skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It all depends on your initial goals.

If your goal is to create a company that is going to be around in its original form and that will 'change the world' then by all means, stick around.

But if you create 'web-apps' for an emerging field where you'll be faced with 10's if not 100's of competitors a successful acquisition is not bad at all. In such markets shake-outs are the norm, and that period is marked by acquisitions and obituaries.

Most successful start-ups find that at some point in time they're going to be acquired.

Your comment reminds me of the criticism levelled at mint.com when they 'sold out', as though what they achieved and did was all negated by selling to their 800# gorilla competitor.

Personally I think they - and Peter Cooper, albeit at a lesser scale - did great.

Whether you should stick around or not depends on a lot of factors, your ambition, your ability to manage a larger company (and your desire to do so), your risk profile and so on.

No one size fits all, there is room enough for all strategies and tactics, what works for you may not work for everyone. Peter managed to do what very few people here will ever manage to do, in spite of all the potential, he did it under his own power, recouped his investors money and paid them a premium, had a pretty much text-book acquisition for a company this size. Nothing to complain about.

Could you do better ? Maybe. But you could also do a lot worse.

The joke goes that no deal is ever right, if you manage to sell you should have waited, if you crash you've waited too long.

So a certain feeling of 'I could have done better' post sale is pretty much the norm, and maybe you really could have done (a lot) better, but for all the same money you'd have crashed horribly or you could have found yourself the proud owner of a stagnant business in a field with lots of better funded and better executing competitors. There might be a way to turn that around but it's not a given.
Marketer rakes £25k Profit I'm So Jealous I'm Giving Up Developing Apps
Thanks a lot. I will!
Let's fund every entrepreneur
Nike Air Force 1
In my Emacs 23 default configuration, the functionality for editing code and comments side-by-side in separate buffers is on the F2 key, whereas replace-regexp doesn't have a key of its own. Guess which one I use more.

Sometimes I wish for a keybinding revolution...

Yes, I know that keys can be remapped, and have done so on my machines, but sensible defaults are still a good thing to have, if only to welcome new users.
'it would be an understatement to say I was naïve about the concerns of "running a business."'

He missed the forest for the trees in terms of his industry. As he says at the end of the article, it is only now - 3 years later - that he has enough perspective to see some of what he did wrong.

His story reminds me a lot of Gerber's master technician who is good at his craft but not the business thereof. Fortunately for him, that industry is still quite small but has massive potential, and he could jump in again (assuming the terms of sale allow it).
These days, people cobble something together. No capital.
No technology.

Reddit, Dropbox, Mint and an endless list of others don't fit this description. The idea that you can just 'cobble something together' and get an exit seems mostly an urban legend to me.
Vim also runs in M-x term. No need to quit Emacs for that.
Musk: Support U.S. space builders
As an RIT alum and lifelong NYS resident, where Digby was born, I have to say I'm a little disappointed that the NYS business/tech climate wasn't appealing enough to stay in our state.
Which is funny, because in both cases they're symptoms of trade-offs made in the language design.

But a Haskell programmer who understands this and decides to accept it is just considered normal. A Python programmer who understands this and decides to accept it (as in the linked post) is declared to be a Blub user, which is essentially a polite-enough-for-HN way to say "LOL STOOPID NOOOB".
[Album] AC/DC - Rare...Rarer...Rarities (2010)
It feels like I'm watching someone try to act out the part
of a character in a spy novel.

It feels more like I'm watching someone forced to act out that part. Those novels me be dramatized, but many are still based on the way things actually happen. Ian Flemming couldn't have kept that out if he wanted to, because he simply knew.

sensationalizing the things they post

You can't sensationalize something on your own.
Good point, so if possible, create, rather than follow.
Just because something is a secret doesn't mean it has to
be exposed

Why does everyone suppose WikiLeaks is being naive about this? I'm sure there are plenty of files that they won't leak, because they think it will endanger more people than it will save.

