skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There is not much that you can learned from people who failed, neither.

I think PB's comment is still the best, "Advice = Limited Life Experience + Overgeneralization".

However, what I learned is that if I accept that there is limitation to other people's advise, I would still like to hear from them in order to help me make my own decision and according to my own circumstances.

My experience with startups is that it always come down to impedance match. Having an academic background in mechanics, what I learned is that condition for perfect impedance match is when system is at resonance. The opposite of resonance is dissonance. In my previous career, I had discovered that dissonance is in fact a resonance, but it is a resonance of a sub-structure when someone has put an artificial constraint on the sensory point (such that there is no signal).

In some way, that's how startups work. Just because you fail doesn't mean that the rest of the world has failed. In fact, they might very well have succeeded but somehow you just weren't part of that success. So our job is make sure that we have as perfect as an impedance match with the rest of the world as possible, so that we are part of the resonance and not part of the dissonance.

This sounds very theoretical. But it is not. It is really about paying attention to others in your eco-system (VC's, customers, co-Founders, channel partners, etc.) and make sure that you are part of their success. Specifically in this conversation thread, we are talking about starting startups with VC money or through bootstrapping. I never felt that it is a religious question. Either way will lead to success and either way can lead to failure.

But as entrepreneurs, our job is to figure what VC's bring to the party and if we take VC money, how we could be part of their success. If we don't take money from VC's, how we could still be successful nevertheless.

I tried to organize my experience and my thoughts in my book-in-progess (http://www.StartupForLess.org).
what a nice article ! i have had similar experiences (total of 8 years in barbados + us of a), and when my kid came along it seemed unfair (on my part) to bereft him of his roots. after some soul searching, we came back...
This nothing to do with computing being less useful, its just that now computing is so essential for other fields. If other courses want to have a computing for X then go for it, it's not the problem of the Computer Science department.
Transforming a idea into business
Django: queryset-refactor branch merged into trunk
I don't know what part or aspect of SL you think couldn't have been done Open Source, but there was this company called Nevrax who developed and launched this MMO called Ryzom. It was not a commercial success, but it got done, and it was open sourced all along, which AFAIK did't hurt them much.

Edit: http://www.fsf.org/news/free-ryzom (where it also says Linden Labs has GPLed the client code for Second Life, back in 2007.)
Inside the Forgotten X Prize—the One That Can Save Your Life
GPL isn't any more viral than ordinary copyright. You can never distribute copyrighted material except under terms that the author grants.

It's like saying the windows license (no unauthorized distribution) is viral because if you got the windows source code & used bits in your program you wouldn't be able to distribute the program at all without getting sued to hell. Did the windows license spread to your program?
Still Debating With Plato--Is Mathematics Discovered or Invented?
Right. There is no way you can relicense it. The derived code is still GPL.
Haptic Technology Coming to iPhone
CakePHP vs. RoR: Which One Do You Prefer?
What Programming Languages Should You Know?
OK, OK, you can be my editor. Just stop following me everywhere and correcting my statements. Sheesh. Normal people just turn in a resumé or something.
Hunter gatherers actually had plenty of food and leisure time and were much better nourished than their agricultural compatriots. Jared Diamond wrote a good article summarizing their lifestyle: http://www.awok.org/worst-mistake/

Seasonal farmers in Europe and Russia spent half the year doing nothing. Even if they had to work their asses off during the growing season, they had nothing BUT leisure time during the winter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/25/opinion/25robb.html
i'd say for a startup founder it's more like computer + business + X
It reminds me of something I read in, I think it was, Peopleware (Or it might have been Mythical Man Month). That software by its very nature requires the programme to be perfect or it won't work, and human beings are imperfect and have a hard time adjusting to the demands of trying to be perfect. In this regard there are _no_ perfect programmers. A perfect programmer is one who never makes a single mistake or bug, ever, on any project, and every piece of code works perfectly, first time, and forever. By our very nature we are imperfect.
Interrupting Google Search
Along this line: when people say, "I would <x>, but I don't have the time" (where <x> is some creative, interesting thing), usually one can substitute the word "Vespene gas" for "time" in their statement, and learn a lot more about them: they are essentially asserting that they are too Vespene gas depleted to <x>.

