skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Doing a startup is much more like running a marathon than it is like being punched in the face.

It's for people with stamina, and the will to fight back.

I've been doing this for many years now and the times that I got 'punched in the face' are relatively small, and most of the times they were simply setbacks that if I had thought a bit longer and had been a bit smarter I could have avoided. Being punched in the face repeatedly suggests that third parties are actively trying to hurt you as an individual, and I can only find two instances of that over the last 15 years, and in both those cases the counter-punch was a k.o., so I don't expect to see repeat performances from that corner.

Entrepreneurs as a rule are not from the soft side of life, they know the value of standing up for themselves.

Going out for funding and being turned down for instance is not being punched in the face, it is a learning experience that tells you that something about you, your product or your presentation needs work, or that the investors you've been talking to are simply wrong.

So you improve and you try again, such is the nature of entrepreneurship and the nature of life in general.

If you can't handle disappointment well then entrepreneurship may not be for you. Think of it as character building.

edit: the disagree by downmod crowd has it today it seems.
I completely agree with you, he comes off as unprofessional and unmotivated. If I had a person like that near me I'd avoid them like the plague, the negativity is just too much.

Focus on the task at hand, get the job done, don't whine. Rinse, repeat, watch the money flow in and the people around you getting happier.

This is a typical case of a victim mentality. If you want things to change then change them, don't sit and wait for the world to change around you for your sake. Go do something.
Since Corporations have become bigger and smarter, Govt cannot monitor their day-to-day illegal & immoral activities.
It is better to breakup these corporations into smaller entities to promote competition and solve unemployment crisis
Microsoft is dumping its rock solid Windows Mobile platform. This is a huge concern for me.

It was developed with years of efforts and in 6.5 Microsoft got it much right.

However just because Apple's marketing strategy worked really well, it didn't mean you needed to scrap your well built-in well tested platform in favour of a copy of iPhone called Windows Phone. It has so far not been able to create any excitement in the market yet but on the other hand Windows Mobile has a lot of fans.

Windows Mobile has thousands of useful applications which help so many people around the world. On the other hand, Windows Phone is just a new platform: do you really think scrapping away will convince those hundreds of thousands of Windows Mobile users to upgrade to something on which their favourite apps are no more available?

You need to encash the already built hype and following rather than pretending that you don't have anything at all and starting all over.
but its not startups responsibility to take care about that...

And yes i do "export" my services to few countries so i would say i have experience with it.
Lost in the Haystack
Your graph shows a wage increase as well. So does the original source which your article cites (2 links deep).

http://www.minneapolisfed.org/publications_papers/pub_displa...

The key graph: http://www.minneapolisfed.org/pubs/region/07-09/figure2.jpg

I take it we are in agreement?
I would ask Steve Ballmer whether he is aware of the fact that Microsoft's licensing for Windows and SQL Server makes scaling out impossible and hence knocks their platform out of the race for cloud computing, at least when it comes to web apps.

I would ask him whether he really thinks that SQL Azure with its $100 per month for 10GB price tag is anything but a sad joke.

I would ask the people who design the Microsoft partner programs why their programs as well as their websites are so incredibly bureaucratic and complicated.

As a Microsoft shareholder, I would ask them to show me growth or raise the dividend so I can participate in the slow but still profitable decline that is the inevitable consequence of their current strategy.
There are plenty of attempts at the creation of new walled gardens, but I don't think they will have a very long life.

The examples you give are all tied to very specific hardware, microsoft thrived on open hardware making tools and supporting those tools.

Look at where IBM is going for what microsoft could be like.
Strongly disagree. When I see those little sparks of delight in my mother's eyes when she is using her iPad I think I see a pretty strong predictor of Apple 'being onto something'. Tablets are not about being great multiple-purpose devices. They're about being good enough.
There was a great post here a while back that said that research showed not only does total productivity start to decline if you go too far beyond 40 hour weeks on a prolonged basis but (and this is the kicker) your subjective evaluation of your productivity gets out of whack so you're less productive but you think you're more productive.
Ahh got you, I will document it better, Thanks!
Yeah - I guess I meant something, anything, that would be a clean break with IE.

