skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"7) The anti-B.S. factor: Silicon Valley is a town where the tech industry dominates the conversation. In sharp contrast, New York is home to many industries so it’s difficult for an entrepreneur to get caught up in what the investor Fred Wilson calls an “echo-chamber groupthink.” Bottom line — entrepreneurs have to be creative and can’t get caught up in their bubble."

I found this interesting, as my own echo-chamber-group-think radar is sometimes set off by things I hear coming out of the Valley scene. For example, some aspects of social media remind me of the original dotcom boom.

I don't live there though, so what does the HN crowd think about that, especially Valley denizens?

As a side note there are clear exceptions, like Ycominbator's diverse portfolio and wish list (http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html), among others.
I think #8 (BE YOURSELF) should really be the first thing on the list. As someone who is now working at a startup straight out of [a really random, lesser well-known, liberal-arts focused] college, the single most important thing is to see how well you connect with the team.

People are really the most important part of any startup in my opinion. Don't try to be someone else. If there isn't a fit, you shouldn't try to force one.
Totally worth it with one major caveat.

SSD drives don't actually delete stuff when you 'delete' them, it just tells your OS that that it can write to that space. Normal hard drives do this too, the problem comes when you actually go to write stuff to the space that is 'marked for deletion'.

Unlike normal hard drives that just overwrite the disk space, SSD drives can only write to disk in groups called 'blocks'.
So when the drive is filled up with stuff (or you've been using it for some time), it has to corral the block, make sure its safe to write to, if it isn't, it wipes it, before finally writing to it ... which is really slow.

This manifests itself in your system basically freezing on you from time to time after you've been using it.
Its fully explained here http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/8

It can be REALLY frustrating, but even with that ... I would NEVER NEVER go back to a normal hard drive.
Why?
My photoshop opens in 7 seconds, Netbeans (bloated Java IDE) in 10, Windows XP boots in bootcamp in 2 minutes, and OS X is fully loaded in 30 seconds.
So yeah ... you can pry my ssd from my cold, dead, mutilated fingers.

There is a TRIM OS command that allows your OS to basically clean out the space on your hard drive that is marked for deletion while you're not using the computer, so that this problem does not occur, but OS X does not support it ... Windows 7 and Linux are the only OS's I know that do.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/10

The other thing to consider is that SSDs are very fast on sustained writes ... copying a 1GB file from one location to another. However, modern OS'es employ frequent but small writes in their operation ... and certain drives that look good on paper stink up the joint in this department (things have changed recently though, since anandtech called them out on it).

What you want to do when you're looking at specs is find out what the throughput is (MB/s) for writes on 1KB, 4KB pieces of data, and compare it to the sustained write speeds, to see how big the difference is. If you want a shortcut ... buy an intel SSD ... and thank me later.
This can be achieved using trash-cli
This sounds like a great tool for developers who are starting out in git, but it is even better for those familiar to it because it makes our life easier.
Yeah. The comments like that deserve to be voted down for sure. I agree they don't really add anything.

But I do think they are genuine. Since these are all people who just replied to an email that we then compiled into a site, they sorta (kinda) qualify as "impressed 3rd parties".
I was expecting an office webcam and a clothing malfunction, not a titmouse from a webcam I have no clue where it's mounted.

I mean is this out of someones apartment window, is the next screen a bird-splat? Or is this a traffic cam, but if it is why on this puny double-way-road and not a 3-lane highway or on-ramp cam? If this is on a street light, why is it easily 2-stories higher than all the streetlights in the photo.

I'm not so much interested in the bird, but where the heck is this camera mounted?
Why would Intel buy McAfee?
This speaks really strongly to me. This is why I stopped working in the field too. It's not impossible to find an awesome job, but it's also not easy. It's maybe as difficult to find a good job as it is to find a good programmer.
Kind of sad that the pdf looks so terrible compared to the site. Also had to fullscreen chrome on my laptop.

Other than that it is rather interesting that so many new accounts are being created to "praise" the slideshow, I hope it isn't the author/curator who is doing that.
Software for Startups - FreeAgent
I think PG hears a lot about location ("We're the YC of Alaska!", "Do we have to move if we get into YC?") and is getting tired of it. If you want to start a startup, moving to a startup hotspot will help a lot. If you want to attend cool conferences, move somewhere that frequently has cool conferences, or be willing to get on a plane for a good event.

The Midwest won't have a successful Startup School clone (at least not with speakers of this caliber) because it's not dense enough with startup people. Maybe there are enough people to make the event worthwhile in all of the Midwest, but it's such a huge area that a lot of people would still be facing very long drives or flying.

