skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here's the original url, if you want to avoid scribd hell: http://findsuccess.net/success%20is%20just%20one%20wish%20aw... (I wish pdf links didn't automatically get converted to scribd submissions).

As for the book itself, it's a bit long-winded, but the "three improvements every ninety days" idea is a good one.
Though I don't completely disagree that many Facebook apps are useless, when did fun become useless?
What's wrong with "gambling your life on a longshot"? There are rewards for taking that risk, and it's not like you suddenly won't be able to get a job back in the corporate world. The world is desperate for good developers, so basically as one you have the freedom to do whatever you want.
Lots to learn from a startup failure:  The Story of Nouncer
How about this:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179764

...seems like more of a joke, though.

One thing I've wondered about is why none of my comments have ever been "dead"ed. Maybe there is a policy to be lenient with people who have high karma.
Seems like this article mostly serves as an advertisement for Clickpass.
One Guy Who Has Seen It All   Doesn't Like What He Sees Now
It doesn't really talk about competition. Since this is common sense, it's inevitable that people will pile into whatever business you're talking about until profits go to zero. If you're in a commodity business like, uh, pens, you're going to be worrying about the lower limit on your income - wishing you had one.
Thanks Dan,

It's interesting to note that 5 of those 13 acquisitions are for video editing software, and 1 is for DVD authoring software. It's also interesting to note that the last video editing software purchase was in 2006. Apple shopping their video division is surprising but not shocking. Apple buying Adobe seems nonsensical when looking at this list.

I misspoke about coverflow, they didn't buy the company, but bought the rights to the technology the company developed.

http://www.steelskies.com/coverflow/
Tech CEOs: Richer Than You Are
Here you go:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20070312/165448.shtml

http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2007/03/12/mic...
Strange Behvaior
So it's impossible to delete? I don't think so...
Free? Pay? Freemium? They all work
Just learn how to build big software systems. This might be as simple as a usb camera in a linux box with a serial port connection to some motor controller. That is actually really complicated, but all the components are pretty cheap.

If you can get a wifi streaming webcam with tele-operated control, you have the basic components of a PackBot. It's not rugged, or self balancing with arms, but it's there.

One mistake aspiring roboticists make is thinking that robotics is something different. Actually it's just a lot of mechanical, software, electrical, and systems engineers working together. Autonomy algorithms for robotics are certainly domain specific, but the skills needs have broad application - meaning most coders have them.
I don't read Fortune because it seems to be written for middle-school students. I do know that lots of former GE managers are now running their own companies. However, it seems very likely that since most large tech companies were founded in the last 30 years or so, and many of them were funded by a relatively small number of VCs, that those VCs might form a very well-connected network, even if other companies also 'spun off' lots of good managers. I would be surprised if the number of Fortune 500 companies run by GE alumni exceeded the number of Fortune 500 companies funded at some point by Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark, etc.
the real numbers may even be worse due to miscategorization. games like 'mob wars' and 'vampires' are currently being categorized as 'utility' apps...
I stopped reading here: How does an equation grow and shrink? Accumulate over time?

Equations, don't grow or shrink. Maybe he was confusing equations with functions.
I think the biggest thing that troubles me about our tax system is how much time is wasted trying to figure out how much we owe. Individuals and corporations alike have incentives to devote resources solely to minimizing their tax burden. I'd argue that a simplified tax scheme would cause a non-trivial increase in productivity that would be a boon to both the government and the people.
well, this is how i invest, specifically. i'm young and more aggressive:

35% domestic 500 index

15% foreign developed markets

20% foreign developing markets

10% REITs

10% intermediate-term bonds

10% inflation-protected bonds
I have experienced tons of regret from putting too much into a dying startup. It is more than possible.
Depends on the stocks. Unlike many modern investors, I'm extremely uncomfortable with the idea of trading something as an asset class rather than as part ownership of a business. You end up doing things like investing in oil companies and investing directly in commodities, which is redundant -- the oil companies are basically a portfolio of call options on oil, where the strike price is the cost of extraction.

Think about it: if you told Andrew Carnegie you were putting "21.87%" of your money into "US Large Cap," he'd laugh his ass off. He'd ask why you knew, to four figures, what kind of stocks you were investing in, but didn't bother to talk about what they made, who ran them, or how much money they earned. He'd ask why you would prefer buying $100 million of cash flow for $2 billion rather than $1 billion, as an allocation based on market cap would have you do. Carnegie is a great example, because for a while he was purely an investor -- he had a diversified portfolio of stocks in companies whose management he knew personally, and he paid careful attention to their business performance and the dividends they paid, not their market price.

Don't do anything Carnegie, Morgan, or Rockefeller wouldn't recognize as an investment, and you should be okay.
The problem is that right now I have nobody in my shoes. Got here in the U.S. 2 months ago, barely know a few people and all of them are not in the startup world. But I do agree with you that I need a recommendation
(If you think what's below is off topic, then make sure you've read the article and be sure to read all of the comment.)