In this case, the safety of a few Afghan informants could be considered collateral damage: you can't expect WikiLeaks to keep their hands completely clean, when they are trying to out pools of blood on the hands of others. There isn't an optimal solution; they will have to make case-by-case judgments. If you don't like that and want them to censor the documents: by all means, start volunteering for them to read all the stuff. In the mean time, putting this out in the open may save countless Afghan civilians in the years to come.
It is a personal choice, IMO. Some like to build empires and for some startup is a path to financial independence. And financial independence is not just about drinking cocktails. It can be a way to do a world tour, spend time researching quantum physics, learning a new musical instrument, or going to International Space Station. Different people, different motivations.
"There is so much noise out there, why would I think I'm not just adding to it? Let's all be quiet for a time."

Most of the noise is generated by people who never ask themselves this question.
£100 Kindle Gateway to an eBook Revolution
Magic Circles On Facebook
Like a program binary, which has been developed by trial and error without a design, which uses overlapping instructions that mean different things depending on the entry point, and which makes extensive use of self modifying code (via gene expression). And which goes through three phases of binary to binary translation: DNA->RNA->Proteins.
All I want to agree with is that innocent people have the
right to exist without getting shot in the middle of the
night.

Which is a naive view, because without American intervention in Afghanistan, their citizens ran the risk of being shot in the middle of the night anyway, because they rubbed some Taliban the wrong way.
If a good developer can't make money from their projects or applications then they are not making applications other people value enough to actually pay for! Maybe the OP should make something people want!!!
"It all depends on your initial goals. If your goal is to create a company that is going to be around in its original form and that will 'change the world' then by all means, stick around. But if you create 'web-apps' for an emerging field where you'll be faced with 10's if not 100's of competitors a successful acquisition is not bad at all."

I entirely agree. I know that HN'ers love web-apps and love thinking that "building something people want" is enough. But web-apps are too "easy", i.e., the barrier of entry is too low, and the competition is fierce. If one's business is a website, then sticking around may be foolish. Just take the cash and go build something real, and let people with a large pillow of capital take the risk.

My point is this: Andy Grove and the founders of Intel were not successful because they built "something people want". They were successful because they created something people did eventually want, because they made wise decisions at the right time, and because their skillsets made them irreplaceable almost. If you want to build an empire, then create something the world will need in the future, make sure you're the only one who knows how to do it, and capitalize on your knowledge while the rest of the world is catching up. This is extremely hard to accomplish in software, but it's not impossible in hardware. I am thinking of electronics, photonics, microfluidics, and the like... not web-apps that can be built in a weekend.
On the contrary look at Zed Shaws http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1563205 post about asking for donations... A great project with wide adoption, yet turning no profit
Funny, because going to the US for me felt like a step back. In Denmark I would never carry any cash which is impossible in the US (NYC at least). The idea of a futuristic ATM seems like an oxymoron to me.
I seem to remember that not so long ago, before Apple announced the iPad (and before it became clear what it was going to be), all you heard was "well it can't possibly be a tablet, nobody has ever made a successful tablet PC". Now, not a week goes by or there's another article or blog post talking about the next potential "iPad killer". Times sure change... and awfully fast too...
> I don't know, you picked three extreme nutjobs ... I'm not sure there's a clear rebuttal of anything.

It's certainly a rebuttal of your statement "No one bats an eye at anti-male/anti-Caucasian rhetoric", because it would only take one counterexample to rebut it.

Actually I'd guess that quantifying statements as "no-one" when it'd be more accurate to say "few people", is probably positively correlated with tribalistic thinking.
Frankly, when compared to Intel, Reddit surely looks like something that was just "cobbled together". Intel has hundreds of physics, chemistry, engineering PhD's building circuits with billions of transistors with dimensions one order of magnitude smaller than the wavelenght of visible light. And these circuits are built in billion-dollar factories. And the competitors can't catch up because they don't know how Intel does its magic.

