skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> thinking around a corner is hard, let alone thinking outside the box.

Well, thinking around a corner means you're already on the outside of the box. ;) Considering you posted this to HN, you're already thinking around corners. I think you should give yourself (and HN) a bit more credit.

Though you never used the term "bored," you more or less described yourself as being bored and your situation as being boring. I'd like to share a wonderful piece of wisdom given to me by my friend, Reginia Riley.

Fascination is a choice. When you choose to be fascinated, you are fascinating. When you choose to be bored, you are boring. In essence, when you say "I'm bored," you are actually saying, "I'm boring." At the same time, fascination is the source of motivation.

If you find yourself being often bored, the above is tough to accept. Some even find it insulting. But it is true and the sooner you accept it, the sooner you'll no longer be both bored and boring. On the other hand, fascination with something tends to be contagious for others and tends to lead to fascination with other things.

If you've done half the things you've claimed, then you are motivated by challenge. You were fascinated by the challenge of figuring out the technical bits (pun intended). Sure, far too much of HN is "money this" and "money that" for startup-du-jour. Sure, money is a way to keep score for businesses, but few ever realize their real driving force is the challenge of entrepreneurship. In this regard, the fascination with the challenge of technology is extremely similar to the fascination with the challenge of entrepreneurship. The root cause is the same.

In technology alone there are countless challenges just waiting for you to choose to be fascinated by them, but it doesn't end with just tech; countless challenges and fascinations exist everywhere.

Your own curiosity and fascination are priceless. When you decided to give them up, what were you given in exchange for something so priceless?

Yes, I know this post may strike too close to home. I know it might hurt. I know you might resent me for it, well, at least at first. It was like that for me many decades ago when I needed to learn this lesson. None the less, by sharing what I learned, I do have your best interest at heart. You're asking to treat the symptoms, but I decided to treat the cause.
Wow man that's some dedication and big risk taking! How long did it take you to learn CS full time for?
Don't forget to provide a location search...
Let’s Call It A Draw(ing Surface)
There are plenty of examples that seem to support this, such as http://www.heyjude.com/ and http://glassonion.com
Thanks for the advice about networking! I totally think this is a good strategy. Can you share some of the insights about how to pick a great tech cofounder?
Again?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1357390 <<<-- This one has the comments.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1360285

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1370134

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1376655

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1383943

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1385999

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1388904

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1389955

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1390588

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1397443

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1408731

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1410992

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1466084

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1640824
Oy, again... They bought all the -current- copies because there was sensitive information in them. The author, publisher and government came to an agreement that the government would buy all the existing copies and the publisher can print a new, modified version.

They were not forced into this. They agreed to it because the safety of our nation, and it's people, are at risk if the information gets out.

It's a compromise that does the best it can with a bad situation.
Yes. It's been explicitly stated on our blog and on the YQL page that it's not going away.

Specifically we've promised a minimum of 6mo notice if we ever did decide to shut it down.
Thanks for your insights. I was quite successful selling sponsorship package for an not-for-profit organisation I cofounded a while back. Industry knowledge is probably a weakness, what's the best way to gain industry knowledge? (following HN is definitely one good way)
This is way too superficial to give a meaningful result. What's needed is something like "eharmony for co-founders", "based on 29 Dimensions® of Compatibility for lasting and fulfilling businesses". There needs to be a way of matching the things that really turn people on without anyone giving up their secrets.

Just a few possibilities:

- background (education, experience)
- specific industry experience
- technical skill set
- nontechnical skill set
- space (iphone, web app, desktop, social media, business, gaming)
- end user (consumer, SMB, enterprise)
- model (freemium, advertising, subscription, licenses)
- geography
- source of capital (bootstrap, incubator, angels, VC)
- goal (lifestyle business, exit in x years)
- special domain expertise
- pet peeves
- favorite things already done
- philosophical beliefs of how things should be done

I could go on and on, but you kinda get the idea. If enough of these meaningful "dimensions" could be identified and codified, you could probably narrow down a search to a few very good possibilities fairly quickly. Business idea, anyone?
10 Defining points of Extreme Programming
Extreme Programming (XP) is a set of guidelines that make software development more efficient and more flexible. Importance is given to leaner processes and team work. When the requirements change, the system can change easily because of the simplicity of the process and frequent testing feedback.
Not just a thought experiment. This is about something a school kid did to try to simulate what thirty three trapped Chilean miners are living with and have been since August 5th.

Related articles:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/26/rescue-capsule-c...

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/MindMoodNews/trapped-chilean-mi...
I like the service you are creating, but it's hard to take the results seriously... are there any better (read: outside of box) ways to determine how good the potential cofounder is?

