skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think this is an excellent point and really gets into what David was talking about in his (absolutely inspiring) Startup School presentation and how it relates to this post.

To many people, being in a startup is about selling the same thing to the same people - eyeballs to VCs or Google. That's it. There frequently isn't a lot of concern over what exactly it is that draws them there. In these situations, long hours are required (or at least mandated) because the target moves so frequently because someone has a "better idea" or needs to implement "just this one thing" to appease some VC who ends up not funding you anyway. This lack of focus and constraints leads to middle of the road products that can only be worked on by people working 14 hour days to adapt to the ongoing changes.

It's sort of like when Hollywood is out to make a "blockbuster." They buy a popular comic book character, get a dozen hack writers to work on it - even while the scenes are being shot - and they put in a bunch of crap special effects. Sure, sometimes it works, but most of the time it's a bunch of dreck that will never make back its $200 million budget. Contrast that to the lifestyle business - er, independent film - being written and directed by the guy who LOVES what he's doing and making it for himself and you get Pulp Fiction.

Me, I'd much rather make "Pulp Fiction" than "Daredevil."
If you want to generalize about a topic, you have to simplify your model, though. Shuttleworth--is he a representative African? Let's count some differences:

1) He's in Africa's richest country.

2) His parents weren't peasants or slaves or absent (as far as I know).

3) He's not Bantu, not Zulu, not a Bushman. He's of English stock.

Whatever importance you might attach to these or other variables, the guy is not a representative African, and his circumstances can't be used to make claims about the whole.

Is that genetic? No. Fucking. Way. Implying that it is is the essence of racism.

Eh. Lots of things are genetic, including the composition of the brain. It isn't necessary to obsess over the particulars, but to make a categorical denial of obvious facts is the essence of brainwashing.
Bad UI in action: 11 clicks to quit Assassin's Creed
hooande, I love the site, but it doesn't seem to work properly in Opera (everything is fine in Firefox). Also, I tried some pages from the BBC web site, and it loses the 'uk' from the 'original webpage' link.
Ask HN: Lisp / functional programming freelance experiences?
Are there any Lisp freelancers doing projects in this lovely language? Or is it all hobbyists?

I'm coming from a C# background but for a while now my love was with functional programming and particularly Lisp. C# / SharePoint gigs earn good money, whereas Python seems to be less in demand and rather valued about as low as PHP, maybe a little higher. Maybe Ruby is closest to providing a "healthy" (for the programmer), strong-demand freelance market when wanting to work functional... any freelancers out there being able to work on projects they love, other than their own? My C# / SharePoint projects pay the bills but I increasingly loathe them. I don't want to get trapped in the "deferred life plan" where I get to do what I love only nights and weekends and do things I don't really like doing any more for a living.

Maybe it's unrelated to the actual technology and just the "someone else's project" that is the cause for the bad flavour of project work. But that would require some psychological analysis I don't care to indulge in; right now I'm interested in how Lisp and/or functional freelancers are faring!
Given the non-industrialized composition of a large part of the African economy, I wouldn't be a surprised if it had a much higher percentage of entrepreneurs than other places.
Is this confirmed?

This is the Daily Mail...
You could carry that further and say "African = loser by definition, so anybody who is successful can not be representative of Africa". It wouldn't be very useful, though.

What point exactly are you trying to make?

You might want to read "Guns, Germs and Steel" for another perspective on human history.
Entrepreneurship is about not caring what anyone else is or is not "telling you".
No one could've said it better than this. Read the following ...

"I’ve often told people that this thing [startup] is worse than heroin. I’ve also told people that I think I’ve proved that entrepreneurism is deep in my soul. I’ve been away, but inexorably I come back. It started when I was younger than ten – I can recall the emotions such ideas generated then, and I know I still work the same way."

http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejecti...
Looks like a spear to me.
Does it make you laugh because it's unlikely, or because it's a bad idea? Because it strikes me as a decidedly good idea. Mood disorders are a medical problem, and the source of those for many people is in not getting laid. In a system with socialized healthcare, this is government's problem. And it's not like the solution is hard to come up with, either.
(1) You're right, it does, but it seems that the pain is just an irrelevant memory because your child is what's important.

