skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: Did anyone read The Four Steps to the Epiphany?
I am curious if someone had a chance to read this book: The Four Steps to the Epiphany http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0976470705 and the real question if for those that did: do u think that book is worth reading today? Do u think, the messages/lessons from this book have a real, useful application in today's tech/startup world?

I am interested in purchasing and reading the book... I'm just not sure if the content (as great as it was 5-6 years) still relevant/applicable today.

Thanks in advance to all.
At least give the guy some examples or explanation to back up the judgement you just passed on him.
INib App for the iPad
There are quite a few spelling and grammar errors. I found several "proof reading" and "editing" offers on Fiverr.com. Basically get your entire site done for $5 [http://www.fiverr.com/users/meeshdance/gigs/edit-your-writte...]

Here's a few that caught my attention:

1. Typo on "Simpelest way to manage your help page."

2. Typo on "we'll email your team wiht the question title."
Only an answer to a specific part, but as far as needing a car goes, in SF you don't, but you likely will if you plan to visit people/companies/events in Silicon Valley. It's possible to get to something like DevHouse (http://superhappydevhouse.org/) by public transit, but it's often a hassle. If it's only occasionally, though, you could sign up for a service like City CarShare or ZipCar.
Why matte screens?
He doesn't: It's too bad you don't have any income, because if you did, you could write off all kinds of startup expenses as a business expense. (emphasis added)
Facebook Statistics
I would go for 2 or 3 lessons and get a sense of the chemistry between me and the teacher. I would also try as many different teachers as possible. The difference between a good teacher and an ok one is dramatic, so this is worth exploring. (Who's "good" may vary from student to student, of course.) I've also noticed that some of the teachers tend to be more doctrinaire than others. I avoid the latter, but YMMV.

If you give it a try, I'd be curious to hear your assessment. The Alexander work is one of very few practices I use every day -- "use" isn't the right word; it's integrated into my habits -- and I have reaped rich rewards from it. To pick a simple example, I've gone on many long motorcycle trips over the years. Typically once I'd been riding for a day or two pain management would become an integral part of the trip. The last trip I did I was astonished at not having that problem any more; I'm pretty sure the AT stuff was the reason.
I did. I was fairly senior at Merill Lynch, and left a cushy job, bogus corp title and well over six figures to start NewsCred. Have never looked back. Apart from marrying my wife, it was the best decision i've ever made in my life. Oh yeah, I was scared shitless. Just do it!
Ah yes, our "free market" health care system.
Yeah, he did, works for me now too.
Ask HN: Best way to visualize / analyze website stats in realtime?
Say I'm running an e-commerce website.

I want to be able to (data updated once a minute):

- See how many orders we're getting. I want to be able to answer questions like "are we taking more orders this evening than normal?" and "what hour do we make the most profit each day?"

- How many people people did X? (where X could be commenting, playing games, registering, tweeted about us, etc)

There's a lot of analytics software up there, but not many let you break data down into minute or hour chunks of time. Also, we'd want to be able to customize what data is being monitored.

We already use Chartbeat and Google Analytics. Chartbeat doesn't let you customize data (so we couldn't see how much profit we make per hour, for example), and Analytics isn't realtime at all.
That is awesome. So many people have moved exclusively to Facebook for photos (because really it's only your friends who care), and better quality is always good.

Plus it makes the "print your Facebook photos" feature a lot less stupid.
Have some idea what you're going to do.

"I want to have a startup" is not a plan. It is a path to failure. If you haven't got any idea what you want that startup to do, you're just setting yourself up for disaster.

Real, productive startups happen when someone wants to do or create a specific thing, and then creates a startup as a vehicle for that thing.

A startup is not an end. It's a means.
OK, I'm half the presentation, and this is really astounding. Aren't you afraid that Plack/PSGI and StarMan are a bit too much on the bleeding edge for such a wide project? Will it scale? How many people did work on this?

