skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I meditate a couple of times a day, as needed, for about thirty minutes.

I generally use it as a refocusing process. Whenever I feel discouraged, overwhelmed, apathetic, or like my head will explode if I can't get this button to render properly in Firefox, I stop, sit in my Big Comfy Chair, and focus on breathing. Usually I count to a certain number with each inhalation and backwards to zero with each exhalation. Sometimes I focus my mind's eye (and other mental senses) on a simple object like a piece of modeling clay or a pebble. Often I do both by visualizing varying quantities of an object (one pebble, two pebbles, three pebbles…). I used to listen to music (something in the vein of either Bach or Tangerine Dream), but now I just absorb the ambient noise.

Usually, after twenty or thirty minutes, the irritant is no longer an irritant, and I'm eager to resume my work. Once in a while, an idea or a solution to a problem will surface. (Maybe this is because the din of compulsive thought drowns out subconscious thought.)

And even though it's not technically meditation, I have found mindfulness — or at least not staring at a glowing rectangle every second — to be helpful. Instead of compulsively pulling out my phone when I'm waiting for someone, I attend to my surroundings. Instead of listening to podcasts when I walk, I listen to the traffic. Instead of ploughing through RSS feeds when I eat lunch, I enjoy the food — or maybe even speak to another human. Basically, less doing and more being. The irony is that the less information I engorge, the less guilt I felt that I'm missing something.

So it is absolutely worth it. Especially if you make concomitant changes to your habits to reduce digital ADD.
That's exactly what he expects them to accomplish: a lot of junk.

The thing is, junk that exists is much better at convincing top-notch coders to join than vaporware that doesn't. It shows them you're serious. More to the point, a good coder will instantly pick out a dozen ways in which your prototype sucks, and want to make them better. Because that's something virtually all top-notch software engineers I've met share: the urge to make something, once they've seen it, as good as it possibly could be. If they can't see it, they have nothing to work with. If they can, you might be able to snag them.
In the end, the goal is not necessarily to make you want to go see the movie from this campaign, but to have a greater mindshare when people show up at the box office and want to see a horror movie.
These gardening cushions are great to use as laptop desks.

http://www.amazon.com/Fiskars-9421-Kneeling-Cushion-Colors/d...
Key ödeme isim listesi 2010
Would be interesting to find out more.
Ask HN: How did you meet your cofounder?
For those of you working on a startup, how did you meet your cofounder? Did it work out? How would you recommend someone in the early stages of a startup find a trustworthy cofounder?

There seem to be two conflicting types of advice. Some say to work with a good friend, someone you already know and trust. Others say to never work with your friends because if you fail, and chances are you will, then you lose both the business and the friendship. What do you think?
Retrocomputing: Clay Tablets.
Interesting, I didn't know the proper definition until now, either. I doubt Paul realizes it.
I downloaded the latest nightly build (2568) and found the new tab feature. It looks promising. However, I really like the way MySQL Query Browser creates new script/query tabs sharing the same session (http://cl.ly/4c353b77cac746d51698). It's more convenient to have multiple query tabs that can be quickly created, switched to or closed down, then having to create a new connection every time for a new tab.

PS: also the shortcuts to switch between tabs weren't working for me.
The observation that junior officers are closer to the situation and better equipped to make immediate tactical decisions than senior officers who are at the rear can, almost word-for-word, be used to describe how to manage programmers.
Have you already contacted everyone you know? Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. You never know who might know somebody else. I've seen a lot of good connections happen this way. Even if you aren't connected to that many people in the Bay area, once you go out a couple degrees on your network, you might be.

The best part is the connection can come with a recommendation as well.
You should also read the wikipedia page on 'Weather Forecasting' while you're there. Or consider if you can predict whether the upcoming December in the Northern hemisphere might be colder than this last July.
If you can pay a modest salary and the idea is good, you probably won't have that hard of a time finding a good programmer. If you can't find a good programmer within a few months, it might mean the idea isn't as good as you think.
Blogger beware: Postings can lead to lawsuits
Advice like this baffles me. Everyone says you need to find a cofounder with skills that are complementary to yours who can compensate for your weaknesses with his skills.

If the OP is good at the business side, let him focus on the business parts and find someone who's good at the technical stuff. Dealing with the mundane business stuff, marketing, raising capital, etc is very valuable and eliminates potentially massive distraction for the technical cofounder.

Business is selling, so if he's any good at it he'll be able to sell himself and his idea to a cofounder without writing a single line of code.
I don't think you can assume that anyone who's never coded can build even junk good enough to attract a programming co-founder in a few weeks of reading their first programming book. Some can, but surely not all.

