skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN (Poll): Why did you start your own company?
Hi HN,

Help me compare results between plurality and preferential voting.

Here is the link to preferential voting http://democratic.ly/vote.php?poll=16.

Thank you
It the fastest way to my FU money
I wanted to solve a major problem I kept having
I have to control what I work on
I like saying 'I am the founder of...'
It's not even a matter of preference, or just needing to use it to get used to it. It's like trying to drive a car where the steering wheel is covered in different grades of molasses and motor oil. It's actually physically tiring fighting the curve trying to just point to things on the screen. After 30 minutes my entire arm aches. I thought for a while it was the particular mouse I was using, I must have gone through $200 in mice and pointing devices trying to find something that worked better until I stumbled upon some arcane command line command to just turn it off.

Completely non-discoverable, some of the worst physical input design I've seen since the Nintendo Virtual Boy. I really don't understand it either, I don't remember having nearly this consternation pre-OSX
Personally I would choose C, it's a case of non-responsibility... I don't need such employee in my company.

This is by no means an attack on you or your organization, but I absolutely despise this knee-jerk reaction to emails, resumes or anything really that's so prevalent in the hiring sector where Hiring Managers are LOOKING for a reason not to even blink at a resume.

I get that companies want the best candidates available, what I don't get is how willing they are to shrink the pool of qualified and excellent candidates because of something resulting from human error. The absence of a subject line in an email isn't non-responsibility; as pedalpete said, his organization reached out and interviewed a guy who came an HOUR LATE. That's a death sentence in the conventional wisdom of job hunting, and look what happened.

No, the exception does not prove the rule, but I think hiring managers-if they want to hire and if this disease of near double-digit unemployment is to shrink-need to get their heads out of their asses and actually HIRE people.

The first step in this is to stop demonizing things that genuinely do not matter when put next to a resume that bleeds talent, organization and character. Missing a subject line is one of them.
While in real life I'm sure that I couldn't actually bring myself to throw over either one, I agree completely with your analysis of baby vs. professor. I've long had these exact thoughts, and I really can't fathom the knee-jerk counter-rational idea that the baby automatically has the greatest value.
Here is the link to preferential voting http://democratic.ly/vote.php?poll=16.
Bootstrapping and Cheap…there is a difference
B

Unless you've never made a dumb mistake on a critical task in your life, then C.

It takes 5 minutes to review an average resume. Yeah, it sucks that the email had no subject, or if the resume has bad typos, or other stuff like that. If the resume is a stinking pile of fail in all ways, then you can safely ignore it. Getting overly anal and rightous about 1 typo on a resume or a missing subject line, or an applicant that didn't realize you spell your name with an I instead of a Y, or have an extra E in your name or other dumb shit is just pretty lame, IMO.

Don't be a prick - cut people some slack.

If his resume impresses you, there is plenty of opportunity to screen for fatal flaws during the rest of the interview process.

You also didn't mention if you're interviewing a CEO or an IC-level person, thou much of my above comments would be the same either way.
I've always thought that Scribd and Gist have very similar logos.

http://gist.com/

http://www.scribd.com/
On Lego-Powered Time Tracking
On the Complexity of Processing Massive, Unordered, Distributed Data
Our idea was to tie the minimum rate to an acceptable monthly income in the US/West for decent living standards.

$35 * 160 hours per month = $5600 a month

Of course, there is nothing stopping consultants charging more. The idea was simply to do away with ridiculously low rates.
Design Thinking vs. Data Thinking
I've said it before and I'll say it again. There is one and only one trait that I've seen in common between successful founders:

Great founders are obsessively analytical. Plain and simple.
I have developed 8 apps now in GWT and have liked it a lot. Of course I come from Java background and have always liked the lang itself. You should also check out other frameworks such as smartgwt which enhance GWT further.
A sadly related, but very informative is the Virginia Tech shooting report: http://www.vtreviewpanel.org/report/index.html. I did a bit of work (mostly code audit) of an emergency alert system at a University and it was one of the most rewarding work experiences I've ever had. Trouble with these systems is that at least where I worked, they were used to notify people of snow closings, etc., which made some people very angry: "why are you sending me so many e-mails, text messages, etc.?"
Right now the front page shows the latest writings, regardless of votes. I did this because especially as it's starting there weren't enough people voting and the popular links remained too static.

