skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm always suspicious of "I switched from Brand X to Brand Y and Brand X was better for reasons I can't fully articulate as they are almost subconcious". It seems obvious that people moving from one thing to another are going to be affected by small differences that someone coming to it fresh wouldn't be bothered by.

The fact that everyone knows Apple has better UI only adds to this, but you can find the same thing in a thousand different Windows to Mac, Windows to Linux, Gnome to KDE or vice versa stories. Some people will get quite irate about how crappy the new UI is, even (somewhat tellingly) if it's a Mac or iPhone that they're moving to after becoming accustomed to something else.
I think that for a lot of entrepreneurs there is probably never a point where they truly give up (and this is probably a bad thing, not everyone is made for it). To me part of being an entrepreneur is a bit like being an inventor, a tinkerer - there is always something you want to fine tune or an idea worth exploring. I can easily see myself following that path until old age, without necessarily ever making amazing money.

Saying that, most careers are dead. Obviously in some areas there will always be a direct path of experience where a true career will exist, but the days where you went from junior to intermediate to senior to manager to vp etc are dying fast, especially with companies people who frequent HN are likely to want to work with. Do you want to take a job where they say you didn't do two years as senior developer or marketing assistant etc so you can't have the job?

More and more companies are starting to recognize the experience gained in the field and it is easier than ever to move between fields and jump "stages". Not all companies are like that yet, in fact maybe most aren't yet, but as they lose good candidates to companies that are then they will change.

So I wouldn't worry about what happens if everything fails, if you're willing to try the life of an entrepreneur then survival post that is going to be easy.
You can always sit quietly by yourself in the corner.
Stevens crash related to lack of technology he pushed for flight safety
FYI, I worked on what we called "DFR" - We have VFR and IFR, Yet in Alaska we need digital fusion. We called it DFR for Digital Flight Rules, but what we meant was Data-Driven flight. Free Flight is fine if you have enough data. We even tried (nearly 10 years ago, with funding provided by Senator Stevens) to allow NRO to provide satellite coverage. And if not, then commercial. It's not like this is rocket science, exactly. We do it to track animals across the arctic. Why not aircraft?
if you have a british accent it doesn't work.
really really doesn't work :(
The problem is not that enterprise won't pay, they can and they will. That's how Oracle sells databases.

The problem is a middle-term one: open-source will shy away from it (and the Apache/JBoss libraries are A Big Reason to use Java), academia will begin to stop teaching it (for all the "it doesn't matter what language you use" arguments, there are many mediocre programmers who can only handle the one thing they are taught), and new company projects will try and avoid the license fees and choose unencumbered languages. That sort of thing won't hurt Oracle now, but it will in five to ten years.

Heck, if Microsoft ever saw the woods from the trees and freed C#, bought the Mono devs and pushed the .NET ecosystem to other platforms, creating a sea of programmers that use their language alone, Oracle could feel the results of this in less than three years.
make sure to use source control... lots of married couples don't ;)

but seriously, we've had fights over that
Premature Optimization vs. 8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing
Everyone here knows Knuth's immortal argument about premature optimization. But today I stumbled upon (again) the 8 fallacies of distributed computing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacies_of_Distributed_Computing

And I am thinking. Aren't they the opposite things? If you try to avoid these fallacies, all or some of them, it is going to be a premature optimization. Especially early on, and especially if your team is small (like we know is best).

Of course, I am not opposed to the fact that all these 8 points are bad things.

My point is a question on how much should one worry about them when laying the foundations of their product? Aren't these fallacies (or at least some of them) unavoidable if we follow Knuth's rule? We all know lots of successful products which fail in some of these.
Of course they do!
Interesting, although, for what it's worth, bitbucket has had this for quite a while now.
Neo4j - The Benefits of Graph Databases (OSCON 2009)
All the competitors did the same thing. I'm not even sure what "adding music" without a computer would look like. Apple just streamlined and simplified it by assuming you'd use their products from end to end (iPod - Mac - iTunes).

That means removing features from the device was balanced by adding them to another Apple product i.e. it wasn't orthogonal at all, it was part of the digital hub strategy that could be considered to be holding them back now.
What we need are (digital) standards in the clouds
Ask HN: Software project - too big scope too little time, what are the options?
This is the data.

estimated development workload: 3000 man/days
team size:technical lead, 4 database designers, 4 application designers, 9 developers, unknown number of testers.
available time: 5 months

The team was brought together from all sides a month ago. Team quality is "usual" (half is quite experienced - half interns). Four members of team have substantial experience in the field (3 application designers and technical lead). Other members of team have no experience in the field.

The team's opinion is that optimistic ETA for delivery is 12 months (with p~0.7), unless scope is cut. TPTB declare that this is not an option and are willing to pursue various arcane options (basically throwing money at problem).

