I was pondering this a few weeks back, and after some thought I realized it's even later than I thought. The logic that an alien civilization should smash its neighbors before it can be smashed doesn't just hold for intelligence, it holds for life; if we can go from metaphorically crawling in the mud in the early 20th century (before radio) to potentially firing our own relativistic projectiles by, say, 2200, in 300 years, who's to say there isn't a species that could pull that trick in 30 years instead of 300? (Maybe somebody who can work together even better than we can, living with a faster biochemistry on a hotter planet? Something like Eliezer's "Maximum Fun-Fun Ultra Super Happy People"? Who knows? It's hard to imagine the human experience has been truly optimal on the technological development speed front.) In which case you may literally have no time at all to try to pick up the "intelligence". You need to smash all life, before you think it might have "intelligence".

And Earth has been broadcasting "I'm alive!" for at least 2.4 billion years, since the Great Oxygenation Event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxygenation_Event Ever since then, any intelligence within the area of probably several hundred light years or more has had the ability to take a simple spectrograph of our planet, observe free O2 in the atmosphere, decide that's too likely to be the result of life for comfort, and obliterate the planet.

Nobody has. (Unless you believe the official Current Earth Destruction Status: http://qntm.org/board However, it appears to simply be instrument failure. Somebody really ought to fix that.)

Even on the galactic timescale, 2.4 billion years is not chump change.

Either the game theoretic optimum is not to smash your neighbors immediately (for instance, widespread orbital colonization is indeed practical and is what happens, which as people have observed changes the balance away from "smash"), or we are effectively alone. Either way I think we can discard the relatavistic-projectile-death scenario, except as a major, unplannable fluke.
Has anyone ended up regretting quitting a good job for their own business?
There are a lot of questions here with people that hate their jobs-- but that's not my situation.

Has anyone here regretted their decision to quit a good, well-paying job to pursue their own business?

I have a great job that pays very well, offers excellent benefits, and has a good work-life balance. That said, my partner and I have spent the last few years building our business and have, for a while now, been at the point where it really deserves our full attention. Quitting would cut my income by a little more than half.

Have you been in a similar situation, taken the leap, and then wished you hadn't? Why?
Couldn't agree more. Steam Cloud (specifically the gamesave backup/restore in the BG) is the key for me. I have several computers. I reload OSes regularly. I'm tired of paying for local storage. My music will soon be part of Google Music hopefully. My PC games are all stored in Steams' servers. All I have to lug around now is my relatively small movie collection.
What about Larry Page and Sergey Brin? Or Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak?

Motivation, more workers, and new ideas are all valuable contributions, but I feel like you might have missed the biggest benefit of all.

Co-founders can be good at the things you, personally, can't do. This is most visible in the business/technical co-founder division, but it can generalize to all kinds of tasks. If you're terrific at engineering large-scale filesystems (or whatever), but you can't build a web interface (or whatever), you might really need a technical co-founder with a different skill set. Every day or so, my co-founder cranks out something that would have taken me a week or more in a few hours.

Don't underestimate the value of teaming up with someone who's as good as you are at different things!
If you think postmodernism comes from Hegel, I'm not convinced you know what continental philosophy is.
I wish they would put these kinds of statistics in context. Is 51,000 gallons per year in DC a lot? Is it 10% or 0.00001% of their annual fuel usage? It's sort of meaningless without context.
Thanks! You should consider writing an article about this :)
Sure, I grasp that, I'm just puzzled as to why you jump to the conclusion that requires logically inconsistent supernatural phenomenon rather than than the one that just requires garden variety mental illness?

Not trying to offend you, in your shoes, I'd like to think I'd pick door number two.
C, C++, Java, Javascript are all members of the C family of languages... even if created by different people for different reasons.
Kortrijk. I guess we don't live far apart.
I use a similar strategy, avoiding the .Net web controls and viewstate entirely, instead opting for open standards on the front-end such as jQuery + html/css. I use c# for the plumbing and web-services to feed/consume from the Ui. Also makes it easier to create different Ui's depending on web or mobile, which is a big part of why I moved to this strategy.
Sure, but Spanish and Irish atheists don't refer to themselves as atheistic catholics, whereas I have heard jewish friends of mine refer to themselves as atheistic jews.
Thanks for the reference; sounds like a book I'd find interesting.

