skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A business just surviving and a business that is successful is two totally different scenarios. You can be surviving for 5yrs, marginally profitable for 5 yrs but still find yourself in huge debt, paying off your credit cards and other loans. Many people quit at this point even though the business is not bankrupt but it is just not what they envisioned and then realize 5yrs have gone by. If the US census calculated those people in business for 5yrs or more making over a certain amount of money, then u would get a clearer picture. There is a lot of grey in that 50% number. You also find some entrepreneurs struggling to make that leap from being just profitable or break even to being really successful, they just hover around that barely profitable point for yrs unable to make the leap, then realize yrs down the line that they could have been in a much better position in a 9 to 5 job.

In the trading industry, they say that only 5% of traders are successful and of that 5% only 1% make enough to call themselves wealthy.....that is why George Soros can make $500mill a year or $1bill in the 1992 British pound trade, or Ken Griffith buying a $60mill dollar painting and giving it to a museum. Many traders will say that number is higher but you find many traders who hover around that break even point unable to make the leap.

Look at the sporting industry, how many kids want to be star athletes and how many make it, then when u look at those that make it to college level, more drop off unable to make the leap. Then of those that go pro, there will only be a handful that will be stars, like Kobe.

So i guess its not about just making it, its about making the leap from borderline success to real success that separates the men from the boys. Since if u are just borderline you will never be happy and you will eventually burn out.
I can't see any images. Have they been taken down?
How Two Guys With No Business Experience Now Compete With The Big Dogs In Town
I did this a long time ago, almost the exact same thing, but I actually parsed trending topics and searched Amazon for ANY product, not just books, based on the content of the trending topic. I started out with books, but moved on to all products. It was a cool project and netted me some cash but not worth carrying on so I dumped it about a year ago.

Was actually incredibly easy to do. I'm sure there are loads more out there.
Hi Mike,

HN is the best response I've received compared to any of the other sites that this link was submitted to, to include Reddit and Digg. Two thoughts come to mind:

1. HN is where we just saw a thread where users posted about the most unethical things they've done to get a startup off the ground.

2. I think that many HNers could relate to me. I was a broke, down-and-out geek/hacker-type that came up with an idea and took it on for the technical challenge. And, hey, I made a few dollars off of it, too.
Either pretty definitive isn't as definitive as all that, or I'm a complete aberration.

I genuinely prefer reading text on an active, high contrast display (monitor, ipad) rather than a passive, low contrast display (physical books, e-ink).

I find the sharp edges of a monitor's display very relaxing after reading an actual book.
Which 3 Web Developers Would you Like to Spend a Day With and Why?
The Etymology of Boilerplate is fascinating. Imagine receiving a press release on a piece of steel plate so that you could put it right onto the presses. Neat-o!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boilerplate_(text)#Etymology
I know "great comment" comments are silly, especially in a vote-based comment system, but seriously, great comment. Very instructive.
See also less vs. fewer.
The image links to Amazon with what looks like a referral id in the URL if you want to kick him back a finders fee.
Court relieves Verizon from consequences of $1.67 billion drafting mistake
Fred Wilson's vision of a family CRM service
Cool. So it's ok for me to abuse any services you launch in future, costing you money for my own personal financial gain? Sweet.
Can someone remind me why Google didn't buy Sun when it was on the market? The culture seems like it would have been a relatively good fit and their use of Java related technologies (obviously now) would have made ownership of those technologies useful.

Had they bought Sun and then sold off the hardware side of the business they would have bought a lot of solid engineers and IP.
Interesting discussion tactic. Your argument is almost entirely an attack on me (first that I have a "reputation", which is a laugh, and then that I bizarrely mistook your very clear statement), and then after making your point you leave off claiming that this is it, you're sure that I'll just attack you.

That people actually fell for that blend of trolling, actually up-arrowing, is a sad indictment of Hacker News. I was sure everyone was pretty accustomed to that cheap tactic by now.
1) Weird placement for input.
2) Not much different from omegle, which attracted lot's of spammers.
3) Bit slow.
There are several here for <$50:

http://www.dealextreme.com/products.dx/category.808~search.m...
they're acting as their own simple bank. you give them money, they give you a debit card and a slick UI to track your money.

when you give them money, they give it to another bank, who they have probably negotiated some sort of deal with. banksimple gets a decent kickback on deposits or debit card transactions in exchange for dealing with everything from fees to customer service.

or at least, thats what it sounds like based on what i've read
They'd have to do internationalisation in some places instead. (couldn't resist...)
Students’ Understanding Of The Equal Sign Not Equal
Having used both Kindles and iPads to read things, I don't understand how people can think it's such a clear choice (see comments, etc of article)

It honestly feels like the "kindle is awesome" side of the clearly made up their mind people have some amounts of vision trouble which has gone uncorrected. I don't understand at a slightest, the feeling they're talking about, nor do several of the iPad owners of various ages I've talked to.