It's actually been pretty rare for one person to post so much work at once. It just happened to be that way today. I think once the traffic increases a bit there will be too many people posting for one to dominate the front page.

I may look into making the algorithm for the front page not dominate like that in the future though.
There's also the fact that you would be making a complete guess that the man was large enough to stop the trolley in real life, and if he wasn't you would simply be adding another victim. Besides, a man large enough to stop a trolley would be really hard to push.
Are you kidding? I use the scientific method quite consciously all the time. Form a hypothesis, try to come up with some relevant experiments, perform them, notice that they (usually) disconfirm the hypothesis, repeat until the hypothesis is not disconfirmed.
Which is interesting (I agree with your general sentiment BTW, a big responsive trackpad is nice) since for many years, Apple went through all kinds of exercises to try and get users off of the keyboard and slow the interface input down. Other than typing, I almost never remember using the keyboard on my pre-PPC macs. Now they are emphasizing the keyboard (and near keyboard input devices) as the way to go.

I actually dislike the trackpad for precision work, but do like it for broad gestures like scrolling.
real-estate speculation

...something which has not worked out so well for many economies. I don't want to make it illegal or anything - although I could live with some sort of -use-it-or-lose-it clause that kicks in after a year, and which proved a decent rule of thumb in the real world. Indeed, the term 'squatting' in relation to real estate describes gaining ownership by continuous occupation of property - which is a lot more work than going to the public records office and writings 'dibs!' on the land register.

Domain squatting is just a waste of productive resources, based entirely on the hope of extracting an economic rent from someone else later; and that rent is in proportion to the productive use a site developer (not the squatter) could make of a given domain name. The only investment squatters make in a domain name is usually to stick an ad page on there and track accidental visitors, which may give a useful data point to the buyer; but even then, the buyer is almost certainly not purchasing the domain because of such random traffic. Although registering a domain has a nominal cost, it's not really an investment in any economic sense; indeed, an ad-farm or 'coming soon' page on a domain which receives any significant amount of random traffic is polluted before it becomes branded, albeit very lightly and in a fairly harmless way. The rational economic price for a domain you own which is not making any money is the cost to date of holding the domain plus $1. Any profit beyond that is predicated on the buyer's project being sufficiently advanced and well-capitalized that writing a large check to the squatter is less painful than picking a different name.

The only economic benefit I've ever heard a squatter claim to justify their asking price was that they had made it uneconomical for someone to put porn there. Can you imagine this if domains were actually real estate? 'Yes, I do want a million dollars for this barren patch of desert with a weatherbeaten billboard and a cow skull - you should be grateful there ain't a saloon or a whorehouse here already.'
"We all know the guy who moves from one idea to the next and never finishes anything. He’s freakishly smart, but leaves a trail of half-finished carnage in his wake. Staying focused is a huge part of being successful."
I suspect that there is a higher than normal occurrence of actual ADD in tech businesses.

Edit: Not sure why, but it looks like somebody decided that every comment on this post was worthy of a downvote. Seems strange.
This is the search design for the people who use google to get to their facebook login

Even if that's true, there's more of them than there are of us.
That is very true.

However, the problem is that the FDA rules would probably block those apps from being deployed in the US App store.

And all said and done, the US App store is key to gaining traction and users.
Can you be more specific here, minus the buzzwords, what "deals" and "traction" does justin.tv have that google/youtube can't hurt them? HN tends to go gaga over YC funded company for no obvious reason and often (but maybe not in this case) rationality and reason goes out of the window.
Was anyone able to glean Google's plans for the huge volumes of heated sea water 'waste'? I sure hope they're not planning on just pumping it back into the Baltic - warming of the world's oceans and seas is a very serious problem (see http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/temperature-ocean-... for a summary).