Also, I'm playing devil's advocate here - how do you differentiate yourself from LinkedIn? It's something I have relied on in the past.
You need enough knowledge to know when someone is making the right decision or not for your business. I run a successful software company, have hired and managed many programmers and still got it wrong with hardware.

>I assume the next time you see an opportunity in the hardware business and want to jump onto it, you wouldn't be taking a 4 year undergrad course to know the drill.

That's actually exactly what I'm doing - although after you have a degree it only takes a year or so to go through the relevant programs, and if you know people in the university it's easy to get private tutoring for specific gaps. It's not like the courses are difficult once you learn how to learn. Plus, you get to see who would be a good fit in your next startup.

Learning by doing: Perhaps I'm just not smart enough, but I need to understand some theory before I can do it right in practice, and I learn best talking to knowledgeable people. I fumble and make too many costly mistakes when learning something completely new without guidance. We all have our weak points :)
The Defenders of Free Software
It's very important to understand that "what is UX" greatly depends on type of company and/or team you are working with (and their expectations).

Startup with small team - these things are still very useful but it's something you should do fast in your head/notebook or whatever to get a clearer picture for your self and provide your team with better suggestions for doing things (and not some formal "ux deliverables").
Depends, inland Florida, Georgia, high humidity locations in general yeah, there's only so much you can do.

Down here in New Mexico and Arizona, on the other hand, you can get really really far with passive design. In a desert shade and a stiff breeze will keep you nicely comfortable even when it hits 40 in the sun. Combined with good insulation and high thermal mass and a house can stay under 25 even in the dead of summer.

Of course in a desert even if you can't swing shade and a breeze you can use swamp coolers instead of ac which are so nice.
The harsh reality is that for every Zuckerberg, there are a thousand who drop out of college and fail. Many get discouraged after their failures and move to other professions which require less skill and education.

So if this is the problem, the goal here should be to prevent folks from getting discouraged and doing things they'd rather not do, right? To keep on learning no matter what place they live in, right?

Or is the goal to self-validate the importance of colleges?

Yes, you are probably not Mark Zuckerberg, but that's okay. Mark Zuckerberg wasn't Mark Zuckerberg either until FB took off. As long as you work hard and keep learning you'll do as well as anybody else, college or not. In fact, it's better to work hard and keep learning than it is to get pieces of paper to hang on your wall. Many times you can get so enamored with the little bits of paper you forget the "work hard and keep learning" part.
That Apple has a store in Ginza but not Akihabara says a lot I think.

Anyway, I've been taking friends from the US who visit me to Akiba for a while now and I have always given these disclaimers before going:

1.) In general, things will not be cheaper. This isn't Hong Kong. Here's the main reason why:
http://www.x-rates.com/d/JPY/USD/graph120.html

2.) Prepare to enter a world where the average consumer who is shopping there cares a lot about things you don't care at all about. Like Anime, plastic figurines and Nintendo Wii games.

3.) Any cool software or hardware that requires software will probably not be localized to english. Windows rules here and Microsoft makes a special version of windows for the japanese market. Maybe it's gotten better with windows vista or 7, I really don't know. That sweet netbook will be awesome for a Japanese person but you're about to enter a world of pain. Here's an example:

http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/234200-45-convert-japanese...

I had a friend visiting last week and he really wanted to buy a cool USB microscope that we saw there. I had to warn him that it might be impossible to get the drivers installed properly.

Another friend wanted to buy the new Jumbo sized Nintendo DS before it was released in the US but we asked the sales rep and he said there was no way to switch the UI to english. No sale.

4.) The main reason to visit Akihabara is if you are interested in Japanese otaku culture and want to understand it more. It's a trip. I recommend it. But don't go expecting to get a bunch of shit to bring home with you.
Inspiration Designs
This is the first post for Inspiration Designs , in this post I peck a great collection of inspiration designs I hope you like them!
Twitter has a strong impact on our culture, but without a rational business model, and several quarters of profitable growth, an IPO will never happen. I certainly wouldn't buy stock in a company which doesn't know how to make money, no matter how impactful their product is.
The most important point in here is: UX methods like the ones above give concrete form to gut decisions and help you defend them against pointless changes and management decisions.

When you just go out and design a UI, people start wanting to add things or change colors (bike-shedding). And you, because you just made it up as you went along, can argue aesthetics, but also perhaps feel like maybe other people know as well as you do.

But now you have personas, so when someone wants to add a feature, you can say: which of these people does that actually help, and which of them does it just confuse or get in the way?