Maybe they should buy Opera Software?
'Copycat' websites drive rise in fake products
I don't know, maybe the problem is that my perception on freelancing is based on a non representative sample: For example I've browsed rentacoder.com for a while: my impression was that the market is extremely saturated, most of the tasks are quite boring, time consuming, low-payed and not much fun. Did not seem to be better than a day job. Being a well-recognized, top freelancer with special skills and good connections: that's good. But being an average freelancer does not seem to be very appealing.
On the other hand at my startup I can create things which my bosses and customers did not even think of. Most fun software problems are not eceonomical to solve in very high quality for one client, but it is economical to solve if you can sell it as a product to lots of clients. This possibility of 'scale' makes startups very different. On the other hand the success rate it much lower. I have failed projects behind me, I know what failure is, but I've learned a lot from them, and still I try again (beside my day-job).
Redditors have done it. Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert rally in DC 10/30/10.
It started with this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/d7ntl/ive_had_a_vision_and_i_cant_shake_it_colbert/

And they donated more than $240k to Donors Choose on Stephen Colbert's behalf to convince them: http://www.colbertrally.com/

Jon and Stephen's announcements:

http://www.rallytorestoresanity.com/

http://www.keepfearalive.com/

Amazing.
They didn't - I was joking about it :-)
This is my first comment here. Oh Boy! how easy and fast it was to sign up!!

I sign just to comment because the comment "(VSphere, 4i) are built on top of the SuSE Linux kernel" is so wrong. The Classic ESX has Service Console is is customized RHEL. ESXi does not have the Service Console. It still does have a command console where one can run ESX commands and a limited set of Unix commands which AFAIK are Busybox's. It also has dropbear sshd.

So coming back to the topic, I too have no idea what VMware is going to do with SuSe Linux.
I would like Microsoft's Developer Division to start supporting Linux more ... Windows servers are too expensive for me making scale-out strategies a PITA and IMHO technically inferior to Linux from a startup perspective.

Biztalk/Webspark are nice initiatives, but not enough.

And I would totally shell out the cash for a MSDN subscription / Visual Studio if I could choose Linux for deployment.

Better yet, collaborate more with the Mono project from Novell. Open-source more of the .NET platform.

The few open-source projects from Microsoft built around .NET don't really have an open-source development methodology ... let others contribute to the DLR, IronPython and IronRuby. Don't fear getting your property tainted ... how many projects from Apache have had such problems, or not getting used by the Fortune "whatever" companies?
A tale of three cultures.

I had been to reddit and digg many times, but have never registered and never posted.

I came to hacker news years ago, jumped right in, and never looked back.

Why? We can talk about all kinds of complex criteria regarding social networking, community building, people behavior, systems behavior, etc., etc., etc., but let's not overlook the most basic thing of all: it's simple.

Simple font, simple layout, threaded conversations, limited options. Easy to read, easy to explore. No "sub-reddits", no fancy filters, no complex algorithms begging to be gamed (well maybe). None of the stuff that people keep asking for to make us "more like digg or reddit".

It's so simple that we actually focus more on the content than anything else. There's a lesson for all of us developers in there.
Thanks - I would never in a million years have discovered that by chance. It is just an empy rectangle attached to the side of the screen - wtf?

OK seriously, what Microsoft (and also Apple) should do is start a "coach your mum or granny" initiative. Everybody should help their granny or grandpa with their PC every once in a while. It is amazing how complicated it is to explain some things.

How do I explain that "show desktop" is just an empty rectangle? How do I explain that apps are not really closed when you close them? And so on. Just imagine a noob sitting there asking "why?" and having to explain. Then improve the feature.
Actually, BD+ and AACS have been circumvented time and again by various people and tools. But regardless, breaking HDCP means we can access the digital uncompressed/unencrypted signal and manipulate it at will, as opposed to relying on the analog hole.
Licorize beta 1: Get links done
Another very important metric, probably more important than raw traffic is number of users and number of posts to each service. You can get more creative in number of posts per blog per month, recency data (e.g. X% of all users have blogged at least once in the past 90 days) and get an even better picture.

Without this kind of context, raw traffic is kinda meaningless. At least the quantcast numbers for both are directly measured and not "estimated".
"A naive business owner was aggressively sold into a plan that wasn't sustainable for their business"

I agree with you here. However, as someone who has been on the ad sales side of the equation, I can tell you that all sales are emotional and the more time you spend explaining to people how to properly price out the product the less likely they are to buy. Literally the more rational you make it for the person to buy your product the less likely they are to actually buy it, because the rational part of the brain isn't the part of the brain that buys stuff.

In addition, I'd argue that what makes advertising not-unethical is that the vast majority of businesses lose money on any given ad buy. If advertising was just a license to print money for all businesses instead of, say, the best 5% of businesses then it would be pretty hard to argue that advertising was making the world a better place. While Groupon may well have been at fault here, the small business owner does have some responsibility to understand how advertising works, what the best practices are, what asset they are trying to build, etc. If the business owner in question understood this then it wouldn't really matter that they didn't understand every last feature on the site. It sounds like her real problem was that the people coming into her store didn't like her stuff; the fact that she was losing money on every sale would have been a non-issue to begin with if this weren't true.
I would really like to believe that, but more and more I think we're heading for a closed/industry.