(2) Obviously you don't have children, or you might think otherwise. :-)
Money and Control (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)
My own experience is that entrepreneurship is an obsession and an addiction. It is a character flaw. It is the deep desire to create and destroy at the same time. It is worse that a disease because disease at least has a curl, or the potential for a curl. The following are my recent articles on how to accept such a predicament and deal with setback and rejection, and how to recover from them.

http://foundread.com/2008/04/18/why-you-must-embrace-rejecti...

http://www.lovemytool.com/blog/2007/10/riding-a-bike.html
Questions about Web Server Attacks
Money and Worth
Review: The New Ruthless Economy
That blog post and the README.markdown displayed by github contain the same information.

This framework interests me, but to be honest I am too lazy to figure out how capable it is and how I am supposed to use it. I'd really like to see screw-unit in action; some kind of solid, real world example.
Actually very few entrepreneurs do one startup and become an overnight success. So even if they talk about their success, they are implicitly talking about their failure (or recovery from past failure which might need to future success). I think the mistakes that most of us make is to think that there is a formula, a formula for success or a formula for failure. There is no formula.
Right. All successful entrepreneurs must speak perfect English.
The Kindle is Back in Stock at Amazon
Microsoft Backs News-Crunching Startup to Compete With Google News
To Partner or Not to Partner–That is the Question
Stealth Inkjet Printer Startup Could Disrupt the Consumer Printer Industry
Foreign Aid: "A complete waste of money that succeeds primarily at keeping Westerners employed." 
A long and interesting interview with a journalist who spent a lot of time working for NGOs in Africa. The conclusion I got out of it was that there's no power that can make Africa better unless the governments finally clean up, and NGOs actually just help prop those governments up. It isn't a matter of investing and building infrastructure either, because the local governments will swoop in and steal the money.
If my math is right, these guys need somewhere on the order of a hojillion gigs of space if they want to give away an account or three to every digg, reddit, and news.yc reader.
MemJet - Low Cost, High Speed Color Nano-tech Printer
No, just strongly correlated.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6990802.stm
Not at all. Plenty of examples come to mind where they're inversely correlated. Working long and hard for cash can wreck social life.
These lists always seem a bit silly to me. It seems to be an attempt at being hip rather than a practical list. I thoroughly enjoy Haskell and Erlang, but I'm not sure they are languages anyone "should know". My list would be more like (pick one from each):

1. C

2. Python, perl, or ruby

3. Matlab or R

4. Common Lisp or Scheme

5. A fifth sufficiently different language, but with worthy concepts: Erlang, Haskell, O'caml, Prolog, Lua, Javascript, etc...

The choices in the first 4 don't matter too terribly much and the selection of a single language from #5 would largely be based on your own personal interests.
Free Agent Nation
Ask YC: What's Your Favorite Startup Resource?
My customers/users. They give me specific advice on how to make my product better, AND they sometimes give me money (without taking an equity stake).
Hopefully this is helpful to some of you. I took some time to compile a list of startup resources ranging from Marketing to Hiring. This list is by no means exhaustive,but it isn't bad.

To make it better, I need your help.

Are there any sites/templates/blogs that you would recommend to young entrepreneurs? If so, what are they?

I want to include as many of your suggestions as I can.

(P.S. - offline "resources" are also welcome)
Diamond's book seems to have replaced "The mismeasurement of man" as the go-to screed for "refuting" genetic differences between people. As a response, I would suggest "The Blank Slate" by Stephen Pinker.

The trouble, as always, is reductionism: One side saying, "This is the one-and-only reason."
1) He's in Africa's richest country.

2) His parents weren't peasants or slaves or absent (as far as I know).

3) He's not Bantu, not Zulu, not a Bushman. He's of English stock.

