skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I co-run a company. We break into banks."

I am so going to start using that.
Does anything like this exist (that's actually helpful/usable)?
I disagree. "Authority" in "argument from authority" does not necessarily mean an expert, just that it's an argument whose validity depends on the character/reputation of the person making it. E.g., "he said/ she said" with a police officer, in front of a judge, is a losing proposition.
Wow:
Squarespace, 712% growth, $5.4 million in revenue. 28 employees. In 2009, they did $2,219,101 in revenue and had 8 employees.
Microsoft Confirms DLL Issue, Releases Workaround
TFA: "Read It Later is a simple account-based service. Read It Later does not collect ‘personal’ information, you just need a username and password to create an account. The account allows you to sync your reading list between your iPhone, iPad, computers, and browsers."
The title is quite misleading, I think. The article clarifies that the sort of people others resent is the person who is too eager to volunteer for things, thus raising the bar for everyone and creating more work.

If someone at your office worked 16 hours a day, making you look bad, even though nobody would reasonably expect you to work that long if your colleague didn't do it, wouldn't you resent them?

Unfortunately, it's all relative, so the fact that he's hard-working makes you look lazy by comparison.
No one knows. Only the effects are well understood.
What is a Capability, Anyway?
Atomic clocks are not based on radioactive decay. There is no reason to suppose that the hyperfine transitions are also influenced.
High-Frequency Trading Created Fascinating Patterns During "Flash Crash"
Here's what I would say to these guys:

If your product actually IS a technology (and not just a website FOR a product), you're going to need a technical co-founder.

Without a technical person, you just have an idea. You may have the market and business plans all mapped out, but this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Your final product will largely be shaped by the technology behind it. Unless you have a detailed technical version of your app speced out for someone to build, whomever you 'hire' to do the coding for you is by default going to define your product just as much as (if not more than) you have.

Now you can hire someone to do this for you, but with high probability, this relationship isn't going to work out. You're going to need this person to work with you 24/7 and be as dedicated as you. That's by definition, a FOUNDER. Anyone treated differently will quit, and you'll be back to the beginning.
Been a huge fan of Django since tinkering with it in ‘06 while at the student paper at the University of Missouri (where the folks who came before me were obsessed with it since Adrian had been Online Editor there years and years ago).

Really awesome to hear a more complete story of how it all came to be.

Thanks, Simon.
If the former always encompasses the latter but not vice-versa then, tautologically, the latter cannot be equivalent to the former. For example since all dogs are animals but not all animals are dogs then dogs and animals are not coterminous. So at the very least we seem to agree that description and explanation are not coterminous.

But, and here is the interesting part, if that response was not quite satisfactory then reflect for a moment why. I'll wait. (Done!? Wow you're quick!) That response was a description of one aspect of the difference between a description and an explanation and not an explanation.

As to an explanation it actually consists of, in part, descriptions so sometimes it's a little difficult to see at times. So it's understandable to be somewhat confused.

Let's say you come home and a friend that is staying over, unbeknown to you, has a tea kettle on and it's whistling. You hear a whistling sound and give you're friend a curious look and they reply, 'It's coming from the tea kettle.' That would be a description.

An explanation would go something like this: Heat excites the molecules of water increasing the space between them, causing the steam to take up more space than the water and cooled air did. That builds pressure... etc.

The short answer is that a description has detail and an explanation also has reason.

Does that help?
Honestly, I'm wondering why we need non-technical cofounders. There are an amazing number of hustlers out there who don't hustle very well...
I don't think I would undertake a 48h programming contest with a single screen.
From the perspective of a good (I think) developer who isn't focused on startup work at the moment, it would be extremely unlikely for me to accept a position as tech employee #1 at a startup with no established market, no market-ready product, and no technical vision. The work and risk for me are high and even if we succeed, I don't get any share of the profit. If I do, then you're talking about equity, which basically makes them a cofounder. I'm not saying that business people are useless, but ideas are cheap. I have no incentive to go work for a company with a lot of stress that may simply fold in a year. Basically, I'd get the same money working for Microsoft in a better environment.
Interesting. The creationists have been saying for decades that assuming a fixed rate of decay is a mistake. So they were right again.
heh... I have the opposite problem with copy-paste.. users keep pasting in content from microsoft word and wonder why it doesn't work properly.
2 minutes sounds ridiculously long to me.
I completely agree. I just find it funny that new science appears and everyone's moaning about the impact of the creationists argument!
An interesting aspect of this is: there are lots of professions where people dread phone calls. If the awesomenessreminder guys were able to call from a different number everyday (which they might be doing anyway, via Skype), it could completely change the feeling those people get when the phone rings each day. After all, one of those unknown numbers is going to be a lot of fun!