My suggestion would be to build a clickable wireframe/mockup using Balsamiq, Flash Catalyst or whatever. That is something a non-technical guy can feasibly accomplish, and it will distill their ideas down quickly and it will be instantly shareable online with potential partners.
come up with a price and ask a bunch of people if they'll pay it
Guys, I think this might as well work! Agreed?
Incidentally, the whistleblower protection bill was passed barely a week ago: http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/article560731.ece

The place to lodge all such complaints is http://cvc.nic.in/lodgecomp.htm

I would'nt be surprised if this law was invoked during the legal defense.
Why a Career in Computer Programming Sucks
The article starts with: "The problem is obvious: it’s hard to launch a startup"

Really? Seems contradictory to what I see & read elsewhere.
My personal thoughts on this: For smart, generally capable people (ie, the people who actually become programmers), programming is a mildly bad but not terrible career. You make a decent salary, you can fairly easily find a new job in any major US city, and you don't have to wear a suit or do anything really dangerous or physically taxing. On the other hand, the upward mobility is quite low, the salary will never really be great, and you get little respect or social status (if you care about that).
It's somewhat ungainly, but one way to think about this is that "static" means "it stays here".

In a function: the value of the variable stays with the function, i.e. it doesn't change between calls.

In a class: the value of the variable stays with the class, i.e. it doesn't change with the creation of new objects.

In a file: the value of the variable stays within the file, i.e. it can't be changed (or seen) from outside the file.
Think, Try, Learn: A scientific method for discovering happiness
My method for getting a great coder even though you can't evaluate coding skills -

Hire a great coder to HELP YOU INTERVIEW. Find a great coder who's work you respect, who is currently employed and not looking to leave his position. PAY HIM his going rate to help assess your candidates.

Find candidates through local meetups, friends of friends, and this lovely community here. Above poster is correct, Good coders are respected. If you actually start becoming a part of the community you will start to find folks who might work out.
I think it's excellent advice, I'm a programmer but with the idea I'm perusing I defiantly have put a lot of time into understanding our target market, how people will use the features and all kinds of business things.

I have a business cofounder which will deal with the details of it all day to day but I think that not at least knowing the overview isn't very smart in a company with size 2.

Ideally you going to want to know a decent amount of high level stuff about the code and how it all flows together, especially the abstract idea of how a web app on you chosen platform/ language works. As a company grows you can safely step away from this but in a team I find it very valuable.
U.S. Intelligence planned to destroy WikiLeaks
its not fair to store owners that online stores are tax free. level the playi g field.
Unless you get Amazon Prime (which is free for a year if you have a .edu e-mail address). Free next-day shipping on the millions of items sold at Amazon. You can get your groceries, tools, electronics, home decor and furniture there, often cheaper than in stores... two days to your door for free.
Are you looking for a full-time commitment from your technical co-founder (initially)? If not you might be able to find someone who can survive working for equity. Just don't come off as one who's simply trying to get some contract work done for cheap. That means get some documents in order and do some customer development. I personally would only consider something like that if the person had done research and demonstrated some hustle.
I was thinking it would be the Dutch driving exam...
> Providing income for heirs is not unreasonable.

I am not saying anything about it being reasonable or not, I'm just pointing out that the article is obviously incorrect on that point.
Interesting. First up to +3, then to -1; perhaps the night owls themselves struck... :)
LA Unveils Costliest School In The Nation - that's $137k per student
Many times I've tried to convince my friends about an idea, but they almost never take it seriously until there is something they can see and touch.

That's possibly because I'm unpersuasive, or maybe my ideas suck. :D But it's a recurring theme. People, even good friends who respect you, rarely jump in on the first moment.
Of course, but the problem is that you can't just show up in SF with some cash and an idea and expect to find a good cofounder. He doesn't have any connections or technical skills. Potential cofounders have no way to judge him or vice versa.

However just because someone doesn't have a proven track record doesn't mean they won't make a good entrepreneur (neither does the converse). The first step to getting a track record is just doing it. Just power through. It doesn't matter if you suck at coding. The business guy who tries to learn and builds a shitty prototype is way ahead of the guy who "just needs the right person". You have to be a problem solver one way or another.

Maybe the solution is to just bite the bullet and hire someone. Maybe it's to go work for a startup for a while. Maybe it's to settle for a shitty cofounder. Maybe it's to build it yourself. Who are we to say what someone's path to success is? The "learn to code" advice is good because it's actionable, shows commitment, and will give the guy infinitely more perspective on all aspects of operating a tech startup.

