skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had a period where my business was very much in the spotlight here in NL, cover of 'Quote', big newspaper articles and so on.

That was all good as long as it was positive. But then I got the other side of the equation, the cranks and the attacks. I could have definitely done without those, as well as all the armchair generals telling you how to run your business for you.

The problem is that this is an extreme version of damning with praise, and it portrays Patrick as a smart guy that should not be near a business decision because 'he obviously can't do it'. It totally misses the point that Patrick has his own timetable, that he spent a metric ton of effort on getting out of situations where others determine his timetable and he's only just begun.

Stupid posts like these can damage your reputation, no doubt about it and if I were Patrick I would completely ignore the whole thing to stay above it.

It's not worthy of a reply by him, that would do it too much justice. I also think that you should not attack someone in such a veiled way to increase your own stature, because by implication the author tells you he knows better and so places himself above Patrick in his business abilities. That may very well be true, but I see no proof of that.

It's not like Steve Jobs wrote that piece.
Thanks, Luke! Apparently social widgets are suffering platform-wide: http://developers.facebook.com/live_status

Perfect timing.
Agreed. Not to argue with his accomplishments, but none of his actual coding has been legendary. Sure, he wrote a bingo card creator and a library that has a decent amount of use, but we're not talking Linus Torvalds here. Business wise, though, he's got a gift, no question.
I was replying specifically to "When a corporate pays for software, they are paying for peace-of-mind and assurance more than the bits that make up the app."

The peace of mind part. And that support contract still hasn't provided a fix for the padded oracle exploit. It'll be "a few weeks yet."
Is Ruby "hot" anywhere besides the valley? I haven't seen the significant uptick in socal, but perhaps I'm missing it.
Alex Tew comes up with one million people
Without details on the task he's running and the setup of his cluster, it's hard to know how meaningful these results are. Using a variation of the example, I've seen roughly 80% improvement with each doubling of the cluster size (testing up to 100 workers).
I agree with this.

And I ride in Trivandrum, a city in South India with aggressive drivers who get mad when they have to slow down and get caught in the really intense sun, minus air-con. (I've noticed a lot of middle-class folk here save on fuel by skipping air conditioning in city snarls)

Never ride on pavements.

Never ride on the edge/shoulder especially in India where a 'shoulder slip' could easily leave you with a broken neck.

Never ride near the dividing line.

Ride in the 1/3 of the road that lets you spot and recover from surprises served up by pedestrians AND Learn cross-steering if you ride fast on a road bike.

Being visible and noticed early-on is the key to survival.

Being 'in their face' is an effective way to stay alive.
I understand the genius part. I don't understand the tradegy. Where's the tradegy in that story ?
Ruby certainly has that ability, and there's nothing particular to Rails that prevents you from doing any Ruby things like that. In the Rails world, actually, you'll find lots of solutions (e.g. delayed_job) for offloading work like that from the web server process on to a dedicated worker queue. But there's no reason you can't just handle it synchronously either.
I signed up for your service, I know it will be useful to me. Thanks for putting it out there. The only concern I have is that it seems a bit self serving that a YC funded company gets, what seems to be, preferential treatment by having their own field in the users table. I feel you should scrape like everyone else ;)
The main issue I see with this Clojure library at the moment is the lack of tests. Other than the general idea is worthwhile and not hard to explore in most functional languages.
"Not only that, if you are a startup that wants to do b2b and you want to sell a product in to that market that will have a tight connection to stuff your clients already run you will be required to use .NET by your customers. Unless you like uphill battles that's the way you'll go eventually."

It's an uphill battle, but it's not impossible. My last job involved me writing Python for insurance companies. Yeah, there's always someone who won't accept anything that isn't written in .net or Java. But generally speaking, it's only a select few on your customers' team that will even know the difference. For the most part, businesses do actually focus on what's best for their bottom line instead of framework ideology.
Tons of backlinks mostly, from lots of very small websites.

Search engines did the rest.

Making people happy was quite a bit of work on that one but I think it was worth it.
It might sound trite but for me, the best clients I've found were people I either knew personally or who were introduced to me through an immediate acquaintance. Look around at your circle of connections - someone probably has a problem that you could solve, and they might not even realize it. After floating around on craigslist for a while, my first big client was my father in law, when I asked if he'd thought about making a website for his small business. This later turned into an online marketing campaign that paid my bills for quite a while.

If you need to build a portfolio or have no connections, you can try sites like elance or craigslist - but I wouldn't rely on them for too long. People shopping sites like that are looking for a bargain and probably won't pay what you're worth.
I will never understand this. Whenever I look at a programming technology, all I see is a tool; I just can't see all the moral drama and tragedy this guy describes. Might be a religious thing. Or I am probably very stupid, like all the other "M$ slaves",...
Thanks for saying this -- I think it's interesting that the comments here boil down to:

. Disbelief that FB is worth that much, or

. ad-hominem attacks one way or the other, or

. Technical discussions on whether there's sufficient liquidity to get a real 'price'.

