skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I know way to many passionate, articulate, and terrible programmers to think passion a good thing. I also know plenty of really great programmers who don't find coding a challenge after all these years. On average I think passion speaks more to youth than the ability to get things done.
That only works if you can't grow facial hair anyway.
Quicklisp or: How I learned to stop worrying and love installing CL libraries
Because some of us believe that creating something innovative that people use is more rewarding than making small contributions towards an existing product/business at a 9-5 job.

More often than not, society rewards you in proportion to the value you create for it. And you can't create the amount of value that comes with a startup without taking on a lot of risk. (Look up "risk-reward" in economics).

That's why entrepreneurs are glorified. They are willing to take the necessary risks in order to create unusual amounts of value for society and, yes, for themselves.
For most freelancers an S-Corp is the best option as it allows you to duck some FICA taxes on a portion of your income. This is under the assumptions that you are in the US and are a US citizen
It isn't about "sucking" or not, it is about having a specialized versus generalized skill set. Both candidates and companies have to look outside of their local markets to make a match the more specialized they make their search.

We're (I work for Rackspace Hosting) constantly flying people out for interviews from all over as we look to find the ideal person for a role. For a company it is much more expensive to settle and hire a non-ideal candidate over time than it is to spend some money on the interview and selection process. The same applies even for valley based companies -- do you think Google or Facebook have a policy of "local candidates only"?
use an int to represent the currencySymbol as well. If you need to resolve it, use a lookup table mapping ints->symbols.
The Great Principles of Computing
I have one. Bet you can't guess what it is. :)
First, be who you want to be. It's your life and your decisions. As long as you feel in control and are happy, who are we to say what's better than what?

Second, you are asking a question with a false premise. It's not either "make a million and be a rock star" or "work a 9-5 job". There are lots of entrepreneurs on here, just like yourself, who are also working jobs. Lots more that are on their own and just barely Ramen profitable. Lots more that are quite happy with having a cottage business.

There is a business and a hype around startups, no doubt. You see a lot of that here, although its usually sub-rosa.

It's the risk-taking superman story. There's a lot of drama. It's the simple cool idea or magic formula that made the weakling into the giant. Business porn. People selling emotion instead of a reality. Some folks trying to help that don't know what they're talking about, they just got lucky once. Some unlucky people who drew the wrong conclusions. Way, way too much fanboyism and hero worship. But that's okay -- startups are all about making a difference, and that usually entails lots of work and risk. As long as folks know the odds going in, why not stay positive about the whole thing? Our enthusiasm for startups doesn't mean that other choices are bad or wrong. Why wouldn't you be excited about the choices you make in life, no matter what they were?
Spot on. As much as we'd like to move to the U.S. the biggest barrier is that small matter of a green card! We actually love Australia, and Melbourne is a wonderful city, but we do face certain disadvantages building a startup from here. We're still doing it of course and, interestingly, in our particular niche (tools for domain name investors) Melbourne actually has a few global players (e.g. Trellian, Flippa). Down the track I see us having some kind of U.S. presence. There's always a way...
Just for some market cap context:

AAPL	Apple Inc.	251.57B
MSFT	Microsoft Corporation	218.24B
IBM	Intl. Business Machine...	164.21B
GOOG	Google Inc.	156.21B
ORCL	Oracle Corporation	138.24B <----
HPQ	Hewlett-Packard Company	88.76B
SAP	SAP AG (ADR)	57.22B
DELL	Dell Inc.	24.21B
CA	CA, Inc.	10.55B
NOVL	Novell, Inc.	2.15B
PRGS	Progress Software Corp.	1.25B

http://www.google.com/finance?client=ob&q=NASDAQ:ORCL
OK, I've been meaning to ask the HN community about this. Please share your thoughts.

Wouldn't it make a lot of sense for Google (et al) to have this sort of authentication every time you want to change your Google Accounts password? Isn't this a pretty safe way to prevent being locked out should someone gain access to your account?

You may be thinking about costs, but this could easily be a premium service I would gladly pay for! For instance, I could charge $10 to my account, which should allow me plenty of password changes in the future. An intruder may "waste" at most one SMS, since he would not have it and until then Google should not send you any additional SMSs. Does it make sense? If it does, you Googlers in here, please pass it on!

While we're at it... how about extending this to domain registrars? This would be even more critical. I must say it, I'm pretty paranoid and by now it clearly shows. I don't know how you guys have launched successful websites and cope with this lack of safety features. I know I'm rambling, but please speak your mind on this issue.

PS: I realize things are not so bad as they could be, that probably keyloggers are rather hard to plant, etc. But it wouldn't hurt to have these features, and the companies involved would only profit, both financially and in terms of reliability.
Or Opera's builtin accessibility layout.
What’s Holding Back Small Businesses?
What's the big deal with startups anyways...