As far as allocating blame, that matches my impression that, although it's often seen as a problem of "French theory", much of the worst stuff is actually by American critical theorists developing it, rather than the original stuff. At least, they're the ones who developed it into a somewhat poisonous and derivative culture, full of political posturing and semi-nonsense writing, and dominated entire fields with that sort of thing (I don't think it has nearly the same dominance in French universities, oddly enough).

In one case (Julia Kristeva), the original author even seems somewhat appalled at what Americans did with her work: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/14/arts/14KRIS.html
I literally said "wow" as I went through the sample. This is a beautifully made PDF and I'll be sure to buy it soon. Amazing.
"Here, You See, It Takes All The Running You Can Do, To Keep In The Same Place."
Dupe: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1480620
Detecting this leakage radiation won't be that difficult. Its intensity decreases with the square of the distance, but even if the nearest aliens were 1000 light years away, they would still be able to detect it as long as their antenna technology was a century or two ahead of ours.

How? If radio waves travel at the speed of light and the first radio transmitters were in operation in the late 1800's, this would mean that the transmissions would be no further than 150 light years or so.

There are stars in this range, sure, but I'm interested in how antennas outside of this range might be able to pick up the signal.
How easy is it to hire good programmers?

It is easier to hire good Haskell programmers because people who choose Haskell are interested in what they are doing.
What's the point if I have to know about it and explicitly install it?

I can set it up for unsuspecting others.
In the U.S. I think humanities profs are actually often net money-earners for their schools rather than net spenders of taxpayer money, though.

Earning money for the school and being a net tax dollar sink are not mutually exclusive. Some of the money being earned for the school may be federal student aid.
My time doing deployments and dealing with Windows Server issues is not free.

We don't have any issues with our Windows servers, but I guess the number of issues you run into is proportional to your experience. We would have a lot more problems dealing with Linux servers. YMMV.

Neither is the time lost using RDP instead of SSH

Practice makes perfect...

dealing with licenses

What? You buy it, you install it, done?

requiring much more HD space than the alternatives

Now you're just being silly. Are you worrying about HD space in this day and age? Seriously?

and lacking real scripting solutions.

I'll give you this, but I've yet to see the need for such an environment.

I have yet to hear anyone using LINQ on anything that's not SQL Server

Don't use it then? I think LINQ is a horrible idea, and horribly implemented, so I'm staying far, far away from it. I would never use it or SQL Server in a startup, that would be insane.

I see how you could accidentally recruit someone who thinks it's the best thing EVER and starts using it all over, but recruiting people addicted to the wrong bleeding-edge technologies is a hazard no matter which technology you use.
Hrm, that's a very good question and an excellent idea.
Great point, thanks for bringing it up. I've had to learn to do lots of different things so I don't always think about this one, but it's certainly a big one. I'm always open to working with someone if they are the right match.
There must be issues with weak legal backing and poor registration processes that lead to this?

In the UK a bid in an auction is a legal agreement to pay the price bid. One has to register with identifying details in order to receive goods and people often close auctions to those with no reputation unless they get sufficient assurance that the person is genuine they are not allowed to bid.

It's pretty trivial to ID most users from IP+ISP records (+ possibly a little social engineering) and "small claims" in the County Court are it seems up to £100,000 GBP. That sort of regime appears to make frivolous offers worth following up for the legally inclined.
There is no inherent reason for using linked lists for anything

Uh, constant-time insertions?
Caption.iT - Locket Imagem e Texto, Montagens de fotos para Orkut
Google and Apple also have the advantage of being able to promote their respective browsers through cross-marketing. Safari is the default browser for any Apple device, and Chrome is the promoted via other Google properties. Internet Explorer has the obvious Windows advantage. Only Firefox really succeeded in fighting the same fight that Opera was fighting, and it's not surprising that both Chrome and Safari tried to ensure Firefox didn't win by improving upon the browser in one of its biggest weaknesses .... speed.

Ultimately, competition is good for the user, but a nightmare for the web developer. It was hard enough dealing with the multitude of IE versions, but today's developer needs to support the entire cross-section of users on a variety of platforms ... most of which command a non-negligible user-share.
I was partly referring to ideas in solving issues as well because sometimes you just solve problems and sometimes problems are an opportunity to look at things in an entirely new light. People who can do both well are rare in my experience.

