skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> - one of the keys to success is being likable. skills/talent alone won't carry you to the top. they can take you far, but if you want to be a star, you gotta know how to hustle. i.e., networking, getting your name/face out there, being likable. if, like many on HN, you want to be an entrepreneur, never stop selling yourself.

My experience has been that this has little to do with being likable. In my experience, most less-technical people prefer confident behavior. Behavior that I (and many technical people) would characterize as arrogant.

If I was advising a younger self, I'd point out that self-aggrandizement, to a certain degree, is acceptable and even good. I seemed to figure it out on my own, though.

but, uh, yeah. being confident enough to promote yourself, on the balance, seems to be more important than not being an asshole. (now, if you can promote yourself without being an asshole, that's even better. I'm just saying, if you have to make a choice, it seems that being a self-aggrandizing asshole seems to be better than being quiet and shy, I mean, as an Entrepreneur. As an Engineer, the equation is somewhat different.)
I would like to mix in HN comments, but I don't like that people would have to register to comment. So I guess I would still like to have another type of comment available.
How-to learn about angel/vc term sheets
Aah Sweden is good sometimes, 5 weeks paid vacation every year, and you have to take out a minimum of 3 consecutive weeks. It's the law... :)
Have anybody had experience with using 4SQ from the advertising side? Does it bring real value as a marketing vehicle?
tlwr; Four Square is a feature of a cell phone network and that is where it will go. No cell phone company is going to pay whatever the investors now expect if it can rebuild the feature for 10% of that and instantly have more than 1.8M eyeballs.

The fact that I don't know anyone who would pay for FourSquare is irrelevant when considering its greatest value is as an advertising mechanism for a cell phone provider. If ATT can say, "We have foursquare" it'll do better for ATT than I suspect FourSquare will ever generate in revenue on its own.

It would be big if Sprint can say, "We're hip, we have FourSquare and Verizon doesn't." That will get Sprint business, but will Joe Company advertise on FourSquare even with 1.8 million users? Will Joe FS User pay for Four Square? Probably not. The vast majority won't -- ever -- Even with 10 M users. Four Square doesn't provide that kind of value. It provides the Facebook kind of value, which is to advertisers -- not the consumer.

Foursquare is a value in that it helps people connect. But connecting with people is like disposable income. If one option for spending disposable income goes away, the disposable income goes somewhere else. Similarly, foursquare users will go somewhere else to connect if there is another option or foursquare costs too much or anything at all probably. I don't even know if foursquare costs money I don't know anything about foursquare really.

What's the point? The point is, FourSquare is a feature. It's a feature of a cell phone that lets people connect. How much does that feature cost for a cell phone company to build? Does it cost $20M? Does it cost the valuation of FourSquare with a $20M investment? Probably not? I easily believe that Sprint or ATT or verizon could build FourSquare with $20M.

This is why investing $20M in companies like FourSquare is not a wise investment. It's not a rational investment.

The second reason it is not rational is this: FourSquare's competition for a buyout is not FourSquare clones, it is any network with 1.8 Million eyeballs. There are tons of those and many that are much more niche and easier to target and understand.

This $20M investment has just raised FourSquare's valuation so unrealistically high that it will be difficult for them to find someone they can convince to waste enough money on it to get a return on their investment. Even with $20M, the best FourSquare can do is get more eyeballs and they're going to have to get enough more eyeballs to make themselves, as an advertising mechanism, more valuable than all the other advertising mechanisms that have just as many eyeballs, but without the unrealistic expectation on behalf of investors that they need to get a certain return.

Many companies with many more eyeballs exist as advertising media with way lower valuations and way more potential as a rational advertising expenditure from a company that may consider acquiring FourSquare.
For now, you are what you do.

Gonna heavily disagree with this one... This is an attitude that turns us into machines with expected outputs rather than people. We humans spend a lot of time limiting ourselves by placing labels on ourselves and limiting our perceptions by labeling others.

Discard the labels. Do not try to fit a role. You might program computers, but you are not a programmer. You fly planes, but you are not an aviator. You play a guitar, but you are not a musician. You teach, but you are not a teacher. All these terms have extra connotations we have all built up.

Your footprint on the world is a culmination of your actions, so in a sense, your actions mark you in the perceptions of others. However, as we humans are so adaptable, we can discard the notion of who we think we are and start afresh, always pick new directions. We do not have to be what we have been, and we do not have to cater to what other people expect of us.

Just because you get a college degree in X and work 30 years in X does not mean you cannot ever do Y; that is a self-imposed limitation reinforced by the X label.

Purpose of life? To live. Nice and fundamental. Meaningless enough to show you that you can do about whatever you want if you have the interest and make the effort. Limitless enough to give hope that if, in your 20s, you feel you are not doing what you want, you can try something else.