1. I write software: business applications. I love what I do. I love getting something to work right the first time. I love seeing people use the software I wrote to do their jobs and run their businesses. I can't imagine doing anything else.

2. The software I have inherited in all 88 companies I have worked at has sucked. I mean really sucked. Nothing to be proud of. Nothing to want to work on. I think it's because business software is now where medicine was 100 years ago.

So I have a choice. Work on other people's crap or write my own. I have done both, but I have to write my own to be happy in this industry. If I could only work on other people's software, I think I'd rather work in a grocery store.

Starting a software business is the most direct way to do what I really want to do.

I realize that other people have different reasons; this is just one answer to your question.
Gillette style razors are the mostly commonly used razors today. If they were really that bad at doing the job every other guy on the street would have razor burn and be actively looking for something else.
I can do that with the api for clickatell.com.
Sounds like a loaded question to me. You know what the big deal with startups are: the potential to create something new and interesting, become independently wealthy, to not answer to a job or deal with the 9-5 daily grind working on other people's ideas, etc. Nobody here made the claim that working at a startup is the most direct path to happiness.
Rebooting RSS, short names for feeds
Where are you reading that "everything that exists is a chemical"? I'm not sure we are talking about the same article, the one I read definitely doesn't say that.

I'm putting quotes around the word "chemicals" to refer to the use of the broad term "chemicals" to mean "chemicals with long names that are psychoactive, not like water and stuff." Every single use of "chemicals" in that article could be replaced with that, so I'm pretty sure the author's talking about "chemicals" and not chemicals.

As for what I'm skeptical of... I thought I made that pretty clear? That chocolate has some amount of phenethylamine and anandamide in it is meaningless without knowing a) how much of those chemicals is present in the food and b) how much of a psychoactive effect that amount of chemical would have on a human. Just from glancing at Wikipedia from those two chemicals, I'm guessing it's not as much as that article wants you to think.
The Peter Pan Syndrome-The Startup to Company Transition
Turning around the Titanic, part 1, triple the signup rate
Python Internals: Symbol Tables (part 2)
How many times did you post this. It must be a joke at this point. HN getting... Well...
Where are you located? LLCs exist in many different jurisdictions and they mean more or less the same but for tax purposes the difference from location to location differ greatly.
I devoured Hardy Boys books between the ages of 8 and 12. I must have at least 50 blue hardback Hardy Boys books in my basement. I still remember the thrill of saving up my weekly allowance until I had enough to walk to the local book store and pick up the next volume.

Speaking of hackneyed writing, I laughed and cried while reading this essay. It definitely became a part of me.
Don't use int for money. Use BigDecimal.

I know performance is an issue, but you can always find non-hackish solutions: like a memory upgrade from management, because you're writing safe, clean code :-)
I refer them to a friend who does that for a living.
PostgreSQL 9.0 now available
I can totally second this adding that the UK and in general northern countries in Europe have even a better situation than southern ones. I come from Italy and there the situation is far direr. Unemployment is stellar, wages are the lowest in Europe, people are losing jobs like falling flies and those who get it usually do not have any stability in the long run.
Autumnal Equinox First Day of Fall 2010
Revenue and popularity are tails of trends. If you're looking at the bottom line you're looking at what was previously (possibly several years ago).

People pay a lot less attention to what MS does these days and people are even making new OSes these days. It wasn't so long ago that people were predicting that would never happen again.
Why fly to the moon when you can simply stay here on Earth and watch someone else do it on TV? Why run a marathon when you could drive instead? Why read a programming book when there's a perfectly good movie sitting in your DVD player?

Ambition. "Educated" risk taking. Non-complacency. A desire to push yourself farther than what society says you should be. To invent something new, world changing. To throw an economic monkey wrench into someones inefficient/crappy invention. To think on your own. To live and die on your own merits.

Many will have different answers as to what motivates them to do it. It's definately not for everyone. You usually "know" if you want to do a startup or not. It's extremely challenging. Not doing one is a perfectly fine choice. Live your life the way you please.
Perhaps, it does take me a day to get five o'clock shadow. Though if I go a day without shaving I can give my wife and daughter a rash from brushing up against it.

Though that is neither here nor there, Gillette style razors are some of the most popular razors out there if they were really that poor they wouldn't have replaced their predecessors as they cost more and would perform poorly.
"Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older."

So 15% of all unemployed are over 55. That doesn't seem that excessive. If we assumed that the labor force is uniformly distributed (which it probably isn't) from 20 to 65, the expected number is 3.3 million.
I agree, there seems to be much more startup advice on HN than people sharing experiences... So yes, there is too much hype.

That said, I am a gainfully employed scientist with money in the bank, and I am also a hard-working co-founder. It is not about money or promises of easy-living to me. It is about the challenge of building something that does not yet exist.