The team estimates that max. 30% (you are allowed to assume 50%) of projected scope is subject to potential replacement with "off the shelf" components where the most optimistic scenario is assumed to cut the time spent on these modules by 50% (due to evaluation, modification and integration).

What I'd like to ask is - what are your experiences in such situations? I strongly suspect that adding more people will only amplify the problem in our current situation. So I insist that scope needs to be cut or deadline needs to be renegotiated. As mentioned - both appear to be non-negotiable.

Is my reasoning flawed? What other options are there?
Bald Boy Bullied
You ask a really good question.

I have failed w/two different startups, one very recent. The first time it was great for my career in monetary terms. The second - I don't know what will happen, but I don't regret doing it.

Working on a failed startup is draining. Your whole life is tied up in it, and if the company fails it seems like a phantom limb for awhile.

To directly answer your question - past entrepreneurship should be a big plus to any company worth working for.

You know you want to try something else, why not another startup?
An All-embracing Collection of PDF Editor, Convertor and Password Recovery
This article will relate to self-study with three kinds of PDF software: PDF Editor, PDF converter and PDF password recovery software.
Maybe MSFT are focusing on getting the search experience right before worrying about money. That's a very startup-like approach to doing business and probably the best thing they could go given their reputation in the search market.
http://unsuck-it.com/rock-star/
Can Money Buy Happiness?
Out of Control: Chapter 2: HIVE MIND
Exactly.

I've failed at majority of the things I've done, but I can always try again. The biggest problem with me was that I took problems as problems to be dealt with, but in fact they were teachers to be learned from. It's something really, really clichéd but the subtle meaning in it is something that takes frustratingly long to grasp. I think that it derives directly from the fact that I cannot change my environment, but I can always change myself.
Since the sensorship is beyond what Google's founders had expected. Even we native Chinese had not expected that then.

However, given they have invested so much on the Free Music Plan, and the market was rewarding, why, all of sudden, they pulled their feet? And risking of losing the world's largest and emerging market?

Though, I agree there are multiple causes about that. But simply thinking they pulled because they were losing ...
> You keep on repeating the idea that no one needs both Varnish and Nginx in their design.

I never said that at any point.

What I did say was your reasoning that Varnish is faster than Nginx is flawed:

Apache+Varnish is 97% faster than Litespeed [1]
Litespeed is faster than Nginx [2]
*therefore I infer* Varnish is faster than Nginx.

Those cited benchmarks are both crap, and if they are relevant to a particular setup (ie yours), then you cannot use them on a public forum as proof that one is faster than the other.

You see, the problem I have is that you're spreading FUD which many will read and believe (as you do).

[1] http://www.unixy.net/apache-vs-litespeed

[2] http://blog.litespeedtech.com/2010/01/06/benchmark-compariso...
Hi dotBen, this is Nicole Miller from vWorker.com (formerly known as Rentacoder.com). vWorker's employers actually select the lowest bidder only 19% of the time (see http://bit.ly/av0S4R for details) so crgwbr will have a very good opportunity for earning a decent income with available Python jobs.
Google choosing Java:

<nelson> Ha-Ha! </nelson>
The "easiest" way would be a page/thread/whatever where people could apply for such a scholarship. So first of all if I wanted to be at the conference but I could not afford it, I'd had to think about why I really want to be there and how I'd benefit from it. Then I'd had to elaborate why I cannot afford this in my current situation.
Of corse if you do this you'd have to run through a lot of applications. You could higher the entrance barrier a little by setting a minimum word count, so that only people apply who would really benefit from this.

A not to unrelated question: Do you also cover the "winners" travel, etc. costs?
If you do decide to go with Java directly consider including Guava (Google's open source common library).

http://code.google.com/p/guava-libraries/

We really like the support for higher-order functions, like Iterables.transform (aka map) and Functions.compose amongst others. There are loads of useful tools including MapMaker, which is great for building caches. The downside is that Function<X,Y> is an interface and implementations are often inner classes, which can be syntactically quite messy.

We've recently open-sourced our common library, which extends Guava with a few additional features we've found useful:

http://github.com/mbst/common/tree/master/src/main/java/com/...
Sum types are not as dynamically extensible at runtime, or by third party libraries, as class polymorphism.
Sun poured billions into Java; is it so bad to ask for one of the biggest benefitors to share the profits?
I was just trying to arrive at the conclusion of the article. I think it starts out listing reasons why developers choose to work on their own startups rather than join other startups. Then it says that the listed reasons are not really good reasons (they don't tend to produce impressive entrepreneurs). The conclusion seems to be that the respective developers would be better off joining startups instead. Hence my question if that would be more impressive than working on one's own startup for the wrong reasons.