It honestly feels like the "iPad is a clearly superior reading device" group don't ever walk into the sun though. Honestly, even with the contrast controls, that shiny screen gets you in troubles in sunlight heavy situations. And really many don't get that the kindle is meant to be used the same places books are? So many people seem to not understand you need just as much light to use it then complain about the lack of light.
Apple Retina Display: Under the microscope comparisons with 1G and 3G:

http://prometheus.med.utah.edu/~bwjones/2010/06/apple-retina...

Discussion:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1461213
I agree - what I'm saying is that people in the blogosphere and twitterverse seem to flail between the extremes all too quickly, rather than letting things take their course. It feels like people are going to declare "Well, that's that, then." and move on to other things despite there still being much to mine, and potentially results still to find.

Perhaps that would be a good thing. Let the experts work on it carefully, calmly and quietly without being constantly harried by the kibitzers demanding definite answers.
But does Google get any money from handset sales?
Facebook Launching Official Live Streaming Channel: Facebook Live
I believe that was the purpose of the GPL3. You know, the one that nobody uses because it is too draconian.
As a linguist, I can say resolutely that your prescriptivism is basically pounding your fists against the immovable brick wall of change. All types of case are rapidly disappearing from English. It's a continuing trend and has been for hundreds of years. The ambiguity generated is a trade-off people make for a variety of conveniences, let alone to fit in.

The subjunctive mood is basically gone from practiced speech, too. None of it is terribly worth lamenting.

In fact, changing it to "whom" would do nothing more than alienate its large-scale market, who aren't all leather elbow pads and Strunk & White, but rather real people who exercise language outside of the confines of a book report.

Sorry, dude. It's just not worth getting bent out of shape about.
Ask HN: What's your reason for doing a startup? Money/Independance/Technology?
What moves you to bootstrap your starup up?

Is it money?
The feeling of working for yourself?
Want to shape the world?
Prove yourself you did it?
Impress others?
Other reason?

Seriously, at several points in my life, the reasons to bootstrap a startup have been different, and would like to know what your reason is.

Thanks a lot
Given that there already is an official distinction between "American English" and "British English", I don't think your comment is very correct. It might be just another rule to add (actually remove) in the A.E. schoolbooks.

Languages evolve. If enough people drop "whom" in America, arguing about this change would be like arguing about whether sweets or candy is "correct".
Very cool. I hadn't thought of seeding the recommendations with trending topics. What kind of conversion rate did you get?
I sat at the top of the tower in hong kong and looked out over the bay. The bed I sat on was expensive, the writing pad on the desk was made of heavy expensive paper.

groan...
law of large numbers. At 100 million customers, just about any conceivable thing that can happen will happen.
I never bought into the whole "do no evil" bit, but I sure got sick of dealing with the army of people who did.
"RIM's support for J2ME [...]"

The gist of the matter is right there. Since RIM supports J2ME, it means they have paid Sun, now Oracle for a J2ME license. That was one of the things that Google bypassed by writing their own implementation.

See this comment on the other discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1599834
First, you don't need `w/uniq' in Racket - hygenic macros do that for you automatically. Here's `swap' in Racket:

(define-syntax-rule (swap a b)
(let ([tmp a]) (set! a b) (set! b tmp)))

But if you wanted to implement it, here's an easy way to do it in the same module

(define-syntax (swap stx)
(define-syntax (w/uniq stx) ...)
(syntax-parse stx
[(swap a b) ...]))

That said, the fact that you can't define macros to be used in macros in the same file can be annoying, and is something that we plan to add to the language.
If you're feeling unhappy even when successful that means, there are issues you need to work on, could be childhood trauma, child abuse, etc.

I went through the same thing and could not figure out why I w as feeling like shit when I was making tons of money.

Ultimately found the reason.

Started going to a ---> --Gestalt-- Psychologist therapist, It's been over a year and it has changed my life enormously. Discovered I had resentment against my parents for many many reasons, worked on that and feel happier than ever.

Give it a shot
Bringing Mozilla Firefox to MeeGo and Android
Wow, great idea with the Search engine. Hopefully it can stay around for a while.

I've got a C & H fan site up at http://dontknockmysmock.com. It gets pretty low traffic and so far I haven't gotten any notice to take it down.
The mentor in the story is most likely many different people or the man Max Klein would like to be in his life. If they are many different people, he just rolled them all into one for story telling.

