skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I spent probably 6 months to an entire year working on failed or unreleased projects. Some were just little things to learn the language, like a trojan written in VB6 that would do various annoying to the user (like "earthquake" their windows), to a couple of sites I've recently launched that are currently too complicated and/or just not valuable to anybody except me. My outlook at this point is admittedly pessimistic.

Lessons learned, in no particular order, except for the last:

- If you need to explain your app to customers in more than one sentence, or if that sentence contains any four-or-more syllable words, or if any of those words' definitions fail the above two criteria, it will probably fail.

- If you are working on a project to scratch your own itch, confirm that other people have a rash.

- Do not give in to feature creep, unless that feature presents itself immediately and without intervention. For example: Back-end features to improve search results: good. Sliders, filters, color coding, additional search options, menus, extra words, animations, hover effects, etc, will probably only confuse people, unless you are a UX genius, in which case those features will merely go unused.

- People trust their gut instinct on what something does, rather than read instructions, or discover, or wander into unfamiliar territory. Find the design for your product that mimics something people have used to solve a similar problem.

- People are generally incapable of abstraction. If you are the "x of y", that means people need to thoroughly understand x, y, and what it means to abstract one to the other.

- People will exert very little effort into learning something unless the rewards are immediate, have been stated to them by a trusted source, or are made extremely enticing.

- Ideas that require a critical mass of users to be useful are easy to come by, nearly impossible to execute.

- Hope for the best, expect failure.

- Stay the fuck away from anything "meta," or anything involving variables. People like being served things that they pick from a menu, or that people suggest. The most complicated task the average person has to deal with, on any regular basis, is probably choosing multiple toppings for a pizza.

- It is far better to release a crappy implementation of something awesome than it is to release an awesome implementation of something crappy. Awesomeness in the idea is easier and more valuable than awesomeness in the implementation.

- Presentation is much more important than you'd like to believe.

- It is far better to be lucky than any of the above. Yes, you can slightly increase your chances of being "lucky," but don't kid yourself.
It should be up now actually. I doubled the resources on my box but I'm also getting hit with Twitter traffic from popular Twitter users. :/

I switched to nginx which seems to handle the traffic much better!

(Also: I asked them to hold this story til Wednesday so I could do a few things and check the stability of the app. Oops. ;))
The 2nd comment (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799442) was downvoted. I saw it after I posted it. It was brought back up by others upto 1 later. Tried as I might I just couldn't understand the rational of the downvotes. I could only attribute it to the Reddit-like behavior where every submission has 33% downvotes, which is why I'm saying HN is heading the Reddit way.

For the first comment, it's pretty well-known that C#/VB.Net is way faster than PHP/Python/Ruby in raw performance. Benchmarks after benchmarks have shown that fact. Often it's just a matter of bringing it up as a reference in discussion. I don't want to prepare a benchmark for every statement I made.

I've seen plenty of opinionated single liners got plenty of upvotes, admittedly those stated the popular views, so single liner is not a good reason for downvote. But nevertheless I'm not into a popular contest. If HN can't tolerate diverge view/opinion, that's its loss.
You have only wasted 100 hours in the last five years?!? Holy crap that is awesome efficiency. That is only about 2.5 weeks of going down a fruitless path.
The salaries of local city police and fire employees in the Bay Area is far higher. Most seem to be making over 100k per year, many over 200k and some even over 300k.

http://www.mercurynews.com/salaries
Nintendo Navision :) Microsoft is huge, I wonder what is the current breakdown of their income. Last from what I remember (2008-ish) was that Business & Office group was the largest percentage, followed by OS and then Server and Tools, Entertainment and devices, Online Services.
Same, I'm still under 30 but have had two startups "fail" over 4 years. The key is finding what you love and I love creating products. Everything I learned in the failures and successes is invaluable: design, development, contract law, outsourcing, marketing, etc. Did I make mistakes, of course but where else can you get that education in just 4 years, and love every minute of it. Now I'm in the process of moving to SF to find a startup to join.

Even in failure I found a market for the technology I developed and came out slightly ahead through creative licensing. The key: never give up. You really find out about yourself when all you have left is your wits. About the companies: The first closed because I was too young and didn't want to move to where I had to, looking back I should have moved. The other failed due to the industry leaders incompetence that endangered human life causing the government to create unforeseen regulations.

PS: Unfamiliar with the area so if anyone knows an awesome startup in SF looking for a product guru who can literally design and develop anything (mobile, consumer electronics, web apps, etc) please let me know.
President Obama to Appear on MythBusters - Discovery Insider
Well there's a bit more to it than just OTS. I do a little work on the summarization part myself then there's also the extraction piece. I did spend a few hours writing code. :P

Thanks for the congratulations, though; who knew a quick little weekend hack would get so much coverage? I didn't (hence why I didn't pump up the volume on the server's resources initially ;)).
IANAL, but I believe in California you're pretty much safe if:

1) You only work on your own unpaid time and not in the company's facilities.