Kudos!
It's definitely worth reading. Customer development is an excellent methodology.
so that we have pavements rather than dirty earth to walk on.
The old model was a cost-reduced Mac Mini. The new one is pretty much an iPad-in-a-box. That's radical enough for me.
Cool, thanks for the additional info.
"Technology has progressed such that we don't need government protection from ourselves as much any more."

Well said. Government agencies pretend to protect the individual but in fact they are bound by the strong insurance industry lobby.
Okay, I understand how it would be possible (not agreeing) to "enforce our own price controls", but how can the U.S force it's companies to charge more to other countries?

If we placed an export tariff on these pharmaceuticals, I fail to see how that could decrease pharmaceutical prices in the US.

Japanese car companies moved production here, why couldn't big pharma do the same?

I don't see two options.
Can't agree more with this comment. Depending on your degree, the amount of work required will be significantly less than the amount of time you have in the week. Not to mention that interest rates on student loans are dropping again, meaning living off student loans while you start your business and do school is a potentially much more successful way to go than any other.

The problem with starting "some time after" you graduate is how easy it is to burden yourself with life responsibilities (wife/kids, new car loan, mortgage etc) when you have real income and stability from a job. When you are halfway into getting your startup off the ground and ramen profitable and you graduate, you can maintain your poor college kid lifestyle much easier than a previously well off wage earner can go back to a poor college kid lifestyle.

This worked well for me, but I also didn't care for any of the other "college experiences". I got my partying (drinking, smoking, minimal sleep etc) out when I was in high school and my early 20's, so found most of my younger college peers boring when I eventually finished my CS degree.
Change to Bios will make for PCs that boot in seconds
I'm a bit torn about that, but I don't feel exploited. Permission was asked and granted, and authors now know the deal. Design is hard. Curation and editing are hard work. I bought 5 copies of #1 for my mother but haven't bought other issues.

I think the price of the paper form is too high, but the production values and low run means he's barely clearing a profit on them. It all comes from ads. That's his call, and, frankly, we are a pretty rich demographic. If Cheng Soon can cross HM over from vanity press to a serious hacker journal, this will become a very important magazine on the order of "Old Wired" and "Old DDJ".
Yes- it's poorly written and edited, but has a decent amount of good content that is still relevant if you can slog through it. Honestly, though, it can be summarized in a couple of blog posts. Read Steve Blank's blog (http://steveblank.com/), and you'll get the good parts in a much more digestible form.
This is awesome info. Thanks!
Patronizing Beta Insurance once your dead is difficult. =) Acme insurance denies my claim, getting Beta suddenly becomes difficult if not impossible. With no public option, I have no other recourse.

Living in Canada, I've never had to deal with the government making decisions, it's always been the doctors. Their is a base line, and you can still get private insurance and go to privately run facilities. You make the distinction too black and white in your original post. You can have a public and private insurance.

It's funny. My wife, a Canadian, talks with my sister-in-law, and has some family down in the US. Sometimes they bring up health insurance issues, and my wife is flabbergasted at the lack of... well... anything. The sheer number of services provided here is overwhelming, and this includes preventative services.

Anyways, I'm starting to ramble. =)
$1000 is a bit low, I would expand to $1200-$1500. (that said I had a studio for $1000 right by GGP, but I had it for quite some time)

I lived in SF for the better part of a decade, all over the city. I would say the best quality of life is to be found if you live off of the "N Judah" streetcar line. It's easy to get to the beach, inner richmond, outer richmond, golden gate park, castro, noe valley, Hayes Valley, fidi, SoMa, BART, Embarcadero, etc off of this line.
Your reasoning for point 4 is horrendous and terrible. You are advocating for the return of snakeoil. There are already problems with homeopathic remedies and "magnets" and all this other crap that gives people false hope and leads them to avoid making medically difficult choices while lining the pockets of shysters.
I like the idea too, but would rather subscribe to an RSS feed. I get enough email already...
+1 for good Javascript teaching

I wish there was a single curriculum that most JS developers were exposed to and can point to.

