skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He's being glib throughout (and the content obviously provides no direct commentary about startups), but I've spent serious thought on the question of "buying one's freedom", as I phrase it. The ultimate goal of working really should be either 1) The pure enjoyment of work itself, or 2) Not working, and so getting your life back. There are various elective methods:

1) Having a successful business, and cashing out young enough to enjoy life.

2) Gambling and winning.

3) Saving enough money to live on the interest.

The latter is the only sure-thing available to people. When you really do the math, however, you see that "saving" isn't really the heart of it. A rough calculation suggests that for every 50 dollars of expense per month you have, you need 10000 dollars in a typical safe bond fund. (This is optimistic, actually.)

So, if your total expenses are 1000 dollars a month, you need 200,000 dollars invested. The typical person is lucky to save 10,000 a year. Thus (not including interest on the money) it takes 20 years to save up that much. With interest, it might take about half as much.

The point is: For every 50 dollars of expense that you require while not working you will need to work an additional .5 through 1.0 years, depending on interest earnings. Thus: If you re-work the numbers and say,

"Well, in my retirement, I can discard cable (at 50/month)"

...that one small concession allows you to retire up to a year earlier, on average. If you can live a Thoreau-esque lifestyle, you can retire many, many years earlier than otherwise. This is not so unreasonable when you consider that humans aren't biologically intended to live amidst luxury.
Macbook air or thinkpad?
I agree... Even more than 3D, cubism intends to interpret time and movement. Nevertheless, I liked the approach of the artist and it's certainly a new perspective.
BASIC and the Rubik’s Cube
You can nest obfuscated references: http://www.rushy.com/cgi-bin/uggc.cgi?action=link&url=ug...
You 2.0: Recreational DNA and Genetic Voyeurism
a) I can't believe this linkbait made to the top of Hacker News

b) the people posting comments about giving away the secrets are newbies at best.
Windows Live Writer on Windows
MarsEdit on Mac
BlogGTK on Linux
It's about Marxists. Think Pol Pot studying at the Sorbonne.
I'll be there - who else is attending?
Interesting, but I think it misses the point of the MBA. Note the "Ultra" in the designator "Ultra Portable". From the very beginning, the MBA has been positioned as a sort of elite machine for the portability crowd.

This video misses all that. If you need to carry a DVD player and all that other gear with you all the time, then the MBA is probably not the machine for you. Perhaps the Lenovo is, and for the Windows crowd it might represent the best ultra-portable choice. Of course you are paying for the X300 in terms of size, weight and price.

To me, the X300 is more of a competitor to the standard MacBook, not the MacBook Air. I think Lenovo's positioning of this is just an attempt to ride the coattails of the MBA's press.
I like most of these. I don't get this one:

Compassion is contempt with a human face.
When I was earning my CS degree, my program was transitioning away from the "liberal arts" college towards the "engineering" college. I came in on the tail end which still had more diversified course requirements. As a consequence, I picked up a minor in philosophy and ended up I think three hours short of a minor in creative writing.

I've been very well served by this educational approach. I absolutely do NOT use my philosophy of quantum physics topical material at work. However, I do outperform some of my peers by having competent technical skills, competent people skills and the ability to work through very complex and abstract problems that have lead to generations of prior teams throwing up their hands in defeat. These are things I attribute to a diverse education.

The people that coast through on a liberal arts degree, as you describe, are generally either coasting towards an entirely different type of life, enrolled in the wrong program (of their choosing) or the type of people that will end up succeeding regardless because they are talented, motivated, curious people. All of which is to say that I think you are hitting too hard on liberal arts, but not to blame you for that because the program you've experienced might have just been crappy and not a good one from which to generalize the argument.
Seconded for technoguyrob[at]gmail.
Hey guys. you just need to go to www.socialmedian.com, click on "create an account" and enter the invite code "hacker"

We've opened up 100 invites using this code today.
I've got a Facebook page, but have never really used it. I just don't get the point. I've seen the MySpace pages of various performers I like, but don't quite understand what is "social" about it (compared to band websites). Don't know nothin' 'bout no LinkedIn.
Nice article. But did it really need to be delivered to me via flash? :/

Maybe a youtube video of a camera panning over a printed out copy next? Or perhaps a Doom level file where the pages are texture mapped onto the walls.
The moment I open a novel by Neil Gaiman and a display ad pops out either asking me to punch the monkey or telling me that I might be interested in something ghostwritten by Tom Clancy is the moment I become a Luddite.
If you've got a good algorithm that can predict local weather 3-5 days out with a significantly better accuracy than the other players in the industry, you won't have any problem monetizing it.

If you don't have that, why bother?
A good lesson on why not to hire employees.