Whatever importance you might attach to these or other variables, the guy is not a representative African

Yes, he must be a mynameishere, given all the above, no?
HN/YC/PG

seems like the right answer. Do I pass?
I can see the reason for this. If you hire a terrible employee, it's harder to fire them than it is to cut off an outsourcing agency. Early employees define the culture of the company.

On the other hand, you'll never get the quality of work out of outsourcing that you could possibly get from a great hire.
They're already on there. ;)
Right, there are always exceptions. But you shouldn't give advice based on exceptional cases.
What ARE they thinking, though? I mean, either they are not thinking, or they should think it is a bum deal?

Some alternatives come to mind, but none compelling in the long run:

- I need to practice anyway (but not in the long run, hopefully)

- I am the best and I will win (ok, maybe you deserve what you get)

- I want to be a designer, but nobody will pay me anyway, so at least I get to do my job for free (= ok, so it is a bum job, but I am a loser anyway, so I can't expect anything better).
Suppose you met an Englishman, born and raised in England, who happens to have dark skin due to his African ancestry. Are you going to tell him he's a "pretty peculiar-looking Englishman"?

Suppose you meet an American, who happens to look Chinese. Are you going to tell him he's a "pretty peculiar-looking American"?
actually the feed for paul grahams essays aren't it should be under blogs to read (even though technically it isn't a blog).
http://safari.oreilly.com/

for ~$500 a year (per person not sure on bulk licenses) access to all the IT books you could possibly want/need. (well almost all)
Ack. I'll take care of that. Thanks for the heads up.
I hate books because I'm left-handed and they're designed for right-handed readers. The Kindle is likely not perfect because the scroll is on the right-hand side, but that's much better.
Haha! I love it
On the other hand, you're overpaying the winner. Because the winner would never rationally spend 5 hours on a $250 contest if he could get paid more than $50 an hour for a regular gig.

So the people that participate in 99designs should be the people that are undervalued in the marketplace, and 99designs helps to correct that.
Sounds like customers are the main thing a company needs!
Oh, and also: the comment you're talking about isn't an "ad hominem attack" anyway -- wheels said "that's a pretty racist comment", not "you're a racist".
Page 6:
The trouble, as always, is reductionism: One side saying, "This is the one-and-only reason."

Page 1:
it has been the long and disastrous habit to look at every variable, any variable, except the obvious ones: The differences between people.

!logically_coherent
I didn't read Guns Germs and Steels like that. I read it as portraying an alternative explanation to the "genetic superiority" explanation. It seemed quite plausible to me, but I am not sure if it is true. It was good enough for me to prove that "genetic superiority" is not the only possible solution - a lot of people don't seem to think so, so I think the book is important.

I will read "The Blank Slate" - I have been meaning to read another one of Pinker's books for ages.

Obviously, there are genetic differences between people. Their effect is another question. Also, the environment is involved in computing the phenotype from the gene. So one and the same gene could produce stupid people in one environment, and in another one smart people (as an example).

I haven't read the book yet, but perhaps you can provide some really compelling evidence for genes (of a "race") making a difference. True, pygmies probably won't make great basketballers, but that is not the kind of example we are looking for, or is it?

Typically sports is being mentioned in that context, but I don't think it is a very compelling example (safe for the pygmies example). It might just as well be percentages of people choosing to take up sports, for whatever reasons (like maybe, because it offers them the best opportunities).
Yes, it really hurts, and women really forget just how bad it was, otherwise they'd stop at one child. Hormones somehow alter their memories. Kinda Orwellian, actually.
I believe it is possible, specially that the article says that there were locals that used the same technique. It could very easily learn how to mimic human behaviour.
This is reminiscent of Pantaleon y las visitadores. It's a military dude in Peru who has to get a squad of prostitutes together to keep the soldiers in other squads from misbehaving.
Right on. What is "Africa" and an "African"? Countries and Continents are social constructs meant to organize people into groups.
The site seems to be struggling--some images take forever to load and some of its functions don't work. Maybe they got flooded by inviting all the social news people.
"Even as high as DH5 we still sometimes see deliberate dishonesty, as when someone picks out minor points of an argument and refutes those. Sometimes the spirit in which this is done makes it more of a sophisticated form of ad hominem than actual refutation. For example, correcting someone's grammar, or harping on minor mistakes in names or numbers." [1]

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
Is God imaginary? No way! Implying that is the essence of atheism.