The Clancy Brothers are best known as a seminal Irish singing group, but they started out as a troupe of actors that went to New York to become famous by putting on works of Shakespeare. The folk music craze was in full force, and they noticed that they were actually making more money renting out their venue to folkies than they were making by putting on shows, so they decided to get into the act themselves. They pretty were much like other folks who emulated the Weavers and other popular acts of the day, but since they happened to be Irish, the songs they knew were Irish traditional songs, and so they stood out and became international stars.
I used the term loosely. But to most people, I think y = x^2 is an "equation".
That's about as good an answer as you could get.
Apple also bought, what was the basis of, Final Cut from Macromedia when the product was being developed to be a competitor to Premiere, but Macromedia management decided not to pursue that segment and it was sold to Apple.
Google Apps doesn't even come close to competing with Office at this point. It simply lacks far too many features that users of Office actually need. You're totally right that its mainly targeted at people who never paid for Office, and even those people aren't using it in staggering numbers.
This is the same Buffet who argues against abolishing the inheritance tax even though he's arranged things so that almost all of his money will go untaxed. Also, the inheritance tax helps him buy companies cheap. (It forces the children to sell.)
Does anyone know why fb is so slow all the time especially with all the resources they have?
The means, not the intent, produce the ends.
(reply to dead response)

No, you didn't say there was no spam in [dead]. But you also gave no examples.

So I did a brief survey and only saw justifiable kills. We're supposed to keep wading through the sludge the editors usually protect us from to figure out what peeved you?

No, thanks. If you make a serious allegation of editorial abuse, you don't get to play hide and seek with your evidence. State your case clearly or drop it.
A pink slip ... after 5 long years of loyal service and hard work. It is at times like that when you realize that working at a fulltime job is something you should do ONLY if you have absolutely no alternatives.
It's safer than my hobby, which is robbing banks without a mask.
Quantum camera snaps objects it cannot 'see'
So the Singularity is when we abstract out all the stuff that only exists to trick us into thinking we've evolved from more primitive beings?
uWink: A Cold Greasy Plate of Fail
Pricefad - collecting and sorting thousands of product price points from various sources
Glad you asked. Here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=be_evil

Couple here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=0x28aa1f185a6b4

Do you need more? There are hundreds.
You know, simulated universes might not exist simply to exist.

For instance, perhaps they are a form of communication? We could be just a really complex story that one being is telling to another.
Eureka Science news - automated science news aggregator startup
I think that there's a distinct bias in your question. The question pre-supposes that the default should be to get a job, sell your time to someone else and get cash in exchange for money. Why does that have to be the default position. You could rephrase the question, "Why would someone stay at their soul-sucking 9-5 job making money for someone else, when they could try and solve the money problem once and for all by making money for yourself instead?"

Job vs Startup, the issue is the same: you're trying to solve the money problem. It's two different solutions to the same problem. Many of us on hacker news think that the smarter way to solve the problem is by starting a startup/business.

Now, you also mentioned "join" a startup. I wouldn't leave a company to work for someone else's startup. I will leave my job to start my own company, however.
This is probably the kind of content that isn't that good for a site like this: it's politics.
I don't know if Buffet is a hypocrite; however his insurance business does stand to gain a huge amount of business should inheritance taxes increase in one form or another. Reason is that insurance companies sell lucrative insurance contracts on old founders who are near death, so that when they die the insurance payoff covers the tax penalties. The insurance contracts are written off by the company while the person is alive and then the payoff pays the death taxes.
I hope MIT's next innovation will be getting the prototypical engineer's handwriting OCR'd.
My new startup - a news aggregator for science, akin to what Google News does but better as it also find and publishes related press releases directly on the site. Science is the first vertical we chose to use the platform we developed on, but we plan to adapt it for general news (if we can get funding to aggregate AP news for example) and other verticals. Comments / criticism welcome :)
New Gmail features
Consulting gig - mobile app developers
One of our clients is trying to connect with mobile app developers.
Don't hate - participate!
You may be one of the people this article was explicitly not written for.
Guido van Rossum: Invitation to try out open source code review tool
Amazon Sues New York Over Internet Tax
Because the worst case scenario of a failed startup is going back to the status quo of the cushy job.

That's why I decided to take the plunge.
I use number of employees - I do agree productivity has increased, in fact, that is part of my point on why the dominant company could achieve its dominance with fewer people. In the limit, may be there will be a 1 person start-up that will be the dominant company of an era in future, and it will achieve its 15 minutes of fame ;-)

Thanks for pointing to Skrenta's post. I read Skrenta regularly, but I missed that one.
For some level of rigor, functions don't grow or shrink either.
This you?

http://www.arlingtonva.us/Departments/Police/news/printartic...
Why give more money to the largest and most inefficient institution in the world - the US Government?