The App Store isn't the only example, how about all those developers integrating their apps with Facebook, Twitter or the Google apis.
I feel compelled to mention that similarly to the OP, I am not having an existential crisis.

Its probably a cultural issue, At least personally I think if you cant have a proper bitch about something, you probably dont love it enough. Same as the british idiom that says you arent friends with someone until you can call them a [Insert crude insult]
Intuitive Understanding Of Euler’s Formula
Thanks. Didn't know that.

Hopefuly this means that implementing the idea I'm talking about is not too much of a stretch from the current code.
I respect him way too much to think that, but you're right, others have been the first line of defense when it comes to keeping up with changing specs. However, when those settled the requirements, he was able to chew through them quicker than anyone else.

He also had a deeper sense of memory. I was only a contractor and worked with them briefly, but from what I have seen, he was the one most aware of what has been tried before and failed. For example, his team made an impulse decision to outsource some chunks of the platform to a 3rd party app, but he was able to connect a few dots and point out that the 3rd party app uses a SOAP library, which in turn uses an http client lib, which uses something else, which they found to be non-reenterant .. or some such.

The rest would have discovered this later and ended up patching it, while he is able to make good decisions right from the start. It helps that he was super specialized, and done nothing but C++ and PHP, on Linux, for the last 15 years; while everyone else on the team had a broad encyclopedic knowledge of a lot of stuff.
After some hunting and pecking this seemed to answer some of my questions: http://www.xeround.com/developers/faq.html

- It runs on EC2.

- For performance, they store data in memory (backed up on disk). So it should be faster than regular mysql (but use more memory).

- It's a drop-in replacement for MySQL (it's a storage engine). Your code doesn't have to change at all. (ie. you can use PHPMyAdmin etc...)

- It scales up and down quickly, supposedly (although I couldn't find many details on how).
That depends on what you're doing. If you're a developer or a sysadmin or something, you need to set up a corporation to provide you some level of liability protection. I'm not a lawyer/tax expert, but my understanding is that this is not something you could do without at least an LLC in place.

If I'm wrong about this, someone please correct me.
Yeah, I'm still mad about that. But only because I had thought of precisely the same thing in parallel with dfranke (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=640213) and he had the time to actually do it. Aargh. People who have time to do clever stuff! :-)

Perhaps I need to get a job where I get to break things.
I don't think the author suggested that. I found the article highly amusing, with several lovely laugh-out-loud moments.

You are taking the article too seriously.
Stop with things like the funeral parade for the iPhone. Really guys, that was really lame.

MS should refocus on its priorities. Every now and then comes out the iPhone killer and fails. Even if you have a good product with Windows Mobile 7, iPhone should not be your target. Android is eating your market share. The iPhone is a closed box from Apple, Android is the OS that runs on phones from different manufacturers, which is the same strategy of WM7 (by the way, why does everything get called Windows at MS? You don't even have the window concept on a phone).
Nice the web thumbnails.. can't find the iphone client.
I started an account here and have had it open in my browser for about two weeks, waiting to dive in. But there's an awful lot of buttons and I still don't really understand how the website works.
All Unit Tests can be combined to create http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_testing
They actually explicitly dismissed XMPP (see the comment on this video from them: http://vimeo.com/13026173). They were also approached by the onesocialweb.org team to work together and also dismissed the invite.

It seems however that they plan to align with the ostatus.org protocol, but so far no documentation of their architecture and protocol has been delivered. In Ostatus, the server-server messaging is HTTP based and using the PubSubHubBub and Salmon protocols.
We bought Locately.com. I don't know if we're not creative enough, but it was much better than anything we were able to come up with which wasn't registered. And having a better name is definitely worth the small amount of money we paid for it.
Microsoft: Windows Phone 7 to be GSM-only until first half of 2011
That's where PC-Mag gives better coverage.

They are 56 bit HEXADECIMAL numbers, not just regular numbers.
On the flip side, my two partners and I started up an e-commerce platform and did fairly well. Started on less than a quarter-million in 2003, and we switched ideas the first several months from one commerce idea to another. We had no idea what we were doing, learning while we went along. It required my partners saying "yes" to customers, me saying "no" to my partners, and a lot of back and forth. But it worked, and was a REALLY good system and service.

Unfortunately, it all went downhill 4 years later when backstabbing wenches pull the rug out from beneath us.
What's with the downvoting? This is one of the few places where MS is currently competing with Google on an equal footing. Windows Live Mail has just as many users as GMail, but wont unless they keep up the innovation... MS needs to keep an online presence, and email is the perfect way to do this considering more people have an email address than use social networking...
> OS X: can't deal with the Finder. I frequently don't know how to navigate to an upper directory, for example.

Four ways I know of.