And you have card-sorting, so when someone wants to add extraneous nav elements, you can say: what concept does that fall within? Which personas will agree with that organization?

And when someone wants to add lots of unnecessary questions to a form, you can say: how does this affect the rate at which people move through the storyboard and finish this key process? Do we want to jeopardize the completion rate for sign-ups just to get some more personal info?

Now, once you understand this thinking and have the political power to defend your decisions, you might cut out some of these steps or only use them internal to your own decision-making. But as a young designer, these can be helpful both to fashion your design sense and to protect your decisions.
Sept. 26, 1983: The Man Who Saved the World by Doing ... Nothing
I think it is the poster mean - it is not sufficient to show which framework has more user by looking at google trend, that applies to both rails and django. Though I think Google trend and number of user is causal relationship.
Sorry m8 but you should read more about Jack Ma and how he started Alibaba.com. As I remember prior to this he worked at governments official yellow pages site for quite some time. He obviously had a good contact network and was well known for many business owners in his country...
Yes, that's true. PhDs are, in the end, a commodity. People like Zuckerberg are not. You can commoditize yourself to the extent that you follow a traditional path (HS > College > Grad School > BigCo Coder > BigCo Manager > Retirement / Death).

At some point, you have to start deviating from that path if you want a better-than-expected outcome, unless you happen to be really good at following whatever path has been set for you by others. Zuck and Gates started early; many people never do.
I mostly assume that the sounds on land are heavily edited too. You can't put a proper microphone on a lion.

I don't let it bother me however.
This website works in Safari on my iMac, but not Chrome. I get the same results as dataguy -- none, just a page refresh with my selections intact.
If you want to start a business, you should get out of your comfort zone. Finding a co-founder on an online platform is the opposite.

Get involved in your area's tech (or whatever your startup is about) scene and find a partner. That validates your idea, too. If you can't find a co-founder in real life, you may need to change your plan.
I would like to see it again but I think Flaherty's Nanook http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0013427/ feels much more real than most of more recent nature movies. Even if there is always some artificial human hand behind (be it only the cutting of the reels), some movies are good and some aren't, and in this documentary genre "good" should not mean bloody spectacular, it should mean just real. In the article someone draw the line to Gorilla suits, I would draw it much closer to Flaherty's way.
That is because they use iframes. To scroll an iframe use two fingers at once. This will also help if you use Google Reader, etc.

Have fun!
If the safety of our nation, and it's people, are at risk if the truth gets out, then we have a lot more to worry about than some guys's book.

Plus, there must be existing copies out there. How long before one (and it only takes one) is on the net? It will spread like wildfire, especially since the Pentagon has basically given it a giant, public stamp of authenticity.

If I was the author I'd probably wait a year for the initial sales rush to ebb, then mail wikileaks a copy.
In all fairness, this doesn't have more than most superficial relationship to the ideas in Fahrenheit 451 (which is an awesome book).
There is a stigma, but there are also tradeoffs. I dropped out after a year, so I have three more years of experience than most people my age. That experience includes managing projects, negotiating with CEOs, presenting stuff to boards of directors, etc. I kind of feel bad for people who stuck it out and graduated into the terrible 2009 job market (that's when I would have finished).

College is just not as good a deal as it used to be. More and more of the stuff you'd need to know is available for free; more of the people you need to know are one email away. For students who aren't attending elite schools, college is probably not a good deal (adjusted for inflation, the wage premium for college students peaked in 1985; it's been dropping in real terms since then, even though tuition is rising faster than inflation).

100 years ago, an ambitious young person might have had two choices: stay on the farm and be the best farmer he can be, or move to the big, strange city, and try to do something extraordinary. In the future, I suspect that most people will view higher ed as equivalent to staying on the farm. You can do it, sure, and it will probably lead to a safer future for you. But if you think you're really extraordinary, or you'd like to find out, you have to get out and do something.
Nah, I have a particularly good memory for movie scenes. The construction vehicles scene and arrest scene are two different things. Bill gets arrested while speeding (while singing Sinatra's My Way in a sports car) and he wreck Paul Allen's car in the different bulldozer scene. Of course this is a movie so both can be pure fiction.
Android security model is inadequate, and it needs a firewall
1 GB a month? I download more than that in half an hour.
It's weird that Vivek Wadhwa's articles keep running on TechCrunch. All his controversial posts say is that the conventional wisdom outside of the valley is better than the conventional wisdom inside it. If you asked someone in, say, Iowa, they would say that dropping out of college to start a startup is a bad idea, that your CEO should be older and more experienced, that an MBA is a smart decision, etc.