When I look at what facebook has done, and the absolute fucking mountain of data they sit on, FAR better quality than Google's in my opinion, If I were on the board, I would be thinking "brilliant job executing on growth, guys. I'm deeply excited to see you make all this pay once you're not running around putting out massive fires all the time."

It's not going to be rocket science to make it pay, and pay, and pay...

Taking another slice: I'd bet my entire (comparatively very small) net worth that the board would unanimously vote down a $33B cash buyout offer right now. There's just no way you guys think that FB has topped out; it hasn't really even gotten going when you think of a complete, end-to-end business model yet.

Job offers happily accepted. : ).
Sounds like history repeats itself. New Microsoft - Google - takes on Netscape browser (Netscape 5 -> Mozilla -> FireFox).

"Integration with Google Services ....
When Chrome OS comes out with a stable release, you'll be able to sync your full computing experience by just logging in with your Google account. It's not there yet, but it's all part of where Chrome is going. "
sounds strangely familiar to the strategy of close integration of IE into Windows successfully played many years ago.

Competition and greed is good. And current state of browsers only confirms it. In result we'll have even better and faster browsers :)
Oh, I've done that, but there isn't much draw to the site anyway, and the fact that i finally joined when I was convinced that Facebook respected privacy, only to find out that they are constantly making things public by default.

To be honest, the only reason I still have a FB account is a feeling that ill need to integrate our products with the site in the future.
Nokia EVP on Android's short-term solution
Networking events work wonders on finding new clients. They might start you off with a small project, probably with constraints, but as you grow with them, you will usually have more freedom.

Check with your local Chamber of Commerce for events. Also, go to events that are totally outside of IT, such as construction or travel. Talk to people and tell them what you do. Somebody will have an idea that they want coded up.
More people than in the past are using 'flag' as a generic downvote.
Can like buttons be recreated using Facebook APIs?
Or, let's hope they do not write about Patrick without asking him. I am not sure how he would feel about it.
My guess is he either won't respond, or he'll take a hell of a long time figuring out the right way to word a response to this.
Yes, Oni Apollo is open-source, and you've got the right repository. The assembled library, oni-apollo.js, is composed of a whole bunch of different bits and pieces and tools which we'll all be publishing on github eventually. It will take a bit of time, so please bear with us.
The source code for the built-in modules is already there, see http://github.com/onilabs/apollo/tree/master/src/modules/ .
Seriously, what business skills?

In 5 years he's managed to build a $30k business.

That is it.

$30k. That's less than a self-employed plumber. That's far less than a doctor or a pharmacist (5 years training).

While we can all read Patrick's writings and think 'hey that's pretty good', all it means is that he's a good writer.

He's a good writer, but a terrible businessman, he has the business sense of a dead ferret.

Clear evidence of dead ferret like business skills:

1. He builds BCC in 1 week then spends 5 years gradually improving it instead of just building more products.

2. It took him 5 years to make another product.

3. He entered an extremely small niche and then instead of building another product he spent 5 years attacking that niche.

4. He'll gleefully take a 10% increase in sales in 6 months for a product he built in 1 week, not realizing that perhaps, just perhaps, he should spend another week BUILDING ANOTHER PRODUCT.

Yeah, they're all the damn same point. The point is that the internet's exploded in the last 4/5 years (whenever he started). It's exploded and 50% of his growth can be put down to just that. The internet growing. The rest of it was largely wasted time if you look at it from a business perspective. He was an SEO expert and totally failed to capitalize on it when it would have been worth millions. He spotted and knows how great small web apps do years ago and yet only just gave up his day job. He missed so many massive first mover advantages reading his blog is like watching a slow motion car crash.

That's why, when reading his stuff I get so angry. I can see it, plain as day on my face. He's done it, he can do it so much better, so much bigger, and yet there he is, tweaking his blog posts, A/B testing BCC, his crutch.

This guy's no business genius, he's totally clueless at business. 10 seconds looking at his tiny market vs. his potential reward for entering ANY other market would make him realize he should make another gad-damn product. He's got the experience, he's done it before! What's he afraid of? He missed every single web opportunity that's been going.

Worse he even knows, knows, that if he switched his product to a subscription based thing he'd probably be rolling in it. And he hasn't even tried. He's even letting people still use the desktop client. Why? WHY?

Because he's NOT got the business skills.

I'm not saying I'm better, in many, many ways I'm a lot worse. I can't get my first product out the door yet and I've not got some crazy salary. But to call Patrick's first skill business is to do a great disservice to all those people who were in the same position he was 5 years ago and are now millionaires or multimillionaires while he's small time apart from some kudos on hacker news and Spolsky's forums.