I don't read self-help books, and avoid blog posts about start-up strategy. I consider such things as a serious waste of time, and a dangerous distraction from free-thinking. However, some people share actual experiences on HN, and I find that to be valuable.

Also IMHO: 9 in 10 of us are not 'doomed'. I don't believe there is an 'us', and I do not perceive myself to be taking chances. Everyday I am doing something that makes me happy. Where's the chance in that?

If your goal is to accrue money, then for God sake's don't do a startup. As you point out, there are much better ways to do that.
This is a bit like going to a Christian forum and asking "What's the big deal with Jesus anyways?", or an accounting forum and saying "What's the big deal with debits and credits anyways?". You're only seeing "hype" because you're looking for it where it's strongest. My parents never talk about startups. Nor do my siblings. My girlfriend doesn't other than curiousity about my own experience. My friends generally don't. My online friends from video games don't.

If you think you're in an echo chamber, step outside. It will likely do you some good, especially re: startups.
I think it's important to point out that "above", in Maslow's hierarchy, means that it assumes that you already have all the other stuff below, and even that you won't get benefit from moving up the pyramid until you've satisfied everything below.
Money in Minutes
This blog is here to help people earn anything from extra cash to a full time living online.
All of the people I talked to who worked in that industry in that time period and watch the show think it is pretty accurate (sample size: 2). Or as they said "that show seems rediculous, but that is actually how it was. people used to get drunk at work. people used to chain smoke all day. your boss would berate you constantly and the only reward was your paycheck, no one was coddling you"
Interesting. Seems like those would help spread posterous too.
> where he shamelessly says he has no recollection of e-mails he sent

Did anyone bought that declaration?

You can't say somebody is a "borderline sociopath" unless you have some other proof than lying in deposition tapes.

Remember Clinton? ... "I thought the definition included any activity by [me], where [I] was the actor and came in contact with those parts of the bodies".
I think there are two separate issues.

First of all, some poeple, like me, prefer to shape their own product without serving obediently for years climbing some corporate ladder, executing orders handed down by superiors. That preference, for me, is independent of all economic considerations.

The economic issue seems like a question of risk tolerance at first sight, but actually it isn't. A startup may be high risk, high potential reward, but starting a startup and being an employee are not exclusive choices. You can always look for a job if your startup fails. If you never try to start a startup, you needlessly settle for the low reward without getting anything a startup founder doesn't get. You're just renouncing one of the opportunities that our society provides. Why would you do that?
Need for Speed World 2010 لعبة نيد فور سبيد العالم حصريا على برامج هوم
>>Why the hype?>>

So my goal for the last year while I have been doing startups my goal has been to get ramen profitable and we did that just a couple of months ago.

The reason this was so important to me is because now, I feel like I am "living off the land" or "surviving in the wild" and answering to literally no one. The amazing part about start-ups is that they make me feel truly alive and independent, while working for someone else makes me feel trapped and dependent. Right now, I'm really happy.

I'm also looking forward to the next part of our start-ups growth, which staying with the analogy, will be like growing a clan of like minded people who want to build on what we started.

Also, I read once in 'Stumbling on Happiness' that people are happy when they can actually have an impact on things. In less than a year, we have already significantly impacted the YouTube space and will be continually impacting the entertainment industry. The exciting part is in my opinion we have done this for the better and that as promised in the book that does makes me happy.

I guess in some ways, I'm some sort of new aged tech-hippy, but at least I'm not alone: http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html
Both ActionScript and JavaScript are based on ECMAScript. However given equal environments (access the hardware exceleration or not) ActionScript will always be faster because it uses strong typing and at then end of the day is compiled into a SWF.
Thanks for the tips. I'm definitely going to do something about both the /b/ issue and the brainstorm url thing (it'll be auto-generated).

(By the time /b/'s significance dawned on me I felt like a massive idiot)
Good point. You're assuming that 10 years ago you released software properly instead of just zipping up some PHP scripts and offering that for download.
And most regrettably, I stopped hanging out with certain people because I felt like they would be a drag on my newfound social ambition.

So did I. And I've been haunted ever since by a TV show that perfectly captured my experience. It was "The Square Dance" episode of "The Wonder Years", when Kevin wouldn't hang out with the girl he wanted to because of what other people would think.

The closing voiceover:

"The funny thing is, it's hard to remember the names of the kids you spent so much time trying to impress. But you don't forget someone like Margaret Farquhar. Professor of Biology. Mother of six. Friend to bats."
What an interesting perspective on language development.

It's funny how the biggest detractors of clojure seem to be those that should be cheering it on, the people that use LISP.

Clojure is a lisp, like it or not, sure it's not common lisp or whatever other dialect you prefer, but that shouldn't matter too much.

LISP used to be leading, now it is lagging and this person seems to be somehow proud of the lag.

LISP is as much a way of thinking as it is a programming language and Clojure is representative of that way of thinking. The implementation details are really just that, details.