And yes this is politics, not hacker news. I may not be able to restrain myself from market anarchist rants every time this comes up, which would tend to reduce the quality of the site.
Looks like an interesting freelancing site.
when, because of diminishing returns, one reaches the margin where wasting time is no longer providing significant benefits (such as feeling better).
The distribution of websites generally probably isn't hugely different.
We're going to Disney World!
My boss wanted to be a photographer, or run his own mortgage company. A) seems out of the question for him at this stage in life but B) might still be possible.
Not for long term investing, but if you are living off of your savings then having some stocks and bonds to avoid pulling more money out of the market when it's down is useful.

The investment paradox is all about leverage. If you have 10+ million then who cares if spending 40 hours a month could give you a 1% better ROI you don't really need the money or the stress. If you have under 1/2 million then a 1% better ROI probably not worth the time it takes to get that extra return. (.01 * 500k) is only 5k which is probably not worth all that much of your time. At in the 1-3 million range your close enough to just retiring that your risk's are probably not worth it.

Note: I am getting around 12.5% ROI/year over the last 5 years and I spend about 8 hours a year looking at my investments why bother with more than that? Well sometimes you want to play with the market which can be fun. EX: After VISA’s IPO they are up 40% how cool is that. Just don't bet the farm and you will probably make some money.
You can do a reverse lookup of the IP. Then there are some regex's around that you can use to pull out the location 80% of the time.
i've been hearing about uwink for years now. i thought it was originally a little terminal thing they installed at bars and restaurants where you could play against others across the country, but i could be wrong.

it's too bad the implementation seems to suck. i would have expected more from nolan bushnell, given his track record with atari.
"Oh well, at least there's still Lambda The Ultimate."

Hmmm. How about I start a site called "Lambda teh Ultimate" which does nothing but promulgate bad programming practices, procedural spaghetti code, and Farkish stupitrivia that's somehow still too nerdy for the mainstream?

There will be a regex filter that introduces bad grammar, misuse of homophones, to instead of too, their instead of they're, etc... Also bots that the markov chains to post schizophrenic sounding manifestos promising to revolutionize all programming by subsuming everything with GOTO and DB tables.

There will be auto-moderation, giving certain users bonus points, implemented by running StupidFilter in reverse.

To become a moderator, you first have to prove that you spend more than 9 non-sleeping hours alone in your room a day, and that you still live with your parents.

The site will be ad supported, but all ads will be required to be pop-ups that install plugin EXEs. If there are not enough ads, they will be randomly generated from emails in my Spam folder.

All of the web design will be generated by using genetic algorithms operating on the corpus of MySpace profiles for users aged 16 or younger.

The commenting will be modeled on YouTube from early 2007 and before.
The author is obviously under the delusion that an introduction to calculus should be gentle and soothing, like slipping into a warm bubble bath. It should not. It should be swift and shocking, like jumping into a river in early Spring.

Mathematics requires an exact and expert hand. They are EMTs. This of your Calc 1 mid-term: "Quick, you have two minutes, resuscitate this equation!"
This looks very nice, I like it a lot. How much work did it take to make this?
Slime-like simple REPL for Vim + Ruby or Python or Lisp
Curious: computers couldn't count to 2 mil?
Proximity isn't video editing, it's media assets management software and it's now been integrated into Final Cut Server.
yes- same goal, different approach. They do install wizards to quickly get OSS apps running in the native environment. We do virtual appliances that are self-contained so they're portable and won't muck up the system. There are advantages to each approach but see a lot of interesting possibilities for value-adds once you control the environment in which the app lives.

sean
If things go downhill, it'd happen slowly. The management team at Berkshire is good and Warren had his pick of replacements. Plus they hold so many companies and are pretty hands-off with each of them.
Heh. Unfortunately, a large fraction of the students tend to die of hypothermia :).
Considering that I'm doing my PhD (Retrovirology, I work on AIDS - I'm posting from a level 3 bioconfinement lab right now ;)) and that I could work only part time on it, it took me about a year (working at night - thanks insomnia!). Much longer than I previously thought, but it required lots of tweaking to get good clusters along with good performance / scalability. Im very satisfied with the result and plan to adapt it to other news verticals as well as add functionality (comments, voting, etc) in the future. Glad that you like it! :)
Many of the people who're objecting - at least on these TechCrunch and FeedBurner stories - would never have bought it anyway. It's better to concentrate on the folks who will buy it (I assume they're out there, though I'm not one of them...) and make something that they'll use, love, and tell people about.