I am so glad he's finally making another product. I really wish him well. But he let so many pitches sail by it makes me angry just thinking about it.
The only reason I don't use Chrome is because of the Google info sharing. Chromium is unclear as to weather it actually shares data or not. I believe at one point there was a bug where it was definitely connecting to googles servers. I believe they fixed it, but it was enough to keep me on Firefox.
I am not 25 yet.

> I don't want to lock it in long term bonds because I want to be free to take it out whenever I want.

Lots of bonds have secondary markets, that mean you can sell them at any time. Of course, you find the most liquid secondary markets in government bonds --- and those, in general, do not yield much at the moment.

> I don't want to risk all of it in stocks but I want a better yield than the net <2% most of it is making now.

Are you talking about nominal or real yield?

Whatever you invest in, make sure that you do not pay too many fees. (Low fees are the primary incentive to go for exchange traded index funds.)

And of course, there's always the possibility to invest in yourself.
I think the HN community is becoming more and more diluted with people who are here for techcrunch-type gossip and articles and not actual thought provoking insights and research.
Wind in Japanese is 'kaze' (風), and the kanji character (according to rikaikun) has a second meaning: method.

http://translate.google.com/#en|ja|wind

Edit:

The kanji for dragon seems to have a reading: "ryuu" and that "sound" (if not written in kanji) has several meanings, one of which is also "method"

http://jisho.org/words?jap=ryuu&dict=edict

"goat" seems to be "yagi", and putting that in jisho.org, one of the results is related to "night shift", so maybe a nightly process? nightly build?

http://jisho.org/words?jap=yagi&dict=edict
The art of mastering airline loyalty programs -- Going for Elite
Another idea may be to increase the amount of time that a new post is "boosted" into the main page list. It seems like new posts fall to the 2nd page really quick. So it might be fixable by tweaking parameters.
What's up with the grainy font on your website? I'm no designer but that's pretty distracting and lowers the perceived value of your application.
Hmm, thank you Jacques, I had not considered that angle. I can see how galling that is now.

I'm generally of the position that I don't care that much when people are wrong about me. At the same time, it wouldn't feel good to have someone hijacking my visibility to raise their own agenda, which I see now could be how this is going.
An IP stack has to expose basic IP functionality, not just responding to pings. Can it, for e.g., do IP forwarding? (that would be an awesome full fledged router) IP checksums?

Also, this program is vulnerable to the classic Ping of Death attack. ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ping_of_death
Thank you. I asked for this in the past: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1194757
Not if you think the advice is worthwhile to others as well. There's no reason to assume shady ulterior motives when there is a perfectly simple explanation: it's just an error of judgement.
Who asked you?
I doubt he will actually cough up the money. It's not based on any assumptions about his character based on that movie, just my sense of how much of a paper tiger his and facebook's financials are.
Instapaper Goes From Hobby To Startup
Seriously, stocks. Over the long term it'll do fine. The last 10 years has been a joke but it won't last forever. Focus on companies that pay an solid and increasing dividend, and don't sell them. That will force you to buy companies that you think will last. Some might not, so diversify. Read the book "Rule #1" - not a bad place to start. Except do what Buffett does - buy stocks that you won't sell (in general).

If you're worried about going all-in (which you should be) use value averaging, in which you put some money in each month, but more as the market drops.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_averaging
Judging from the votes, the majority of readers feels this post was very inappropriate. What I don't understand is:

- Why it is massively upvoted anyway and

- Why people don't feel that it is equally inappropriate to personally attack the author and accuse him of all kinds of bad intentions, when an honest misjudgement is the more likely explanation.
Agreed, I was just probing the limitations if any.
using kanban on my current project and no software has come close to a real world whiteboard.

simple, everyone can use it, cheap, can 'save' it by taking pictures, nicely physical, forces people into one room, gets people standing and talking.

not found any agile sw that is any good for me
Except that you don't have job security precisely because you're not going into management. Cost of living raises for 15 years without moving up the ladder (i.e. going into management) make you stick out like a soar thumb. In my experience these are always the first to go because they just look too expensive on any chart.
Are you in Windows? We're using Typekit to load some fonts and some setups aren't particularly good at rendering fonts. :/
I agree 100%.

When I see horridly aliased fonts like that, I always assume it's some kind of Apple thing that just doesn't look right elsewhere.

Is that it?

http://imgur.com/69eTV.png

I use the latest Chrome on Windows 7 and Ubuntu.
Maybe, all the shares being for sale does sort of implicated a lack of demand so the price would drop, it's a very far extreme end of the curve though. With an FB IPO and "all the shares" being for sale at once, I'd have to assume they'd go up, lot's of people seem to believe in their future.