If I wanted to hear that, I'd just ask my parents.
The logic behind the multi-floor Asian 'department stores' of many tiny, almost-identical tech shops is something I've struggled to understand. (Even beyond almost-identical, sometimes the same company has several storefronts, in the same building, on different floors.)

Among 100+ stores over 6+ levels, there may be 20+ with very similar inventories. Why does this provide a win for sellers or customers, over a smaller number over stores with larger and more unique inventories?
Oh shit, I upvoted you by mistake.

> The author, publisher and government came to an agreement

They released that book knowing the full implications in the first place. Either the Pentagon promised them a sum of (taxpayers) money they couldn't refuse or they forced them into it.

> They agreed to it because the safety of our nation

Oh yeah, terrorism and all that ... good thing George Washington isn't still alive.
Is it still hosted on App Engine?
Shouldn't the sector you want to work in be a very vital thing? My choice of ideas and my connection with a co founder will depend of my previous experience, interests and domain specific knowledge.
... and the rest generated by incinerating waste (which produces far less carbon than piling it up in dumps)

Anybody care to explain how is that possible?
Two things. One positive and one negative.

Positive. The author understands the gist of what's going on. Places like YC focus on Minimum Viable Product and doing just one thing that people want. These are great and wise strategies for both investors and entrepreneurs, but there's also another term for it that's not as flattering: bottom-feeding. Going after the little bits of value here and there, not being a hunter, existing by providing the least amount of value possible. There are huge bottom-feeders! Facebook is one of them. But it's little tidbit work. Stuff like reminding me when I like to scratch my nose, or a service for recommending dog groomers.

Negative. The problem here is that the author seems to think he knows where technology is headed, and that's always a foolish bet. His view is that we should be making complex things and solving hard problems. While I agree that hard problems need to be solved, I don't think you can decide ahead of time which problems are going to be the ones that gain traction. This is like the government or VCs "deciding" that one area of effort is going to give more results than another. Nobody knows. This is the risk of startups. It's why the smart move is to do the little stuff.

More to the point, there are two kinds of innovation (to steal from Kuhn). There is "normal" innovation, where people take existing tech and put it together in new ways to make trivially more usable things than existed before. Then there is paradigm-changing innovation, where completely new things appear.

By far, normal innovation is the norm. Probably 99.9% of all innovation is normal. Maybe more. Systems change from the ground-up, not from the top-down. Eventually a bunch of little things reach critical mass and a paradigm-changing innovation occurs. But hell, most of the time you can't force the little innovations to work, much less the big ones. I love the contrarian tone, but it's just not a realistic article.
3d printers are just one tool in the box. Traditional cnc machines are also dropping in price and the software is getting easier to use. The MIT Fab Lab demonstrated building a house in a few weeks with a set of tools that fits inside a shipping container. They aim to bring the cost of this container of tools down to $10k. At that price point we could see a whole new range of businesses performing advanced local manufacturing.

http://www.fablabhouse.com/en/
It seems complicated and long at first but once you get it, it is done easily. For instance, try to explain "how to walk" to someone who had an accident and forgot it. Even thought we know exactly how to walk and start doing it takes less than a second, it takes days to explain/master.
Lift 2.1 ships
If the safety of our nation, and it's people, are at risk if the truth gets out, then we have a lot more to worry about than some guys's book.

Spoken like someone who has never worked in intelligence or the military. Don't get me wrong, I'm very critical of the US military-intelligence machine, but your comment implies that no secrets are worth keeping if they're true, which is just patently false. There's a huge body of strategic, operational, and tactical information that should definitely be classified. I'm not saying the handling of this particular incident made sense (as I don't know all the facts; do you?) just that the world is more complex than you imagine.
USDA Bans Delicacy? Pork Blood Cake Candles Snuffed Out
The book did not have sensitive information according to the Army who vetted the book ahead of time. This isn't a legal action prohibiting anyone from selling or buying the book. It's still on file with the Library of Congress, and I'm sure the author, editor, reviewers, publisher etc. all have a bunch of copies still.
Yes, but that wouldn't tweak my NewShinyometer quite so hard.
I didn't see anything about terrorism in the article. And having a knee-jerk reaction about anything that mentions security is as bad as the mindset you're railing against. There has to be a balance.
Excellent historic materials. A more "modern", if less clever grab-bag of code is asmutils:

http://asm.sourceforge.net/

If you want to see master-level x86 assembly code; google the stuff by Terje Mathisen. He was a freak programmer that won every asm optimization contest throughout the nineties. He worked on Doom and some other id titles. Lately he has been advising Intel on x86 architecture and optimization! (Yes, he trains Intel designers on how to best optimize for their own platform.)