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I had such a warm response from HN on my last post. I wanted to update you with some news. Let me know if I am being to outright. I added print styles to our tabs. Also, for you webmasters, embeddable tabs!
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Q&A With Howard Lindzon
qoiob.com uses shorter (1 char) and more stylish (symbols) domain names (and also works fine with Tweetdeck and other auto-shortening tools) http://✰.ws/
"But that’s a lot of work, so I’m hoping you guys can do it for me. Just call and give me a daily affirmation."

"You want us to call and tell you you’re a good person?"

"That’s right."

So, was this the inspiration for Awesomeness Reminders? http://www.awesomenessreminders.com/
How I got to Google
This probably doesn't cost very much money. A friend of mine in India mentions that with the average programmer's salary there, you can afford to have several personal servants. For the salary of one employee in the US that manages HR compliance, you can probably have 10 people in India that Google for the nearest store that sells tubs of nacho cheese. But nobody complains about how HR compliance raises the fees you pay in the store.

Banks, like all other large corporations, already have epic overhead. A few guys in India using Google and a few people to talk to you on the phone does not make much difference to their bottom line. (But it does impress people.)

(Oh, and what is "HR compliance"? No idea, but I'm sure every bank has at least 5000 people that do it.)
My wife's card is a Signature (mine should be too I would think but is not for some reason).

I could look into it tomorrow.

I'm curious to know what they can really do for you. His examples were mostly finding and compiling information that wasn't necessarily hard to find but just annoying or possibly tedious.

That in itself could be interesting to take advantage of, especially if they're fast.

But could you do something a bit more advanced: let's say you're traveling for X days somewhere, maybe you could ask for them to put together for you a complete program of what's good to see there, places to eat, train schedule, while considering details like days museums are closed, weather... That sounds a bit much but if they can actually do that kind of things, it can get interesting.

What about patent or trademark search? Salary/stock options comparison in your sector? Best price for specific car? How can I jailbreak my phone? Can you send a letter to my landlord about the broken dishwasher? I'm curious about the limits really...
This is the intention, but there are probably some limits that we could afford to refine. As people switch over, we're starting to get some good data around usage patterns and will certainly tweak if necessary.
Since you're recycling your material (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1776383), I will too (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1776429).

I don't know how many episodes of World's Wildest Police Videos you've seen, but police can already force you to pull over anywhere, at any time, and for any or no reason. Spike strips, PIT maneuvers, etc. Letting them pull you over with a remote command would be a huge improvement--high speed chases are unsafe for all involved and (due to frustration and adrenalin) increase the risk of police brutality.

Of course, with computer-controlled cars, you can eliminate traffic infractions and hence most if any need for police to pull you over anyway.
Once you've overcome the social issue of each person wanting their very own vehicle, you don't need cars at all. You can use buses and trains.
Another interesting comparison, IMO, is to banking and finance, where the atmosphere is even more distinctly "big swinging dick", yet the gender ratio is still not as imbalanced as in IT (IIRC, the ratios in finance are more like 65:35, whereas in IT it's somewhere around 80:20 or maybe even worse, depending what sector of IT).

This is one of the main reasons I don't buy the argument that women stay away because men are assholes in tech: the men I've interacted with that are in finance put the worst of the IT douchebags to shame when it comes to misogyny (the guys in the money fields often really hate women, or at least have no respect for them, whereas in tech, they just don't really interact with than many women, so most things tend to be male-centric, I rarely see actual hostility), yet women work in that field far more readily than they do in tech.

I'm sure the remunerative aspects play some role here; it's pretty easy to get rich if you can make it through hell-year at a hedge fund, whereas being code-monkey #8 at some random startup is likely to do little more than pay the bills for another year or two.

But still, you'd think any financial disincentives would apply equally to men and women.

I definitely think there's something else going on here, and it seems to have a lot to do with interest, not incentives or disincentives. To me, the main question is whether the interest discrepancy is cause by an innate difference between men and women (for whatever reason, men like building stuff, writing code, solving problems or whatever, and women don't) or a social one (men are encouraged to do it, women aren't).

Given that I ended up in this field with pretty much zero influence from anyone (I started messing around with APL when I was about 8 and found the executable while poking around for games on my dad's computer), and to this day I've met a grand total of maybe 4 females that were interested enough to learn to program at all, as compared to hundreds of males, I'm skeptical of claims that it's purely social, the numbers are just too extreme for that if the same natural urges exist in all of us.
This is definitely an interesting idea.

If you can build it (and that's a big if), then it will almost certainly have a market, since it is solving a very specific problem that a lot of people have and want to solve. The biggest question is, can you build something that works well?