The flip side of all this valuation talk (you know, DHH had me at 'evaluation' hahahaha. that's priceless.) is that if you were to attempt to "buy" Apple, it would cost you a lot more than $267B... maybe even a trillion dollars. Does that make them worth more or less than their valuation? Don't get me wrong, there are dynamics here, it's not a static calculation.
Indeed. And as much as I'd like to think that I'm talented and have good ideas, I'm not going to risk being financially screwed to try them out right away.

Looking at the founders who dropped out of school, or built an idea into an empire, a common thread does seem to be a measure of financial stability, if not complete freedom from debt.

Here's hoping that day comes someday.
You may enjoy this

http://translationparty.com/
Will Nokia build Windows phones?
Facebook Sells Your Friends
Tell HN: I got sick of people procrastinating. Now I tell them to Finish Shit.
I got sick of my friends complaining about not finishing small projects. Some of them claimed they were too busy to finish writing that novel they've been thinking about for the last few years (They told me this when we were wasting time in a bar, no less). One friend told me that he wouldn't be able to start his own company because he ran out of time.

After hearing all of these people bitch and complain, I finally snapped and told them to stop talking and just "Finish Shit"!

Something strange then began to happen. People actually started to get motivated, and were finishing their shit! Books were being worked on, papers filled to form LLCs.

This exclamation turned into a mini web app idea for me. What if people could submit things they were procrastinating on, and get yelled at by complete strangers until they were motivated enough to do it?

I built a rough version of the the app at finishshit.com. To submit something you need help with, just message @finishshit on Twitter. If you're not a procrastinator, check out the site anyways. It's very therapeutic to yell at procrastinators that deserve/want it.
What made the original Wall Street movie a classic is that, despite Oliver Stone's liberalism, he created a character in Gorden Gekko who was a genuine advocate of capitalism, even if he personally represented the less attractive side of capitalism. The greed is good speech is fair and accurate, because greed is really the desire for more, and it is a motivator.

Now, 30 years later, Oliver Stone has become a marxist who loves Hugo chavez, and advocated that the US government nationalize the oil industry like chavez did, which is no small point, as it was the shrugging of capitalists in Venezuela that resulted in Chavez cracking down with violence and nationalization of the oil industry... and the flight of the best and brightest resulting in the dea spiral the country is now in....

And this new movie, im afraid, is going to be knocking down a strawman with capitalism painted on his chest. This Gekko Twitter account doesn't seem to really even be trying to channel gekko. At least compared to the original.
This is why Goldman Sachs has weathered the financial crisis so well: they invest heavily in their IT.
I should also mention that I'm adding features over the next couple of days, so you're not looking at the final version just yet.
> I'm not surprised patio11 is not responding to this.

Well - it's also the middle of the night in Japan. 04:28 according to the site I glanced at.
Scraping is a waste of resources for both parties involved. So is API polling to some extent. If we are going to move forward into the era of the Real-Time web, we need to be setting examples of how different companies/sites can work together with event-based messaging/notifications. Twitter is great at this with their Streaming API. Facebook is trying, but their real-time API is a bit lacking at the moment.

We're just trying to build something people want, and according to pg, he has received many requests for email notifications on HN, and we thought we could help in this area.
Patrick picked a niche product to hone his skills in, he had to pick something that was complex enough that he would see the whole story, yet simple enough - and not critical enough - that if his day job demanded it that he could ignore it for a bit.

That rules out B2B, which is where the money is when you're a one man show.

So, now he's got his hands free, he's got his knives sharpened and he's going to do his next project, presumably at a higher level of turnover.

Some people are cautious other people are much more of a risk taking nature. I can fully sympathize with the way Patrick went about this and I would definitely not assume that this was all one big accident, it seems to me as though it was by design. He simply tried to find a way to turn his idle time in to passive income enough to get his hands free.

Running a business is about being in control, about not letting your business run you in to corners that you can not back out of, and Patrick has - as far as I can detect - succeeded admirably in his goals so far.

I have absolutely no doubt that he will do it again, I really hope that this time he'll hit one out of the park.

> I'm not saying I'm better, in many, many ways I'm a lot worse. I can't get my first product out the door yet and I've not got some crazy salary. But to call Patrick's first skill business is to do a great disservice to all those people who were in the same position he was 5 years ago and are now millionaires or multimillionaires while he's small time apart from some kudos on hacker news and Spolsky's forums.

Let's look at that 5 years from now, ok? Some people are slow but steady, some people are fast but go down as fast as they go up. Patrick has tried very hard to take the lottery element out of how he runs his business and that alone should tell you something.
Print preview is still missing from Chrome. It's the only reason I keep FF around (to make sure meeting agendas fit in one page, and I will adjust the zoom until they do).