They should pitch that service to property management, technical support, customer service, etc.
Technical teams are strongly preferred by Silicon Valley angel investors right now. I think part of the reason for that is that the current generation of those angels came of age in the 90s when highly technical teams were required to build anything that worked. That's the model they know.

However, these days technology has diffused and become componentized in a way that makes it much easier to build products that customers will buy using contractors. That's not to say that using contractors is easy - I only tried it because I have several years of experience managing outsourced technical teams. I think the strong bias for technical founding teams may shift or moderate in the future.

That said, I continue to look for a technical co-founder because I believe that technology decisions will need to be made day-to-day as my start-up matures. Fundamentally, I think that outsourcing only gets you so far.
The Rule of 2 - Back of the envelope discount when considering an investment
Yep. Kind of like the electric universe people have been bucking the status quo as well and on the last comet rendez vous mission they were the only ones to correctly predict what would happen.
Start a website selling gift baskets by mail, or build a simple program to make business cards and sell the perforated paper along with the program. If you're a good business-person, team up with a technical programmer and hit the big time!
Anyone know about what the technology stack is behind Bing? It would be interesting to know if MS uses their own .NET framework or if it is built on something else.
Yeah - I didn't get that part either. I'm guessing what the OP was saying was that for "new best selling releases that come out in Hard Cover and Kindle, but not Softcover, the Hard Cover Sells 50:1" - or something like that. I find it hard to believe that 50x more Hard Covers than Kindles are selling in 2010 - I saw three kindles and One iPad on the Plane back from BWI to Phoenix last weekend (Plus my iPad).

Speaking as an owner of a K1, K2, iPad, and in a week or two a K3, I'm putting the future out to Five years before eBooks become the dominant form of consuming light fiction in the United States, possibly even less. Ebook readers are going to get very cheap, very quickly. I'm expecting WiFi Kindle will be sub $99 within twelve months. And that will be a Hot, Hot Christmas Gift.

But, we may see it more quickly in the TextBook Market - those new inkling textbooks are _killer_ - I'd hate to be in the business of owning a University Textbook store right now. Their days are _very_ numbered. My call is minimum 50% business lost within 3 years, and close to 100% within 7 years. The kindle made me think that there would be a long time before there was a market for electronic textbooks (The Kindle is a horrible experience for textbooks) - The iPad+Inkling (and similar tablet/e-textbook frameworks to be released soon) make me think we're going to be blown away by how fast the conversion takes place. Fall 2010 - .5% of Students get their textbooks in eBook format. Spring 2011 - 1% Fall 2011 - 3%, Spring 2012 - 8%, Fall 2012 - 15%. Spring 2013 - 25%, Fall 2013 50% of all University textbooks in eBook format.

Textbooks w/Social Networking are here! (Literally - the Inkling App lets you share notes on the content with your classmates - and has a world class highlighting feature)

Inkling is the Killer App for the iPad.
So web browsers keep trying to do right what Windows-like window managers messed up. (and I think they still need one think: the ability to split the view to compare tabs)
"Fine thanks. How do you do?"

Don't have an answer? Hack the question.
Not for a while : )

I'm focusing on helping people earn more via my Earn1k freelancing course right now, so it's basically an IWTYTBR business course. We teach a lot of techniques that can apply to freelancing or even product-based companies.

Btw, thanks for the kind words!
Apple Said to Prepare New 99-Cent TV Show Rental Service
Nasty auto robocaller forced to pay $2.3M, sell Mercedes
Can someone clarify what a spike is? It doesn't appear to refer to just resource load...

"...we spent several hours fanning out that spike to include three versions"
see my response[1] to a very similar question above

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1630769
Little Geeks on the Prairie
Wow, does this go right along with the comments from the dev's thread about this app a couple days ago or what???

People were saying that he was throwing ideas at a wall until one stuck or got noticed, and sure enough, here's a popular publication with a link to his new app.

He must be having a chuckle right now. Not sure if he's actually making money, but this has to feel like and accomplishment.
Sudoku is very boring. If I wanted to spend my time solving small value NP-complete problems I might as well go out and solve TSPs over and over again.
I've been in that position too and came to similar conclusions, but there is a huge middle ground between contractors and cofounders: employees.
What search engines are left now? I know there's Google, Bing, Cuil, and DuckDuckGo, but I'm drawing a blank past that.
This article raises good points, but I'd like to argue / disagree with it in several points:

It doesn’t mean that your users are stupid, just that they haven’t spent the thousands of hours in front of a computer that you have.

Like office workers spending 8 hours a day in front of a computer? They easily make that time only on work time.. not that it helps.

..they don’t know how to (or even that they can) copy and paste text.

Some users don't. But what should I do, send a copy of computer 101 with every eMail I send?

Many users are used to web applications and don’t understand that they need to download and install new versions of desktop software to get access to the features in a new version.

So, what's the maintenance staff there for? In my experience regular office users don't set up or update anything, ever!