2) You only work with your own hardware/software.

3) You don't do anything even tangentially related to your employer's line of business.

I do not believe #3 is really a hard requirement, but it significantly decreases your chances getting sued (and losing if you do get sued anyway).
ARM started out as a joint venture between Apple and Acorn. They would not be able to stop producing chips for other companies, so why would they do that? They already get everything out of ARM that they want, there would be very little benefit to this.
The iPod maybe, the other two not at all. Apple saw that iPods were going to be subsumed by phones so they made a phone that was the best iPod ever. They saw the notebook market was going to be cannibalized by the low end so they took that over.
I don't doubt that could be true, and if it's true then it certainly makes sense to spend $ to generate $$.

Hopefully not a parallel to overpaid CEOs whose primary responsibility is to generate wealth for the stock holders rather than take care of the employees.
> You can't have groups if everyone is going at their own pace.

Isn't this how adults learn? (And children too, when out of the classroom.) If you want to learn something new, say how to program in Haskell, what do you do? You probably don't try to find an institution to which you pay a lot of money and which offers you in return a seat in a room along with thirty others like you in which an instructor talks to you for a few hours a week.

Instead, if you want to learn Haskell programming, you check for learning materials online and go through them at your own pace. When you get stuck, you find online forums where you can ask questions. Also, as you learn, you answer other people's questions on the forums. You are learning at your own pace but you are not isolated.
That's exactly my point. Adobe's market cap is $15b. Sprint $13.6b. $50b (and rapidly growing) is far more than they need for a very large acquisition, or even two, and they've never shown any appetite for large buys. Not to mention that they could probably easily borrow the amount they'd need to buy either of those so cash on hand is irrelevant as a threat.

There aren't many companies with a market cap higher than half of what Apple is sitting on, and unless you think they're going to get into department stores or oil, most of those few are disqualified.

They're at the same point Microsoft was at in 2003, they have more money than they can plausibly employ. Investors would far rather receive some of it to deploy themselves in other venues, or in more Apple shares.

Jobs will cave soon and begin dividending. Or perhaps he has a large stock buyback in mind.
Are you punching your users in the face?
Apple is not going to buy a mobile phone carrier. They are interested in a product or service that they can shutdown and relaunch into an Apple product as quickly as possible.

Mobile phone companies are not a unique market for Apple that can be i-stamped and sold. All carriers support competitor's products which cannot be easily removed.
Doesn't make sense to me. They've already got their own game platform, and devices that are connected to the TV. Why try to integrate a completely different platform into a gaming ecosystem that's already thriving?
Not likely. Bill Gates offered 'name your price' and a golden pony to them, but old Yamauchi declined the sale. Apparently, japanese companies tied to national identity are impossible to buy (for foreigners at least).
Totally, MSFT is a completely fear driven company. They haven't led on ideas in years, I can't think of the last great new MSFT endeavor.

As a side note, I have an uncle who worked there very high up for over a decade and when he put in his resignation letter leaving for Apple they had security guards escort him out within 15-30 minutes of turning it in. Plus, if you met the guy you'd realize how unnecessary it was--his dad's a pastor and he's the most honest and religious person I personally know--goes to church every Sunday, prays before every meal, and always defers that "God rewarded and blessed him." I'm not religious at all, but the way MSFT treated him made me realize how arrogant and ruthless they are, but that also that they are heartless to their employees they worked with for years and years.
Anyone notice the Med School profs making 1.5M/year? Wow.
Killing Sign Up Forms
It might want to purchase an ads company of some sort to start competing with Google more fiercely in the lucrative ad space.

ARM seems unlikely given that their previous purchases have gotten them an ARM license and development team, and its an expensive purchase just for talent.

I would actually go with nVidia -- this would give them both a CPU and GPU firm in-house, and $7 billion is a bargain for that IP and talent, especially since the company is profitable. They also have interesting products coming out -- compute-specific processors and mature technology selling into the high-margin research market, 3D vision, PhysX, etc. -- that Apple could integrate deeply into their other products (Mac Pro, AppleTV, OS X, etc.).
The pay of government employees, in the Bay Area at least, particularly the rank and file level are paid well beyond what they would make for similar work in the private sector. This goes for everything from meter-maids to file clerks or secretaries. The police and firefighters especially get a fantastic deal considering that they do relatively menial work that doesn't require much education or experience.
I remember leaving Apple in the 90s, then visiting for meetings (because our start-up had a business relationship with Apple).

The contrast between our small (six person) company and the entrenched folks at Apple was amazing, especially since I had been one of them just a month or two earlier.