No, you are not what you do. You are you. What you do is what you have chosen to do at that time. It is okay to change, okay to do the unexpected, okay to break out of your comfort zone and whatever comfort zones and roles that TV and society have tried to impose upon you.
I don't think it's likely that the creators of HN would support this, as it would conflict with a startup Y Combinator invested in (Disqus, http://disqus.com/about/), whose sole purpose is to provide coment system for sites and blogs. Of course, HN creators also founded YC, hence the conflict.
Some sort of categorization might be worthwhile (and do-able, since you're sticking in the startup vertical). Maybe tags/labels, given that your audience is pretty geeky? i.e. "engineering, design, mobile, marketing, management", etc. Browsing 600+ jobs is not just about good pagination controls.

+1 on the searchability issues. Should be able to search by city/region.
Nice, I like the concept, and love the example it opens up with.
This is a story with a theme, a theme of stubborn refusal to admit failure in the face of the huge successes of others. Linux showed that open source can develop a vibrant operating system project. The BSDs have shown that a tightly controlled engineering effort can be achieved within an open source context. And Apple has shown that you can even make an operating system off of the Mach lineage! When faced with repeated failure, one has to look at the common denominators. It's GNU.
You're right. The best startup job site in my opinion is startuply. The problem is it's not every startup. They only have what a company willingly goes and posts. Startups Hiring is in its infancy, so theres not a lot of companies yet. But the end goal is the be the largest list of startup jobs. I think the only way to attain this is be eliminating the requirement of a company physically going and making a post.
A Founder's Job
There is a place in the world for salaryman-level loyalty to one's company, but it sure isn't anywhere where they have a word for "at-will employment". For a typical American company, I do two weeks of work for you, you cut me a paycheck, and we are even. We have an ethical, professional relationship -- and if it is not mutually beneficial, a firm handshake and some polite chitchat about possibly doing business in the future and then I'm out the door.

Small companies that I do not own are companies. Does my status as a "small employee" (only one of me, and not externally funded!) entitle me to lifetime employment regardless of my productivity? No? Then I am not a salaryman and you should not expect me to act like one.
That most countries employ various mixes of policies generally fits with my thinking about how things should work. Bugs in the systems should be addressed through incremental changes

Why not radical changes?

Where things get dicey is when politicians buy too strongly into a particular -ism and aren't able to employ other tools when necessary.

How do we know what kind of idealism that politicians are employing? Why not think that they're just a bunch of self-interested politicians who wants the vote?

How do you know which tools are suited to which problems? How do you know if they're suited to any problems at all?
Yes, the price seems really high for a company facing such enormous risk in what is essentially a commodity industry. More power to them, but I wouldn't give them any money.

It is way more complex than "hooking up a laptop battery to a DC motor, though. I give them a lot of credit for getting as far as they have.
Just some bullet points as I go through it:

* Kind of intimidating on launch. Maybe a couple intro slides?

* Seems powerful (multiple projects, locations, repeating tasks)

* Why do I have to double tap a project in the project list?

* Sync to Google account is clutch!

* A task due today is overdue?

* Priority management is good.

* Icons feel a little... standard?

* Location is cool. Might be the best feature
Ask HN: Angel investor & startup day planning
Hi!

I believe that entrepreneurship brings an amazing amount of good out of the people, lots of creativity, and I read about so many of the cool results on HN every day.

Inspired our Social Media Day meetup today in Taipei, I got an idea to organize a "Investors, meet startups" kind of event over here. I read so many events like that in the US, UK, but much less in Asia. In my experience, people here are just as daring and creative in starting businesses, but have much smaller exposure and narrower possibilities. I heard there are a few firms that do investment in startups, but mostly the way firms do - playing it safe.

So I was thinking about pulling together a one day event, where investors (firms, angels, whoever wants to) can showcase what are they looking in startups, and more importantly startups can showcase what they offer - and hopefully see the networking kick off...

I'd like to ask if anyone here had the experience organizing something like this? What do you think, what pitfalls are there, how is the best to get to it? Any advice is welcome. Choosing venues, how to get people on-board, everything...

Cheers! :)
Languages described using BNF can be ambiguous and context sensitive. When there are multiple parses, Marpa, an implmentation of Earley's algorithm, will produce them. Differentiating between multiple possible parses is left as an exercise to the user.
Even by the standards of lightweight blog articles commenting on reports of rumours that was a terrible article.