Data storage

File system hierarchy and network mount points are so far off the average user horizon that you shouldn't bother anyway. You just point to it in the file explorer. Everything else is completely pointless.

As for filetypes and converting: ok, that's a valid point. It's a good idea to send instructions with it, as it is a somewhat non-common task.

The jargon you use

I agree. Talk the users language, not computer slang.

You should therefore never put something only in a right click menu or anywhere else that it can’t easily be discovered.

Please, I beg you. Put stuff where you would normally expect it from your WM / OS. If it would be in the context menu, then put it there. Normally you also put stuff in the menu bar / ribbon / icon bar depending on conventions. Don't try to invent new interface guidelines, you'll probably fail.. horribly.

Concurrency

Try not to expose them or avoid it entirely (rework the workflow if necessary). Otherwise build the interface in a way that clearly notifies the user of this circumstance.

Non-technical users aren’t so confident and won’t try things in the same way. In fact some of them seem to think that a wrong move could cause the computer to burst into flames.

Most of them don't try anything at all. They will ask you how to do it. If you have some kind of system that has tweaks: train your users (that's what tech training is for).

So try to stick to conventions they will understand

Absolutely.

The need for backups

I preach this all the time. People also always agree to me in this respect. Doesn't help, they never actually do it, much less spend money on it. Could as well talk to the wall..

That they should read the documentation

I totally agree. No one will read your precious documentation. If you roll out a new software, train them with the workflow. You do train your workforce to use the tools they use, right?

Unskilled users often don’t realize how unskilled they are. Consequently they may blame your software for problems that are of their own making.

May? They always do. I figure this must be human nature or something.

One just has to be as polite as possible in such cases.

In other words, stay professional.

-------------

Otherwise I found it the article as entertaining as irksome. Raises some good points.
But if you build an abstract semantic model of the bureaucratic "machine", you'll be able to "program" the organization as if it were a computer. Imagine what you could accomplish!

Sure, it's a lot more difficult due to the non-deterministic nature of most social systems, but even a loose, stochastic model allows you to "hack" organizations in a way that is likely to make your endeavors within an organization that much more effective.

Interestingly, the fuzzier nature of social systems gives it a kind of "undo" function - you can, in most circumstances, make up for mistakes and misjudgements - so the cost of experimentation is more similar to software than to, say, structural engineering.
The point about the rotation rate of the solar core is merely a corollary from their hypothesis. The hypothesis is that the variation in the radioactive decay rate is caused by solar neutrinos. The experimental evidence supports most aspects of this hypothesis, except that they were expecting a somewhat faster period. Given the facts that the surface of the sun rotates once every 28 days and that our period is caused by the solar core, whose exact rotation rate is unknown, it is not unreasonable to suppose this is the first evidence to show that the rotation rate of the core of the sun is somewhat lower than that of the surface. A resulting period of 1 hour or one year would have been reason to suspect the hypothesis was wrong. As it stands, they have every reason to suppose their hypothesis is right.
You're saying this as if it's contradictory. Those people were right, he was throwing ideas at a wall, and one did stick. It doesn't make their point wrong, and I remember many commenters saying that this is a valid strategy (which apparently it is).
The author is arguing that Google is going to be the only one that gets to do this in the first place. They've changed the game in that they can have no competitors. If Google wasn't doing this, it would still be possible for someone else to step in and do it right. In that light, they've changed quite a bit.

* note: I'm not really familiar with the court case here, so I have no idea if the author is making a valid assertion or not.
Same here - breaking the rotational momentum of the Sun is not the simplest explanation that comes to mind :-)
I don't know if many people would buy this for themselves, but it would make a great gag gift for someone.
I'm half way through the YC application already. And, I'm sure that YC is insanely valuable in terms of how much coaching and guidance they offer. I don't want to miss anything or let other things float by without looking at them seriously.

P.S. Hey, Aditya, Airfare has been rediculously expensive this summer. Otherwise, I would have taken you up on the air mattress offer by now.
I don't think its as black and white as you'd like to see it. Entrepreneurship is and has always been about organizing labor and capital. Nothing on its own is useful until there is an organizing factor that makes it greater than the sum of their values.

Do we give brick layers and construction workers ownership in the buildings they create? No. Do they deserve to? That could be argued all day, but if you're a capitalist, you probably believe they deserve whatever the market offers or whatever they agree to accept. It's not that non-technicals are out to get you or exploit you, its that they simply see themselves as the organizing force that takes the risk and thus deserves the reward.
'[I]n this analogy[...]'

I have analogies but the very definition of an analogy precludes it being the thing it analogizes.
A google docs link to original scheme manual, in case the site bogs down.
http://docs.google.com/viewer?url=http%3A%2F%2Frepository.re...
clickable: http://Newsley.com
Apple: Short Term Winner, Long Term Loser
Do you have some links to your side projects/no-burnout-work?