When people say "I want an event like this in <my region>", they really mean "I want an event like this within a 2 hour drive of my house, preferably closer." They don't mean "I live in Ohio and would happily travel to Kansas for this event." If someone were to announce an event like this in, say, Minneapolis, a lot of people form Indiana and Ohio would realize that that's not what they had in mind when they asked for a Startup School clone in the Midwest.

And now PG's invested in a flight comparison startup, so just as people sometimes link to http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/, he can link to Hipmunk to say "just fucking fly here."
Startup Hipmunk offers dazzling new view of flight search
Thanks for the reasonable response regarding the morals.

As far as "beyond simple disagreement", I guess "strenuous disagreement"?

The fans of Rand philosophy seem to hate the idea of union employees striking for dental care for their kids but have no problem attempting to shake down the system if you're already rich. I totally do not understand this.

Similarly, I think the whole "everyone's replaceable" thing is a fundamental part of reality that anyone over the age of 14 should have figured out. I find it ironic when I get told that if I were older and less idealistic, I'd come around to Rand's viewpoint. Seems to me she's the idealist, except it's bizzaro idealism that fetishises selfishness.

Finally, as I said elsewhere in the thread, the novel's viewpoint on leadership clashes pretty strongly with my own viewpoint on leadership. Leadership's not about what's in it for you, it's about what's in it for the group, or else you're a bad leader.
The danger of aliasing the command itself (the bare 'rm') is that you come to count on the safety of the alias. Then you work one day on a friend's or coworker's machine and...BOOM.

What I do instead is make a nearby (and simple) alias. For example:

rmi='rm -i'
Here's some arguments against Ayn Rand's philosophy that aren't exactly shallow: http://noblesoul.com/orc/critics/
IIRC, in the months after the Chernobyl accident, mushrooms in affected areas were concentrating the fallout up to 400 times.
Ugh. No. Don't start doing meds just to get through job interviews. Better yet, don't do them at all (if you can possibly avoid it).

The fact is nobody really knows how they work, and they all have rafts of side effects which their makers are loathe to discuss with you in an upfront and intellectually honest manner. (How do I know this? I worked for one of the larger makers of such drugs).

In any case it's unlikely that you'll be able to predict how they'll affect you on the day of the interview (if they have any affect above placebo at all), and might even make you have greater feelings of anxiety and low self-esteem (as in "I'm so messed up I need pillz just to hack these job interviews).
I was thinking more along the lines of:

<a href="#"><div class="mybutton">Button</div></a>

.mybutton {
padding: 10px 5px;
border: 1px solid black;
background: red;
width: 100px;
text-align: center;
}

Instead of a gradient background and rounded corners, which is still trivial to write by hand.
Good point. I agree that her argument is not the strongest there, but I can't imagine another one that could be any more persuasive, especially if it involved the supernatural or tradition as many do.
To be fair, I can't think of much that wouldn't be painfully slow on a 100Hz CPU.
Some of us aren't doing so fine.

Knowing not to do something is good, but knowing how to do something is far better.
Read Atlas shrugged, liked it, so here are some critical comments.

Galts speech is too drawn out, I skipped over it after 2 pages (it's like 20 pages). Way too much repetition.

Characters are fairly stiff.

For a good month or two after reading I was a selfish shit. In this I think I'm not alone.

It's pretty difficult to find issues with the philosophy espoused in the book, I think the only thing worth criticizing is how poorly it is as a novel (as a political treatise it's a pleasant read).
It sounds like you could do front-end work, maybe a bit more than that but you would most likely still be working with someone that has a bit more experience when the going gets tough. Otoh, who knows...

The best way to find out is to try. One way to hone your skills quickly and mercilessly is to join some open source project that does something interesting and eat your way in to an existing codebase. That'll teach you quicker than any other course. Be prepared for a very steep ascent and fairly ruthless critique by other coders on the project, but that's how you learn fastest if you're open for it.
To Rand, the ultimate measure of one's self worth is how much money you are making vs. how much you could be making.

Rand gave up $0.07/copy in royalties to make sure Galt's speech was included in the book.

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/189415/word-count/nicol...

Roark, in the Fountainhead, also turns down money (and shuts down his company) to preserve his artistic vision.

I really don't know where you got this idea from.
Can't scroll on iPhone.
Good, detailed response.

There is also a certain irony in that Adobe and friends dragging their feet in supporting Cocoa and Apple's latest stuff, was one of the reason why Apple waited so long to drop Cocoa... and now is so allergic to devolve any control of their platform, including to Flash/Adobe. :)

(note: I am not saying this is the _only_ reason, and I am happy to accept there are other reasons. But this definitely didn't help).