By contrast, Reddit looks like something that was built in a couple of days by two bored college students. I like Reddit, but let's face it, they're not pushing technology anywhere. They don't have to deal with quantum effects, current leakage, and that kind of stuff. They just run a few servers, and they don't have a business plan that can compare to Intel's. So, what exact point are you trying to make?
Otolaryngology medical billing
Expert coders for Orthopedics now available for billing and coding assistance, dial toll free 1-877-323-4707 for electronic claim submission.
I would like to qualify that I personally don't equate lack of monetary success to failure or such, however, I once ran a large successful electronic design manufacturing and distribution business, while I was extremely successful from the outside looking in, on the inside I was suffering. I hence gave it all up, at which point a markedly evident change occurred in family, friends, business associates, perception of me which was a clear as ice. You would not be alone I'm sure facing the dialema of making something cool but not making financial success from your efforts : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1563441
> if you've never been somewhere like South Korea, you don't really know what it looks like. Frustrating as it was for me as an outsider, I did admire a few points about it. There's an attitude of, "I am KOREAN and STRONG" built into most Koreans - this can be insufferable if you're not allowed to eat at a restaurant, but I also find Koreans to be a bit more confident and proud than people in surrounding areas

If for Koreans to be self-confident it's necessary for them to ban non-Koreans from restaurants, then I'd say South Korea is a pretty fucked-up society.
See also the report from Wired a week ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1541261

Much discussion there.
Sure. Different people have different motivations. Nothing wrong with that. But, to be honest, if your goal is financial independence, go work in investment banking until you are 35, retire, go see the world, live frugally, learn quantum mechanics for fun, start painting in your free time. I know people who did that.

The point is: if you're after financial independence, take the boring, yet easy, path. Give 10 years of your life to a bank or law firm. Maybe you can make a million or two. Retire. But, if you're going to give 10 years of your life to a company that has a 1% chance of getting anywhere, then be committed to it, do it for fun, to build an empire. You'll most likely fail, but you'll have a good time, at least.
This just seems like blog spam - here's the actual article:

http://www.quicksprout.com/2010/07/26/10-mistakes-youll-make...
Writing User Defined Functions for pig
From Assange:

"Now we contacted the White House as a group before we released this material and asked them to help assist in going through it to make sure that no innocent names came out, and the White House did not accept that request."

http://www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2010/s2968342.htm
> for lack of something more insightful and concise

What's wrong with "bigotry"? It covers roughly the same meaning IMO.
Of course. most of Europe is ahead of the US in terms of online banking.

For example:

My bank here in Norway let's me transfer funds internationally online. I can't do that in the US.

All I need to know to send money to another Norwegian bank account is a single account code. --No need for routing/sort codes or anything else.

The banks here have even agreed on a single scheme for two factor identification so that even if you have accounts with multiple banks you don't have to carry around multiple key fobs, worry about who will be sending you an SMS with your single use code, or whatnot.
Looks like it differs widely across Europe and UK is not on the leading edge of it.
And a link to their web site:

http://attempto.ifi.uzh.ch/acewiki/

This sounds fascinating, especially the way they interactively help people construct sentences within the constraints.

I'll be intrigued to see how this develops.
In my country we stopped using checks at least 15 years ago, and who carries around enough cash that you want to deposit it? I've only used an ATM machine maybe 2-3 times this year. If I need a small amount of cash I just ask the cashier at my grocery store for some extra cash when I pay using my card, but it's been at least 3 weeks since the last time :-)

I can't think of a situation where I need cash at all, except for a few vending machines. If I need to buy a car or something from an individual, it takes me 5 minutes to transfer the money using the web. If I want, I could even setup a list of friends/family (for safety) and transfer money by sending an SMS message to my bank.
Too many:

+ MathsJam "conference" - http://www.mathsjam.com

+ Full-time day job

+ 90 talks a year

+ 6 articles a year

+ Analysing all the routines people sent me

+ Analysing a new data structure

+ Developing three web site ideas
According to this excellent book I read:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Backroom-Boys-Secret-Return-British/...

