skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I can get a full Ubuntu distribution (64bit, dual monitor, 3D desktop, browser, media player, cd burner, flash, pdf viewer, mail client, development tools) in under an hour. With XP I need longer than that just to find and install the network drivers (and that requires cheating, as I need to use a second computer to download the drivers). Last time I tried to get a decent XP system configured it took me a whole day to get everything loaded.

People still have this notion that Linux is hard to install, hard to use or that it looks ugly. As a matter of fact it's easier to install, easier to use, safer, faster and looks much better than any Windows (including Vista) on half the hardware.
"Pop an XP disk in any system made in the last 5 years and you're up and running in no time."

Actually, I had enormous problems when my wife got an unformatted replacement drive for her laptop and I tried to do just that. It was easier to wait a week for a manufacturer-specific OEM disk than to try and debug everything. Ironically (given your followup), the wireless was a huge mess.

If you buy an OEM system preinstalled with Linux, it will "just work" as well. See Dell, system76.com, and the Asus EEE for examples.
I couldn't agree more. People forget that the calculus of Newton and Leibniz was based on infinitesimals, not the "rigorous" epsilon-delta proofs and the concept of a limit. Calculus was found by intuition and experimentation (Archimedes' method of exhaustion to find pi), and not following the implications of "What happens if I arbitrarily define a limit?".

Current calculus education is like teaching kids about color theory, photons, how the eye works without just letting them fingerpaint. Those details will come, but the vast majority of people just remember calculus as a painful memorization exercise.

As an aside, e is the same way. Most people have it taught as an abstract limit concept: lim n->inf (1 + 1/n)^n without realizing it's actually about growth (and that's how it was discovered):

http://betterexplained.com/articles/an-intuitive-guide-to-ex...
Why do you say it's counter-intutive? Isn't the thesis largely the same as "Haste makes waste"? That idea has been bouncing around since at least 190 B.C.

http://www.phrases.org.uk/bulletin_board/22/messages/411.htm...
Its easy to get consumed by consulting and not make much progress on your own products. With contracting, you must spend time finding new contracts, accounting, and sometimes even legal issues.

I wasted years contracting instead of working on my own projects full time. All my energy was drained by the clients I had.
This topic interests me a lot. IMO, most people's concept of existing creativity in computer science is a joke.

In 25 years, people will be amazed at how little creativity there was in computer science and that it took so long for people to realize this and do something about it.
Four Bad Designs
The press becomes the press-sphere
The quality is really amazing for the price. They also ship overnight, etc.
I'd have to agree with you. I bought a tablet PC that came with Vista - after a few months I couldn't handle it anymore and decided to install Ubuntu. The installation was quick and effortless and all of my hardware continued to function. Enabling the tablet functionality probably took a good 5 minutes.

Don't plan on using Windows ever again - it's even easier to get software on Ubuntu - just call apt-get and you are good to go.
Startup Weekend Portland
I used alphagraphics too, but had to give them a quark file (eww) and they screwed up one of my fonts the first time. It was about 4 years ago. They turned out great, once the font was fixed. They have a nice paper selection, which people tend to commend me on.
It's a pretty robust axe
Looking at creative pictures can help to get the creative juices flowing
Simply Accounting + Retired Accountant
I used a bookkeeper ($50/month) and tax accountant for taxes. He is a retired multi-millionaire, that wanted to see a smart young guy succeed. All expenses were via credit/debit card. All revenues were promptly deposited into the bank account, and reflected on bank statements.

A bookkeeper or accountant is useful once you start making money, because they help keep you objective and should be a useful resource.
> Are you not debugging a memory leak in a production Lisp app?

But, you're confusing the actual application with the Lisp implementation. Arc (and Mzscheme for that matter) are not as mature as Erlang's 20 years (or whatever). If this was running on a more mature Lisp system, I don't think we'd be discussing the same thing.
According to the video in the link rguzman below, Semco has 5,000 employees.