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/01/what-ive-learned-from-sa...
Speaking of the emoticons feature, am I the only one to absolutely prefer good old text emoticons over image ones? The silliest are the so-called "next-generation emoticons", they're so silly-ugly.
I have eaten at uWink over a dozen times now over the past 10 months and I have never had any trouble with their ordering system, service, or credit card/check processing.
Finally, Microsoft and Yahoo in Merger Talks
These are really old. Colored labels have been out for a while.
Rails gets more mature (Upcoming Rails 2.1 Features)
Clients I Have Failed: What Not To Do
to live a more sane life, for the excitement, the unlimited growth potential, the ability to solve the problems you want to solve how you want to solve them, for the financial freedom, for the ability to work when you want to
i think the list should be this one instead:
http://mail.google.com/mail/help/intl/en/about_whatsnew.html
I sent him this objection:

We already build very powerful intelligences all the time, in the form of children. But despite having a lot of raw computing power, they aren't very useful without knowledge. They need to learn a lot of things before they can live effectively, solve important problems, etc...

Artificial intelligence and intelligence are not fundamentally different things. If you want AI's that turn out better than children do, you'll need improved parenting and educational techniques, or an alternative. I haven't seen any commentary on how singularity people plan to deal with this. And if they could, why not just use that technique on human children and vastly improve the world, now?

The main difference between AI and children I've seen proposed is that the AIs can run on superior hardware. But it's not like people currently use all the hardware resources their brain makes available; maybe that will be a bottleneck in the future, but it isn't one we've hit yet.
So you're obviously not a parent, since you're not understanding that every parent sees your comment, agrees and thinks: Yeah, but I'd rather be a parent. :-)
Want That Post to Go Popular? Here are the Best and Worst Times to Post It
I think it's more a distinction between "people who have problems" and "people who don't have problems". When you don't have a problem, you're in browse mode - open to new ideas, but only if they're substantially different from everything you've ever seen and trigger some flicker of recognition, some reason to think it's a good idea. When you do have a problem, you're actively looking for something to solve it, and get really excited about the solution. So if you happen to have the particular problem that Xobni solves, it's great, but if you don't, it's just ho-hum.
I said specifically The accuracy (beyond decimal point) is certainly irrelevant, but it came right off a spreadsheet and I left it in because it sums to 100.

As for indexes vs individual stocks, I don't want to spend that much time worrying about (or tweaking) my investment portfolio.

So, for you, it depends on the stocks. But if you work backwards, where does that come out on an asset class basis? Are you buying no international equities? No commodities? No REITs? What are the actual %s?
Vintage Toys from 1970 | Increase Web Traffic, Search Engine Optimization and more
There are many 100s of 1000s of accountants, lawyers, and lobbyiests who all depend upon the bizarre tax codes for their jobs. In addition, many companies depend upon their various loopholes... They represent both wasted labor and vested interest.
Actually, I am a parent and both of us, while we love our children and love to see them grow, are still tickled to be done with diapers. And when I hear a kid whine or a baby cry (out in public), it is music to my ears; That is not my kid crying, I don't have to do anything about it. A bit selfish yes, but an honest and natural feeling.
I have read on a previous comment in another story about "shorting bonds and longing stocks" but this was given as an example of a bad idea. Why is it so? If in the long term stocks outperform bonds wouldn't this actually be a good strategy for a long-term investor? Obviously the risks would be higher, but since it is over the long term it shouldn't matter, right?
Of course you didn't have a problem. You're reading news.YC. Odds are that the uWink experience is just like your average day at work.

I'm holding out for the command-line version of uWink. I think I'd be better off ordering drinks with raw SQL.
Google Techtalk: How Ant Colonies Get Things Done
Since this didn't survive the front page I'll just add stuff in case somebody drops by later.

A simple variant of the n-back task (adjustable between 2 to 5-back) is here: http://cognitivefun.net/test/4
Test 1 is a classical reaction time test.

I haven't had time to think of how to track and display progress, so it just loads the stats. Suggestions are welcome. If Test 4 is stable I'll be working on other tests, like interference tests and counting and such.
Yeah, I don't buy the Dow either.

But this is what I was getting at. You say to buy stocks, in a good index mind you, but you also say they are no better as an asset class when you adjust for risk. So why buy them?

Or do you agree with my point from above?:

The overall point here that I suppose I am making is that just because asset classes grow at the same rate when adjusted for risk doesn't mean you should be indifferent to which you invest in. Buying low, selling high aside, if you can smooth out the risk via buy and hold and other strategies, it is wise to invest some in the assets with the higher growth curves.
Thanks, I submitted earlier today but it didn't make FP. See this thread if you're interested: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=179580
Python at ITA
A simple n-back variant is live as of this morning but my submission didn't last long... I'm replying to all the responses in this thread. Again, it's a simple implementation, but FYI, http://cognitivefun.net/test/4
FYI (or, FY fun) I uploaded a simple n-back test here http://cognitivefun.net/test/4

Submitted to HN but it didn't last and I don't want to spam :)