Venter also wanted to patent the whole human genome once he'd sequenced it. It was only by a huge and expensive effort by the Wellcome charity that the genome was sequenced and made freely available. If you enjoy reading ..AGAAACCATCAGCACA.. then:

http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3501

This is also discussed in the Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Genome_Project

Anyway, the book I linked to is great fun.
Masinop free WordPress Themes
Masinop is a Wordpress theme tested on the latest version of WordPress.
The barrier to entry for investment banking is a lot higher than it is for writing web-apps, also that route may be closed to a very large portion of the world (by virtue of location alone).

Building a web app that might be the gateway to your dreams takes nothing but a computer, a working brain and an internet connection. Getting into investment banking has a wholly different set of requirements and so might not be the 'boring yet easy path', it might in fact be much more difficult. Also, investment banking would not support the number of people that are trying their luck in the web-app (or phone app) lottery.

And for plenty of people 'boring' doesn't cut it, no matter what the rewards.
>>The best thing Microsoft could do is to innovate and do something no one's done. Everything they've done of late is in markets where someone has already done very well in

But that is what Microsoft has done historically.

The old solution was to use profits from already owned market segments to invest much more in other market segments, until they own those too.

I don't know either why it stopped working.

Could the problem be a lack of a monopoly leverage? They can't threaten hardware/software makers anymore?

Or maybe the problem is just leadership, as others wrote?

Or maybe they have just screwed over too many people (to paraphrase an old Netscape executive, too many people has woken up with a bloody computer monitors in bed)?
Real Estate Property Searching Easily in India
Deals in real estate in india, real estate listing of properties in india.Residential real estate property for sale. Buy Residential apartments, flats, house, bungalow, villa, independent house. Search rental residential property for sale listings in Now! Get best residential property deals in delhi, Bangalore, Mumbai, Kolkata, Pune from real estate agents, brokers, dealers and real property owners.Your Property Search ends here.
Replace reddit with google or oracle for a better comparison.
Intuition is internalizes experience.
Where's the rest?
Investment banking only requires you to go to the right schools and to be able to tolerate excruciatingly boring work for 16 hours a day. I know people who amassed a nice loot that way. By contrast, I don't know anyone who amassed the same amount by creating software, although I know a few who tried.

The problem with web-apps is precisely that the barrier of entry is too low. You are competing against the entire world. No special skills are required beyond programming. It does not require credentials. What makes the game easy to play is also what it makes it so hard to win.
"from a combinator" - a freudian slip :)
Is Red Wine Healthy? - Health and Financial Freedom
Wow, here in Sweden every bank seem to invent their own scheme.
I only know half a dozen software empires. I know a lot more hardware empires. And I am not talking about semiconductors only.
I have been thoroughly impressed with how productive Zed can be.

whether or not he is good at promoting himself - and he seems to negatively affect enough people that the point is arguable - he is good at getting things done, people who fail to acknowledge that reveal more about themselves than they do about Zed.
People could use them to go on remote vacations, he said, touring the streets of a faraway country or interacting with the locals without ever leaving their bedrooms.

Average TeleHoliday Duration: 4 Minutes.

Seriously, how long would you have to drive your 35 pound 15,000 dollar bill around the streets of Rome before somebody made off with it? The guy on the street corner who unlocks phones could surely unlock one of these, and presto, free robot.

I don't think a sane person who values his property would ever drive one of these things out into public unsupervised.
I'm sorely tempted to become a customer of yours, one of these days, when I've found the energy to rework my site it will probably happen.
It doesn't matter if downstream users are technically capable of exercising their freedoms or not. The point is that GPL preserves those freedoms and MIT/BSD doesn't.
Unless you think that best research is the same as number of things published, we won't know how good it is decades from now so I will have to stick with smart as a measurement of how good it is.

