skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
0) Hype comes from shock value. Startups can create shocks (innovation, disruption, fortunes made, fortunes lost etc). Perfect media material. No wonder there's hype.

1) Tech startuppers are tech savvy. They also tend to have strong opinions about stuff.They write/blog/tweet/comment a lot. Adds to the general noise around startups.

2) Possibly, noise about why startups rock helps reduce insecurities for some. It probably helps, given that startup life can be hard.

3) Nothing wrong with people trying to do their job well. Just that discipline, integrity, hard-work are less glamorous than a "brilliant idea that changed the world". Fact is, any successful startup needs discipline, integrity and hardwork - multiplied by two.

4) The opinion of a .NET programmer (irrespective of what he/she earns) matters. Especially, if its about .NET programming. Or about a product that I'm making. But I'd take his/her opinion on general startups less seriously.

5) I don't live in the US. Where I live, there isn't too much hype around startups. Indication that it might be a SV or US only thing.

6) I'm an accidental startupper. I landed here by simply moving away from jobs I didn't like. I haven't done very well (yet), but I'm happy with what I'm doing. I'd do it again. May be there's more to people starting up than hype. May be it has to do with (sic) the joy of creation. May be it has to do with the kick of having a large population use something you made. May be its a drug :) Who knows
don't let the door hit you on the way out.

the original author wasn't writing his blog post for you, and he didn't submit it here. the post is at the top of the front page because 26 other HN users found it interesting. i learned something new, and i'm grateful.
How much time have you spent with lawyers and consultants on your verbiage, terms and agreements with payment processors? The thing that worries me about any new payment startup is whether they've covered all the right bases... if they haven't, they can be out of business overnight when they realize what they missed. It's a fine line between selling points and factoring (processing payments on behalf of another business), where factoring is contractually forbidden in almost every merchant account and 3rd party processor contract.
I've personally moved more than 100 miles for a job, several times. hell, I've interviewed on the other side of the country and I got the job (I ended up getting a better offer in the sf bay area, so I didn't end up going, but I got the job in Virginia, even if I didn't take it.)

and I've worked with some other people who worked from home most of the time and commuted more than 100 miles once or twice a week.
http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Please-Think-Twice.aspx
Wasn't there a startup doing this with videos? Video + simple question
Sounds like a nice tool. Will definitely give it a try for high work-load statistical data processing.
As far back as I have memory (and I'm told before as well) my family had Macs in the house; our LC575 and Powerbook 150 were staples of my childhood.

I remember one day when I was in my dad's office after school, sitting at his PowerMac 6100/60 ( this would have been about 1998, with me being 8). He was running SoftWindows emulating a 286 running Win3.1, something foreign to me. He showed me around this mysterious "Windows" thing (which wasn't too interesting to me) and then showed me what happened when you quit windows and went into "DOS". A few looks at cd and dir and I was enthralled.

Pre-teen years spend with a string of cast-off 486s and old Macs (and that critically timed slackware 7.1 disc) gave me things to meddle with. Not having broadband Internet until 2007 taught me to delve deep into whatever i had access to, not able to fall prey to flash games and other time wasters.

Basically, being pompous enough to think that I could meddle with things beyond my young age fostered that crucial skill of "I might not know off the top of my head, but I know how it probably works, and I can find out exactly how it works"
Hackers & Founders meetup NYC
Looks interesting at a glance.

But guys, seriously, make your docs available in HTML format.
PDF-only docs are out of fashion since the 90s.
If you say no to him, you'd better be right.
A site for sharing product links
Would love to know what you think about something we're in the middle of building.

its a site which makes it easy to discover and share cool products.

using our bookmarklet or direct on the site, enter a link of a product we return the page data, you can tweak the info and then post it into your own product stream.
others can follow you and vice versa.

we were thinking it would be great to help discover new products, i would love to follow scobleizer etc if he started posting new web apps, i would love to follow a friend whose a DJ if he started posting new tunes.

its kind of like a digg v4/twitter hybrid.

streams of products,

once we have data we can aggregate trends etc.

will work with online data through links or offline via apps - i.e. take a photo of something you like in a store, push it to your product stream

wanted to know your thoughts on the idea - any feedback - much appreciated
My Dad has been a programmer longer than I've been alive, so I've always been aware of programming. When I was 13, some friends and I built a ZX81 with my Dad's help, and then he taught us to program in BASIC. I was fascinated for a month or so, and then I forgot it. I don't think I even tried to program again until Senior year of highschool.

At my highschool, there is a tradition called Senior Projects. Every senior has to spend at least 50 hours (not very much) over the summer, working on a project of their choice.