According to the title on this, page, however, they might be looking for sysadmins:

http://semco.locaweb.com.br/en/content.asp?content=1
Counter-intuitively, any initial burst of acceleration when starting an urgent task will always seem quite productive.

However, maintaining that constant high rate of speed is what contributes to burn out.

It's like getting onto the highway's on-ramp and staying in 3rd gear until you hit 70 mph; it's really easy to get up to that speed, but staying there (at least in third gear), can cause a seriously thrashed engine quite quickly.

Couldn't help but throw in an automotive metaphor.
Shine. It will be a nice day in SF @ 65F during the day
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&...
Sounds like you haven't found the right accountant. For $300/month, we offload _everything_ to ours. We wrote more about it here: http://dynamite.errfree.com/posts/72-accounting-the-books
I've implemented #1.
"Top-quality" sperm is going for $3k/vial?
I print my own using Avery Micro-Perforated business cards.
I actually had to down-mod you here because I think even you'll admit that a 3 for basically echoing the first point (out of 4) of the article isn't well deserved. :-)

You're correct of course, but the article does a much better job at explaining this.
I wonder if there is something missing in that problem description. I can think of a trivial winning strategy that doesn't even require the participants to observe the other people's hats.
http://4by6.com for really quality stuff
You are the greatest. Lonely for clear, precise thinking, and actual content here in the midwest, and finding this site, this essay included, has been a joy. Plus, for all my own start-up endeavors, these encouragements to persevere are very helpful. True things do need to be said again and again and in different ways all the time. Thanks. Thanks for the careful thinking, and for advancing the idea of careful thinking in general. Thanks.
For everyone that is in love with Facebook/mySpace, I'd like to reiterate that their challenge right now is firmly embedded in point number 3.

Also note that the lack of advice for that point correlates to the difficulty of the situation. You'd be well advised to let FB sort out their issues prior to building a business model on providing apps for them.
How To Improve Notebook Battery Life
Maybe the one just got lucky and the other was unlucky? It's just anecdotal evidence. The HotOrNot founders got rich by scribbling something on a coaster (or something like that) - doesn't prove we should spend more time in bars to create a successful startup. Or maybe it does :-/
AOL Lands Verizon for Exclusive Ad Partnership
My roommate works at VistaPrint, I wouldn't recommend them to ANYBODY. They employ shady tactics such as trimming a few millimeters off of each side of the card so they could fit an extra two or three in their printing presses (this also makes your card smaller than the general business card size).

Their quality is actually really shoddy as well, and the free cards all say "print at VistaPrint" on the back of them. Not to mention the fact that they go to all lengths with retention emails after you place a single order (without having the option to opt-out) to keep people ordering more. They also charge a ton of hidden fees.

In short: If you want your business card to be a serious reflection of your business, DON'T use VistaPrint.
Getting Real with 37 Signals
Blockbuster Offers to Buy Circuit City
Video: The xos exoskeleton in action (jump to 1:15)
Also see the article: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/building-real-iron-man
I second Moo.

However, I always have my professional designer create the cards and http://sbprintthis.com/ handles the printing.

Unless you're a crack graphic designer yourself, there's not substitute for having them professionally done. Think back to cards you've received. Which ones stand out? I'll suspect that it's either the ones with a schtick - Matt Mullenweg's plain white "Type Matt into Google and click I'm Feeling Lucky" cards - or the beautifully designed ones printed on heavyweight stock.