I don't understand this post. If you substitute a word that's essentially the same, that's a synonym and you therefore gain no meaning. And it makes no sense to say people are essentially asserting something when you put an assertion in their mouths.

I think it's more complicated than energy and time; generally, I don't think people actually like <x> enough to want to invest some time and energy or Vespene gas in it. I just went to an energy efficiency event today. 45 people had signed up and only 27 showed up to install energy-efficient things today. It would have taken 5 hours and very little energy. I think a lack of interest, causing a lack of commitment, explains it better.
yeah, it's cool, except the article has a number of mistakes, corrected at http://ekzept.livejournal.com/185329.html
I wonder if the bioinformatics will have caught up by the time this X-prize is won -- right now, an entire sequenced genome tells surprisingly little useful information.

http://www.genetic-future.com/2008/04/watsons-sequence-gloom...
Maker Faire (May 3-4 2008)
Oh man that post would have had so much more substance had it not linked to that Mac commercial knock off. However I'm with Rails on that one for the issue of code portability.
It's a decent show (get it on Comcast HD here in Boston).

But, I think it's silly for MojoHD not to offer the early episodes on their website.
For people who have not been keeping up. What does this exactly mean? I looked in the Doc and couldn't find a link to anything about the queryset-refactor
This reminds me of the need for math in the sciences and engineering vs. the way math is studied at a typical math department. You need to know how to use calculus and differential equations to be an engineer, but you need to understand the fundamental principles underlying those techniques to a much greater degree as a math major (and as a math graduate student, even more so).
Optimization most definitely is science - if done right, anyhow. You conduct observations (benchmarks) and form a hypothesis about what will improve speed/memory usage. You make the changes and conduct experiments to see if your hypothesis was correct. You draw conclusions based on the results and if your hypothesis was wrong, you change your hypothesis and try again.

Is optimization not science?

Edit: But yeah, design IMO will always be art as much as science.
the only thing "fucking awesome" about zed is that he reminds me of maddox. what a poseur.
Hong Kong

Pros: Modern city, great public transportation, access to China, low taxes, cheap and easy to setup business

Cons: Very small (but growing!) tech sector, limited and competitive market for local skilled employees, few tech VCs, cost of living can be (but doesn't have to be) expensive.

I'd love to hear from anyone interested in the Hong Kong startup scene. (farra-NOSPAM at apache dot org)
>The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

He switched context from discussing the US-only consumption to total global television consumption. It seems worth thinking about the implications of this change even if the numbers are inaccurate.
At least he's candid.
> I share his suspicion of most XP techniques.

Well, he is suspicious because he assumes people using XP are programmers. That's not correct.

The idea behind XP is to get somewhat usable code out of non-programmers. Why companies don't just fire people that can't program, I'll never know... but XP does seem to work. Instead of getting unmaintainable, untested, half-working garbage, you get unmaintainable, tested, two-thirds working garbage.

Oh yeah, now I remember why these programmers exist. Companies seem to value quantity over quality of programmers. That way people can be sick or go on vacation and you'll still get your two-thirds-working code. BRILLANT!
Well I agree with him, and I don't ever watch TV, but... interactive media seem to be better at sucking people in than TV. And they're getting better all the time. This is starting to scare me, nobody else?

And there's an exceptionally thoughtful Reddit thread on the topic: http://reddit.com/info/6h7ph/comments/c03u0jv
Using Bluetooth to Track Prisoners
I'm not sure why he thinks literate programming source code is hard to parse. I would just implement it like this; normal text is normal text, program text is indented two spaces. Example:

This is a super-fun algorithm. It is a function of super-fun-arguments, a list.