Don't give them the ad impressions, all he's saying is "it's a rumour" and then gives the most inane reasons for why he doesn't think it will turn out to be true. Maybe it will, maybe it won't, either way you can find better things to do with your time than read this drivel.
The best way to improve is to practise and to look at the sites that you think are nicely designed , get inspired but never copy.
Some of the best designed sites that i can think of are 37signals (all there sites are designed simply but elegantly), zengarden, mint.com
Do you have any plans with this, ie. to turn it into a full-fledged (paying?) service? Open source it? Etc?
Startuply has been down since last night :\

I'm pulling a lot of my company data from crunchbase. I plan on adding a full profile in the next few weeks.
I can't be a good dad to my 3 kids and have enough time to read a chapter in a book each day (along with employment, house chores, etc), let alone go forth with any business ventures.

Do you really find your statements to be true? If so, how do you balance them? Orthogonal seems to be an unarguably incorrect statement, though.
Cheers, thanks.

two representations of the same todo list

Kind of. With FolderBoy, any note (or folder) can be in multiple places at the same time. So, I guess you could create a "Priority" folder, with all your tasks arranged by priority, and also put these (exact same) tasks in another folder(s) with them organized in a more project-like way.

I think what yours does better is that you can have two lists side by side.

Ah, yes, we don't do sharing...yet!
You can love what you do but also not like having to do it under external pressure. Vacation is all about removing that pressure for awhile.
It's an interesting article, but surprisingly light on details, even for Scientific American.

Here's the actual paper: http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/early/2010/06...

And here's a delightful book that hits this topic and more:
http://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Others-Evolutionary-Origins-Un...

Sarah Hrdy is one of the absolute best popular science writers out there. This and her earlier book "Mother Nature" are two of the best unsung biology books I know of. I've given multiple copies as gifts.

Edit: Having now read more of the referenced paper, my opinion of the Scientific American article drops further. The key detail left out of the SA summary is that the paper describes an interesting mathematical model, rather than yet another 'just so' story. Read the paper, skip the summary.
I like the direction in which your taking things. I feel that your work.. is just a good herculean effort away from being very mainstream.. I just wanted to comment to let you know.

Keep working on it man, It is looking good. there may be things that are off (from what I can tell) but I also can tell that your well on your way to having a very nice polished product.
Your search feature filters out #, so searching for "C#" yielded search results for C.
I think my fulltext search might be killing off words that are 3 letters or under. Will have to look into that. Thanks.
looks like your server is struggling with the HN traffic. i can't get the root to load.
Ideas Are a Commodity, It's Execution Intelligence That Matters
Few thoughts:

- Gotta improve/simplify the actions between left and right view. It doesn't feel right that you can't mark an item DONE at the right.

- You should show completed tasks by default. Nothing more satisfying than seeing that checkmark and seeing what you've done. After a day or so, they can dissapear.
It is nearly impossible to hire a good developer

[Sigh]

He's right. And it's getting worse. We have a bunch of open req's right now as we're staffing up a new project and you'd think with all the handwringing about the economy and how many great engineers are being laid off it would be easy, right? Nope. It actually seems like the quality of applicants has gone down since the last time I was interviewing people.

Out of all the people we've interviewed, there's ONE that I would say is a good hire (as opposed to just "can probably do the job with some hand-holding"), and the rest of the interview team is lukewarm on him. And this is after HR has screened out the bottom of the barrel and our technical phone screens have filtered out a few more. ONE person who's just a "nice to have" and there's a good chance we're going to pass on him.

If anyone here threatened to quit, at this point we'd probably chain him to his desk :-)
Those stock options in the startup where you work aren't worth much, if anything. The experience is very valuable though.
I wish that, in my twenties, (1) I knew this, and (2) I had the balls to be brutally honest with myself about what my strengths and weaknesses were

I actually agree with the advice on working on your weaknesses early in life, because pushing your limits helps you better understand yourself. I don't think I was dishonest about myself earlier, maybe too idealistic trying to fix some weaknesses that I nowadays consider part of my personality. And I'm not talking about skills here, but more about mental debugging of your emotions, ambitions, relationships etc.
Create A Clean and Stylish CSS3 Contact Form
The index is updated daily. When it crawls if it notices a job is no longer listed it will pull it from the index. In theory every job on the site should always be available and listing on the company career page. The older ones will still work it's way to the bottom... Search is ordered by date discovered desc.
As someone who just recently bought his first house, it seems unrealistic to have saved up that entire amount within any kind of reasonable timeframe. Obviously, you should buy a house (and other things) that is within your means, which is more what the housing bubble was all about IMO.

But I do agree with your general premise.
That's how I read it too. I couldn't imagine the exact metaphor he was going for (companies start in the shire before adventuring out into the world?), but it's not off-putting, at least. It's no expertsexchange.
We'll see how it goes. We're going to use it ourselves and work on it a bit. If we see that more people are using it, we'll start reviewing suggestions and will be ready to invest more time into developing it.
why does your support page take me to getsatisfaction.com instead of an instance of purify?
Sounds like theres a few problems with my fulltext search. Going to update it sometime today to be more accurate. Thanks!
Why I hate the Android SDK.
I'm guessing they picked an integer A for the average of the men's and women's percentages, and then a smaller (positive or negative) integer D for the deviation from this average for each sex. Then they could use A+D as the score for the women and A-D as the score for the men. If one of these is even (or odd) then so must the other be.