Giving something a nasty name isn't enough to prove that it's wrong. You have to actually refute it.

> Did white people steal the "rule the world" gene? Of course not.

Do you remember Biology 101? Populations change over time. Why are other species capable of evolving, but humans not?

I'm not saying that genetics are the explanation for this change, but again, if you're going to deny the possibility you have to actually provide some evidence.
Just wondering, are any of you female that are commenting on this?

It just reminds me of the male pundits sitting around debating abortion (assuming yall're male).
Crap Dentists, Lawyers and Doctors still exist; In my experience in simalar porportions to Mechanics, Real Estate Agents and Recuting Agents
That's the dirty little secret of a lot of web storage and hosting sites. They can sell you gigs upon gigs of storage because in all likelihood, you'll never use all of it, or by the time you do, storage will have come down in price.

Sure there are some users who will max out their accounts, but those will be averaged by those who hardly use any.
"And that, in turn, depends on end-users being good at their job."

Incompetence is Everywhere, not just Developers and Managers, EVERYWHERE. Big companies, small companies... maybe 95% of the population is generally incompetent. Every so often you get a glut of the 5%'ers and it's great.

Personally I think I’m one of the 95%'ers, but hopefully not too far away from being a 5%'er.
"As for me, I'm competent, and I know I am. (Yes, this is a "everyone says that" moment.) I know that because when I build things, the final version looks more-or-less exactly how I though it would when I started, and took about the estimated amount of time."

He must not tackle very difficult problems...
I think it's easier to fire an agency than to fire an employee.
I agree. It's taking its time with me, and I haven't tried uploading or downloading anything yet. At least my account says "paid until Jan. 2038"

I'm gonna try compressing and uploading my pictures (just <2GB) then downloading them to test out their transfer speeds. There's a 5GB filesize limit which is nice. If it's fast enough it will probably replace Gmail drafts as my filetransfer of choice. I'll post with the results when done.
No. I merely pointed out that the "differences between people" is the one factor that people refuse to examine.
All the rage in Europe: Firefox marketshare climbs higher
But is it not your thesis that this difference is the explanatory variable, in and of itself?
W. Edwards Deming observed "Nothing happens without personal transformation."

I think it's this personal transformation that's one of the hardest things about a startup. You start out wanting to change the world and end up at 3AM wondering what's gone wrong and realizing that it's you has to change first.

Barry Moltz wrote a great book "You Have To Be A Little Crazy" that addresses the emotional roller coaster that every entrepreneur faces, observing "Entrepreneurs start businesses because..they have no choice. Passion and energy drive them on good days and sustain them on bad days." Some references follow:

http://www.amazon.com/You-Need-Be-Little-Crazy/dp/079318018X...

http://www.barrymoltz.com/

http://www.skmurphy.com/blog/2006/12/27/you-need-to-be-a-lit...
I made something similar to this a while back for my friends:

http://www.squidoo.com/startup
Ask YC: Recommend a merchant account provider
There are too many too choose from and no way that I know of to differentiate. Please help.
I'm disappointed by your answer, but even more so that you have more than 1 upvote. For once, reddit provided more value to me than Hacker News:

http://reddit.com/info/6haio/comments/
Wow, that is horrible.
Upload utility seems to break Firefox 3 Beta 5 with Ubuntu 8.04.
Sweet, was just studying at my school library and it's prepaid.
Check out Moneris, though they may not be the best choice for you it's the most used one around here. It really depends on where most of your business will be done.
it's like saying that it's retarded to enter a programming contest, which I disagree with

Yeah I do agree that it's best for people honing their skills and experience; and for people living in low-cost places where payment in high value currency is worth it (rentacoder, elance, ...). Hell maybe it's fun for some designers like programming is fun for some programmers. What's wrong with that?