Or to own a grocery store, apparently.
Read the sentence before the one you quoted. :) I mean, if I've got to work, what better way than to get my own hands dirty, so to speak?
What does he mean by 'Canonical Issues'?
you should start a competitor to scribd called doomd that does just that
This is something that would be very convenient. However, like most everything else related to web browsers, you constantly have to deal with backwards computability across multiple browsers. So this is just going to end up being ONE more thing that CSS coders have to be aware of. Hurray for CSS variable adoption being available to 90% of browsers in 2015!
I think it means that a compassionate person assumes the people he's compassionate towards are incapable of bettering themselves, and thus contemptible.

I'm not sure whether I agree or not, but my first guess is that it's sometimes true and sometimes not. Deep, huh?
Or, "make something people need."
Webistrano: a Web UI for managing Capistrano deployments
Flash Fights for Search Engine Rankings
Is it possible that the need for a language tailored 'business logic' stems from the simple fact that actual logic is at no point whatsoever involved?
Technology Is at the Center (Peter Thiel interview)
Homesteading on the High Seas
To be perfectly honest, either of those options would work better (for me) than Scribd. I use GNU Gnash instead of Adobe's Flash. YouTube works fine, but Scribd doesn't work at all. Doom is also pretty easy to get working, so that would honestly be better.

All in all, I can't read this article, because it's locked up in some proprietary crapware. -1.
Is this legal? It's a commercial book, and I haven't heard anything about it being allowed online for free.
Cynicism is a cheap substitute for sophistication. You don't actually have to learn anything.

So true these days. For proof, take a look at the comments on any mainstream social news site. Cynicism up the wazoo, but not much actual intelligence. sigh.
As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.

This one amuses me, but I don't get it.
Is there any hint of what the site will do for me?
"social|median is a social news service that connects people with personalized news and information" sounds alot like what I am getting from MyYahoo (or Google News).
Also, Websense at work blocks Sribd saying: "ACCESS RESTRICTED - Website categorized as Personal Network Storage"

Can anyone please host the pdf in your server and post a link?
Imho : A picture worth 1000 words, so 1picture = 1000w, 1001w > 1000w => 1001w > 1picture
Your Equity Isn’t a Payment, it’s an IOU
It seems odd that so few are about programming. Presumably we can fix that...
First look: KDE 4.1 alpha looks promising
After reading some of the responses its funny, I hear "seo's inflating their vaule" and "Whats canonical issues" ...

1. Some SEO's do inflate their value, honestly most hackers here don't need one; our best clients (mutually beneficial) are the ones who have a site, but its old, out dated and not producing like it should. A lot of people don't have the time to monitor their back links, check their title and alt tags and hunt for more links... If you asked anyone I've ever worked SEO for; they would say I've gave them a great ROI

2. Canonical Issues: AKA Keyword Cannibalization, when you have more than one page focused on one keyword. They compete against each other in google, mostly used in reference to the title tag as most CMS's really mess those up.

(edited: for mistake)
Too Much Suckage
Right, but what is the relationship to the Chinese?
Thanks for tip. I am on Win so got WLW. Also found BlogDesk which looks decent & lightweight. Will try out both.
The beauty of this system is that it won't lose any comments. Even the people who are forced to enter a captcha (which usually decreases the amount of comments) would rather do that than know they wrote all that for nothing.
Why reinvent the wheel, if you want more customization than what Ning offers, just download the source code of the social network that you create on Ning and then extend it to suit your taste.
If you don't redirect www. to . or vice versa, then robots can see duplicate pages, which can be bad for SEO.
Mind you, I'm not saying that this half-assed, semi-conscious method of "up-or-out" is actually any good. At least half of the advantage of such a policy comes from admitting it up front, so that your employees can adjust their working styles, their culture, and their attitude. When a company's words are all about retention but its actions are all about up-or-out, it's more than a little insane. But that's corporate culture for you.

I'm trying to move up but the company doesn't seem to want to let me.

Well, here we have a situation that doesn't fit the up-or-out model perfectly: Companies where, for a certain class of top performers, there is no "up", only "out". These companies are not interested in grooming their IT staff for management, or bigger roles, or anything else. Their behavior suggests that they're really just hiring a stream of IT consultants on two-to-three-year terms... but they use full-time employees instead, possibly because they're cheaper, possibly because of employment law, and possibly because there are limits to how much power you can exert over a consultant.

It sounds like you might need to listen to your company's actions, rather than just their words. Words are very inexpensive. :)
A picture worth 1000 words is a Chinese proverb, and you can inference from it the 1001 words sentence, so it's a Chinese proverb too.
Student Entrepreneurs And StartUp Companies
The first one who talks about backups will be downmodded.