It might be worth checking to see the distribution of D, compared to real variation between men and women.
It would nice to able to sort by those headings your have (Company and location especially)
Having a bit of trouble loading it in Chrome - is the site down?
I'm planning to add a tags system that will organize jobs and companies by their type. Thats up next!
The fact that most companies don't give a damn about making products for Linux is Linux's fault though.
You need to take three weeks, but not consecutive.
Hmmm, assuming since you posted an Ask HN that you read HN comments, it's difficult to believe you haven't seen lots of people talking about the usual subjects (at the moment) - node.js (javascript is the language), clojure, haskell, OCaml, scala, erlang. All of these will give you a new perspective coming from the three you mention, the first two are probably the most web-focused (though perhaps people will disagree with that?). Also, plus one for smalltalk/seaside, and minus one for python, which isn't mind-bending enough coming from Ruby in my opinion.
Is it really wise to invest in companies that require venture capital to operate?

A loan is merely one way of getting funding.
How does a request for 6 weeks vacation turn into underhanded, disloyal, and dishonest?

Some people would be grateful to have an icepick in their forehead to end their misery, but I'm not saying you should stab yourself.
I have a feeling we've killed it, the sire isn't responding at all.
- The clear/save buttons are a little un-intuitive. I'd expect everything to just get saved as we go.

- I do really love the concept. Awesome way to improve upon something so simple.

- The title editing is a little clunky: the edit button shouldn't be there (you should just be able to click the title), or else only show it on hover, and you need a submit/cancel button instead of only submitting on ENTER.

- The "edit" icon before each item: the placement of this (and the way it looks) make it look like it's a checkbox where you can check things of when they're done. Move "edit" to the right, and put a checkbox before each item where you can mark items done. Don't hide done items immediately, but remove the checkbox with a checkmark (Green) and leave the item there for a day or so.
They probably extrapolate the number of users by the increasing number of smartphone sales and arrive at some scaring figure of users in, say, 5 years. Then charge accordingly.
I think the OP assumes the reader has a typical "ass in seat here at the office = productivity" job.

It sounds like your company has a much more developer-friendly approach to work, of which I am envious. Are you hiring?
I mentioned this in another response, but I believe this issue really has more to do with who you hire, how well you pay them, how you treat them, etc. It's more about the execution of philosophy, not the composition of and adherence to policy.

To be real candid we've not run into a situation yet where a developer was going off the grid for a bit over a week at a time. The devs we hire are really really talented and they go into withdrawal if they don't open an IDE for a couple of days. They're compulsive coders...I mean, I pay them to do what they do, but most of their motivation is internal. The common thread is that they all have a passion for development, and that shines through.
Of course, the ease of moving across the country has been facilitated by advancements in transportation and communication, and the trend of people having children in their 30s is likely correlated with the simultaneous increases in average lifespan, so this is really a self-correcting problem.

Evolution is a process that is always at work in all circumstances, not something that we can circumvent.
Good points, and wow, I didn't expect to find myself defending a four year old blog post today.

I'm not sure where you get the "little to no warning" bit from what I wrote. In the examples I cited, I gave about 2 months notice in both cases. The idea is certainly not to burn bridges or blackmail your employer. Just that it's OK to take the odd sabbatical.

I eventually migrated to consulting, where I could simply end a contract then disappear for the rest of the year. And from there, I migrated further to running my own product company, where you can disappear for 4 years straight as long as you have a laptop along.

Still, if I had a job today I wouldn't limit myself to 2 weeks vacation.
Sidenote: where can I find the person who came up with the "docking bar" idea for websites (that hideous JavaScript thing at the bottom of your viewport).

I need to hurt that person.
Lets be honest here most languages are much of a muchness, religious wars aside, and will probably all end up with pretty much the same set of features.

Sure I would like to have the time to play with OCaml / Erlang / Haskel but what I really want is the time to work on an exciting application!

Thats where the fun is. If I had the time to play with robotics, telepresence or virtual reality I would learn whatever language I would need to do it.

Languages, meh
Emacs doesn't seem to be much of a failure. The GCC is used by everyone. However, admittedly, they are written by RMS himself.
how much PG is better when used on the scale MySQL is used

Please do your homework before spreading FUD. PostgreSQL is used at large scale every day, e.g. at Skype: http://highscalability.com/skype-plans-postgresql-scale-1-bi...

More examples can be found here:
http://www.postgresql.org/about/users
Yes, a problem with the linode, rebooted and working now. Weird, we don't even have the traffic.
JVM method handles in a nutshell