I like the idea of relying on HN comments to try and decide whether the article is worth reading, and I can see the potential for adding more and more "opinion" sites later on to cover more articles on the web. I'm not convinced that it
will actually help, but it should be possible to build this just for HN and see whether it helps or not.

In any case, great idea. I really hope you make this work!
"water is no different than most things" is precisely what this article (and the UN; the right to water and sanitation was added to the human rights awhile ago) disagrees with. Would you apply the same logic to oxygen instead of water?

Even accepting that water is no different than say cars, I disagree with the peacefulness of the free market. The free market is all about competition. In this case, competition drives the groundwater table down fast (a couple of meters a year, in some places), and forces everybody to play the game of drilling ever deeper holes.
I like it, a lot. Could do something similar with coding (PSD to HTML)
As a foreigner, the US credit card and rating system puzzled me a bit.

But the most annoying thing about it is that it's difficult not to be part of it. If you have credit cards or not, you will have a credit score and that score will be used when you want to buy a house for example…

For a couple of years after moving here, I was using either cash or a debit card, but I switched to credit card for a lot of things mostly because you kind of have to play in the credit score game.
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As I was reading this article, I was thinking, "Really? You can ask that and they do it for you?". It just never occurred to me that I would need a personal assistant to help me find a tub of nachos (or help me with a crossword or any other chores). I just find it..weird.

On the other hand, this article pretty much sold me into determining if I need a Visa Signature card.
I've had a few break in the sense of wires/chips physically losing a proper connection, but that's a matter of holding it just so while you get your data off. Nothing worse yet.
If they don't stop at just describing the semantic knowledge that a person would derive from the experience of objects, but instead also include the process knowledge—in a rigorous, possibly algorithmic form—then it would be the world's biggest MOO.
I often find this idiomatic as well, both in scripts and on the command line:

dostuff
( cd $directory && otherstuff )
morestuff
> But if we start from the assumption that gender shouldn't matter

There's your problem. By using the word "shouldn't" you seem to be conflating "our best guess at objective reality" with "what we think would be morally correct". It is unfortunate that thinking like this is still allowed to infest some higher educational institutions but it doesn't cut the mustard when nobody's funding is on the line.

In terms of objective reality this assumption is unwarranted. There are significant documented differences between the distributions of intellectual capabilities of genders including the higher variance in IQ for men and men's aptitude skew towards maths and away from language.

> In the past, simple, personality/preference/constitution-based explanations for gender discrepancies have proven false many times - women didn't have the constitutions to be doctors, women didn't have the temperament to be lawyers, etc etc - so I'm inclined to distrust this sort of explanation, at least initially.

In the 70s, 80s and even 90s this would have made more sense. But as the years of higher university attendance of women stretch out, as women continue to succeed in previously male dominated areas such as medicine and law you have to ask 'why not in tech/CS/startups'. It isn't as if it is a area that has ever been reputed as having a history of institution chauvinism. To me, the weight of evidence points more and more towards the differences in distributions of capabilities and preferences between genders playing a significant part in participation rates in tech. However much of an 'Inconvenient Likelihood' this may be for both the tech industry and many women, it shouldn't blind us to evaluating the evidence as objectively as possible.
I wrote extremely naive Ruby algos from scratch that solved the problems in a couple seconds, or in the case of the last problem, a couple of minutes. I'm sure the whole challenge would have taken longer if I tried to use any dependencies.
Reactive Demand Programming
There was never a consensus of scientists that the earth was flat in any society within a hundred miles of the ocean, which incidentally is about all of them that can be said to have had scientists.
Lost in a sea of code
Tarsnap is a mediocre service - the co-founder you needed was one that could have brought a user focus that was apparently beyond you. I'd guess that the majority of your business is directly due to being one of the insufferable, self-satisfied minor pundits on HN. You say that fully 10% of your signups are _direct_ page referrals from HN - a remarkable and telling statistic.

Might I suggest that you invite some of the other big fish in this small pond over to join you? I bet that, say, ptacek would be good for an immediate doubling of revenue.
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I meant with regard to the fact that ability to pay determines whether you can buy something. Obviously everyone needs water to live, just as they need food, housing, transportation, recreation, sex and many other things to live which require you have something to trade.

Can you tell me a place where the free market rules where can't get the clean water you need to live for far less than an hour's worth of labor at the lowest paid job?

I can think of plenty where the use of force rules where its not even possible to get any clean water at all.