Sure (although a lot are websites that were shut down later on, to focus my resources):

[1] http://www.learnivore.com (ruby,rails,iphone screencasts aggregator)

[2] http://www.toutpourmonipad.com (ipad case finder for the french market)

[3] http://github.com/thbar/opaz-plugdk (an experiment to create VST plugins using JRuby and Java)

[4] http://github.com/thbar/music-labs (more music stuff with ruby)

[5] http://github.com/thbar/petite-lettre (a little ruby gem for inter-process communication based on yaml)

[6] http://github.com/thbar/magic (a DSL to make it easier to implement UI with IronRuby, WPF and Windows Forms)

I have one side-project ongoing (that I will mention here later on) and another one for after.

I have learned a lot on each of these projects - bits that have most of the time been reused shortly after on customer projects (sphinx, mongodb, jruby...).
I really like this idea. One thing that surprised me when I entered Cognitive Behavior Therapy was the power of affirmations. The old Saturday Night Live 'Stuart Smalley' is an unfortunate social stigma that stopped me from ever taking the practice seriously until I was shown some hard evidence of it's effectiveness (no, I don't have it on hand, you can google as easily as me).

So I gave it a try. Then I tried it some more. Over time it really takes a transformation. At first I really felt like Stuart; but that is because I didn't believe the things I was saying. If I kept lowering the bar eventually I could find compliments about myself that I actually thought were true. The good feelings and confidence those smaller compliments gave me helped boost me to higher levels, and up and up, until the point now where I feel an abundance of confidence in most of my day to day interactions that I never had before.

Affirmations are really just a mind hack to architect your internal reality intentionally. You DO have an inner reality, so why not try to take control of it? :)

EDIT: Oh, but back to this startup.. I like this idea, but I hope they understand the principles behind affirmation therapy as a part of CBT. Simply telling someone they are awesome will have no actual affect if they don't believe what you are saying, so there needs to be a little bit of a day-to-day feedback process to hone in on the target emotions you want to generate. I doubt this much effort is being put in, but I might be willing to drop $10 to find out. :)
But be prepared to answer questions about a hearing disorder.
Why so many administrators?
Two minutes is a gross overestimate. You can get it down to 30-60 seconds if you have an autodialer, but 90 seconds is a generous estimate even without. So figure 90 seconds per call, 30.42 calls per month per customer, you have 45 minutes per customer per month. $10 for 45 minutes is $13 per hour. $10 per hour labor (a generous rate for US-based English speaking labor) leaves a very thin margin, but still potentially profitable.

If you scaled this, you'd want to have a VoIP autodialer system, at which point you'd get down to maybe 60 seconds per call average, which is 30 minutes per customer per month, which is $20/hour revenue, so $10/hour labor would give you $10/hour on top of that to cover everything else. You could do this with call centers, which imposes real estate cost, or you could have a web-based system for employees to connect into from home, which also gives you the benefit of being able to hire them as independent contractors instead of employees and hence not having to worry about their taxes or health care.

There's further optimizations you could make. $10/hour is a high rate for paying people to place unwanted phone calls to complete strangers. I know because that's more than what I made doing that job. If you were running a call center of stoned teenagers and college students, you could probably get away with paying them $8/hour to call up subscribers and tell them they're awesome. Yes, most call centers are staffed by stoned teenagers and college students, at least the ones in charge of making scripted, outgoing calls. Well, at least mine was.
"The dinosaur is fine too. Thanks for asking."
You would favor abolishing the FAA?

Really?
Exactly. Getting a working mental model, even if it's not very exact, does wonders for the ability to experiment. The problem is, most people get an explanation of what the different parts of the computer are, but not a working model of how it works.

And here lies the challenge of designing computers that are useful for people without the mental model, and efficient for people with it. Gadgets tend to do one or the other, but accomodating both is a good bit harder.
It's a spike as in a spike solution -- an end-to-end prototype to see if a chosen method of solving the problem is feasible, but without writing tests or handling all error cases or the like.

http://c2.com/xp/SpikeSolution.html
I expect under the hood Bing is Azure.
The sun is a big ball of plasma, not a solid object. It's got currents and layers doing all sorts of interesting things--and what you see on the surface doesn't necessarily tell you what's going on below.

[edit]: I don't know much about stellar physics. See reply.
This is a great book.

Personally I'd be put off by the mention of a School of Management in the headline, it's not really about management. It's related to product design and how to learn from your users.

Or rather, how to learn from people who are nearly using your product, or using your product in extreme ways. These "lead users" are the (potential) customers who are going to tell you something more interesting than "faster horses" when you ask them what they want.
Helveticards. Swiss style. International fun.
To be honest, I never understood this letter grading system used in the US (and maybe elsewhere)... and if you already have scores (like 40/100 vs 85/100), why even bother with another system?