It makes a difference.
Is Google App Engine a Lock-in Play?
I think it's more a hired-help solution, although having an on-line, web based accounting thing would probably not be a bad business for the right person.
As much as I like the 37 signals posts and concepts, they seem more and more to be trolling.
My second thought was how great it is that Google joined the scalable web app business. Amazon's pre-announcement strikes me as a counterpunch to Google App Engine frenzy. Hope it comes soon and the cost isn't too much above S3.
bookkeeper + accountant
"Don't fight the internet."
Can your type checking system do this?
If you enjoy what you are doing there is no urgency and you don't mind working 7 days a week.
I think it might depend on what you are using them for and/or your business. If you sell face-to-face, good cards might be important for your marketing efforts. It seems it would matter less if it's contact info for people who are trying to sell to you. If you are printing a few to get the attention of VC? They will probably say, "This is how the company's going to spend my money if I give it to them. Is it sensible?"
The Internet, a collection of computer networks that already has hundreds of thousands of users.
This is the first mention of the internet in the NYT
My most humble apologies, sc. Thanks to your patient guidance I now understand that business is serious business and should be taken seriously.
This article wanted to make me comment on two issues.

1) Decent abstraction layers ease the moving process. In my current project I was unable to decide on which datastore system would best cater for the project, so I simply abstracted the datastore enough that I can now (and have) slot in any kind of backend, whether it be BerkeleyDB JE, an RDBMS or a custom in-memory solution.

2) Everyone keeps comparing AWS and App Engine as similar products when they seem to be intended to be quite different by Amazon and Google. Google App Engine provides you a hosted environment in which you develop your app. Amazon's web services work at a much lower level. I'd imagine Amazon's goal is for value added resellers to offer App Engine like services _ontop_ of their stack.

That is all.
http://www.trifectaagencies.com

At Trifecta Agencies we have a great product for a wonderful price. I started the company 7 years ago and it has been running strong ever since.

Email me.

-Chris
I use FreshBooks (http://www.freshbooks.com) for invoicing. I'm probably going to explore Quickbooks.com (their online solution) also for the accounting side of things.
John Wheeler, inventor of the term 'black hole', is dead at 96
What is like to be a programmer
Startupping (or Hacking) doesn't have to be all gloomy and doomy, you know. In fact, I think most hackers are in it for the fun.
I can vouch for the quality of his work.

He also can do logos and stickers and such if you need those.
Hmm, this conflicts with the Javascript meetup: http://javascript.meetup.com/4/

I think you mean the Delancey Street Restaurant (not Delacy) http://www.delanceystreetfoundation.org/enterrestaurant.php
In the valley for startup school? Check out SHDH
On Testing: Some Programmers Refuse to Get it
I use the quickbooks free starter edition plus Turbotax online. So far no problem and I got my refund right away (thank to free efile).

Once you start making money I think the best thing to do is hire an accounting firm or internal accountant/bookkeeper.
Guerrilla IT: How to stop worrying and learn to love your superusers
You can't possibly have a valid point, because you're starting from practically zero data. All I have is vague theories about what might be wrong, and what you know about what's going on in our software is a proper subset of what I know.

Why don't you wait till you have more data before wasting all our time with stuff like this? What's the rush?
Blockbuster Bids $1 Billion for Circuit City
You are right, i was unclear here. I didn't mean "urgency is poisonous" is counter-intuitive, but rather the advice in the blog-posting "we work less (4 days a week) to be more productive".
The issue with urgency is that you often have no control over it. Can a startup beat a competitor by saying "let's work less"? I doubt. Urgency can also have the positive effect of concentrating all forces towards a certain goal.
"Blockbuster says that it requested a response by Feb. 21, but, to date, Circuit City has failed to provide due diligence necessary to allow Blockbuster to make a definitive takeover proposal."

Feb 21? A little late for that timely response, ya think?
Exactly. It's much easier to sell added value than reduced costs.
I second this. Great options, great coating, I also opted for rounded corners. Way better color representation than the last place I ordered from. Can't go wrong here.
My First Facebook Thrift App
They're spot on this time.

A lot of people seem to be misinterpreting the post and are assuming 37signals are promoting sloth, inactivity or doing things more slowly. As a company that releases products and new features on a pretty regular basis, 37signals should not be accused of this.

Instead, the post is actually highlighting the problems caused by "urgency." Urgency can be a massive problem because most non-emergency matters of urgency are bred by laziness. This is because people have asked for tasks to be done by a reasonable deadline in the past, but then the job hasn't been done due to laziness. So.. the next time the person asks, they make the job look "urgent" to force it to be done on time. After several cycles of this, almost everything becomes "urgent".