It seems this only shifts their heat dissipation problem from having to cool servers to having to cool large quantities of sea water. Perhaps the latter is an easier problem to solve (gigantic outdoor cooling tubs?) but I don't know.
Groupon’s Success Disaster
SodaJS, functional web testing in NodeJS
Write your tests in NodeJS, run them with Selenium RC, or on Saucelabs OnDemand service in all your favorite OS/Browser combo's.

Very, awesome.
Some of the newer TLDs seem to have reduced the prominence of squatters by increasing prices enough to make squatting prohibitively expensive. I guess that would be one solution to the "squatting problem" for the more mainstream TLDs... Although, I don't think there will ever be a fair system to take domain names away from one entity and give them to another.
Can you play Doom on it?
---- Ms. Bartz also said the company is working closely with advertisers on developing new ad formats. She added that Apple currently "has this obnoxious control" over what kind of ads and content can appear on some of its devices, but it "won't last," suggesting that advertisers don't want to be told what their ads should look like. ----

bazinga!
i think the yahoo bing deal is for 10 years. so yahoo isn't going anywhere for a while.
While I definitely agree that a couple thousand isn't that much, it's still more expensive than a lot of "night and weekend" entrepreneurs can afford right away.
Well that's pretty cool then. I'll check out the app. Thanks for the reply.
It's so hard for me to fathom how tools like this can be businesses (in the long term). I'm sure it can be done, and similar things have made money in the past, but the privacy part of economics seems so skewed.

My data is worth tons to me, nothing at all to greplin, and a little bit to advertisers. How about I give greplin access to as much of it as possible, for some convenience that doesn't depend at all on network effects or even computing resources beyond what I have at home (or in my pocket)? At least when google does this kind of stuff they have other reasons not to leak or sell my data.

Good luck to greplin, though! Their success will mainly validate the PIM search space, which will help semweb enthusiasts like me.
http://blog.leosoto.com/2008/12/on-really-disliking-monkeypa...
Also, his sister was always screwing up his tech stuff. :)
I think the proper term is "eating", not "cannibalizing". It would be called "cannibalizing" if the laptops were MacBooks, and if it were unintentional.
We Rule (Newtoy/ngmoco) Nominated for Multiple Awards
> I've wished for a long time now that Apple would just give up, admit their mistake, and accept that 2 button mice are the superior option.

The number of revisions on mice that Apple has produced that actually are multi-button mouse, obfuscated under a pseudo-one-button form factor is simply mind-boggling. Just put a second stupid button on the darn thing. I used to do a lot of work with some pre-press design bureaus that were all mac shops. Without fail, every single one of their Macs had either a logitech mouse or a microsoft mouse hooked up to them. When I asked them about it they just said that whenever they bought a new machine they just tossed out whatever Apple had packaged and replaced it with one of those two mice vendors as company policy.
Poor Man's Profiler
There is nothing wrong with the App Store concept. There is a huge problem with locking down a device that is the property of the consumer. Adults can choose to only install apps from the App Store, and it may or may not be a good idea for most users.
That's intentional. More minutes wasted by customers results in more money in the pockets of the wireless telecom companies. (Overall.)
No offense, I was a successful bmx racer for a number of years so I used to be a hardcore bicyclist, but I really have a problem with bicyclists riding on roads on which they have no ability to maintain the posted speed limit.

I experience this nearly every day on a road I drive to/from work. This is a four-lane highway with a posted speed limit of 45mph. It is a favorite of bicyclists for some reason so there are a lot of riders on the road, even during rush hour. There are a handful of stoplights on this road over about a 5 mile stretch.