Every JS developer I meet has a different way of doing encapsulation and abstraction. This makes it terribly confusing for developers new to the environment who just want to know "the typical way" you do XYZ.
It's not the elderly's fault that bad laws make them expensive. Elderly people aren't a problem, bad laws are.

Obviously poor people aren't the problem either -- personally I want to see far more immigration of poor people who want American jobs (yes I want rich immigrants too ofc) -- but inefficient govt programs like food stamps and unemployment benefits do cost a lot of money.

The problem is the govt and its mistaken idea that redistributing wealth can help people. It doesn't. It destroys wealth. We'd all be way better off if they'd never done it in the first place, including the poor and elderly. (Now we have transition issues. We need to abolish it in a way that doesn't screw people who are relying on it.)
I'm pretty sure you made an apostrophe mistake in "apostrohpe's" - the "s" is making "apostrophe" plural.
so i looked at your profile... you work at amazon on the kindle? and you're planning to quit and work on http://www.storyfun.com in 20 days? that's cool. i think the main thing is.. you got to really believe in your product to risk the 40-60k
Doh! I feel stupid now, I was keying off the last sentence. Thanks for stepping down to my current mental level :)
I cannot agree with this advice enough. Working for a startup, even as a summer intern, will give you a much clearer idea of what it actually means to run a company than reading HN every day.

You may even realize it's not what you want to do after college.
1. Be good. Be very good. Don't be the "front-end guy" or the "back-end guy", or some other "guy". Once you know what you want to build, building software is about five things: algorithms that solve your problem, programming languages that express your algorithms, computer architecture that makes your algorithms run efficiently on real hardware, the practical toolchain, and the management of complexity of real software. So study algorithms, and then graduate algorithms, and then advanced graduate algorithms. Do every challenge problem online. Study programming languages to express those algorithms. You can get away with three: C, Lisp, Haskell. Everything else is crud. Study computer architecture and compilers to see how your programs run efficiently. Learn great tools (Emacs/Vim/Visual Studio/bash/Linux/OS X/Windows whatever - just great ones that you're damn good at). Learn how complexity is managed. Look at lare open source projects, study how they're organized, and contribute patches to understand how small changes can effect a large system.

2. Learn what to build. Once you get really good, your time starts to be more valuable than gold. There will be very few people in the world who are as good (the internet will bias you to think that the world is full of great people - this ain't so, there isn't enough of 'em). You owe it to people and to yourself not to bother with improving something by 1% or 10% because you're wasting time in opportunity cost and could be improving something by 1000%. Make sure what you're building is worth building, and make sure every line of code you write is worth writing, otherwise you will fail. Break the NIH syndrome in yourselves now (all good people have it, phenomenal people that build successful companies broke it in themselves). Learn to infer what people want.

3. If you're that good, you will easily get a $100k job after graduation (probably more by then), and grow to $180k in a few years. That's very, very comfortable. It's not worth busting your ass 16 hours a day to build another CRM tool when you can have a $180k job. So don't start a business to start a business. Start a business to bring a meaningful change in the world. A huge change. A 1000% change. There are lots of hugely successful companies out there that do what's not meaningful to you - ignore them. But do make sure that what's meaningful to you is also meaningful to millions (hopefully billions) of others. You won't get rich writing Lisp compilers.

This is what matters. Most everything else is fluff.
"Sex.com was sold to Escom in January 2006 for a reported $14 million price, widely cited as the highest priced domain sale in history. [1]"

Apparently it's up for sale again, so perhaps it's not worth quite that much...

