skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I stopped reading at "wage-slave". Let's not use language that implies that working for a wage is slavery. Slavery is always forced on you, you have no choice but to work, not because you need to eat, but because the man with the whip says so. It's offensive to compare the situation of a slave and someone who earns a salary.

Slavery is force, not from nature, but from another human being, if you can't see the the distinction between adapting to our environment (sure, we have to eat) and being forced by another human being to work, or die, then sorry, I won't bother reading whatever it is you want me to read.
and don't forget that many jobs aren't asking their holders to use critical thinking or problem solving. they are asking them to learn how to do a task and repeat it over and over again.
Don't do a music startup, even the best ones continue to fail against the legal barriers. It's a graveyard of cool products buried by legal, why go there?
Man, it seems as if the only thing missing is a data bank where you can drop off your hard drive and the bank will store it for you and even lend out free space to others at an interest. Yay virtual currency.
How to hack discipline/motivation?
When things go wrong e.g you quit your job, you messed up something big, a not-so-good bank statement. How do you guys usually keep yourself motivated or disciplined?
1) Thinking is hard. Teaching people to think is harder.

2) You need to know (by rote) an incredible amount of random things to get by in daily life. To be a professional, you need all of them and more, plus an incredible amount of domain-specific knowledge.

If you don't think #2 is correct, try learning an Asian language. Since there are very few similar words, you'll have to learn all of that random crap in the new language and you'll suddenly realize how much school has prepared you for life.

(Asian because it's totally different than European languages. If we were typing in an Asian language, I'd suggest a European language instead.)
I think you're confusing having the power to say something with having the obligation to say it.
looseweightgetlaid.com Like it. Combine it with a dating site: the more weight you lost, the more date connections you get access to.

Or it might be evil.
"Here in the distant future I can just speak to my handheld supercomputer and it shows me exactly what I want."

You've got a Nexus One too? ;-)
Who worked to make $X million dollars and then just stops working? You just work on different things, you never stop working all together.

Actually I think there are plenty of such people out there. But you rarely hear about them, because they have no reason to publicise themselves. Surely someone must be out there, appreciating expensive luxury goods all day long?
Work all the demonstrations and exercises in Kernighan and Pike's Chapter 8 of "The Unix Programming Environment". Less than 60 pages in a friendly large font. You'll be glad you did.
What boring jobs.
Two things.

1. Don't worry about the idea. They tend to change a lot. Pick something that interests you, roll along with it, and if you don't like just move on to a different idea.

2. I'm a college student too. One thing that hasn't been mentioned yet is IP and the University. Talk to your professor about this carefully to make sure that your IP is yours and the University doesn't get any claim, just to alleviate headaches from happening later. In some schools, if you use the college's money or resources to create something they legally can claim a piece of it. Make sure you know about these details before embarking on any business venture.
That's tricky because the whole idea behind daz is to register the 'graph', so the majority of the data consists of artists, bands, song and album titles, dates and connections between those.

It's like a giant network of musical collaboration, hard to give that a 'voice'. It's major use is to find music by bands that are related through one or more members.
Even without an explicit grant, distributing a product includes an implied license to use related patents. So even under an open source license with no specific patent clause, a company would have a hard time releasing something open source, then suing users for patent violations for using that same something. (They might still be able to sue for violating those same patents in other ways.)
But WHY are they trivial? Because we can extract metadata that help us prune the solution pool? And if that's the case for the KNAPSACK problem, does this hold for all such problems?
All that talk and not a single screenshot of what it looked like with the font change.
It occurs to me that the professor is teaching you something. Good people are a dime a dozen. Good ideas are much scarcer.
"a gerbil attacking a tiger"

Very apt description of the SCO vs. IBM law suit, with the predictable result.
Looking at Comp Sci major this Jan. (Provided I finish High School.)

If? Finish high school!

Okay, tough love time: you are not the only person here who things school sucks - you know why? Because school often does indeed suck. But it's not forever. Yes, ideally school should be a great educational platform but yes, sometimes you are stuck with third-rate teachers whose only interest in teaching is to make you memorise stuff.

But guess what: being able to memorise stuff is not a bad skill. Being able to do something that sucks in exchange for a future pay off (doing Comp Sci if that is what you want) is absolutely a good skill.

I don't think anybody here would lack sympathy for your situation, but you can't change your lousy school - you can only change yourself. Try and battle burnout by challenging yourself - The Internet Is Your Friend (tm). If you are being forced to memorise history dates, find a historical novel that deals with the period and read it. If you are forced to memorise math/physics formulas, find some of the great teachers online and work through their material (eg. check out http://blog.mrmeyer.com/ ).