I have yet to see an bicyclist able to maintain a speed of 45mph nor do I see them have the ability to accelerate away from a stoplight with the same ability as an automobile. This leads to many traffic issues and numerous dangerous situations. The issue is only barely related to the bicyclists. It is mostly related to their abilities relative to other motorists. A car/motorcycle that was driving on the same road with the same acceleration and speed capabilities would be a nearly equivalent danger.

While I would never endanger a cyclist, I have seen many drivers put in danger by the habits of cyclists. And in my personal opinion, there should be a law that states that a cyclist should only be able to ride on roads for which they can maintain the proper speed.
Domain hacks are funny but counterproductive and problematic in the long run. Domain hacks involving digits are a marketing problem squared.

See the reasoning behind the switch from del.icio.us to Delicious.com:

So why did we switch to delicious.com? We’ve seen a zillion different confusions and misspellings of “del.icio.us” over the years (for example, “de.licio.us”, “del.icio.us.com”, and “del.licio.us”), so moving to delicious.com will make it easier for people to find the site and share it with their friends.

http://blog.delicious.com/blog/2008/07/oh-happy-day.html
Key difference: sentience.

We keep the tree around because of its aesthetic or productive value to us - i.e. the old maple tree is preferable (to us) over the younger. We are inclined, in this case, to preserve the "work" we've already done to raise the tree up to this point. We do not perceive the tree as conscious nor sentient.

The human, however, is, at least in our books. We care about the fact that the child has a lifetime of experiences that it has yet to experience - and we value said experiences, and most of us I think would agree that every human is reasonably entitled to experiencing the highs and lows of life.

I'm not sure if it's valid to harp on people for having different logic and/or morals when it comes to dealing with sentient subjects as opposed to not. It seems to me entirely logically consistent to treat the two differently.
A rather simpler explanation is simply that the black guy is a member of the liberal tribe. A way to test this: replace "Chip" and "Tyrone" with, e.g., a low income housing or gun rights activist.
Try giving them a call maybe?

From their contact page: http://www.groupon.com/contact-us

Having trouble using Groupon?
Email Groupon at support@groupon.com or call 1 (877) 788-7858 (during normal business hours, central time)
Many power plants heat sea water (either for steam or cooling), I think the ocean can handle a data center just fine.

Update: I should add that I'm all for environmental study to make sure that they aren't venting it out in a sensitive ecosystem or at a radically different temp. Done correctly this can be an important development towards sustainable data centers.
Since you are asking for people to stand up, yes I will toss the baby overboard. I have no qualms about it in any way shape or form.

The baby has no value, it won't be able to help with our decision making process to get back to shore, it won't be able to solve problems we may find along the way, if we get stranded somewhere it won't be able to build shelter or find food. At that point the baby is nothing but dead weight that requires a constant amount of resources without any returns.
A good article, and applicable also to why some of Google's projects succeed and others fail. What fail? Ones that rely upon a deep understanding of social interactions: Orkut, Buzz, Wave. These social applications/networks don't have a specific purpose they just are and people can use them how they want. Compare that to Gmail, Google Docs, AdWords. Singularly-purposed applications that no one disagrees about how they should be used. Google is great at solving problems, not so great at creatively thinking about situations that may not be problems and may not have a direct solution.
Exactly. There's no way to know if the action of pushing the fat man onto the tracks would actually stop the train. Worst case scenario, you might end up killing one extra person.

In the 'switching the track' example, on the other hand, the worst case scenario is that your actions have no effect on the outcome and no additional people die than would have died otherwise.
I'm kind of confused why we care. It's another data center, big whoop. I am worried about the waste from warming sea water, but other than that, meh?
"Amendments earlier in the week sought to lift a much-criticized healthcare tax reporting requirement that both Democrats and Republicans agree needs to be fixed. But the amendments failed as senators could not agree on a way to recoup the $17 billion in revenue that would be lost by doing away with the provision." - http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-pn-small-b...
Isn't broadcasting live video expressly forbidden by AT&T's 3G TOS?
This would have to be one hell of a data center to have an appreciable effect on the temperature of the Baltic Sea.
Does the app store allow for geo-targeting ?
I have been in the same situation multiple times and I will concur.