Regarding "we" vs. "I", I actually had that in my draft but it didn't flow well with the rest of the post.
Well the thought crossed my mind, but this article reminded me of all the linguistic obfuscation that was going on. The lecturer would seldom make a statement without several tangential subclauses/digressions getting in the way. I started to wonder why this professor was deliberately making a complex matter harder to understand...

At any rate you can see for yourself
http://jhfc.duke.edu/globalstudies/pdfs/VattimoPaperdoc.pdf
although this was not the paper he was presenting, it would be interesting to know your judgement.
Yes, I definitely came out with a better opinion of Eleanor. I don't see the arrogance or entitlement--- I see someone passionate about an art form that most of her cohort couldn't care less about. Legally, Mr. Brown is on solid ground, and Eleanor is at best treading water. I appreciate that he's contacting people directly rather than suing through a proxy. But despite this, I think he's shooting himself in the foot.

Be cautious with your generalizations about 'modern suburban American teenagers' and her spending habits. Having spent my youth working minimum wage jobs, one of my largest regrets is not being able to afford buy more and better books. I was able to take advantage of public libraries and university libraries, which remain one of my favorite features of American society. But I'll forgive Eleanor a lot for trying to follow her passion.
Regardless of what the framework may or may not allow, the fact of the matter is that most .NET web applications are using the full ASP.NET stack

Yes, but that is not what he said. That the majority of .Net developers are completely hooked on the entire stack is a problem when it comes to recruiting people. That is not the same thing as claiming the .Net stack is rigid and inflexible.
http://www.amazon.com/PHP-Good-Parts-Delivering-Best/dp/0596...
I still have some additional cash and am not spending all of it, but I'm willing to lose most of it as I have more coming. While they say don't count your chickens before they hatch, I also like a lot of the companies that I'm speaking with and would much rather spend money on them, than on some company that I have no idea how their business is functioning.

Then again, if the sky was falling, perhaps it would have been smarter that I keep a large amount of cash.
EC [Epistemic Contextualism], in the sense in which it concerns us here, is a relatively recent development. Nevertheless, in the latter half of the 20th century, several at-times overlapping strands emerged which, in one way or another, made ‘contextual’ factors of central importance to certain epistemological questions, thereby setting the stage for EC in its contemporary form.

That doesn't sound like postmodernism to you?
Inaccurate flame bait, flagged.
I'd move the ads to the opposite side of the text entry area.
They kind of get in the way of the control buttons at the moment.
The Biocep R Project Brings Open Science to the Cloud - ReadWriteCloud
That seems a strange way to put it, as if these grow on trees or something. They are expressly designed for mass murder.

The wikipedia article for peaceful nuclear explosions didn't show many other successful uses. Are there others I may not be aware of?
>highly educated and enlightened people

are not necessarily trustworthy.

Those familiar with a topic can have entrenched views.

Wisdom to me means the application of knowledge for favourable outcomes - a limited set of people will tend to produce outcomes in their own favour.

When you apply some arbitrary barrier of intellect or intelligence or knowledge then you move away from democracy; I'm not a great advocate of democracy but this should be borne in mind.
I moved the ad down precisely because of this. I will consider your suggestion. Thanks!

edit: maybe even have a .txt file beamed through the command line.
“Love toward men, but love without belief in God, very naturally leads to the greatest coercion over men, and turns their lives completely into hell on earth.”
– Fyodor Dostoevsky
I think this is an absolutely brilliant idea. When I have children this is definitely being installed on every machine they have access to.
I don't think this is true, at least in the general case. When Chrome first came out (and I was still using Firefox), I downloaded it to test it out, but didn't stick with it, because it wasn't immediately compelling. I came back to it occasionally, and after about 6 months they had turned it into a really great browser, much speedier than Firefox.

If you look at the usage trend during the first few months, you'll notice that it starts high and curves down, then slopes back up again. I think this supports my argument. The reason that it gets a lot of share has little to do with branding so much as the fact that they made it in to a great browser after a lot of hard work on their part.

The litmus test to my observation is that if this is really true, then Opera should pick up a lot of usage share from people like me who switch between browsers based on the latest and greatest. I remember trying out 10.10, and although it was good, it was no where near this good.