1. Use the column view so you can see every folder you've navigated through. (My preference)

2. Right click on the title bar's label.

3. Use the path button on the toolbar.

4. Use the back button (Yeah, it's not always up)

If the toolbar is missing, click the white button at the top right of the window to return to a regular Finder window.

:) That said, none of those are exactly obvious which is a recurring problem with OSX. About the only thing OSX gets right in that category is that almost everything behaves the same so you don't have to figure it out twice. For example, open a document in textedit, you can right click on the title and get the folder tree the file exists in.
Why are there so few good developers?
Ask HN: How to deal with job hate/mid-life-developer-crisis?
If you hate your job so much that you can't keep from saying it out loud, or even singing to yourself about how much you hate it every morning just thinking about it- but yet when job opportunities come up that you could apply for, you don't because you're holding out for something better, and you drastically want to start a company, but you can't get excited about any certain idea or sit down and bang out any code for ideas you have, what does that mean? :)
Github.

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/github.com

Really, open source is growing faster than it ever did before, the products are getting much better, they're slowly wising up to the fact that open source does not mean 'shitty support' or 'no need for marketing'. More and more people are finding ways to make money in open source projects.

Drupal got a very large amount of funding based on software they're giving away (ok, not my personal choice, but still).

And so on. Open source is maturing, and microsoft could do a lot worse than set a trend for a change instead of trying to hold on to the brakes as hard as they can.
Collaboration with Mono on .NET would be the "killer" news for me. With Java looking increasingly shaky, it'd be nice to have a second "write-once, run-everywhere" paradigm.

While this may not end up being the greatest of reasons, a lot of my classmates shy away from .NET languages/MSFT technologies because they're more difficult to develop in Linux. Getting rid of that complaint would be super awesome.
That's interesting, thanks, I remember writing my own on the Z80.
Perhaps the market for this type of software is going away, as you described. In that case, focus on getting as much revenue out of it with as little work as possible, while moving on to other things. No point in fighting an uphill battle that'll get harder with the years if the market is indeed going away.
seems like a dup of http://news.ycombinator.org/item?id=1554687
there's a ton of comments already, BTW
At this point probably the smartest thing which Microsoft could do would be to adopt some Linux distro (perhaps OpenSuSE, which they already have some relationship with) and base all of their future development on top of it. At a stroke this would eliminate many of their security and malware problems, dramatically improving the user experience.

Windows remains prevalent, but at present as a software developer I'm not seeing much of a future for it, other than as a legacy system that I may need to support, and am recommending home and business users to move to other platforms (either Linux or Mac) whenever that's possible.
Doubling Lithium-Ion Battery Storage
Perhaps the most satisfying hack I ever did was with the 6809. Making it handle high speed communications directly. It was done by decoupling its address bus during instruction fetch and then feeding it instructions from a separate ROM. The effect was to let external logic handle the control flow even if the 6809 did the data processing.
Agreed. Chicken and egg problem would be much harder than the realname bit.

There are 100s of these sites out there, it's just hard.
My work laptop (Vista `Enterprise') takes longer to wake from hibernate than it does to cold boot.
Sorry--"dark-tipper"?
I would add to this: make MS web apps compatible with all browsers. It really does not make any sense that for big apps that cost a lot of money like Dynamics apps you have to use IE or the app does not work.

I worked on Dynamics CRM for more than a year and I can tell you this: you do not get any relevant benefit from IE as a platform (as a user as well as a developer), it's annoying for developers that cannot use their tool of choice, it's annoying for client that have to switch to a different browser just to use the app. Moreover it's slow and buggy, and this makes the experience with the app, that is not very good, even less pleasant.
As someone who works in B2B I have found this to be the case.
looks beautiful and cool idea - will try it
A modest request: please, with each version don't make it more and more difficult to make the Windows explorer behave as in Windows 95. I mean having a folder tree and detailed view. Some people still work a lot with files and folders "the old way".

Bonus points for not moving the configuration screens around.

Things that have changed with explorer: less space for content, caused by adding not-so-useful toolbars, folders tree replaced by "selected" or "favourites" pane, "easy mode" tree navigation that prevents opening more than one branch at the same time, default to "libraries" in Windows 7, default to views other than detail, sometimes very difficult to change, hiding file extensions, folder redirection... Most of the changes can be reverted touching some registry or configuration setting, but it's increasingly difficult and time consuming, and sometimes impossible.

I guess the changes are intended for new users, but it would be very welcomed to have a "classic mode" switch somewhere. Usability is important, but please consider that old users have different usability requirements. For me Windows is less and less usable with each version.

About the config dialogs, I've recently had to make a novice user to change the DHCP settings for Windows 7 over the phone. It wasn't an easy task.