I'm still really confused over what I perceive to be antagonism towards contests (unless you own a mom & pop design firm)...
Assassin's Creed has other flaws that are the reason it's just an OK game in spite of its amazing graphics and innovative parkour physics, but this confused the hell out of me when I was playing it.

Basically, you just walk right up to the person you're going to assassinate, press a mouse button to kill them, then run around a city randomly for a minute or two to lose the heat. Repeat.
If you want to really be well versed in programming techniques, it's worth learning a statically-typed functional language -- Haskell, OCaml, SML, or similar. This will teach you techniques you won't commonly see anywhere else.

I wouldn't say you need to learn one of these, but I wouldn't say you need to know Matlab, or Lisp/Scheme either. Just that learning different programming styles will make you a better programmer. Prolog and Erlang reputedly have this property as well, but they're still in my to-learn queue, so I can't speak first hand about them.

Also, unless you never plan on going near the web, JavaScript is pretty much a necessity these days.
Paypal's merchant services are pretty easy to get up and running. The rates are ok if you're doing low volume, though if you're doing high volume you can find much better.
Cool URIs Don't change
"Startup" is a pretty broad category, but for funding advice, http://www.venturehacks.com is hard to beat.
lifetime membership? but my account said it's paid until January 18, 2038! :D
Yeah, I'm not buying the argument that the iPhone poses a threat in the enterprise space. I email from my phone a lot and it's the main reason I haven't switched an iPhone. Typing on that thing is just too brutal for someone used to a keypad.

In the consumer space though, it will prevent RIM from gaining any ground.
100 mpg Prius
I just noticed that this classic piece of advice has never been directly posted to HN.

I think that giving "things" a name is one of the hard problems that programmers tackle every day. Normally our success or failure at choosing good names is kept hidden, and can only be seen by those who look at our code. Websites are one of the rare places where the world at large has to deal with our mistakes.
EDIT -- In reference to The Blank Slate:

I read it awhile back, and while there are some stretches in his usage of evolution to explain every form of behavior, e.g., people sat around fires for millenia therefore storytelling ability evolved, his explanations concerning adaptations for general survival utility are well supported.

I would recommend reading it with a grain of salt, and take evolutionary psychology for what it is, with the same level of skepticism you would apply to get data from any social "science".

EDIT--Some suggestive guideposts when reading in this field:
http://www.gnxp.com/MT2/archives/003817.html

http://itb.biologie.hu-berlin.de/~hagen/papers/Controversies...
http://www.badscience.net/?p=518

Be on the lookout for handwaving, but certainly investigate. Don't make it the only book you read in this area...
Rumors: Apple working on iTunes controller for iPhone
Any internet radio stations play going-to-sleep music? I'd visit that station every night twice.
Seriously, no discernible lyrics, just that rhythmic musical stuff. It's a two-fer: every adult, and twice a night if they have kids. Wrap it with ads for nucs, pampers, gymboree, mattresses, nyquil, alarm clocks, you name it. You'd get me every night.
Firefox 3 Beta 5 (which is great) worked for my upload on XP. The only issue was that the cursor mouseover on the upload button didn't change from an arrow to a hand -- not sure if that's a bug or a feature.
Inside Dot Com: Student Lifestyle
Optimizing Common Lisp
By old people I mean people that criticize any paradigm they aren't familiar with. You don't have to be old to do this, but old people are more likely to do it. I could have used the term neophobe I suppose.

OTOH, the thought of old people down modding me makes me lol.
Hmm. For sleeping music, I'd be concerned about subliminal messages playing about an hour into it. Could you imagine hearing "buy a Honda (x 100)" played after you've gone to sleep?

Actually, that might provide a pretty decent return for the advertisers.

Some people don't like hearing music at night, but I can say I certainly do on many nights. I've basically given up my music collection for online radio (pandora.com), so no "night time" playlists. You might be on to something there.
Create a Pandora station with an artist that has similar qualities.
SomaFM is a good source. Space Station Soma would put me to sleep all the time while I was playing Eve.
You may be right--I'm right-handed and would have no way of knowing--but aren't books symmetric?