So ignore clojure - and any other modern attempt at bringing LISP in to the mainstream - and decades from now you might wish that you had not, because you lost your chance at shaping the future of the language that you profess to love so much.
The problem why they refer to you instead of professional is because they want to save the $$$
The Peter Pan Syndrome–The Startup to Company Transition
With OpenID, I wonder whether people would appreciate the option to "outsource" their authentication. If places like domain registrars supported it then people could take the option most convenient for them.

Some people would just use OpenID to their email provider, others could pick providers who use two-factor auth of various kinds (and pay for the extra SMS costs there, without the site themselves having to support it).
The really paranoid could have SecurID-style keyfobs for every site if they wanted to.
IBM to buy Netezza
Say thanks to the man who makes your computer run
Regret minimization
Underground trains do (almost) always stop at every station on the line. I wonder whether the issue in this case was due to weekend closures - there are very often lines and stations which are closed at the weekend, either for maintenance or because they're mainly used by commuters.
Corporate "fun" and team fun are two very different things. Just let each team do what they want to do and if you have good coworkers, the fun will happen organically.

Last thursday my team decided to go to a bar. About 15 of the engineers went, and it was a decent time. Was it as fun as my college days with my dorm friends? Of course not. Was it better than the company picnic? Hell yes.

A few of the "fun" things that I've done with companies that actually worked:

I worked in an office that was a converted residential house, we had a BBQ every friday in the summer. Simple, cheap, but honestly taking an hour and enjoying the summer weather on the back porch in the middle of your work day goes a long way for moral.

Pranks. This can go too far, but in moderation really is funny.

Going out to a bar if you actually like the people you work with.

Skydiving, not everyone did it but you want to talk about a "team building" exercise, have everyone jump out of a plane together.

Almost all of those that worked were organically started by the guys in our team. My current company has no "fun" policy as I see it, but my coworkers are fun, and that makes all the difference.
Because we are the people pushing the bubble to the point of busting. Entrepreneurs with all their faults are a necessary evil, if you consider us such.

We chart the newest frontiers.Taking risks with our lives, our finances and our futures in the vain hope we will make the world an ever-so-slightly better place in which to live.

Yes most of us fail, but does that mean we don't deserve our own spotlight, voice or recognition for - at the very least - trying?
I'll bet soldiers don't get spam [snail] mail either.

Not suggesting that Google staff are reading all your mail but they're getting something out of the content there aren't they?

Do they parse it for trend words and use those advertising to you?
Taking the stairs is a mistake you only make once :)

There's a very strongly worded sign at Covent Garden station, telling people that it really is faster to wait for a lift. But I often see tourists making their way up the stairs.
Its easy: there is a market for this kind of adventure. If you are young and want to found a new startup, you're the best client for capitalists that want to risk money without doing the work.

You will be working for them, with the bonus of high upside but also with high risk of losing everything. If you are OK with the risks, it is a good bet, but these capitalists will try to make it glamorous and smart, even though you chances of getting rich are not that high.
They forgot Minneapolis as well :(

I'll draw it:

_____________
Do people here think there's any importance to how professional/personal the domain name of your site is? For example, I registered inconsistent.nl (currently sadly empty because I nuked my web server in an experiment and still haven't gotten around to fixing it properly) because it fits my outlook on a lot of parts of the world. And as a bonus it works equally well as a Dutch or English domain. But other people keep telling me it is to unprofessional...
I've seen a study that people who sleep 8/9 hours a night typically don't live as long. Of course, correlation vs causation and all that.
Different strokes for different folks.

The vast majority of people look for a stable job, and don't mind being a 90k .NET developer at Big Corp.

But there's a small section of the population that cannot stand to "grind" for a large organization, or even for someone else. They want to work towards something that they are passionate about, and ownership greatly increases passion.

They are the sorts of people who do not believe in the "divinity of repetition", to separate their work life from their personal life.

Some people want to spend time working on their own projects, instead of someone else's... even if that means forgoing buying a suburban home now and a nice car. The idea of grinding for them is much worse than being out of a job or not having a large disposable income.

I would not say that there is "startup hype", but that (thankfully) there will always be a section of the population that fits the breed that I described.

There is the "entrepreneurial fire" that some have, and most others do not. Don't knock them for it. They have a different value set than the Big Corp types, and there's nothing wrong with it.
A Topiary - the next movie coming from creator of Primer
> or generated on an application you can install on your Android, BlackBerry or iPhone device

It seems it's a bit like a RSA fob as an app.. Very cool, and a concept that could be expanded. Basically, you could sell whitelabel apps and the backend service to websites that wants two-factor.
JMP 9 releasing on Oct 12
Ask HN: So, who is in Munich for Octoberfest and when do we all meet?
I live in Munich and I'm sure some of you are here now.