(defun super-fun-algorithm (&rest super-fun-arguments)

We start by parsing the super-fun-arguments into lists of foobars. See page 1234 for the parse-into-foobars utility function.

(let ((foobars (parse-into-foobars super-fun-arguments)))

OK, I'm bored now. But this is only tedious because I'm writing about irrelevant details (we all know what defun does, after all).
About time! As Alex Papadimoulis explained when he (briefly) changed the name of The Daily WTF to "Worse Than Failure", the problem is not just that so many software projects fail, it's that so many are passed off as a "success" just because they are finished, even if they don't work. That's "worse than failure" because at least you learn from failures.

I think the free market could curb the "software quality problem" but only if software companies are held accountable. If there were more awareness among software customers of the low quality of most software written, and a potential that a software company gets the bejeebus sued out them for shoddy work, then there are several good things would come of it: 1. Companies producing shoddy software would go out of business instead of scamming their way along. 2. When their asses are on the line, maybe they'll start demanding some quality before quantity. 3. Maybe we'll finally see a state or national licensing requirement for programmers, like there is for nurses and doctors.
Curious what StackOverflow's logo will be like?
google giles bowkett archaeopteryx. did presentation today @ goruco (ruby conf in new york). started presentation with system autogenerating drum and bass rhythms through Reason.

not audio software; midi software. heavily lambda-fied. essentially a meta-sequencer, which allows you to write probabilistic templates, each of which can then generate infinite numbers of grooves conforming to the template.

obviously this is based on "This Is Your Brain On Music" and the nature of musical structure, in that our brains rapidly extract the meta-structures of music. therefore you should not compose in structures, but in meta-structures. currently an Archaeopteryx composition consists of a probability matrix and code. the probability matrix governs whether drums play frequently or infrequently; the code defines strategies for beat mutation.
oh god.. I'm not sure what to say about this entry
http://99designs.com/contests/6774/designers/245401#entry-44...
duh... isn't that obvious http://99designs.com/contests/6774/entries/441391.png
This is newsworthy because it's the first time a branch created by Subversion was successfully merged back to trunk.
That is a pretty amazing point - I am betting most people will ignore that.

Whilst current CPU trends are to "wider" architectures - how much of that is lack of innovation in the CPU design area rather then some major actual shift - ie will we see new CPU innovation in the near future where explicit parallelism is less of an issue?

Having said that, parallel friendly functional languages like erlang and haskell have so many other advantages, maybe its worth shifting in that direction anyway.
Web 4.0 Is For Wankers:http://tinyurl.com/6ezphw

Sorry, I couldn't resist. I'm tired of people trying to assign version numbers to the web. Particularly when it's vaporware.
From John C. Bogle, the founder of Vanguard, the thesis of his book: "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism"
if you can separate your code from the GPL in such a way that the GPL version becomes only a lib (unmodified), then you can close or do any licensing you like.

for example.

package com.mycompany.lib

import org.someGPL.lib.A;

myClass B extends A {}

In this case you simply include the GPL lib as GPL and your Lib as any type of license

in your class B you can override functions you don't like and add more of your own functions.

Finally when you release your code you have to say that this code uses the following GPL code...
Negroponte, developers at odds over future of OLPC platform
Thanks for sharing the experience. Makes perfect sense.

> What's hard to explain is why they decided to
> take such public action. Perhaps they have a
> leader of unusual courage or integrity.

The company is run by owners, not managers. That's the hope of capitalism.
Just get an old Model M from ebay, and remove the keycaps with characters. You do have to get an oldish one, though, the newer Model Ms don't have two keycaps.
Geometric shielding. I stayed away from class except on test days.