The UN's problem is hardly with countries where people are allowed to trade and keep what they earn.
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cperciva, I completely understand the sentiment, and I can relate to it as a single-founder myself (not really a "founder", not yet, for now I am a solo consultant.)

But I don't think infrastructure/libraries can be considered "co-founders", because they don't give you new ideas and insight.

You see, to be able to use a certain solution, platform, library, etc. You have to know of it, know of its uses, and know how you might use for a specific problem.

OTOH, co-founders, domain-experts with vested interest in your enterprise, are not just mere resources to be called upon when needed and put to use. They are not just a knowledge-base of solutions. No. They're engines for creating new solutions, but also the means to pose knew questions and problems. Problems you never knew you had, and solutions you never thought of, or thought were acceptable (like "who cares, forget it" -- humans are excellent at these types of dismissive approaches to problem solving; we have an intuitive knack for ruling out issues that are not worth bothering with. And by "we" I don't mean programmers, sticklers for the tedium and observers of minutia.)

At the very least, a human co-founder allows you to take a day off, picks up your spouse from the airport, and comes with you for happy hour. I would kill for someone who is "in" on it with me. These types of "benefits" might not merit any sophisticated Rumsfeldian epistemology ("there are unknown unknowns", etc.) but they're very important, and I say that as someone who sorely lacks them.
Its a gradual rollout. You probably don't have it yet.
That might be the kick I need. Count me in!
Quite possibly - the original was a lightning talk delivered at YAPC::EU in Pisa this year - so while a single page of text would probably be a better idea for you as a reader, the original format worked very well live.

Imagine the presenter going through these one at a time with descriptions and appropriate pauses so people go "oh my god he's not going to ... he is!" and an audience of a couple hundred perl hackers laughing their collected asses off at each slide to approximate the original effect.

If anybody does collect it into a single page version, please do tell cog - I'm hoping that the video will eventually go up onto http://presentingperl.org/ along with all the others, and I'll make sure it gets linked with a thank you :)
I find it difficult to believe an efficiency article that tells me that 'e' is shorter than 'emacs' but to write a 15-line perl script to replace 'uniq -c'. Add to that the cdto script, which replaces pushd crudely and without recursion.

Premature optimization. Spend more time learning about the tools you already have, then figure out how to shave whole seconds (over the course of a year) off using them.
Not even hire anyone. If he white-labels the service and lets others brand it, he will be sweet.
Very simple. It takes me 30 min to drive to work in my car and 1 hour in the good case with the train. The train can take up to 2 hours overall in the worst case. And this is partly time to switch train, going to the train station etc. Not much time you can use to read or take breakfast quietly.
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Tell squatters to get off their domain names, then come back to me.
it saddens me that such linkbait generalizations make it to the frontpage of HN

it strikes me as insane that discussion on these issues centers around the mean (pun intended). being an entrepreneur one is a few sigma away already; we can't even see the average from here so why are we wasting time chatting about it?
Meet NELL. See NELL Run, Teach NELL How To Run
the new Social Network movie is pretty damn good. Doesn't exactly focus on the work side, but it has some good cues on business strategies and the social side related to SV.
Of course, this is why insiders such as Dick Cheney have been investing heavily, personally, in water and encouraging water privatization as governmental policy worldwide. Not so recently, more like 6-8 years ago. It's the next resource to rake the working people of the world over the coals for.
You know, honestly these requests weren't all that outrageous...

I've recently become rather disheartened at just how little "extra" it takes to impress American's these days. Many societies around the world take it for granted that services is a part of...well..."service". For example, when I was in Turkey with my wife, we were a just your average cafe. We really like the little tea spoons that they had, and wanted some for home. We asked the waiter if the cafe had any extra they would mind selling us. He told us that the ones they had were all dinged and used, and wouldn't it be better to have some brand new spoons? We agreed, and he sent one of the other boys working in the back down to the local store to buy some for us while we sat and sipped our tea.

Ordinary little cafe...nothing really that out of the ordinary...so why is this so foreign in America?
I'm a female bootstrapper and I know many more in my network. My contact info can be found in my profile; feel free to DM me next time you put on a conference.
This is very similar to FluidDB (Fluidinfo, the creators of FluidDB have recently closed series A funding with some great backers).
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Robotic Prius in 2008
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I just got back from Turkey 2 weeks ago. I know exactly what you're talking about. Hospitality is a matter of great pride for the Turks, as is in many countries in the middle-east and Asia.

And you're right, this idea is very foreign only in places like America and the UK.

This point wouldnt even be a matter of discussion in countries like that. Its so normal.
If there was a special device which made you more recognizable in an automated traffic environment (be it on a bike, or as a pedestrian), I would buy such a device even if it wasn't mandatory to have one.