You're too lazy to solve the problem the obvious way, so you're going to downmod people that remind you to Never Let This Happen Again?
Ask PG: Thinking of establishing YC in Africa?
i will like to ask PG, are you thinking of establishing YC in an African country?. There are alot of first rate hackers who have great ideas but have little or no opportunities to turn them into viable businesses. so whats your take on that?
I attended a great session by David S. Rose, an angel investor and partner in AngelSoft (doing great things in the Angel Group investing world) at BarCampMoneyNYC a couple weeks ago and learned that Angel Investors and Angel Groups are usually the stage between startup and VC. They are more willing to make smaller investments in less-proven ideas. By the time a company gets to VC stage, it needs to have a pretty well established.
Image-Keyed Information Filtration
most people can grasp the general seo concepts fairly quickly, a quick guide like this and an afternoon of work could yield some strong long term results for your site.
[Designed] A raft of home items
The real trick is doing something you enjoy to make that money, and then doing a bit of work during your 'retirement' since you enjoy it.

So, I would suggest you only need 100k in your scenario if you plan on working on and off with some contracting/consulting. If you are adequately motivated you could do that in 3-5 years on your average salary.

I think I fall into the category of people who can't just cruise in a 'normal' job. I just get too bored and can't deal with wasting the majority of my time just putting in time. Long story short, I was only a year out of university when I figured that out and left my easy job with great pay and leading a team of 5 to go into the startup game.

So while I can identify with some of the concepts in this article - I really don't tackle the issue with the same approach.
Bookmarking Meets Lifestreaming with Lifestream.fm Acquisition
Electronics makers push for home networking standard
Yes, it was exactly those articles ('Ideas for Startups' and 'How to Start a Startup') that solidified my intentions to leave the (poorly managed) startup I was currently working on and do my own thing. I have never looked back. The comment I was referring to didn't appear in an article, but rather in a conversation when pg said something like (paraphrasing) "We have seen enough applications with ideas for online dating sites." If I am mistaken about this, then I apologize, perhaps I simply didn't limn the context or feeling of the statement. In any case, my original intent in commenting was to say, 'Follow your heart and your dreams, regardless of what the world says.' You will almost certainly learn something valuable from this experience.
Link Love with LinkReferral | Increase Web Traffic, Search Engine Optimization and more
And nuclear physics is not that hard. Quantum ElectroDynamics, OTOH...
So - how do "hackers" afford to work for nothing even if you convince them the product is good, a fun place to work, and give them equity?
You might search this site looking for discussions of Europe. If they're not willing to go there, which is relatively easy, I highly doubt they're going to set something up in Africa, unless there's some super compelling reason.

The only one I could think of is price. How much would it cost to fund, say, a team of three for a year? Living expenses, internet connection, etc...?
On super() in Python3
I think your interpretation is spot-on, but I disagree with the quote.

I suspect the author is defining compassion more like "pity" than "patience and understanding" (sympathy, by definition).
'What Emacs is to editors, Stumpwm is to window managers'
Oh, the invite code IS hacker. It seems I am not the only one to misunderstand you title :-P. I first got it as "Alpha invite to hack on social|median's code".
Microsoft server crash leaves 800 planes in the air without air traffic control
Collective Intelligence - free collection containing many influential essays
Personally, I don't think that there's a one-size-fits-all language for "business". The needs and quirks are too diverse.

I do think that domain specific languages (to use the term du jour) that are focused on the actual needs and quirks of a business built on top of good fundamentals is a solution.

The argument about whether or not the DSLs need to be embedded (ala macros) or external is a separate argument.
http://indistinct.org/marketing.pdf
That's why there will never be just one. :-)
These companies are very short-sighted. There is already a networking standard, ethernet.

"Home networking" standards have come and gone (Remember HPNA anyone? Or the early Proxim wireless gear and proposed standard?). The problem is that people inevitably want to connect things like laptops and such to their home networks, devices which already have wired and/or wireless ethernet capabilities.

What they really need to develop is a protocol and QoS for A/V equipment to intercommunicate. Good luck trying to get 10,000 companies to all agree on, and consistently implement, any sort of ubiquitous communications protocol.

These companies simply can't help themselves from breaking "standards" in situations like this. There would be an agreed-upon method to have your A/V receiver talk to your DVD player and display, for example. Except if you had all Sony gear, then there would be an "enhanced" mode that added some trivial feature. Then Panasonic would copy the concept, but with their own "enhanced mode". Then Denon would steal Sony's method and Kenwood would steal Panasonics, and soon the whole thing becomes fractured and broken.