I chose to make a videogame after talking to one of my cousins (another programmer). He recommended I pick up Python and use the PyGame library. Over the course of the summer I made a simple 2d game. I aced my presentation that fall, and then promptly forgot everything I knew about Python.

However, I enjoyed the project enough that I decided to study CS in college. My first CS class was what really got the ball rolling. Since that class (two years ago) I don't think I've had more than 20-30 days without programming.
I do use LauncherPro :D The pro version actually! Great $2.99 app on Android.
Google Fight for Twitter
The worst case outcome of this (which I think is useful to mention, but maybe it is obvious) is when another company manages to think through all of that and "succeeds": figuring out how to monetize their product in a way that actually seems like a fair value proposition to all parties if you think through this, but instead totally fails because there is some website offering the same service "for free". If users cared enough to think through the business models of the companies involved, they'd realize how doomed the second company's model is, where the best case scenario is that one day they log in and they've pulled a Scibd, and that they should probably not be willing to use a free service, but instead they just go with it, get angry when it either collapses or starts monetizing, and them glom on to whatever the next "for free" version is. :(
That's one datapoint. The counterpoint is the thousands of forum owners who mistakenly relied on captcha to prevent spam at the expense of other antispam measures, like GeoIP.
Depends on the criticality of the data you're hosting. For casual data I think that's fine. For stuff you absolutely need to be sure never gets lost or destroyed, I think you really need a backup routine that incorporates separate physical media.
Will it have airplay support?
I totally agree with you that it is understandable to feel cheated in this occasion. Changing the model without saying so clearly is just bad communication (see the posterous link fiasco). But nevertheless I feel that a company does not have to explicitly state the fact that they are somehow aspiring to make money with their product, that is a given. So as a user I cannot be too shocked when somecorp starts to make money.
Your questions are focused around money. Startups shouldn't be about money.

If you want to be comfortable, work hard and save and focus on promotions. If you want to be rich, go into finance. Startups aren't comfortable, and most of us don't get rich. If you're in it for the money, you're going to quit when things get tough - and they will get tough and stay tough for longer than you think.

Do it only if you can't imagine doing anything else.
>3. For Mac users, where PDFs don't load in a plugin in the browser by default, they want to be able to link to a PDF that opens in the browser instead of popping up an external viewer.

FYI, PDFs absolutely load in the browser by default.
I think the whole HTML5 thing was a big PR exercise to improve the way they are seen. Possibly also a big play to get acquired - "We're doing cool stuff with fonts! Buy us!".

Fundamentally though, they're about locking away documents behind a pay wall. And personally, I don't see their value proposition at all.
Some plants give off chemicals that suppress the growth/success of their neighbors, a phenomenon called negative allelopathy.

Tiger's history sends the idea to his opponents that they can't win, so why try? I think this is a sort of memetic negative alleopathy.
Not to down talk the existing state of iOS HN native apps - but last I checked, they just weren't worthwhile over simply visiting the website with mobile Safari. There was no capability to view more than the top 20 submissions, upvote, threaded comment view, etc. These things might have changed since I last used the application, but there is plenty of room for improvement. It's tempting to build the client myself, unfortunately I'm booked solid with work for at least the next three months. I'm sure someone better than myself will come along and put together something awesome.
Right, I made a joke, but at the same time was trying to show the importance of picking an easy to spell and pronounce name.
The demos are really mind-blowing. Stuff that I never expected to come so fast to the browser are becoming a reality. This is really exciting stuff for me. I will definitely use some of these libraries (linked to from the page) in a few upcoming canvas based projects.
He's a textbook Type-A personality

Type A individuals can be described as impatient, time-conscious, controlling, concerned about their status, highly competitive, ambitious, business-like, aggressive, having difficulty relaxing; and are sometimes disliked by individuals with Type B personalities for the way that they're always rushing. They are often high-achieving workaholics who multi-task, drive themselves with deadlines, and are unhappy about delays. Because of these characteristics, Type A individuals are often described as "stress junkies." Many business and political leaders have Type A personalities.
Thank you so much for your response - I am very grateful for your encouragement. Have a great day and thank you.
I know a woman who was telling me about a cause she thought somebody should take up. I told her nobody else seemed to be interested in getting the ball rolling, so she should lead the charge. She looked like I'd suggested bending spoons with her mind. "A person like me can't do that," she explained.

She didn't mean that it would be too draining or impractical for somebody in her situation. She just wasn't capable — it was an a priori fact.
You lost me a bit there... writing and reading it back, and persisting the signature?