I would have to say that that guy was smart and knew his stuff.
Anyone else ironically hoping MS creates a better iPad just for the opportunity to install Linux on it?
No, I don't think so but I don't like snakes and have no particular love for reptiles - they aren't that nice to pet.
> Investment banking only requires you to go to the right schools

That alone is a deal breaker for probably a very large percentage of those that would want to go this route. Also, it requires a plan long in advance. So that 'only' is a bit out of place there I think.

> to be able to tolerate excruciatingly boring work for 16 hours a day.

That's another slight problem. You couldn't pay me enough for a job like that, I'd probably burn out long before reaching my goals, whatever they were.

> I know people who amassed a nice loot that way.

So do I, their personalities and backgrounds are about as far away from the typical web entrepreneur as you could get.

> I don't know anyone who amassed the same amount by creating software, although I know a few who tried.

I know more people that made somewhere in the millions to 10's of millions with a few 'out of the ballpark' hits in software than in any other business outside of regular trade.

I know one investment banker that did well, but then again, most of my contacts are in the software world, not in banking so that will likely skew the picture.

Competing against the entire world is pretty much the norm for every other business except for software. So first mover advantage, execution, customer support and so on are where you make the difference, and that gives people a sense of control over their destiny, which is a powerful motivator by itself.
what kind of hostility did you feel?
To a large extent that depends on your definition of empire. If an 'empire' is defined as a multi-billion dollar company then I agree with you, if it is anything over 10 million then there must be 10's of thousands of them.

I'm pretty sure my own company does not qualify as an 'empire' by any standard, but it keeps me free, off the streets and pays the bills, I couldn't wish for more. I wouldn't exchange it for a boring job in investment banking for whatever compensation you put on the table, there's more to life than money, as I've found out the hard way.
Top 3 Web Traffic Refferers: Facebook, YouTube and StumbleUpon
Here's one analysis result you might want to follow: According to Woopra that monitors over 100,000 websites, the Top 3 for referral traffic is Facebook, StumbleUpon and YouTube.
It's 8 minutes. Watch the videos. You'll be happy you did.
Apparently the secret code phrase is "500 Internal Server Error"
Well, groups like Wikileaks aren't wanting to apply anarchist ideals haphazardly; but rather in a reasoned way to help achieve a more bottom-up democratic world, which of course requires a better-informed populace. Among other things.

For example, Wikileaks did try to work with the White House to remove names of innocents. (I cited it elsewhere on this thread; you can read how they went about it.)

Each of the state powers you mention can be used for helpful things, but usually aren't. Take for example law enforcement. Any society will need some measure of protection from sociopaths taking over. However, the US goes wild with it, using it to achieve by far the world's hugest incarceration rate!

And war requires the highest bar of justification. Needless to say, the US government doesn't come close to meeting it, illusions aside.
Both google and oracle have shown much more vision, as well as ability to generate revenue, than reddit. So it's not fair to replace with them. They're not equal.
Hmm, I have to admit a 'nobody' account with UID and GID 0 is weird. I'm not sure if it is possible for a non-superuser to have those values so you may be right here.

With AppArmor, at least, it is perfectly possible to assign different policies to the same program. Policies are applied to programs identified by pathname so all one needs to do to sandbox, for instance, /usr/bin/gcc:

1. ln /usr/bin/gcc-4.4 ~/sandbox/compilers/gcc
2. Create and enforce an apparmor policy for ~/sandbox/compilers/gcc
3. Remember to use only ~/sandbox/compilers/gcc for untrusted code.

I do this (among other things) for my platform, and given that I only require user-submitted code to solve one of a limited set of algorithmic challenges, I can get away with blocking access to /etc/passwd (and everything else but a restricted whitelist).