Don't drop out though. I got pressured by a company to drop out and go work for them; I didn't do it and it turned out they went out of business anyway. Moreover, they knew they were headed to going out of business, but they still tried to convince me dropping out to work for them was a good idea. It's not.
this is just wrong; if you're talking about LGPL code (not GPL), this is correct
This doesn't invalidate Shirky's point. It just changes the plot of the story: Once, the Irish had free time to make music. Then modern industrial society took that time away. Now it's being taken back -- to make music (and LOLcats and Wikipedia entries and WoW characters).
One might assume my previous post was made in jest, based on the flippant closing comment. But without a smiley, who can tell? ;-)
Hitting The Reset Button (read the comments on Fred's blog)
Have to watch out though if you have scholarships. Some of them have the equivalent of a self-destruct clause that can be triggered by taking just one semester off. In order to take a NASA internship for one semester, I had to get approval all the way to the top of the chain (president of the university) or I would have permanently lost my tuition scholarship. As it was, although I had administrative approval, when I came back the computer system automatically marked me as a "dropout" and I was blocked out of most log-ins. Took a year to get me reinstated in some of the systems.
Being derisive about your creative endeavours is probably better for their ego than realizing how useless they are...
More info on the wiki here:

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/QuerysetRefactorBranch
This might help:

http://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/QuerysetRefactorBranch

Some other comments by the developer, Malcolm Tredinnick:

http://www.pointy-stick.com/blog/2008/03/11/queryset-impleme...

http://www.pointy-stick.com/blog/2008/03/26/more-django-quer...
Sounds like a good idea for a startup. Really, what they're talking about doing with that data is essentially running a diff on people's genome's, right? Sounds simple enough. ;)
This is one of the major 1.0 goals for Django... Awesome, I think newforms-admins still has to be merged with trunk...

Can you smell it??? (Django 1.0)
Have you actually read the GPL? It is not that complicated of a document...and it's quite clear that neither of your desires would be legitimate uses of code licensed under the GPL.

I can't understand how so many people manage to misunderstand the license in so many ways. Read the license, and if you don't understand it, read the FAQ. Every question you can possibly come up with will be answered by one or both of them.
Salad Recipes
Salad recipes.
I worked for RIM in 2005/2006 and the entire time every company under the sun was coming out with a "BlackBerry Killer". It was supposed to be the Treo, Good Technology, Moto's Q9, WinMo with active sync, Nokia E60 etc etc. During the entire time sales kept growing steadily at around 25% a quarter.

So the iPhone is just the latest one of these and things will turn out as before. For example, sales of the BB have been very strong since the iPhone launched and even exceeded analyst expectations in Q4 and that's unlikely to change.

Look at it this way - when the BlackBerry came out in 99, RIM had around 100 poeple and sold 25000 devices. Now they're one of Canada's largest companies by market cap, have thousands of employees and sell millions of devices per quarter.

So what I'm really saying is: no worries. They've got plenty of good people working there, the CxOs are competent and they'll do well.
That article confused me. On one hand, Blackberries aren't going to be replaced among core users by anything that doesn't have a keypad. On the other hand, RIM is threatened by the iPhone. Which is it?
Some people think "a good user interface" is one that they see a lot of. Lots of clicky buttons and a small area where you type your program is their idea of perfection.

Emacs takes the opposite approach (a black screen where you type stuff) and apparently this annoys some people. You can pry emacs out of my cold, dead hands.
I wonder how much electricity Facebook uses, in total, for all of these servers.
Ask YC: Anything better than Google notebook out there?
I wanted to use Google notebook to store and sort my "stream of consciousness" and notes online, but I dislike the lack of folder support. Got me thinking, what have you guys found works for you in terms of electronic catch-all note libraries?
Anybody else going? Jamie and I plan to make the trip. I know there are at least a few Perl mongers here at HN...
It's amusing that you believe that a top five (probably #2) hosting provider that has had a competent cloud computing initiative for years (Mosso) is threatened by cloud computing entering the mainstream. I'm not saying hosting isn't going to get more competitive...I know that it is. But RackSpace has always managed to be among the fastest growing, most reliable, and highest margin, hosting providers in the industry.