Another way to interpret it would of course be to still opt for the own startup, but for better reasons.
It seems unfair, but is fair for a lot of people.

You know what troubles me? Imagine using a powerful search engine and they decide to sell the first 2 pages of search result to the best bidder.

Now imagine that they put the search in some difficult place so you are forced to see "their portal" you don't care about every time you want to search anything.

Now they put their links before to their portals in the search results too.

Add images ads all around the screen, making it slow to search(you need to load all images first).

Make the ads to blink.

Put the ads in a popup screen blinking all the time, that you have to close for searching.

Now imagine that a competitor "does the right thing". They care about the user, don't sell priority on search, don't annoy their users with images, they get what they need in a superfast text page.

This company will get my "unfair" support, and the other company my "unfair"contempt and oblivion. No matter now they do the same that the other company, because they were forced and will came back if they can.
While you're at it, put "following" before the number to distinguish it better from "followers".
He also did the first port of X11 to Mac OS X, see Xquartz(1).
Car Video System - Car Headrest
> The concurrency innovations are at best experimental, seem kitchen-sinky,

Could you expand on that statement. I don't think there is anything experimental about Clojure's concurrency features. They are quite robust and build on proven technology.
To come back with a predictable response: everyone says "who" even if they mean "whom". Using "whom", even if it is grammatically correct, is perceived to be wrong in most conversational situations, or other informal situations like Twitter.

Anyway, the quick guide: if you would say "him/her", use "whom", and if you would say "he/she", use "who".

"Who is that?" ... "He is the programmer."

"To whom is the message addressed?" ... "It is addressed to him."

He -> Who / Him -> Whom

But who wouldn't say "Who is it addressed to?" You'd sound like the posh bloke from an Ealing Comedy if you used "whom" all the time.
The comments in reply to that are a brilliant example of why I don't read reddit much.
"Asking" doesn't mean suing first thing in the morning.
Note that both F# and Ocaml have object systems and have excellent support for imperative style programming.

http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/u3-ocaml/ocaml-objects.html#ad...
In the subset/superset thing, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to be only talking about adding stuff to the a particular namespace, not adding stuff generally, and seems like a reasonable compatibility compromise rather than a patent trap.

And, despite the smug tone and schadenfreude, I'm not sure this latest patent warfare will convince anyone that Mono is a safe bet, quite the opposite in fact.

Why should anyone take his word at greater value than the various Java boosters (and Sun employees!) that previously said basically the same things about Java?
Hm. A search for "other" using that o and e shows that there are a lot of websites out there using this trick, presumably to mask their spamminess / plagiarism from Google.

Off topic here though.
Don't think cellphones can surpass the PS3/Xbox that easily. While technology is constantly making progress, we're about to hit two giant brick walls, that will somewhat slow that progress. These are: A) Power-Consumption and directly related B) heat accumulation.
I meant it as a more tactful way of saying "you didn't work hard enough/ideas weren't good enough/didn't develop fast enough/weren't emotionally strong enough" or something just happened and you had to reintegrate with normal society :)
This analysis hints, and another [http://carlodaffara.conecta.it/?p=478] suggests more explicitly, that Google might be OK going forward if they recast/relicensed their Java implementation as a derivative of Sun's GPL'd OpenJDK.
I'm pretty sure the prior art was just with Self. Smalltalk had polymorphic cache tables, but it was Self that was doing really aggressive in-lining of those caches (e.g. in-lining the method and all code the method called right into the cache). Strongtalk was a Smalltalk implementation of the result of the Self research (plus optional H&M type checking) but before they released anything they got bought by Sun to get the expertise for their up coming HotSpot VM.

So bottom line: Oracle may actually own all prior art via Sun (Self research was done at Sun).
Animated History of Nuclear Explosions
Well they could have just gone with python if they had known this was coming. They probably picked Java on the basis that it is free to use and fits into the open-source community.
Science Jobs
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Git-deploy : a fast way to push a website through ftp
First question that you should ask is "Why is date not negotiable?" This should provide you the rationale for prioritizing features. Identify the core features and push for negotiation on the other set of features.

Looks like money is not the problem. In that case be aggressive on your search for 'off the shelf' apps (open source or commercial). Can you buy a working product and develop the addons? Can you buy an application and modify it to meet your requirements? When all that fails then see if you want to develop the app using third party components.

Easier said then done but it's better to spend time on questioning the rationale for each high level technical decisions and feature request.
At my previous company, we had a patent lawyer who would always ask around if anything we developers did were patentable. I would always downplay what I was doing and come up with things that might be prior-art.

My thinking is this: Even though the company would only use it for "defensive purposes" (which I believe), you never know who owns the company tomorrow. And you are not going to work there tomorrow either, so you might be the one being sued.