Business guys with grandiose plans are like professional NNPPs—they talk a big game but they never get anything done. Just start executing.
This sounds really cool. I wonder if we could get the Epicenter café in San Francisco or some other spot to stay open late one night a week. Something critical mass-style where no organizer is necessary, just a place and a time.
If this is "real pain", I wonder what some of the weirder stuff of C++ would be, "surreal pain"?
Driving theory test practice online
Access complete online official car, motorbike DSA driving theory test questions bank from which actual exam questions are chosen. Know exactly what to expect in exam so there are No Surprises!
As nostrademons said, I'm expecting junk code. But that's fine, because junk code still conveys the idea of what you're trying to create far better than the English language ever will. There's a reason why the YC application form asks for demos.

Pitch them your idea. That's going to be the challenging part. Find the one great coder who gets excited

Better to have two or more excited coders so that you can pick the best one; and your odds of having multiple coders excited by your startup are vastly higher if there's actually something for them to look at.
I think it depends on what the main difficulty is in making the idea work as a business. Some ideas are technologically difficult to solve but don't need viral network effects to be useful.

Some ideas are very simple to implement but are dead in the water without a great communicator who goes out and spreads the word, sells it, creates a buzz around it.

If your app is in the second category then you should learn to code and bring more people in later on. If your idea is in the first category then I think you are in a difficult situation, because if you find a good technical co-founder, he (or she) will be more important to the business than you and you don't even have the skill to judge whether he's good or not.
Buy balsamiq. Create a prototype. Get it in front of prospects.
Get a domain name, put up a description of the product, start collecting emails on that page. Interview potential users/customers of the product. Collect information (primary research) to show that the idea has legs.

Show this info to potential technical cofounders. Find someone who is interested in that space already.

If you don't have a personal interest in coding, don't spend much of time on that. The one exception I would give is simply mocking up the interactions in html/css. This is much simpler than writing full blown apps, and can communicate the idea quickly. To go even simpler, sketch the idea out on paper.
Every blog post, every URL, and every domain should have it's own forum. Make that forum universal enough, fast enough, and easy enough to use, and you have the twitter of forums.

This has been blatantly obvious to me for about 4 years now. The only reason I don't pursue it is because I get distracted by easier and more interesting "low hanging fruit".
I mentioned it wasn't as bad as the initial comment.

I appreciate the constructive criticism. Next time I'll make sure I deliver on what everyone is saying.

And linkbaiting, why lie? I tried it out for a reason but ultimately I only chose ten because I received 10 reasons from other people. They all weren't only "my" ideas. I mentioned it at the end of the post.
If I can split 50/50 with someone solely on equity, that's fine. It would be a full-time commitment initially. I'm willing to do everything I can, and am hoping to find someone with a similar obsessive personality. I've gotten positive feedback from close friends about the idea but it's a pretty simple concept and so I think it's prudent to use some discretion with whom I pitch it to.
Go to Hackathons like Startup Weekend, Google Campout, iOsDevCamp, etc.

You'll find some developers there to collaborate with.

One of the YC startups in Winter 2010 met through Startup Weekend. We were all in one team and continued hanging out even after the event. Later on, the business guy had an idea for a startup. One developer from the same team decided to join him as cofounder. I ended up working with them for the prototype and also during the YC session.
Throw in C++, C# or Java and you've got all three archtypes covered.
Some people still fancy plain C, though I haven't used it for years, it will give you some historical perspective, as it is the granddaddy of many languages today.
I think in general though Australians are largely in the same boat with work. The difference though could possibly be that it seems to be getting worse for Americans.

The thing is these days if you choose to live more simply you can easily get by and have a heap of free time. I don't really have it at the moment because I'm combining uni with freelancing/ startup. After I finish uni though I could see myself having plenty of freetime should I choose that route and just live off some freelancing/ startup funding. I have most of the material goods I'm interested in given the low price of electronic goods these days. It's only when you start aspiring big material goods that you get stuck in the trap of needing to work long hours and bring in a small fortune to get by.
Should probably be qualified better: "The problem is obvious. It's hard to take a startup and turn it into a successful company."
So all these US companies have this 10 (or something) days of paid vacation. Is it usually possible to get longer (but unpaid) vactions, or is this not an option?
I'm glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. I fact, I stopped listening to This Week in Tech for that very reason. I felt like a lot of the people on the show, Leo included, were getting swept up in how many followers and fans they had, and would blather ad nauseam about it.
read before you type, from my comment above:

Weather is usually predictable only about a week ahead.

and about

December in the Northern hemisphere might be colder than this last.

Thats not exactly a prediction, It is a seasonal variation due to inclination of earth w.r.t. sun. Thats same as some product will have higher sale before Christmas, or there will be more traffic on roads before thanksgiving.
That's a very legit opinion, no idea why its getting down-voted.
You could outsource development of a "0.5" version of the application, and use it to start hiring and selling. There are a lot of part-timers who can easily build that initial version for some money. Potential co-founders would have a much better idea on what they are getting into when they see your app, and building it this way will also help you refine your thoughts on what you are getting into.
So, it will get rid of war and famine?
A detailed mockup would probably a much better use of his time than possibly making something that would take a technical co-founder a few hours which for him would take weeks.
The vacations I enjoy the most typically have:

-A start date

-A end date

-A location/destination

-One or more good friends/family

-A vague idea of what we'd like to do

Any time a vacation is actually planned beyond what flight or road to take and perhaps where to sleep, for me no fun is had at all. You spend all your time stressing trying to meet deadlines and worrying about what comes next, instead of living in the moment, which is what a vacation is all about.