I think you underestimate the growth that will continue to happen in hosting for the foreseeable future, and the strength of RackSpace in that industry. Most of our customers (who are hosting providers) view RackSpace as a very serious competitor to be taken seriously on nearly every front. And I'm not saying nice things about RackSpace just because we'd like to sell them some software. They really have built an impressive business.
"plugin that's distributed separately"

"distributed it independently"
Interview with James Bennett - Django release manager
RIM is threatened by the iPhone. In spite of statistics showing the iPhone keyboard to have a much higher error rate, a significant portion of users don't seem to mind. Besides, the iPhone is the brand new "hey, I'm important" status symbol replacing the old status symbol (the loving named "crackberry") of the corporate golfer-businessman.
I've used Blueprint for a few projects and I don't have anything bad to say about it. Although, I'm not going to be using it anymore because I tend to make use of about 50% of what it offers.
Joe, are you a web programmer?

I'm really interested in why people don't get LP because it was love at first sight for me, in theory at least. It'll help bridge the gap between writing journal papers that contain the theory and the code that implements/demonstrates the theory.

The other day I got some code (calculating and displaying the Cramer-Rao bounds on radar parameter estimators) written by one of my professors who gives stunning lectures and writes excellent papers. The coding style was straight from the 80s... think Fortran. I think that's because nobody ever had to read his code, so although he got great at lecturing and writing, he never got to practice coding. And I think LP will help avoid that and encourage people to combine documentation, code, and theory.

I think a very different set of constraints exist for web programmers and indeed for my own php/mysql-style apps, I can't imagine doing LP.
...or torpedo your insurance. They'll find some way around the anti-genetic-discrimination laws once they calculate how much they can increase profits -- up to and including lobbying to repeal those laws. They aren't set in stone, after all.
He seems to have a habit of always telling us how long it took him to do something, as though the amount of time it took makes it more or less impressive...

I remember people doing this when I was 13 and hung out in graphic design forums - "This took me about 35 minutes...what do you think?" - it wasn't cool then, either.
Bien sûr. Je suis australienne moi-même, mais j'habite à paris depuis 5 ans... Je viens de "Googler" 'en venir à', et pour chaque résultat sur la première page, il y a une phrase en anglais qui correspond utilisant 'come'.

Si je traduisait ton expression 'je vois où tu veux en venir', je le traduirais par 'I see where you are going', ce qui n'est pas du tout pareil à 'I see where you are coming from'. En fait, pour moi, la bonne traduction de 'I see where you are coming from' est plutôt 'je vois ce que tu veux dire', où un truc du genre...

Mais bravo quand même. Dans mon premier post j'avais oublié l'expression 'en venir' (sans le 'à'), où effectivement la traduction de 'venir' est 'to go'.

Anyways, hope that cleared things up a little...
"Joe, are you a web programmer?"

Yes, by some definition of "web programmer". (I work on Virtualmin, Webmin, and Usermin. So, a large percentage of my work is back end systems management with a web front end.)

I've merely never committed the time to doing a project with LP. Which is why I included a (yet) in my comment. I'm not ruling out the possibility of some day falling in love with LP. It just hasn't happened so far. I think it's one of those things that requires quite a lot of up-front commitment to make use of, and so many projects start off as tiny "throwaway" projects and eventually grow large (or don't).
I'm not sure I buy this logic either. Programming is right in the name, and some proponents of XP are good programmers. And, I really don't see how horrible programmers would be made better by poor techniques (which I believe some aspects of XP are).
I use a plain text file.
keep your data out of the hands of hackers and cyber-terrorists

I'm not good at marketing: I'm too honest. I simply can't grossly exaggerate threats like that. Black hats, sure. Cyber terrorists? Not a very real threat.
I'm actually taking the opposite approach... I started using jQuery to do all my DOM related stuff, but now learning actual javascript for the fun of it. It really is a surprisingly flexible language.