Instead, I would try to get permission to blog about it, so it is available for everyone -- including my future self.

I recommend everyone else do the same!

(Throw-away account - I'm not sure future employers want this)
Precisely. My dad is a typical executive at a big company and the consensus still seems to be that startups are not as "legitimate" as, say, working at Morgan Stanley. We argue about it a lot.
If MS turned C# and .NET into a true open-source ecosystem, as well as the CLR, my next project would be in C# without a doubt.
Is entrepreneur life sustainable? That's something I'm trying to figure out right now.
My short history of Engine Yard and my Resignation
This is the story of my startup experience of a company that took $38million in funding in 3 rounds. I am almost fully vested and I've just resigned and here is my story.
Google didn't create Android. They bought it.
oh well, it was fun while it lasted.
I am happy about this. This demonstrate that patents and copyright in the IT field can kill the innovation. So a hard war in this field can contribute to abolish copyright.

Small developers are very vulnerable, let's see what happen when the giants eat each other.
Traits vs Roles
You missed the point. I'll just clarify the intent the question here for everyone else who does:

I'm just starting my second year of college, and trying to figure out where I want my life to go. I think I was born to do startups but need to know what I can fall back to. There's a very low success rate but because of statistical bias we hear mostly from those who succeed. I want to hear the other side of the story to find out what it's really like.
It affects what you do next, and the way you tackle everything from jobs to relationships, probably for the rest of your life.

When I left the company I started, I intended to start another one almost immediately. But then I didn't. Partially this was because of assorted conceptual and administrative issues, but partially it was because I realized how burned out I was. I'd been living this thing for five years, breathing life into it as part of a very small team, starting with literally no budget. Business is hard, and it was often soul-destroying - I discovered that other people were considerably more cut-throat than I was willing to be, and consistently underestimated how low people could go. And on top of the business itself, I was up to my eyeballs in code most of the time. Over time, I lost perspective. Within a space of a couple of months, though, two immediate family members were told they were seriously ill, and my sister became long-term disabled, and I was snapped back to reality.

It wasn't that entrepreneurship wasn't for me, as such, I don't think. It was that the specific kind of entrepreneurship I was living didn't fit my hopes or goals, and was eclipsing everything else in my life in a very negative way. I didn't think I could fit the care-giving that would potentially be required with the demands of the job. They're still going strong, but I wanted to live a different kind of life, closer to what Tony Stubblebine writes about on his blog. (Tony's the smartest guy I know on the topic.) That was always my intention, but we diverged.

It's certainly positively affected my career. Since leaving, I've spoken at Harvard, been published by IBM and have worked in a bunch of really interesting situations, with fantastic people, on a consultancy basis. Before the startup, I was a ground-level developer, so that's a win. But I'll certainly start a company again, at some point, if only because I'm the kind of person who loves to make things, and to do things on my own terms.

I'd ask yourself carefully if it's entrepreneurship that's not for you, or the situations you've been in.

(By the way, my family's health situation is vastly improved - but I think the thought experiment of what would happen if you needed to be a care-giver is a good one.)
... Also, I'd venture that most successful entrepreneurs have experienced a run of failure. That's how they learned to do it well.
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14 reasons why mobile ads will never take off
You might sound like Inspector Morse; he was repeatedly correcting Lewis. Here in England, "everyone" doesn't say "who" when they mean "whom".
I've found this tool after looking for a lot of ways to send my website to my hosting server : FTPSync, FTPSync.pl, FTPSync2d, WPUT, GIT-FTP, WEEX and Unison over netdrive.

It's very nice because it works over ftp, which means that you can use it with a simple file hosting server. It's also very fast because the diff with the server is done from a single __REVISION__ file.

The only issue I had was that I had some files that were different between my hosting server and my local test server, but it's very easy to edit the source to skip them.
I'd like to also add that with the advent of resolution independent displays (such as seen in the current generation of mobile devices) such limitations like this will slowly fade away; although this most likely won't happen for a while in the desktop world (there's more of a demand for size of display than resolution of a display currently, and most operating systems don't have great support for resolution independence as it is [somewhat untrue for fonts oddly, as the kerning algorithms make use of subpixel resolution, but most UI's are pixel/raster based at only one resolution]).
I am perfectly well able to receive SIP calls over that private IP. Sure. You do need STUN, but honestly, I have a feeling that it's ever so much easier to do correct roaming between cell towers with those internal IPs which is likely the reason for this configuration.
Whoever gets the tickets will have to make their own way over there.
If you drop the patent stuff and focus on fair pay I'm in.
Cool. But what is flattr?
This sort of things makes me think that http://www.illumos.org/ (formerly OpenSolaris) could run into trouble sooner rather than later...
Dumb question, isn't Java free and open source now? What are they suing about?
Being unhappy running a successful business