I figure you know your vacation was done right when you wake up the last morning and think, "man, I don't want to leave"
Shoot me an email, and a description of your idea, and I will take an hour of my time to draft a road-map for you that you can take to any developer to execute. Gratis.

[My commercial interests are online advertising, education software, semantic web, data-warehousing and everything middle-east. My Open Source interests/hobbies are Lisp, Android and the JVM. If you're not doing any of these, your ideas are guaranteed safe with me, at least for the next 24 months. And you have the whole of HN standing witness to this.]
The "lean startup" way to go might be to use MockingBird for free :-P
You worked for Naughty Dog! How do you sleep at night knowing my dream job is your ex-gig?

Prick! ;-)
I think the fact that the OP doesn't have the skill to write code is an even more imperative reason for him to pick it up in some form IMHO. As several commenters have already poignantly pointed out, in a company of this size, it really is best that everyone involved becomes an "everyman," so to speak.

For the business types, this means hacking software (or hardware!). For the software (or hardware!) types, this means hacking business.

It's way, way, way too early to specialize.
The details of which days are going to be sunny a month out, which will be rainy, and when storms will arrive is chaotic and impossible even in theory to predict in detail more than a few weeks away. Practice is worse, there we manage no more than a few days, and this has been true for several decades.

That said, there are larger trends that can be predicted. For instance the seasons which come from astronomical facts. Or the several year El Niño/La Niña oscillation. Not to mention relatively slow moving Rossby waves in the jet stream. (One of which is bringing hot weather to Russia and monsoons to Pakistan right now.) These give useful information about what is likely to happen and keep happening over periods of weeks, months, and to some extent years.

But none of this brings us any closer to the idea of being able to give an exact weather forecast for a day 6 months in the future. That goal is impossible. And has been known to be impossible for several decades. Furthermore I assure you that this fact is well-known to every competent modern meteorologist. (The word "competent" does not necessarily cover people chosen primarily for their appearance to deliver the weather report for local TV stations.)
I'm not trying to be rude, but replying to questions and comments on this thread might be a good idea.

Right now, there are 25 comments, and only one is a reply by jiganti.
If I were the OP, I'd seriously jump on this opportunity. Having someone do this gratis for an hour in this community can, in some circumstances otherwise, cost an awfully pretty penny.
Great question.

No, we haven't split-tested the addition of Paypal. We're constantly running tests, but this is a low-priority one for us based on extensive customer research.

Since we can't test it all, we pick the biggest potential wins (e.g., headlines and offers) and run them as rigorously as possible.

I do know that IMVU offers an insane number of payment options, but I think this may have more to do with their particular userbase.
Also, according to Wikipedia, base64 encoding makes the file size 33% larger than the binary file, and compressing it (as with gzip) only shaves off 2-3% of the base64 file size.

Nope, the second part is wrong. See also the discussion here http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1491165 - overhead of compressed base64 tends to be very small, smaller than the HTTP protocol overhead. Base64 has only 6 bits of entropy and Huffman coding is able to take advantage of this.
Doubtful. In order to find out why people don't buy, we do heavy, ongoing customer research/surveys/phone calls with people who are on our prospect list but haven't purchased after the expected purchase time frame.

Hardly anyone, ever, has said "I haven't bought your course because you don't support Paypal."
I think it would be easier to be anything you want to be if you have:

* Universal and free healthcare
* Free education (all of it)
This makes sense- I have a lot of confidence in my ideas but if people aren't responding it's likely not going to work.
HTML5 Raises New Security Issues
What publishers can and should learn from The Elements
Upvoted for bringing up The Mathematical Experience in a relevant way.

If I could get everyone to read just one book about mathematics, that book would be The Mathematical Experience. More than any other book, it gives the actual experience of what mathematics is like.

Much of it is accessible to someone who is still in high-school. And yet it has valuable lessons for people who have PhDs in the subject. I know a number of mathematicians who say that it explains why they went into math. And I can say that in its pages I can find explanations of both what caused me to love math, and eventually to leave it.
Bebo Application Developers - Apps Developer
Socialfactory develops Bebo applications, offers Bebo apps evelopment services at affortable prices.
_Why Yown Is Funny So You Can Laugh Too
Michio Kaku: The World In 2030