Consider the way many people complain about and at corporations. Their anger and demands are way out of line with what happened to them (some bad service, maybe) but most consumers know that most big companies simply won't listen unless you make a disproportionate amount of fuss.

This is the sort of urgency that is very harmful to SMALL companies and freelancers. It's those clients and customers who claim every tiny job or feature is URGENT when, in fact, it's not at all. Those clients are the ones that cause stress and the ones that will ultimately give you a heart attack.

There is a two way relationship needed with compromise on each side. The clients / users / customers need to be reminded that only emergencies are urgent, but your compromise is that if you promise something then MAKE SURE YOU FULFILL IT! I'm sick of how many supposedly "reliable" people don't live up to their promises.. yet we're supposedly meant to accept this nowadays. Well, I won't, and I'm with 37signals on this one. Ditch urgency, live up to promises, and it'll all go a lot smoother and with less stress.
The difference between undefined and null in Javascript
> But how many days must later be spent debugging issues like this? Will this time spent debugging be counted against your productivity gains you attribute to Lisp? This is exactly the sort of problem Erlang has nailed down.

http://damienkatz.net/2007/12/erlang_vm_crash.html :

"So the Erlang VM died suddenly with a failed memory allocation. This is actually quite okay [...] However, the Erlang VM didn't restart automatically. Apparently we need to configure something for that to happen, only we can't figure out how to make it work. The documentation is either wrong, confusing or the feature is buggy. This is the kind of stuff we keep hitting in Erlang. It's fantastically productive for many tasks, but using some of the built-in libraries and features can be a huge time sink. (inets and xmerl immediately spring to mind)."
zinxq: Permalinks are good.
Gwt-ext
The advice in the post doesn't say they "work less". They say they've worked fewer hours.

I wish I could find the study I read last year that found only about 20% of hours spent at work by a typical worker are productive, but I'll have to settle for this: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/fashion/31work.html

Working fewer hours does not mean you do less work. Indeed, the improvement in efficiency can mean you ultimately produce more. It's like if you drive a car at 100mph everywhere, you'll use more gas per mile than driving at 55mph (indeed, this was why that limit was set).

(Update: Heh, just noticed someone else used an automotive metaphor above!)
Here's another good one, from InformationWeek:
http://www.informationweek.com/shared/printableArticle.jhtml...
How much money should we raise? Two founders, two investors, and guidelines
It is very possible that Erlang could have a better way than Lisp, and that Lispers can't see it until they learn Erlang. Entirely possible.

But an arbitrary bug in an arbitrary Lisp program is nothing even remotely like sufficient proof for such a statement, unless you are trying to claim that Erlang programs are inherintly bug-free, regardless of how they were implemented...?
When building the userbase of a site I managed, I found that the largest growth periods were caused by events largely out of my control: the attraction of social super-nodes.

First, someone started participating who had a massive following on YouTube, and basically jetissoned over his entire auidence to our site. That doubled our traffic overnight.

A few weeks later, someone with influence in a massive forum community posted something about us, and that was an even larger traffic boost. Essentially, people from that forum site started spending their time on our site.

Putting email scrapers and all that stuff to get people to spread word about you is nothing compared to what a few social super-nodes can do for you. Once you attract those people to start evangelizing your product, you have increasing chances to attract even more super nodes.

The problem is attracting those super nodes in the first place. Build something that people can form an opinion about. Super nodes want to put their hat on something, their seal of approval. Generic does not get approval, I assure you. Stand for something, and imbue your product with that ethos. As sparse as reddit looks, you can bet that there's something identifiable about that site.
I personally have gone for EC2 and intend to stick with them for now due to the support received and what I've been able to achieve using it. We've tried Google App Engine also (we're mainly Python guys) but that was my first concern that if I became too comfortable with it that we would be locked in. Ultimately though the decision was made for us - Google didn't allow some of the libraries that we need to use
The next low-hanging fruit is auto-restarting instances, so you don't have to have two instances just to babysit each other.
Weird to think that was only 15 years ago.
This is the first mention of the internet in the NYT
Google AppEngine for Personal Web Presence?
Steven Covey made piles of cash in the 90s preaching urgency vs importance.