There might be a startup in there somewhere.
Your comment seems to make the case that markets are competitive whereas governments are monopolistic. I feel reluctant to buy into that without an authoritative statistical study. My experience, though anecdotal, does not lean in that direction significantly enough.

On the other hand scholars[1] have argued that much of the first world have made the bulk of their progress in very protectionist environments and have opened their markets selectively when it was to their advantage. I havent seen those arguments debunked effectively. The notion of "free"ness of current markets is also debatable given that it is guarded strongly by international politics.

Mathematically speaking, I do not recollect that free markets guarantee equity as has been claimed in some comments here. They do guarantee an equilibrium, which however need not be a good/desirable one.(Think traffic flow without signals).

I am not against free markets, I think thats perhaps the best option available, but as long as it remains easy to externalize costs, it will continue to remain broken. Because what you are paying is only part of the cost and someone else is being forced to pick up the tab.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha-Joon_Chang
As well as the 10.10 laptop mentioned elsewhere, I have a laptop on 9.04, which is rock-solid. I won't be upgrading it. It will likely reach its eol on 9.04. Most stable and reliable release since 5.10, in my experience.
When I saw the title "zero-equity co-founder" I thought it was about inspiring employees to work as committed as an actual co-founder, which would be totally appropriate.

I think the downside of single founder startup is that 1. there's no one to bounce your ideas with; 2. speed to market is greatly reduced; 3. there's no one to share the stress or keep each other motivated when things get tough; and most importantly, 4. there's no one to share the joy when you manage to solve a business/technical problem that is not visible to outsiders.

I don't see any apparent advantage of keeping a single founder startup. You may have the ability to run the startup as well or even better as a multi-cofounder startup and keep all the shares - but it's not fun, and fun is very important for an entrepreneur!
Those same "co-founders" are working for a lot of other companies though.
Robo Prius in 2008: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10042320-76.html
You don't give him any credit for having a web form to fill out?
To keep things in perspective: this is a thread about a "cute" rendering of Hitler, complete with innocent Anime eyes, and the mention of Jews is done in a jovial, playful manner, almost game-like.

We're not talking about an internet meme here, we're talking about mass murder of innocent people, not too long ago. There are still living survivors. So excuse me if I refuse to play along, and slap my knees all the way to the cemetery.
I've been testing Fedora for the past couple of weeks. My reason for considering a switch is my tiring with the serious regressions that I've encountered with every Ubuntu release. I know, the grass is always greener, but I feel I ought to give it a try.

I'm also wary of Shuttleworth's commercializing of Ubuntu. I have no problem with a benevolent dictator, but Shuttleworth aim isn't benevolent.
I tend to be fond of movies based on true stories. For true stories about people who set an impossible-sounding goal and accomplished it, I will nominate "October Sky" and "Cool Runnings". Neither has an office setting. The first is about a young man who did not want to end up a coal miner, like his father. He and some friends began making rockets and managed to parley that into college scholarships. IIRC, he ultimately ended up working for NASA. The second is about the origin of the first Jamaican bobsled team (that went to the Olympics).

Hopefully, people will see how this might be relevant to folks wanting to found a new business. Office Space is a good movie but is now kind of disturbing to me as someone who currently works in cubicleville. I think of it as "dire warning" rather than "inspiration".
...assuming they're not just leeching.
It can be a good recipe if you just need the system that works and if everything was already working.

However, on my computers, on the hardware side, I always expected the improvements of the new version. Then I've discovered that simple upgrades can even break the software side of the distro (the interaction between their own parts), as it seems that the upgrades are not enough tested compared to the clean installs. I've found that it's much more probable to have everything working correctly if I just keep the home partition but install the new release from the scratch. But this is also more work than it's convenient, for doing every six months.

Additionally, I've found that security updates are still behaving better when run from the console than from the GUI. It shouldn't be so. The GUI updates should not be so annoying and attention consuming but really do things in the background.
"But are you trying to define a heuristic that proposes that one human is better than the other solely due to the field of work?"

No. I am merely stating that having kids is not an accomplishment, it's one's biological programming. One should admire people who do things that are challenging and difficult, like proving hard theorems or sailing around the world solo. It's not about status nor academic pedigree, it's simpler: if everything is admirable, then nothing is.

"I'd any-day prefer to be a little-league team manager than troll on comment threads."

Just because I am being downvoted, that doesn't make me a troll. But thanks for the remark. Now you can be all happy that you're on the side of the "moral majority". You're a self-righteous sheep. Be proud.