It is not worth it to incorporate a business entity for something you don't have cash coming in from. It costs time and money, when there is no serious income or a direct business focus its just a waste of your personal resources.

A sole proprietorship DBA with a separate business bank account is sufficient to do anything you need until the time comes to incorporate. You will know it when the time is right

(Also note that I'm in California where they tax a flat $800 every year for operating an LLC regardless of income. If the side projects make nothing and year over year get charged $800 + tax & legal issues, it becomes a costly pain in the butt. I dissolved mine to a DBA last year. If it wasn't for that damn $800 LLC tax I'd probably have kept it...)
It really depends on how serious you will be about it... if it's just sort of a hobby and you're making a few hundred bucks then there isn't much to worry about... but if you're out there raking in bank and marketing your services "as a business" then that is a different story... most states/cities would require you to register your "business" as a sole proprietorship. You will also need to make sure you keep good records of all the freelance income and make sure you're paying the right amount of taxes. Depending on how much money you expect to make freelancing, you'll probably want to talk to a good CPA to make sure you cover all your bases.
Does/Could this app locate or detect a user is at a particular event?

If Justin.tv could sort by event, other users could watch events like outsidelands music festival and flip through all the different view angles of the concert.

I understand event based results can be found by searching, but the idea of a collection of event streams intrigues me. Just an idea..
Why does Twitter limit to 140 characters?
I wonder how they came up with that number. Is that the size of one TCP/UDP packet or what?
Another difference here is old age. Trees don't really die of old age (to my knowledge, and even if I'm wrong it doesn't matter because most people think trees won't die of old age), so both trees have an equal number of years left in their life expectancy. The doctor has already used up a lot of his potential.
It's not just the curve. It's the usability and reliability of the things. The hockey puck mouse was noticeably unusable within seconds of putting it in your hand. Pretty much the first time you tried to move it, or click, and the mouse had rotated to some indeterminate angle...it's like it went directly from the designer's drawing into production with absolutely no use-testing.

The Mighty Mouse is likewise an unreliable piece of garbage, yet with no way of fixing its primary, and easily noticeable problem, the clogged ball. It's like the purpose for the entire transition from balled mice to optical mice was never a lesson Apple learned. And again, this is noticeable within a very short time-frame under use-testing. And this was a $50 piece of hardware!
That may be just the datapoint I need to shift a new project away from Flash to HTML5.
I recognize that as a CBS science/tech correspondent, it is this person's job to write this blog. So in that context, I don't take as much exception to his writing about his decision to quit.

But for an ordinary person, it seems equally as narcissistic to announce your intention to "quit" social media.

Don't announce it. Just do it. Anyone who you care about, or cares about you, is going to find you via another means anyway - email, phone, or in person. And anyone you don't really care about, well, they probably weren't paying attention anyway.

It's about as meaningful as joining a Facebook "Quit Facebook on 01/01/2012!" or something like that. Which is to say, it's not meaningful at all.

No one gives a crap.
So does he mean you shouldn't negotiate opportunities? I don't think this is valid in general.
A tree, left undisturbed, will go on to live for hundreds of years. So, a tree being relatively elderly does not reduce its remaining life. The medical researcher, on the other hand, has gone through approximately 2/3 of his life. Thinking in terms of person-years saved, it might make sense to save the baby instead. Of course, this is ignoring the aggregate benefit to society the researcher might provide over his remaining years. So it's only utilitarian on an individual level instead of an aggregate level, but it's a utilitarian justification nevertheless.

But then this could just be me trying to retrospectively justify my inclination to save the baby.
Why Subversion is not my favorite VCS
Google hires a content guy from Netflix