Hang in there. No, all of life is not like that. But, life is what you make it.
In some circumstances - if you're being exploited - it's the appropriate response.
I like the third option quite a bit (though what I was trying to do looked more like the second) but the problem that I'm having moreso than anything is in trying to GET a fastcgi parameter as a variable in my settings.py.

I'll carry this over to SO, as the downvotes suggest that this is not only offtopic, but inappropriately placed altogether, but thanks a million for your insight.
Spying on Spy Satellites
If you want to start a webco and don't code, learn UX
"Right now" is a weird time for US dollar assets. Take a longer-term view and 4% is reasonable.

Incidentally, my savings account in Australia is still paying 4.6%.
GigaOM (telco), kottke (internets), kk's cool tools (DIY), arXiv (science), cluserflock (internets), Smashing Magazine (graphic design)
But Scott Fitzgerald called this out in Gatsby eons ago:
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past."
Wow, this sounds like the screed of a collage freshman who just discovered that the adult world is like, totally fake and shallow, man.
I suppose my point was to challenge your signal-sensing apparatus. The problem of putting signal v. noise on a pedestal is that we take for granted what the shape of good signals looks like.
In the world of high-stakes poker, it is commonly understood that the only way to make a million dollars playing poker is not to want to make a million dollars. If you care about the money, your lizard brain takes over and stops you from taking the risks you need to take. As soon as you see the chips on the table as dollar bills, you're finished. Practically the definition of greatness in poker is the ability to play the same for pennies as you would for millions - as far as the great players are concerned, it's not really money, it's just how you keep score.

I think the OP is making a similar argument about startup founders - if you're emotionally invested in the payoff, your ability to make the right decisions will be impaired. You'll choose smaller markets, less ambitious products, make safer design decisions. You think too much about making money and not enough about growing a business. I think it's no coincidence that the likes of Page and Brin and Zuckerberg never really intended to start businesses. I think it's no accident that Warren Buffett still drives an old Cadillac and lives in his old suburban house.
Thanks. That's exactly what I needed.
Does Daily Scrum Have To Have So Rigid A Structure?
I see daily stand-up meetings ("daily scrums") as a one of the most beneficial practices in SCRUM repertory. Theory says that during the daily scrum each team member should answer three well-known questions.

What I find strange is that theory doesn't leave much room for any discussion during the daily scrums. Discussions should take place during the follow-up meetings, immediately after the daily scrum. In general I agree with this rule. Bigger issues which don't require entire team can be talked through later.

But I think it's much more beneficial for a team if all members are allowed to jump in anytime during the daily scrum to add anything they find helpful ...
I think you missed the point: The poster has a rare opportunity to work with five engineers to attempt to build a company, and he'll even get class credit. He could just fake it and do some dumb proposal, or he could take it seriously. Asking advice of domain experts (hahaha) sounds absolutely sensible.
Coincidentally, I've got a great idea, I'm going to be moving to Fort Collins in about a two months and was going to start recruiting developers.

I'd love to get in touch with you to see if there's a fit. Is there a good way to exchange contact info on HN without publishing it to the wider world?
Being able to ask for help when you're down is also a good skill. I think you'll do fine.
As a programmer who didn't take the compiler class in school, what's the best way to go about learning what it takes to write one? A book recommendation? Find a CS dept nearby and take the class?
Adobe chief Shantanu Narayen believes he doesn't need Apple or the iPad
I do speak in very, very general terms here.

But I think you can still extract valuable insights if you're careful and you qualify these abstractions. It could be useful to analyze what the nature of an HN signal is? Could be very-low on argumentative properties. And very high on objective, factual properties. This could be good. But it could be a mistake then to presume that this is a 'forum' in which discursive/argumentative qualities are usually a bit more flexibly welcomed, etc.
Distributed, decentralized, redundant, encrypted online file storage with the ability to share information with specific groups and individuals.

From the user standpoint, a user would access their content primarily through client software that would ask for their id & password (or perform other authentication). The authentication process fetches a small file from the network and decrypts it using the user's identification. That file then acts as a key to find and access the rest of the user's content in the network.

From a network standpoint, every client system has access to an amount of data proportional to the amount it's willing to store for the network. Data stored on the network is chunked down, encrypted, and stored on multiple nodes. Piecing together encrypted data without being able to read the contents of a user's index file should be considered Very Hard.

Something along these lines could really change the computer industry, and I think it's within the realm of possibility for a university and 5 CS majors, if they're sharp and motivated to work on it.
I don't think this question is relevant. If the last hop is wireless, the entire network is classified as "wireless" and exempted from regulation.
I came to the same conclusion when I consolodated into a 30 year loan. Since my loan doesn't grow much faster than inflation (if any), I won't save much by paying it early, and the monthly payment will seem smaller every year.
The 9% success rate is uncannily similar to the music business success rate with major artists. It's long been known that's a 1-in-10 business.