Of course porting to Intel first, and to Cocoa later costs a lot of money and men-hours for what is no appreciable difference to the end user (unless they are geeks and therefore know what goes on under the hood). So I don't completely blame them for that: Apple seems to be in a transition every other year!

As for Flash GPU acceleration, the fact that Flash performed so much worse than VLC seemed to already show Adobe wasn't being completely honest. Surely if VLC can, a company like Adobe should have no problem!
I like the idea of choice that's available when you need it, but hidden when you don't. Take Firefox for example. It does a pretty good job of providing features that you need most of the time either in the interface or in the menus.

More advanced options are available in the logical place. Even those are carefully organized in a logical manner. When you select an option in the tools panel, you have a pretty good idea of what will happen.

If you really want to get crazy, though, you can open up about:config and be presented with a huge variety of options, many of which make no sense unless you know what you're doing. It kind of reminds me of the advanced options in Internet Exporer (with Carat Browsing and all), except that it's well-hidden from the average user. Those that need it know where to find it. Those that don't will never stumble on it. I think that setup avoids a lot of what Joel is talking about.
7 “Comforting” Mom Sayings That Really Aren’t
Sometimes, moms just don’t have a clue what they are talking about.
I don't think it's fair to make that criticism if you haven't read the book.

The book is a novel of ideas and is, as such, an abstraction. You should not try to interpret it as a prescription for how society should work.

I think what you're looking for is some sort of political treatise or pamphlet. Atlas Shrugged is an argument about the morality of capitalism. If you are looking for more than that in it you'll be disappointed.

I do recommend you take my advice and read it though... I generally have a policy of reimbursing people in beer for the amount they spend on a paperback version. I'm sure that I or someone else would happily extend that offer :)
Intel just bought Texas Instruments cable modem division so maybe they're looking to make a big push into the CPE market? x86 all-in-one gateways with embedded security & AV scanning perhaps? McAfee has tons of deals with ISPs so this would be a big foot in the door for Intel to push not only IP gateways but other types of set tops too. $7.7B is a big price tag but if my theory is correct you need to look at it in perspective of how many CPE devices are sold per year -- cable modems, routers, set tops. Presently they're all using ARM, PPC or MIPS chips. That's a huge potential growth area for low power x86. Wouldn't surprise me to see Intel pickup Motorola's set top business in the near future.
The dev seems pretty devoted, and also very vocal on his Facebook page at least. There's already an update waiting for review at Apple. Hopefully we're in for some good additions soon.
The problem really is that googling with site:news.ycombinator.com or using Search YC isn't a very good approach.

Using my raising an angel round example again, say you search "raise angel round" http://searchyc.com/raise%20angel%20round. The results suck. There's an Ask HN that could have been good except that it has no responses. There's an article that sounds potentially useful, except that the link no longer works. And then there's also a lot of things like "Tweetdeck raises an angel round." "Posterous raises an angel round." Totally useless in this case.
What if we had taken the bailout money and simply paid the debt directly back, instead of lending it to the lenders, and leaving the original debt still in tact. Wouldn't the companies have been saved as well as the debtors if we had simply paid back the mortages with the bailout money?
I admire your initiative, but "structure" -- at least as you describe it here -- is not a problem. It's a solution to the problem of organizing content. Don't you think?

The question is, are Wikis the best answer to this problem? They're really very good at helping us categorize things that are very differentiable, and very definable. For example: The Hundred Years War make a good article in a wiki. "How to raise angel investors" does not. Instead, people write articles about it, and you take what you want out of them.

Why don't we start with an HN faq, much like the Reddit programming faq [http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/faqs/programming], and if that's successful, we can build from there. My philosophy is: address specifically the problem that you (or someone) has (i.e., "I have questions, and don't know where to begin!"), because spreading out too much or being too ambitious can literally kill a project. Don't take my word for it: the svn guys talk about how those sorts of projects were the "worst" parts of SourceForge: [http://code.google.com/events/io/2009/sessions/MythGeniusPro... <-- somewhere in there]

So let's start with a specific need and address that. Once again, I'd be happy to help you if you elect to go forward, but we need to attack one thing at a time.
Do you have a particular idea that you're looking to implement, or do you just want to do some sort of startup?

If you do have an idea, you should get to work on it ASAP. There is no better time than now. The longer you wait, the more likely it is that someone else is going to implement your idea and execute it well before you even get started.

If you don't have an idea, then finding an idea should be your first step. You can't really focus on picking up certain skills unless you know what you're going to accomplish. On the other hand, if you know you want to do a web application startup, then you should start learning PHP, Ruby on Rails, etc. right now.