I can't see how someone who purposefully picks fights could be considered a valuable mentor though.
Do people actually use Tor, day to day?
Steve Jobs must be laughing from his evil genius lair about this. You know, two dogs fighter over a bone and stuff ...
The vast majority do, except when the word is preceded by a preposition. E,g:

"Who is it addressed to?" versus "To whom is it addressed?"
This still doesn't make it a dialect though :) Sorry, but it just annoys me to see American English fanatics say how British English is "wrong", or a "dialect" of American English when it was the original base of American English to start with :)

I do agree with you, languages evolve. But that doesn't mean we should just drop grammar altogether. I was a little snappy in my original response, and I apologise for that, but the sentiment is still the same.
Yes. Shitloads.
So why didn't they just use the open source version?
Yea I read my computer screen almost 18 hours a day, and I don't get eyestrain either.
While the non-experts did get excited early on, I haven't observed any flailing between extremes on the blogs of the computational complexity theorists I follow (R.J. Lipton and Scott Aaronson). Initially, Lipton seemed neutral, and Aaronson was skeptical. Since then, I've seen the dial on Lipton's blog move steadily towards "nothing to see here, move along".

I personally agree with those who believe that the draft is too disorganized to warrant further study by experts. If the author had used the traditional definition/proof/lemma style, the problems that have been pointed out so far would have been immediately visible, rather taking the experts days to untangle. [edit: For example, John Harrison, the author of the HOL Light proof-checking system, wrote on August 10: "As far as I can tell, nobody’s quite managed to work out what exactly the statistical property of k-SAT he’s using is." http://scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=456#comment-44852]

I don't mean this as a critique of the Deolalikar himself, but I do think he sent out his draft too soon.
> A. If you are paying a monthly fee, what difference does it make if that fee is called a hosting cost or a retainer?

I have more latitude when I put the pieces together: hosting here, retainer there.

> C. If you only pay your experts when there is an emergency, there is no incentive for anyone to help you avoid having emergencies

That's a fair point, but on the other hand, it also seems that if you're paying an 'expert surcharge' on your hosting, your incentive is to get as much out of that as possible, whereas the experts, getting a flat fee, can't act as de-facto consultants without eating up all their margins that way. There's something of a conflict there. How do you guys define exactly what your role is?

Also, presumably someone is developing the code to be hosted there. The better they are, the more likely it is that they'll be able to do a good deployment and monitor it on an ongoing basis.
It's the same for all the other Resume 2.0 adjectives.

http://unsuck-it.com/ninja/
http://unsuck-it.com/superhero/
http://unsuck-it.com/wizard/
"3.6x" math is not accurate. If I have time, I'll write a longer explanation (full disclosure - I'm a partner at a VC firm). Short version - returns are calculated from the moment of investment to the moment of exit, so getting a 2x in 1 year is a 100% IRR. You do not spread it out over 10 years. LPs get their money back and deploy it in other asset classes, so the return clock for those dollars has stopped.

Yes, management fees go out every year (at least for the first five or so years), so that works against short holds, but for the most part a fast exit is never a bad thing, unless the cash on cash multiple is really low.

There's a tension in both funds and LPs as to which metric is more important, IRR (which rewards fast exits, even at low multiples) or multiple of invested capital (which rewards holding out for more cash out, even if it takes a lot longer). GPs generally have an incentive for the latter. LPs sometimes prefer the former.

To the original author, if you're a HN reader - most people, myself included, would happily share our perspective as fund managers. It would have been worthwhile for you to do so, before you posted the blog post. Understanding fund economics is definitely a good thing for entrepreneurs, and I applaud those like Fred Wilson that have tried to make it more transparent, but don't count on blog posts from Fred or others to fill in all the gaps; go out and ask some people yourself.
I dont actively follow the rails communitee so maybe what i heard was a while back. I know rails and ruby in general are becoming probably the most actively developed communitee in relation to other languages frameworks. So as you say many of the issues are being resolved very quickly and effeciently.

Im not the biggest fan of rails, i kind of like padrino actually, however i do like ruby and have found some very cool people within the communitee.
Michael Nielsen is working on a new book called "Reinventing Discovery" which I very much hope is a step in this direction.

http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/michael-a-nielsen/

At any rate, the folks on PatientsLikeMe.com are sharing, and they have results to show for it:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_heywood_the_big_idea_my_broth...

Really inspiring stuff, because I assure you that the folks participating in these programs do not consider themselves hackers OR radicals.
Yup, seems to be a lot of listeners eager and not a lot of complainers. I did my best to complain for a while, but eventually got sick of it. Actually, might go back and complain about that.
If you're at all like me, you might end up being very discontented at every job you go to, especially when you see things that are obviously being done wrong, and you do not have the power to change them.
The only issue so far ive seen is that there arent any rails/ruby sites that have complex interfaces. Twitter is barebones. ONce theres a site that has heavy traffic and a more complicated interface its possible the perspetion of the technology will change.
I don't want to repeat myself, but see my comment for links.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1600965
Shitloads of spammers.
Truth or Consequences (Eric Schmidt)
Now compare the iPad display with one of a PSP, then a TV, a CRT, an LCD, an XRAY film, a Chess board, a canvas, etc.