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2010/07/01/sex-com-sedo/
I liked Wesabe's approach to my data, period. Wesabe let me export my all of my data, and even provided an API for it. Mint, last time I used it (a long time) did not.
It was huge for them. My point, though, was that we made our own mistakes. If we had had a better user experience before TC40, they either wouldn't have made such an impression at the event or wouldn't have overtaken us so quickly.
Actually, I'm curious - do you have much evidence that insurers are deciding who lives or dies? I haven't even seen compelling evidence that having insurance at all (let alone variations within insurance) will determine whether you live or die.
Or you can just compile a language you want to javascript. Treat it like assembly. You can be glad it works, but you'd rather not write in it directly. Examples of such: coffescript (http://jashkenas.github.com/coffee-script/) for those who like python/ruby, ruby (though this is not perfect: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3593312/production-usage-...), GWT (somewhat butchered java -> javasscript) and scriptjure (http://github.com/arohner/scriptjure Clojure -> javascript).
Amazing stuff. Modern Perl indeed.

Interesting that the whole server side is built on a JSON-RPC API. That enables writing completely new clients later on.
I think compilation to a single binary is not a big advantage when distributing to others. I think that because I've rarely seen anyone distribute software that way. If it's a widespread practice in some circles, I'd like to know more about the circumstances.
Javascript has 3 serious, fundamental problems. The first is that it's a prototypal language that's been forced into looking like a class-based OO language. This leads people to confusion and frustration, much the same as if you were making a burrito and someone replaced your ingredients with pita bread and hummus. If you try to work against the grain by imagining that JS is just another class-based language you will end up thinking that it's some crazy mutant language that doesn't make sense. If you go into it understanding the paradigm and how to make the best use of it you'll get much better results.

The second major problem with Javascript is that it was prematurely standardized due to excessive pressure to ship during development, and thus has a lot of little mis-features and defects in the core language that haven't been fixed due to concerns about breaking backward compatibility. Luckily it's generally possible to avoid these areas of the language without having to compromise your code so it's just a matter of keeping to good practices and of knowing what to avoid.

The third problem is that Javascript is primarily a web technology where it is married to the DOM, and historically browser DOMs have been a mess: non-standardized, buggy, sometimes slow.

Overall the result is a language with a few landmines that need to be tiptoed around but that is still very solid in its fundamentals. Compare that with many other languages that are more polished and yet fundamentally limited in significant ways (such as Java's lack of closures, for example).

The wonderful thing about JS is that because of its expressiveness, power, and advanced featureset, using the language properly becomes a potent self-reinforcing feedback loop, jQuery is one of the better examples of this.
See also http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/...
I suppose you have no problem with the underlying assumption in this scheme, which is that adults should be treated like children.
I know some of them are using Onenote
negative $25 000
Can't you carry forward losses into future years?
Ukraine authorities take action against Zeus botnet ring
I wonder why I haven't seen this book before?

It felt like seeing pictures from my childhood, since when I studied long ago Lisp was the first language taught. I've written partial implementation of lisps a couple of times, it isn't hard -- and quite beautiful.

(It's a pity it isn't using the new Perl 6/Rakudo parsing stuff, which is probably too new.)
that's so risky... laymen cannot draft those types of documents, no
matter how sophisticated a computer program... At least not in most
cases...

I still like the idea though, free legal forms
Realize that the answer to an absence of Javascript would probably be more Flash and ActiveX, which is actually a much worse security problem.
The Einstein Principle: Accomplish More By Doing Less
"If you know it's going to work, it's not an experiment." - Jeff Bezos
What's better than Wi-Fi? Super Wi-Fi
That's optimistic, especially if you want to use bicycles and public transit.

You could live in the tenderloin - it's one of the worst districts in the city, but it's close to a lot of stuff and rents are cheap.

Check craigslist. Also, there was mashup posted here earlier. http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF&msa=0&msid=111...

Pretty good summary. Seems like you guys are concerned about saving money and making good contacts - in that case, I'd probably recommend the mission. You'll have to pay like 1000-1500 for a studio, but the location is prime and it's eminently walkable.
Marc,

Thanks for putting your thoughts out there like this. We are currently tackling the small business finance space (Profitably.com) and it's interesting to see your comparison to Mint.