Strangely, within the music business the independent small labels can frequently achieve 1-in-3 rates. Why? Because when they fail they fail small, it didn't cost them a great deal. So they don't need a great deal to recoup those losses. Amongst the indies it's perfectly fine to have a sleeper (slow but constantly selling) album... they're hits still as they recoup their cost x5 which makes money for everyone involved.

To me, angels are closer to the indies and VCs are closer to the major labels. So you've got to ask yourself, is your venture the next big pop/rock act? Or are you the arty, experimental and original new band with limited appeal but with staying power?
"The odds of getting funded are lower for single founder startups"

That's actually encouraging! who does not like a challenge. And does that mean that when single founder startups do get funded is because they have better chances or just a better product/idea/execution?
999 business ideas, courtesy of Seth Godin and his folks.

http://www.sixmonthmba.com/2009/02/999ideas.html
I'm a single founder (thathigh.com and footprintanalytics.com). Bootstrapped, I've never taken outside money.

Don't pigeonhole yourself into YC. If you get rejected, so what? In fact, why not just build what you planned on building now, in your spare time?

YC will help immensely, to be sure. But it's by NO MEANS a requirement to be successful.
Here are some images and information I found on these types of units.

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/services/telecom/solution/subm...

http://global.mitsubishielectric.com/bu/communication/transm...

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6809934.html

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

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6534712.html

http://www.techcentral.co.za/aboard-the-ship-that-keeps-sa-c...
By default I shudder reading any article that suggests that a ustom font is a smart UI choice for web apps.

Almost without exception, custom font choices lead to broken designs, slow serving, and work against clean UI.

But this article fairly balances the joy of selecting a custom font, with the sheer litany of issues that come with proper integration: compatibility, hosting, licensing, sizing, etc.
"But I think you can still extract valuable insights if you're careful and you qualify these abstractions."

Err, yes, but were you planning on offering any such careful qualifications? I can't explain your ideas to you.
I think most people get mortgages so they have space for their families, not space for their stuff.
Hm. Do you ever invest into self-proclaimed bootstrappers? I was under impression that you don't.

In fact, here's what I remember you told me: "yours looks like a micro-isv in the making, not a startup in the common sense". I took it to mean that you invest into people going after larger markets (which imho requires being able to utilize capital - the antithesis of boostrapping), and specifically avoid people going after smaller niches capable of sustaining only a small group of one founder and a couple of hired employees.

It would help if you clarified that.
There's Felix Dennis: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyefDseVCZk

I'm not sure how many luxury goods he consumes, but he does write good startup poetry: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/404957/money.txt
Couldn't agree more, that's why I am a computer engineer :P
I think a critical question to ask yourself is 'why do I choose to go at it alone'? As you venture forward the skills necessary to succeed will increase both in depth and in scope. Being your own lawyer, accountant, marketer, engineer, designer, PR, advertising, support, HR ... will be very challenging. Having that trusted partner to balance the load and give a sanity check is important.
I have a friend who has done some really neat stuff with Modern Perl. I think that is the perfect name since it seems to be just using modern methods of development with Perl.

So, here is a serious question for the Perl geeks though:

Is Modern Perl basically TMTOWTDI falling out of favor? It seems like the article is saying "This is probably a better way" (TIPABW?)
Dear HN, save my life too 
I'm not sure it's the best place to explain my problem, but I've seen similar posts on HN, and these posts got a lot of interesting replies, so I give it a shot.

Here's my problem : I smell.
Ho maybe you think it's funny, smelling sometimes happens, you know, you do some sport, you sweat, then you smell. And that's perfectly fine. Unless it happens even when you don't do sport.

That's my problem, I smell and I don't need to run 30 miles for that.
The strange part is, it only happens when I'm not comfortable in social situations, for example at work, but I don't smell if I'm at a bar with friends or alone at my house.

And because of that, my social life is quite terrible.
Imagine for a moment that you smell, and you have to go to work, and all you can think during you work-time is how bad you must smell, and how eager you are that the day finally end so you won't hear your coworkers sniff all the time around you.

You can't concentrate, you can't study anything, the only thing in your mind is how bad you smell, and the more you think of it, the more you smell because you're more stressed.

How can you go to a classroom, a conference, a movie, or simply enjoy life when you are so ashamed of ruining people's comfort ?

Picture yourself trying to learn some maths in a maths course, and the only thing you could think of is how to hide your own odour. When the course end, you don't have learned anything.

Actually I can't pinpoint the source of the smell on my body, but I noticed that at the end of the day, if I press my nose or try to smell the mucus (yeah that's not very sexy), it smells bad.
I did a sinus scan, a dentist check, went to the ENT and everything seems ok.