That's what I use the iPad for.
How does Merb compare to Padrino? Any ideas? Besides Merb being part of Rails now.
In hindsight, it might have been cheaper to buy them outright than to litigate a battle like this. Then again, they're going to have some undisclosed settlement, so we'll never really know how it ends up.

I'm guessing they didn't buy them because of the business they were in. Selling workstations + Solaris was only part of their business. I think the services part of their work was bringing in more money towards the end. As far as I'm aware, Google doesn't do much in the services realm, which probably factored big into their decision not to buy.
Delighted to see our local university (Newcastle, UK) feature on HN!
Umm, stop orders?
Ask HN: Selling iPhone game source code for $100 USD. Anyone insterested?
I am selling the non exclusive source code of a Flight control like game.

You can read about it in.

It is a great starter for anyone wishing to enter the iPhone App store, you will learn a lot.

http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/missile-o-mine-defender/id338323991?mt=8

I you want the full exclusive rights, that is possible

Contact me at jimmy@inodesoft.com for further info
That's great, too bad I can't run this for my own sites because a bunch of idiot network admins (like those running IRC servers) will ban all traffic from Tor exit nodes without taking into account exit policies.
> Google has always been known for their lofty ideals ...

Notice you said "they are _known_ for their lofty ideals" it doesn't mean they live by their ideals.

> They are the company you can trust to walk away from billions...

If they already make hundreds of billions, walking away from 1 billion doesn't seem that bad in exchange for a PR win and more billions comming in the future.

> We saw that in their interactions with China. We saw that when they owned up to the data they accidentally collected driving down the street. We saw that when they changed their rules to make it harder for spammers to put adsense on temporary landing pages.

My personal measure for company idealism is this : "the amount of revenue (both long and short term) they are willing to give up in order to abide by their ideals". Was China a major market for them? No. They raised a PR stink only after they realized it was lost cause and they might as well drum up some PR points for it. Then capturing of too much private data -- well, if it was a lawsuit coming because somone could have leaked it, there's not much idealism at work there as damage control. Changing their rules to block spammers -- also just trying to cut out the irrelevant noise, to make their ads more focused.

> I've been a Google fan boy for a long time but this week they lost my respect.

I have set asside my respect for Google after their IPO. Not because they did anything wrong, but because I knew it would come to this. Don't get me wrong, they are still a good money making machine, but that's all they are -- a big friggin' money making machine. Google doesn't have a soul, it doesn't have a moral sense, it is here to make money. If it stops making money it wil vanish. If telling people you are "good and not evil" makes money, they'll tell people that, if getting in bed with Verizon makes them money -- so be it.

I for one, don't blame Google. They are just now performing according to my expectations and behaving like a large, publically owned company should behave. I am still baffled at the large number of intelligent and rational individuals who have been misled by Google's PR over these years.
Hi there,

That's a great idea. I hadn't thought about plugging it into a bulletin board system, but did think about trying to plug it into facebook. A recommendation engine plugin for phpbb, etc could definitely make the forum operator some additional revenue.
https://www.torproject.org/faq-abuse.html.en#WhatAboutSpamme...
Oracle is sending a very clear message every programmer, young and old.

"If you use Java to make something valuable, we're gonna sue the crap out of you".

This will have long term consequences for Oracle.
I thought we were supposed to use java instead of c# to avoid getting into the this exact situation :-S
The Twitter goldmine
You could dedicate an IP specifically for Tor?
Why Twitter’s Launch of Tweet Buttons is Not the big story [Hint: it's DataSift]
This might help with people who are fence setting between the Android/iPhone app realm and the python GAE and Java GAE stacks. Sounds like Oracle is every bit as what was expected by the MySQL people.
On my suburban street, without sidewalks, the pedestrians and children playing own the street nearly as much as the cars - the traffic is sparse, and there are stop signs on just about every corner. The kid's games are suspended to allow cars to pass. There are pedestrians; I'm not enough of a connoisseur to know if they're "walking" ;-).
We need to change how we think about our errors (in life)
Yes, but that requires paying extra for a dedicated IP just for that.
Here's my idea... I've been trying to get to this conference for a few years now, can't afford it. How about I get a ticket and then I'll pay it back and when I can, I also do a write up about http://www.businessofsoftware.org on my blog at http://austintechgeeks.com and finally I'll keep attending the conference and supporting it on any way possible.

best r.
Oracle Sues Google over Android OS
It seems like a good approach. The only thing that throws me off is the two columns with tabs; which tabs go where seems arbitrary to me (but maybe it's not and I just don't know that). I wonder if it would work to split it between the types of channels, with one column for social/submitted/aggregated news (Digg, Slashdot, HN) and another for the primary sources.
Why the future is bright and stealing from Microsoft is not that bad
Some things I learned from game theory and meant to summarize since a long time.