Moving is a tough one. Don't discount your network of friends and family in your current city. They provide a lot of support and friendship that you will have to do without while you settle into a new city. If you live in or near a large city you should look for networking events aimed at startups. Startups love to present their product, and it's a great environment for meeting like-minded people. Check LinkedIn for groups in your area.

On the other hand, if you were already looking to move then the change of scenery could be just the thing you need to shake your life up kick you into startup mode. Also, you won't have any pesky friends or social engagements to occupy you for a while after moving, so there's even more time to work on your code. Really, though, you just need to pick a big city that you enjoy and can afford. Definitely visit several cities first and spend some time there before you make a decision.

Most importantly, however, you need to remember that planning and thinking are great, but doing is what gets things done. Focus on doing.
RescueTime was approached by AppSumo (Noah Kagan) and we did it. It's a no-brainer for the participating firms.

SaaS has nearly 100% margins-- the only meaningful cost is people (sunk cost) and customer acquisition (hella crazy hard/expensive once you try to scale beyond WoM).

Being a company that participates in these deals gets you:

1) A bunch of (largely) non-paying users. Maybe you get a few grand in revenue. Meh. But some subset of those will get addicted and will be full price to renew.

2) A ton of links. Hellloooooo SEO.

3) A ton of new people talking about you. Hellooooo word of mouth.

Definitely a great option.
Doesn't work too well on iPhone.

Horizontal - the top and bottom are truncated
Vertical - too small to read
You know that Flash uses ActionScript, a dialect of ECMAScript just like JavaScript, right?
MIT thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1617168
Last year MIT thread - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=860701

West coast 4 life ;)
Sort of off topic question but does anyone know why the second "t" character in the last paragraph is rendering as a "†" (Dagger, U+2020)? Is this part of a digital watermark or something?

"Matt Mireles, the founder and CEO of †he video transcription service SpeakerText"

edit: spelling
What would Darwin say to today's creationists?
Do you have a link to his blog? (It's a hard thing to search for.)
The steam turbine (invented by Hero of Alexandria in the 1st century BC, and improved dramatically since then by Parsons, among others) is a kind of steam engine. With regard to reciprocating steam engines, I don't know of any in current use either, but I would be surprised if there weren't at least a few niche uses.

You are certainly correct about high-pressure steam being essential. Did Watt's patent make it illegal to develop high-pressure steam engines, or just uneconomic?
CS5 (released April 2010) was the first version of the suite that was fully Mac OS X native. (Mac OS X was released March 2001).

By that standard, iTunes still isn't native. Apple always positioned Carbon as a fully supported and native framework. They even promised 64-bit Carbon support in Leopard before yanking the rug out right before it shipped, which no doubt rendered a lot of work by Adobe useless. I would have preferred it if Apple had officially deprecated Carbon many years ago. But instead they kept updating it and saying it was supported; there's no reason to blame Adobe for believing them.

Of course I agree there's plenty of reason to blame Adobe for Flash being a steaming pile on anything other than Windows.
Well, she did say - "Money is the barometer of society's virtue".
Agreed. KDE is full of people who ran away from Gnome when Gnome decided to take away the ability of people to make choices. It's the average v. power user problem - both are important to a platform.
Yes, you can catch the talks on Justin.tv again this year.
Three reasons to switch to Flock
From a technical standpoint Presence lets you slap a web application on top of a physical location/object in order to enable that location with virtual services. There are some examples in the FAQ, however we were thinking it would help to be a bit broad in order to see what users will do with it, instead of suggesting what they can do with it. For example if we say that a restaurant may use it to remotely alert you when your table is ready, people may at the very worst think this is targeted to restaurants and at the very best think its targeted only to businesses.

Being so heavily involved in development for the past months it did not occur to us that people would not be able to figure out what the app does. We will have to find a good way to provide some examples without making the examples restrictive. Thank you.
Yeah, sorry about that. I'll try to fix. Also.. patches accepted! ;-)
The main problem I see here is that, even if a wiki wasn't too nebulous a solution to this problem, it is almost certainly perceived as one. Do you want to keep up Yet Another Wiki(tm)? Because I sure don't.

But besides that, it actually probably is too nebulous a solution. Wikis are great for well-defined, discrete quantities, e.g., Princess Diana. You can define it, tell what happened, etc. How do you do the same for an article like "Raising Angel Investors"? You don't, and hence people write articles about it instead.

In response to a comment by the OP [see below, or http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1618744], I proposed that we simply start by addressing the problem in the most basic terms we can, i.e., an HN faq or thereabouts, much like Reddit's Programming faq [http://code.reddit.com/wiki/help/faqs/programming], but I'm very open to suggestions, and -- as an enthusiastic denizen of this community -- I'm also completely willing to help with the legwork required to make a plan that doesn't suck come to fruition.