I think the problem is psychological, although the smell is real (some studies show that some people believe that they smell when they don't but that's not my case, I know that I do).

Do pheromones actually exist in humans ?
Is it possible that I smell when I'm stressed because it's a kind of defense mechanics ?

I don't think people realize how bad it actually is.
When you're ugly, or disabled, you could still have a social life (I'm not saying that I would rather be disabled, you need a lot of courage to have a "normal" life while disabled), but I least you could get support.
Who support you if you smell ? Nobody. People assume you don't bath (my hygiene is probably better than most people's), and you're just "the smelly one". People don't have compassion for you. You don't bond with other people and everybody knows that in the end, the only thing that counts is social relationships.

Please HN, please, help me.

I couldn't find help on the internet, I wrote that thread like a message in a bottle (and I'm so ashamed that I used a throw away account and Tor, just in case), and I hope that maybe someone here could give me useful informations or advices, because I know that comments here often give new perspectives.

And if you don't have any advices, you could still discuss about the fact that people with a strong body odour are discriminated.

Dear fellow hackers, please help me.
A technologist is speculating on the future and possibilities of technology, it's nothing to be an alarmist about.
Hierarchy of needs: air, food, shelter. If you live in the USA and want food and shelter, you cannot get it without paying the man taxes. Even if you own your own land, you must pay taxes on it.

The counter argument (that one could be a homeless person), is no more useful than pointing out that a slave could choose to die: yes a hard choice, but a choice non the less.

So the creation of a tax system, whereby a person is forced to pay taxes, a percentage of which goes to the rich that hold government debt, is a system where everyone is forced to work by men with guns. That's slavery.

But you can believe that you're not a slave just because there are slaves, or have been slaves, who have even less choices than you do.
Hulu Is Not Ready To Go Public
Give those "just" $36M to me. Thx.
Tapping into Distributed Erlang from Rails
If they relaunched it I might use it for retro charm.
Why would they use an image to show the fonts? Don't they offer a product that allows you to embed fonts? I tried interacting with the text (e.g. selecting it) and ended up dragging an image file around.
He did do that, he "took" Red Hat Enterprise Linux software source code, recompiled it, called "unbreakable Linux" and proceeded to undercut Red Hat in support pricing.

By most accounts, it's an unmitigated disaster. I think they sold like the first reference sales and then trickled to almost nothing. They still use the term "unbreakable Linux" but there is no OS product marketed around it anymore.

Sometimes people don't like the cheaper knockoffs.
Thanks for the break down. I've been intrigued by this opportunity for the past two years. Even purchased Localfindr.com in hopes of doing something about it but never developed the concept further in my head.

Definitely a sector to watch!
AppNowGo is stunningly amazing. I played around for about 15 minutes and built a simple app to keep track of my textbook sales. It's like Wufoo on steroids with a dash of Smartsheet.

Suggestion: add support for select APIs. For example, you could let creators add a button for submitting a book as an Amazon listing. You could also support the twitter api and let creators pull in tweets into their applications.

I see a ton of potential here. Just my $0.02.
it's a gorgeous infographic but the gloss hides some questionable underlying data - any metric which suggests the UK is less "politically stable" than Italy, for example, is very difficult to take seriously.
Statsmanship: Failure Through Analytics Sabotage
It can be done, your odds at succeeding are just (far) lower. A 2 person startup has 120h a week. You only 60h. Besides you can't possibly unify the required skills in one person.

In summary; I wouldn't do it. I speak from experience, I'm running a one person startup now.
Yes the investment from YC is not much, and that is exactly why I would like to use it for anything that makes my startup successful and nothing else.

I think you're missing the point of YC if the only reason you're hesitant to bring on co-founders is to keep down living expenses deducted from initial YC funding. I'm sure PG might correct me if I'm wrong, but the philosophy of YC is that it's the founders themselves which determine a startup's chances of success. It's not saving a few thousand dollars on living expenses. You should be focused on getting your startup what it needs to be successful, and that's the right people first, money second, if at all. Of all the things YC provides the funding is probably the least significant thing influencing a startup's possible success.
Ask HN: Resource for responsible exchange of ideas?
Dear Hackers,

I'm sure many of you have come across this situation where you have a brilliant (or just cute) product idea in your head, which is probably worth something to someone, but you really don't have the time to pursue it.

On the other hand, you want to make sure your idea is treated well: it is well understood, critiqued and evaluated; and should someone take up the idea, due credit it given and development updates are made available.

In other words, just blogging about or posting a web app idea to Reddit is probably not the way to go. Is there a solution to this?
Beware the trappings of liquidation preference