Us: Let's get this done. We're three months to financial destruction, let's move.

Apple: (totally not getting it)

... add to this people who stuck their heads in our meetings, saying "Sorry, I'm triple-booked, hi, see you next week."

I can't say I'm sorry to see the old Apple go. (I'm sorry that the Newton was never properly followed-through on, but that's another story).
First startup was a consulting firm when I was 21. I turned freelance clients into a business with a partner. I left my job to focus full time on it for about 6 months burning through savings (I did have a mortgage).

Second startup was a photo sharing startup 3 years later in 2004. We both left our jobs at ClearChannel before we got funding but secured an angel round about 3 months later. That lasted a year and a half before we ran out of money. We made the mistake of rebranding and rewriting the product with the funding (won't do that again). By the time we were ready to market 9 months had gone by and we didn't have a lot of money left.

Currently bootstrapping and looking for when I can leave my day job. We don't have traction yet but I spent 4 weeks hitting the streets and talk to customers (students).

I'm 32 now and after every startup I swear I'm done but I can't not do this. It's in my blood. I apologise to my wife on a regular basis for it. Thankfully she's always been supportive. Two times since we got married 3 years ago and I've looked her in the eyes and said "I think I need to quit my job" twice already.

Hoping the third time is a charm :)
Here's what my brother suggested is in the Other category:

Other= overtime, cozeep (caltrans construction overtime), mazeep (caltrans maintenance overtime), compensation time off, education incentives, motorcycle pay, bilingual, flight officer, management, etc.
Incredibly cool and in-depth post. But it's funny, I just assumed the conclusion intuitively since the first time I used a blue bird.
Show HN: Tuxtorial - Create and share screenshot-based tutorials for Linux.
I've been working on this full time for three months. I wanted to make an announcement to gauge interest before I make a beta release.

http://tuxtorial.com

Please provide feedback on the content, my writing skills not great and I want to know if the text is readable. I hope to make it ready for everyone to play with in a week or so.
I don't know if it would be good for Apple to own a carrier. Right now the iPhone is in a good place: everything awesome about it is attributed to Apple, while everything crappy about it can be blamed on AT&T. Calls drop all the time? Crappy reception? That's AT&T.

If Apple suddenly becomes responsible for the whole shebang then it'd probably tarnish their brand somewhat. I'd imagine that's why they came out swinging after "Antennagate": for the first time people could blame Apple for some of these AT&T-issues.
It probably did a little more than help. By my estimations, having a reputation is far more important than having a product, especially when pitching to TC.
Clickable: http://tuxtorial.com
There's another common theme that would have killed every one of these sites: marketing. I don't see it mentioned anywhere in any of his site ideas. They all seemed to be "build a cool thing and put it on the internet" type of execution.

I went through a whole pile of little startups just like this guy, with similar success, before I started to figure out the marketing side of running a business. Once I started paying more attention to "how are people going to find this" than "how is this going to handle [obscure corner case]", that's when my stuff started getting popular and making money.

Take any one of those sites, and try actually promoting it to the world. You might be surprised at the results.
You're right, it may not be necessary. But there is speculation that ARM is on sale and Apple could be planning to expand beyond their current markets.
Quick Ideas on Moving Household Items
International shipping of household items is similar to goods shipping, except that you need to be extra careful as household goods have every kind of delicate, fragile and other items included in it.
Check out http://thescholarapp.com. Feel free to email me at jaisen@jmathai.com if you want to chat.
I'm not entirely sure how much I'd trust get_peak_memory_usage() for this kind of debugging. I'd be more inclined to profile this with xdebug before making these kinds of code changes.
It's just not advertising dollars .. they are not that much of a deal maker as far as college sports.

The success of the program and the upward trend has a major effect on these things, among others:

1) # of season tickets + individual game tickets sold
2) Seat Licenses
3) Donations to keep the tickets (e.g. My School has priority points. You need a certain # of points each year to keep the seats in the same section or get into a better section and better parking).
4) More Donations and endowed scholarships from Boosters towards infrastructure improvements or money towards the fund (viz. Nike's donation to U. Oregon, T Boone Pickens and Oklahoma State, etc.)
5) Not as significant but a successful program also leads to increase in number of applicants (esp. if the program is trending up and the exposure is increasing)

Also, The head coach might be making more than what the state paycheck comes across as .. the additional amount is either paid through an athletic funds trust or a certain percentage of advertising revenue or a certain percentage is footed by wealthy alumni
The injury and fatality rate among police and fire employees is far below that of many other jobs like fisherman, lumberjack jobs, and basic construction work. A private in the army making 30k year will see horrendous things and experience immense stress deployed in combat. Whereas I imagine most cops will never fire their guns out on the street over the course of their entire career.
So when are these countries going to learn that expensive social programs aren't sustainable?
please implement pagination.
Firefox froze for a few seconds while rendering your page.
Here is one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_officer#Occupational_haz...

quote: "Despite perceived dangers, policing has never been listed among the top ten most dangerous jobs in America. In terms of deaths per capita, driver-sales work such as pizza delivery is a more dangerous profession than being a police officer." (see reference in footnote)

Edit: I did say "less than the populace at large" ; will try to find a specific link to back this up, not just one that shows being a police officer is not as dangerous as other jobs.
I can personally attest that my mouse and my eyes are only very loosely correlated, maybe 50% at best.