To try to cover the base I think I see: ASP.NET uses a single encryption key for all sessions, until you change the values in the web.config file (which I think requires a reboot).
They made me throw out the blades.

http://www.tsa.gov/travelers/airtravel/prohibited/permitted-...

"Razor-Type Blades - such as box cutters, utility knives, and safety razor blades (disposable razors and their cartridges are permitted)"
Atari 800 XL. Mostly playing tons of games, a little bit of BASIC.

Nice side-effect: I learned English earlier and better than my peers. Being stuck in a game was perfect motivation, dictionary was always at hand (thank you Adventure).
Google's Marissa Mayer on pet peeves and women in technology
It seems like Scribd would solve more problems if they let uploaders pay to give their readers free access. I'm not the Scribd user; the guy publishing with them is.
"The value of your service to a user isn't going to increase simply due to the passage of time or growth of your site. "

Yes it will. If that user uses your service every day, over time, it will be more valuable to them. Most services also don't just stay the same over time. More features are added and bugs are fixed, which adds to the value.

"If they wouldn't pay for it on day 1, the odds are they won't pay for it after 2 years of using the service."

If you never gave them the option of paying in the first place, how do you know?

"I think companies trying this route in the first place will be easier to change than peoples' reaction to it."

The answer is to not have free services in the first place. Many companies have tried the freemium model and then realize that it can't scale (IE: the costs to support this free user base out weighs the benefits).
You might want to edit that comment to link to your project since the comment will probably now rank higher than your repo for that hypothetical Google user.
Why the hype?

Economic mobility != http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_mobility
I wonder if it's because this group is over-represented in the deciding-who-gets-hired-or-fired group.
It gets annoying if it's constant
I agree - A 'buy RubyPoints' image/link might be desirable; and similarly to parent comment, what is the major incentive here? What site(s) currently offers redemption of Rubypoints?

> Thanks for the suggestion, for now if you'd like to see what a paid link looks like: https://www.rubypay.com/i/9c7wfUo4ACZ

Rather than having to sign-in to view how a transaction is done, can you have a demo page that includes 'dummy' rubypoints that can be redeemed to view a pdf/mp3 - for me, it would help make a decision about whether the service is useful or not.

In general, cool idea! I'm just the type of person that would like to see the service in action without having to login/create an account first.
Definitely makes sense. Since the sites been around for a long while already, it's not really urgent that you get a UI refresh done by "tomorrow". Might as well take the time to get the infrastructure right, which as you pointed out, will also make updating the UI much easier.
He's right on at least one thing. None of us thought of Twitter.
Hi there,

The task benchmarked was from a component of our messaging stack at work that I'd ported. My intention was to offer an example of the end-to-end performance of a real-world task that someone might be writing, rather than a sample task that's not much more than a no-op. I'd suggest that this particular one is real-world as it's straight out of one of our applications. I've no intention of trying to be dishonest here - just offering the measurements of my (and our) internal evaluation of the tool for our needs.

While I can't provide the source of the task, I can offer the quick-and-dirty source of the quick little "PyInvoker" I'd whipped up (sorry - didn't realize there was something called PyInvoke at the time). It just takes a message, unpacks the JSON, and uses getattr to call the appropriate task. Nothing fancy like e-mail error notifications, retries, and the like: https://gist.github.com/18a30689832569d67861

Anyhow, always and absolutely take any claims regarding the performance of a tool with a massive grain of salt, and try them for yourself to see if they suit your needs. Octobot's not designed to replace background processing in most applications as tools like Celery and DelayedJob (both of which I use myself) are great, a bit easier to write for, and a bit simpler to get up and running, depending on the application and language being used.

There's no intention to have slighted anyone or any other project here. I'm stoked that a lot of tools exist in this space. I just hadn't seen one on the JVM that offered this level of simplicity and parallelism with a bit of restraint when it comes to feature creep. But if you have an application that demands high throughput / low latency execution of tasks, this might be worth evaluating.
Hmm, is that only for Safari? On my OSX machine, Firefox pops up PDFs in an external instance of Preview by default. Presumably I could install the Acrobat plugin, but it doesn't seem to come with it, or to be able to find one already installed on the system. But if Safari does show them inline, then I agree I was wrong about the "default" behavior, since Safari is the default browser.
What about people that are already in the middle of building other things (like a comics empire)? If I have (what I consider to be) ten brilliant ideas, the best thing for me, personally, to do, is to execute full-steam on one, instead of dividing my attention. Should I then let the rest rot, and perhaps be rendered moot by the passage of time and technology—or should I give them away now while they're still fresh?
charging from the beginning actually scratches two itches: the business can evolve steadily, the revenue benefits the company. And second, as a paying customer I have exactly those "rights" the OP would like to have in this scenario. Trying to implement the early-pay-plan is a whole other story, and I doubt that it would have worked for scribd, had they started charging money without any content. classic chicken-egg-problem
Which is more dangerous than all the others things you can do as root - like inserting an arbitrary kernel module - how?
I was always dismantling things as a child. Remote control cars, clocks, lawn mowers, etc. I had a strong desire to just learn how things "worked."