There is a reason that most A/V gear still connects with simple cables and minimal interoperability... I don't see this changing anytime soon.
huh? You never heard of ModRails? Check out ModRails.com

Installing and setting up Rails is getting more and more easy since the days of 2005. The only disadvantage now is the memory consumption of each Mongrel instance that loads your entire Rails app into your memory.
"The real trick is doing something you enjoy to make that money"

Well, one problem with that is that taking something you enjoy doing for itself and depending on it for your paycheck may cause you to enjoy it less. Possibly a lot less. There's a reason for the phrase "turned it into work". I started playing around with Linux as a hobby, and the same with Python. After I was making a living doing system administration and programming in Python, I found those activities far less attractive. Fortunately, I was able to find fun in things like Common Lisp, but writing actual production software in CL turned that into work, too. In order for something to be fun, it has to be optional, basically. I'm sure there are people for whom this isn't true; if that's you, count yourself lucky. :)
As with most websites, the comments are even better reading than the article (which is excellent). One that stuck out:

This guy is going to be in legal trouble. He certified every 2 weeks he was looking for work and admitted he wasn't. I work for the state unemployment office. This is going to be investigated. Jail time!

Wow, dude... lighten up :)
Lytegem lamps are great. I have about 10 of them.
My interpretation: a perfectly logical argument may convince you to take actions that harm yourself or others, if all you value is intellect (robot builders, please take note).

"Between the mind that plans and the hands that build there must be a Mediator, and this must be the heart."
I was going to use this comment for some xmonad advocacy, but after reading the article, I think I'll be switching to Stumpwm. Haskell is nice, but Lisp is better :)
Unfortunately that isn't me - but there are some ways around it. I enjoy tinkering, prototyping, breaking new ground like your average geek. So I try to stick to that as much as possible.

There are some times that I am forced to do some things that turn into work - but I try to minimize it. Hopefully if my longer term plans come to fruition I can avoid it entirely :)
If you can do medium-term (over the next year) then consider trading weather derivatives. Such contracts pay out on eg the number of warm days being higher/lower than consensus.
What about scrapping data from similar sites?
Here's a derivative idea: kiva.org for startups everywhere, with a % take in the outcome.
The seed funding business is at least national; you don't need to have a YC in each city, because founders will move. There are signs it may also be international. About a quarter of the startups in the last YC batch had foreign founders. We're going to see how far we can push that trend before resorting to an old fashioned technique like starting branch offices.

http://ycombinator.com/faq.html
Feedback on niche community site
MyPersianBuddies is a social community for Iranians worldwide and we've been open for one year now. Our growth increased for a while, but it seems that now we are completely stagnant. We are maintaining our current members and they are spending more and more time daily on the site but we are getting no new visitors these days. What is your impression of our service and how do we get out of this growth rut?? Thanks guys!
17 Year old - running a myspace business
During new year celebrations in Seattle, they had to reboot Windows right in the middle of the fireworks! That took too long , so they had to set off the pyro manually.

http://kirubakaran.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-year-gift-from-o...

That was no way of the same magnitude as the ATC crash, but still the failure was so real and viivd as I was there in person.
I just love how the envelope gets torn apart. The Thinkpad still looks chunky and they don't even show what it offers.
If you enjoyed this, I can also recommend a book called "A Working Stiff's Manifesto: A Memoir of Thirty Jobs I Quit, Nine That Fired Me, and Three I Can't Remember" -- really quite a riot and makes you thankful for loving and enjoying being in front of a computer creating stuff. At least, that's what it did for me.
This is old news and it just proves that sometimes the most uninteresting projects become profitable.
Ask HN: Which XP/Vista editions can be legally virtualized?
I heard that it's legal with XP Pro and above and Vista Business and above. Could you also recommend some readings about it?
Review of metaaso
I review Indian startups. Here is my latest one - http://www.desistartups.in/2008/04/30/p2p-startup-metaaso-mermaid-desistartups-review/
Isn't the WWW just a huge social network? CAUGHT YOU ON ONE!
Thanks for the explanation. I'll give it a try, and submit feedback. I'm curious to see what makes it different from, say, Reddit.
Yes

Read the last 6 mos of Bubblegeneration for more details
"The servers are timed to shut down after 49.7 days of use in order to prevent a data overload"

Sounds like improperly designed software and it's not the first time I've seen people try to sell solutions that require a periodic reboot to cover up for poorly written code. Why in the world does a system in charge of air traffic control need to be rebooted every 2 months?
1gor, you're douching up this thread.

That's fake money. As Marc Andreesen pointed out, U.S. taxpayers paid the Bear Stearns CEO $60M in cash, directly:

http://blog.pmarca.com/2008/03/congratulations.html

PEACE
I would advise a little caution; I hear that Stumpwm has some stability issues.

That being said, I have never used it as a wm; so this is second-hand advice.
Why would one want to use windows for something as critical as ATC? As if there weren't enough problems out there with antiquated planes, etc. Yikes!
I had the same problem, but that url isn't working for me - guess I will have to wait until I get home to read it!!
I recently went to BestBuy to get some ink for my Epson printer when I realized I would be spending $70 dollars for the black and color cartridges together. Instead I spend $100 dollars for a brother laser printer (black and white but that's all I really need) with wireless networking support. I absolutely love it and even if I need to buy a new one every year it will still be cheaper than buying ink for my inkjet.