(Much of the time I am using hotkeys, and when I am actually using the mouse it is often flitting around in my peripheral vision where I can see it but don't focus on it)
Have Your Own Private Pathogen To Fight Your Cancer Of The Breast
I think anti-trust litigation would be a reason why they aren't in more markets.
When I was beginning, this would of been great. I think would be nice to differentiate by distros. Also if they can be linkable and indexable so for example when answering a question on ubuntu forums, being able to link to specific videos would be nice.
I'd say start with "Don't Make me Think"
Designer's thoughts here.
Closer to four months, given how many hours I had to work on my business at the time. It is still cheap at the price, though.
Du lich viet nam
as an admonition: this project is very much a work in progress right now (at the moment, I'm moving the ORM into Wilson proper) so the docs are a little out of date. I have a separate github repository that serves as a wilson example: http://github.com/chrisdickinson/wilson-example/

I'll push up some updates to the example tonight, and I plan on updating the docs within the week.

EDIT: The docs are updated and the example is too. Whew!
I actually like it doesn't end in a stupid one liner like most similar talks. It's not a hollywood movie, it doesn't need closure.

Further research and tests of changing policies are needed.
Actually, the skill level is fairly high. The CHP academy is around 7 months long. Training is similar to boot camp. They train physically, high speed and safe driving techniques, weapons training, and of course they have to learn the vehicle code (it's a LOT bigger than you might think), and how to write reports. Getting into the academy is fairly difficult, and many cadets washout before finishing.

There are so many laws about what police can and cannot do and how they have to do things, that it's actually quite complicated and has a steep learning curve. They also work long hours (12 hour shifts).

I'm a bit biased since I have brothers in the CHP, but it's definitely a tough job.
When I worked for a large systems integration company, we would wipe the hard drives and re-install the OS from a gold master customized for a specific customer. As a result PCs ran faster and had more RAM available for applications.
Robert M. Lefkowitz's 2007 PyCon Keynote discusses the "main goal is communication, not programming" in great detail. Wish there was a text I could cite.
(A) This applies only to inventions and patents. All other IP (including copyrightable material) like software and documents is still at issue.

(B) Indeed. Nothing is a hard requirement until you get asked in the court, "what made you think this was not a hard requirement when it's written in California code".
Is your company Microsoft?

We recently used it on a project, but the project was a very pro Microsoft and due to politics on the client's end, we pretty much did MS for everything.
Meanwhile, teachers struggle to get supplies for their classes and kids' music and art programs are cut.
This corresponds closely with my experience, as well. What keeps the wheels from falling off is largely people's emotional investment in product; the harshest assessments of Apple's product I've ever heard came from Apple employees. Too, everybody loves a winner, and Apple's been doing a lot of winning lately; it keeps people motivated when they can read about their projects in the Times.

But it's a big company, and it has a lot of big company problems.
Again, in general I agree...but there are frequent exceptions.

The most impressive competitor might still be up-and-coming (not necessarily big and entrenched). You also may simply not know about them, even if millions of other people do.
Maybe but when they announce iTunes in the cloud there's going to be a massive youth sector for whom mobile access will be a killer feature and who won't be able to get it affordably or reliably from the current carriers.

If Apple were to buy a carrier they could relaunch it with dataplans focussed on kids and transition a massive younger section of the market across to them.

Ten years later that youth market grows up to become the adult market and all of a sudden Apple dominates the carriers too.
"refudiate" isn't a word (though it appears to be a Palin-ism -- http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Refudiate). Perhaps you meant "repudiate?"
Well, it's important the USA stay competitive in the global ball relocation industry.

I know, that's harsh, lots of people love sports and donate to their colleges on that basis, sports are good for character development and leadership skills as well as physical development and so on. But I have a really hard time seeing this kind of thing as anything other than an indirect subsidy to the sports industry.
This is one of the planned features for the next release. Users can say whether a tutorial works for them or not, and based on their User-Agent, the system will be able to guess whether it should work for a new user or not.
This is the kind of brilliant and pointless analysis that I love. Me, I would have just emailed the app author and asked them.
Aha. Still, telling a story to get that phone call is sometimes crucial!