I picked up a Tandy 1000HX second hand when I was probably 9 or 10 years old. I mowed a ton of lawns to get a hard drive for that machine. Shortly thereafter, I received a 486 and a handful of Walnut Creek CDs of various (dated) Linux/BSD distributions. I'm still not sure how those CDs came into my possession, I believe they were passed on to me from a friend.

I spent some time BBSing and learning to write shell scripts. On a couple of BBSes, I read hacking and phreaking text files and started to learn C/Assembly. It was free knowledge as our library was lacking in tech books and I rarely got to go to a bookstore. I also developed a fascination with radio, telephony, and basic electronics.

Three to four years later, the family decided it was time we had a computer (that we could all use). They picked up a 90Mhz box from HP that I promptly installed Linux on and used it to play games, program, and read any sort of documentation I could get my hands on. I also branched out into Perl and started writing small applications with it. We got Internet access about this time and I spent hours saving/absorbing documentation and tutorials from gopher/www/ftp sites.

In my late teens, I took on a job at the local Radio Shack repairing busted electronics. I learned quite a bit there, but electronics these days are disposable, so I had to find other work. I was doing penetration testing on the side for quick cash and ended up getting a contract for the City I lived in. After I finished the job, I got hired on as an intern in the IT department while going through college.

In university, I carried a double major in Computer Science and Pure Mathematics while also attending the local community college for Network Administration. I never finished either degree as I was offered a full time job as Network Administrator at the City. I took the job, quit school, and got married.

During the year or two before I dropped out of school, I learned Ruby with some friends from the ACM at the university and began doing freelance development.

So here I am today, Network Administrator for a small municipality and part time freelance Ruby developer. I'd really like to ditch the ties of my day job and get a full time development job or break out into my own business, but I'm trying to save up some buffer before I decide to take the leap.
Yay Microsoft for allowing those on Windows! Yay Google for allowing it on Android! Yay Canonical for allowing it on Ubuntu!
Freshman undergrad. So, I'm young.

I've been around computers my entire life.
When my father was in college (in the 70s, he's an old fart), he majored in EE/CS (or rather, EE / Math with focus in CS, because CS didn't exist as a separate major in his college).
I was raised in Silicon Valley, so I just hold my interest in computers/technology to be a product of both my parents and my environment.

On the other hand, my brother is a musician, and my sister wants to be an artist, so I don't know.
Yep; it's similar to how barbers rub their razors on leather-- called "stropping," IIRC. It apparently smooths out any microscopic dings in the blades' edge. It also helps to realign the blades in the case of those multi-blade cartridges.
Exactly, the "Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us" video is a great rebuttal of this idea. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc
Just as a case study, Reddit did exactly that, and their users flipped out. Reddit ended up doing OK with it -- they've made at least enough from it to be able to afford some infrastructure upgrades and at least one new hire -- but there was a pretty vocal not-small group of users that were unhappy about it.
His library might be dead, but that's not the case everywhere. My nearest library (Aurora Colorado) is generally packed full of people anytime I go there. And while there are certainly plenty of people on the library computers, a lot of them are browsing the book stacks and checking out plain old books.

The idea that the Internet contains everything you can find in a library is (at present at least) absolute bunk! The internet is great for enthusiasts to read more about their favorite subjects, but for a beginner learning about a new subject, books (physical or ebook) still rule.

And it would be a huge mistake to believe that everyone can afford a computer or an ebook reader. There are still a lot of people even in the US or other first world countries where $100 for an ebook reader is completely unrealistic.

Libraries are a great asset to communities and to democracy exactly because the price of admission for library users is so low. You don't need credit, you don't need any hardware, just a desire to learn.
LoverHugs.Com : Download High Quality Wallpapers
Carrier Pigeons are faster than rural Broadband
I wish I could link directly, but there's a section in Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics that talks about attractiveness as a function of visual abstraction. The fewer details a face has, the more people will like it, because more will identify with it. Dilbert's characters, "attractive" or not, are very heavily abstracted.
Jacqueline Novogratz on the art of investing in business to change the world