What are you up to now?
Oh by the way I've "told the friends", I've announced it on perlmonks :)
Thanks for the advice but we're really leanin towards living in SF. After living in NYC for 3 years I think I'd go crazy living 45 mins away, and needing to get around by car.
>I favor letting candidates for programming or testing jobs show what they can do.

As nice as it is to see a company that actually does this, the hard truth is that the first line of resume-readers aren't the people who can separate the tech from the cruft. It's the HR drones who see the buzzwords and squeal in delight. Or, before them, the automated resume parsers that count the occurrence rate of buzzwords and top-tier colleges and allow/deny based on that.

Is it any wonder why the tech-minded gravitate towards (or create their own) startups? I don't know how it is for everyone else, but for me personally, if I wanted to go into marketing, I'd be in marketing. And getting a job in most companies these days is all about marketing.
I think the universal conclusion is that engineering is good - great but management needs alot of work.

As a former intern... I concur.
This issue is why bison's license contains a special exception for the part(s) of itself it includes in its output. http://www.gnu.org/software/bison/manual/html_node/Condition...
Tenderloin/Mission/Sunset are places you might be able to find something for a grand.

Tenderloin - stabby stabby.
Mission - on the dirtier side, a little sketchy in parts, but trendy and experiencing lots of gentrification.
Sunset - lots of asian influence, very livable. You'll very rarely see the sunset from here though.

You might even be able to find something in Richmond for a grand if you're lucky. Just keep an eye out, set up alerts on padmapper.com. I found a $1400 one bedroom in a nice part of the city there.
Nice hack.

So how do we know modern compilers don't do this?
i'd point out that 4 hour claims are more along the lines of methodologies for using time efficiently in combination with the pareto principle (80/20 rule).

for example, his claims of gaining muscle mass involve 20 minutes at the gym doing a specific exercise routine, twice a week, and eating more protein. so its really a 6 week or so process.
I think a lot of modern architecture tends to look cold when photographed like this. However, in person I bet the textures I see on walls becomes more apparent which warms up the space.

btw, this looks like a great place to play LazerTag.
I would love to be able to run a bunch of legacy operating systems just to study their inner working, A/UX, Mac OS, Amiga OS, SunOS, OS/2, VMS, QNX, BeOS and the entire OS zoo.
For $1000 you can find a small studio, but also consider the advice to look for places in the peninsula (Mountain View, Menlo Park, Palo Alto) and East bay (Oakland, etc)

As a rule of the thumb, the places north in the city (nob hill, south beach, marina, etc) tend to be upscale. Downtown is not so bad, but I'd stay away from tenderloin. I don't particularly like the Mission and SOMA, but it seems a good number of startups have offices there, so YMMV. Northwest (close to the Golden Gate Park) have nice places, but seems to be worse if you don't have a car.

You'll see that sometimes a neighborhood is perfectly fine and safe and you walk two blocks down and it feels sketchy and unsafe. That's why I recommend you walk around.
You weigh the cost/risk of dealing with Yodlee against making it yourself. Marc seems to have used a usually sound heuristic - I don't trust these people, I don't want to bother working with them. Personally, I would have agreed - a partner that's an aggressive negotiator with high executive turnover can end up being an enormous liability in more ways than one. Better avoid them.

But heuristics are by definition imperfect. If Yodlee really gave Mint as much momentum as Marc thinks they did, this might have been an exception to the rule.
However, each time you fund your wallet, the minimum amount of funds that you can put in your Steam Wallet is $5 / £4 / 5€ to keep transactions and payment service provider fees to a minimum.

Is $5 really a micro-transaction?
Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty
All the S means is you file a request with the IRS to be taxed differently from the C, which is the default. The actual entity does not change, it is a tax issue. Also, with the S election you cannot raise investor money, only the C can raise money.