Urgency = putting out fires
Importance = creating value
I realized recently that exokernels are basically the same thing as hypervisors. So maybe some lessons from the exokernel can be used in today's virtualized environments. Rails libOS, anyone?
Wozniak on today's young innovators [vid]
The NSFW Semantic Web (GRDDL Profile for NSFW)
Go for a hosted solution like quickbooks online or something like that. Why? Well, you can easily give access to your accountant or an investor (VC) and avoid all the paperwork that way... and you appear transparent to them. Now, that has some pros and cons but I think the pros overweigh the cons. You can then hire an accountant that's not even in your city and can save a lot of money that way. You also don't have to spend $500 right away since you'll be paying month-to-month.

http://oe.quickbooks.com/product_info.cfm?sc=QBC-V51-HME-FAM...

http://quickbooksgroup.com/webx?addPost@@.ef86087
I know it's nitpicking, but I've seen this in a few places lately, and it bugs me...

This wouldn't have surprised Mark Twain, who once apologized for writing a long letter because he didn't have time to write a short one.

... because as everyone knows, or should, this particularly excellent witticism was Pascal's:

I have only made this letter long because I have not had time to make it shorter. -- Lettres provinciales, Dec. 14, 1656

It's also attributed to Cicero (but I've googled for a source and can't find it) and Augustine (but what he said was a little different).

Edit: as long as a couple people are interested- more here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163425
Where do you look?
"I have only made this letter long because I have not had time to make it shorter."
When people wish they could downvote a story but can't, often they take it out on innocuous comments made by the story submitter.
"... and now you’re a sharecropper on the Google plantation."
Not to ponder this particular post, but seriously: who do you use to print business cards? This is a $50 investment and a google search will tell you who can do it.

I think that a lot of these ask YC have gone a bit too far and don't add much value.
Probabilistic Assertions: Crashing When Something Feels Wrong
The reason I did it this way was because I had other uses for my rfind() function.
Apropos of http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=163423

Further discussion here:
http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/exlibris...

... with contributions by a (different) pg!
cool. I like that better. I didn't google before doing mine. Also, there was some reason I didn't want to call 'git branch' twice, although now I can't remember what it was.

So it goes with this kind of stuff.
Creative Web 2.0 RSS ICons for your blog
Some really sleek and never-seen-before type rss icons you might want to utilize on your blog. Got Web 2.0 written all over them
For anyone interested in OSes, I recommend the EROS, Sun Spring, Singularity, and Synthesis papers; they are signposts outside the well-explored Unix/VMS territory.
> Why don't you wait till you have more data before wasting all our time with stuff like this? What's the rush?

I used the opportunity of your reliability failure to make a larger point about reliable software. I admit was deliberately provocative and terse in the posting, but I have futher clarified things in the comments. I thought about writing a long, detailed, well balance article about this. But that wasn't going to happen, I don't have the time. But then I thought why not just write what I think, but not everything I think? So I did.

Sorry, I might be completely wrong about the source of your problems, I am definitely theorizing as to what you are seeing and I don't think I've implied otherwise. But I will say these are the sorts of things that crop up again and again in Java and other GC'd mutable state languages.

Good luck debugging the problem.
I'll have to try that Interweb thing.
Abstractions, abstractions, abstractions, abstractions.
Unlocked iPhones: $471 in China, $625 in Turkey
Quake III on the iPod touch
I dont think this is a bad post at all, and was glad to see it here. We have been having this very discussion internally this week

Our last quote for a business card run was $1100. Far cry from '$50 and a google search'.

Peoples responses here about who to with (and who NOT to go with) have been very helpful.