Of course, Opera doesn't have that nice bump that Chrome does where Google puts "Hey you! Try Chrome!" on incredibly popular websites, so we'll see.
"I disagree"
- Paul Betts
Hitting a Tiny Bull’s-Eye Miles Under the Gulf
While I'll grant that all these speeches were made on a trip to the Middle East, it doesn't seem reasonable to me that the Muslim world needs to be a particular focus of NASA. In terms of important world partners, I would think that India and China would be two of the major players that NASA collaborations could target, but neither of those are majority Muslim.
Not exactly, but I guess I didn't explain it very well.

The thing is internet distribution is very high volume and low margin. That's a better deal for the consumer if they want something popular or amateur (in the sense of something created for love rather than profit). But as it's become the dominant model (and as it was preceded by big-box discount stores, particularly in the book trade), publishers focused on a smaller number of big selling authors, and there was correspondingly less cross-subsidizing of niche or starting authors that didn't have as much mass appeal, at least in the short term.

It's harder for a new or specialized writer to get into print than it used to be, because publishers can no longer afford to front the cost of keeping their books in print while waiting for them to gain traction based on an editor's instinct about literary quality. Not that I think there's anything wrong with publishing on the internet, or that making money is the only valid metric of an author's quality, but while some writers develop more slowly than others they still need to pay the bills. I like science fiction, for example, and over the last 30 years the variety and quantity of writers and subjects on the shelves has declined as publishers prefer their established moneymakers, or stories that can be marketed as trilogies, and so forth. Thanks to the success of that Twilight series, for example, my local Borders seems to have devoted a good quarter of the sci-fi/fantasy section to books about young vampires in love.

I'm just saying that a lot of niche-specific marketing and editorial infrastructure has fallen apart as the industry has shifted course, and made it more difficult for some producers and consumers to find each other. That publishing infrastructure looked superfluous from a business perspective and so many large publishers cut those departments to remain competitive, but business is notoriously focused on the short term. MBA logic would argue against committing resources to publishing, say, the first novel of a contemporary Burroughs or Joyce.

I don't mean this is a disaster of course - real talent will usually get noticed, and as mainstream publishers become more conservative (in the sense of preferring material with mass market potential) there are disruptive opportunities for small publishers and the book business in particular has been through such cycles before. Amazon is effectively the bookstore with infinite shelves so publications of minor interest aren't crowded out by flavor-of-the-month writers the way they are in bookstores. I have no wish to turn the clock back, I just don't think the disruption of the old paradigm an automatic win for consumers in every respect.
Simple, API calls, markdown...incredibly handy and brilliant in my mind. Kudos on the app.

Pastie has this capability, but is it possible to slip some text to the API via a shell script and bounce back the url?
The poster's main issue is not that people who didn't go to school are generally better than people who did, but that people who went to school aren't generally better than people who didn't. I.e., because of grade inflation and the trend to not make students do much work, people who went to school are just as likely to be lazy and stupid as people who didn't. A degree isn't a signal for anything anymore.
I guess the problem I see is that they tend to move too slowly. So, they might adopt the technology that was right for two years ago, and then replace it 5 years too late.
> Still, postmodernism cannot be discredited just because it does not make sense to people outside of its paradigm.

The idea that outsiders do not understand pomo is handled well in the article. The physicists, specifically focused on mathematical and physics jargon in the writings. They concluded that it was complete gibberish. Stuff like 1 = sqrt(-1) and so on.

The claim that there are some for whom this stuff does make sense is a little scary, as that implies some kind of secret coded language that makes sense, but has to be decoded, or the fact that they are just as crazy as the author.
Nailed the post-modernist response to Sokal - nice work!
If you take the leap and regret it, what is to prevent you from getting another good job? You'll probably regret it if you don't take the chance, so I'd go for it.
This is clever. What better way than to use space exploration to inspire people and get them on your side?
And on a related note: the most violent and death-dealing ideology in the history of the human race is atheistic communism. For the advancement of its "revolution/s" the cost was untold tens of millions of lives throughout the 20th Century, more than all the wars of religion ever fought, all piled together, with even the most liberal estimates.

Just saying ... man seems to do rather poorly on his own when he departs from the love of God, and the love of his neighbor in view of God's love.