skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: how many years have you "wasted" on failed startups?  And any regrets?
Over the last few days I've seen people post their lists of failed startups. What is not clear, however, is how many man-hours (or man-months or man-years), that were spent on these failed startups: were they working full-time on them, burning their own finances, or were these side-projects while working in full-time employment?

So I was wondering: how many man-hours (man-months, man-years etc) have you spent on your "failed" projects? And do you have any regrets?

(NB: I use the terms "wasted" and "failed" loosely).
If these are your main complaints with PHP, you need to look into CodeIgniter.
That clearly wasn't my point.

http://blog.rescuetime.com/2010/06/17/google-is-eating-micro...
My only regrets are the ones I didn't fully launch.
Really good animations, really good points, but I don't recall seeing any concrete suggestions in any of these.

Are they just high-profile, high-quality rants, hoping to get others to come up with changes? Or is there something more concrete backing these that isn't disseminated with them, preventing their (really good?) ideas from being implemented?

I've only seen a few, but are others more useful? They're all interesting, but those aren't the same thing.
As with all NLP/machine learning, it's trivial to do if you know the tools and already have the data -- but pretty difficult to do well.
They are JUST launching their mobile platform

"Just launching"? It's the seventh iteration of the OS. It's in the name.
While I understand how voters often want "public accountability" and itemized breakdowns of state budget, something like this seems like a mistake.

There was another thread on the front page earlier today about why companies keep salaries very private. There are reasons why private companies do that. Forcing a government institution to publish these like this must make for interesting inter office politics.
When you look at it closely, Apple, as a portfolio of talent, technologies and interacting businesses, resembles the sort of microorganism that Intelligent Design proponents advance as evidence of a god.

Having been an Apple employee, it's funny to me when people describe Apple this way. If you think of their operations as perfect, godlike, or seamless, you have no chance of really understanding them or replicating the good parts yourself.

At Apple there are indeed conflicting agendas, moments of doubt, in-fights, technical debts, and lame-duck products. There might be less of these things than other big companies, but it's still just a group of thousands of individuals trying to make great stuff.
As someone who works on Windows Azure, this got under my skin a bit :). In particular, I thought this was slightly lazy writing

(W.r.t Azure) "I suspect it’s not performing well" and
"Put simply, it’s hard to imagine that Microsoft is aggressively developing or marketing Azure, since cloud computing offerings directly threaten Microsoft’s revenues and profitability in the PC market, especially its Windows and Office products. "

From Ballmer mentioning "we're all in" in pretty much every speech he has done recently all the way to Azure being all over the financial analyst meeting [1][2], I sometimes think there's not a day that goes by when I don't hear about Azure in some way from MSFT :)

[1] http://kara.allthingsd.com/20100729/liveblogging-microsofts-...
[2] http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Cloud-Computing/Microsoft-Pushes-Cl...
The real story was told over the phone FYI. Should have been clearer
Jonathan Coulton discusses Mandelbrot
Hadley on a Postage Stamp?  (R/ggplot2)
"Don't architect distributed things that require passwordless ssh keys to run. If you need to distribute files to a bunch of machines, they should be pulled from an rsync or http server, rather than via scp or remoting invoking rsync over ssh."

Is this statement directed at me ?
It seems to me that if you need some combination of deploying files and executing commands, the chances that you're going to implement it more securely than SSH is pretty low.

It's true that compromising that one machine with the SSH key is going to compromise your whole cluster, but at least you had to compromise a machine rather than hijack some network service.
You have to take into account the market, i.e. who's buying those Wii consoles.

I have a Wii at home, and after the first month I got tired of it. I also cannot use it as a DVD player and it's just sitting there.

And I wish I would've bought an XBox or a PS3 because you can at least use it as a media station when you're tired of it.
I've burned perhaps a hundred hours on projects which did not go anywhere in the last five years. Actually, I don't like that phrasing. Let me try again: I have spent a hundred hours learning that I have better options than two ideas which seemed like winners until I had done some work on them.
It's a problem that HTML5 is promising to solve too, and that HTML/CSS/JS in general did a pretty good job at in many use cases.
Narcissistic Mental Retardation Disorder
I can't even imagine a Chase teller doing that, and I like the people at my bank.
I've been wondering what the point of keeping a "clean" history is. In what way is less information better? All this means is you're destroying the real history, rewriting it to look more like a straight line, which is not at all how it was developed.

If you want such a history to reflect how it was developed, there are wonderful version control programs out there. Like RCS. Why not just use that?
Wait until the pensions kick in.
I currently and feel I always will live my life by the Steve Jobs quote:

"It is the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, that actually do."

While I may never reach the goals I aspire to, I feel that is ok because it always leaves something to strive for. When I was in high school I remember telling my friends in a matter of fact way that I would make my first million before anyone in my senior class. I am not entirely sure if that's the case, but I had done so by the age of 22.

At 23 now I often find myself saying things like "I'll look to settle down and start a family only after I make my first $100 million."

Are these goals realistic? healthy? who knows ... All I know is that they are just that ... goals. They give me something to strive for and as long as I am aspiring to something greater than what I am, I feel I will constantly move forward.

Some people say this makes me crazy or eccentric, many wonder how someone my age who has failed several times manages to have such impeccable self assuredness. My answer almost always is "Succeeding may shape our confidence, but failing builds our character." While it sounds cliche I certainly believe if it were not for my failures, I would not have become half the person I am today.

I think most "visionary entrepreneurs" find themselves in similar situations. They refuse to give up, sometimes even after failing over and over again.

In my opinion THAT is what makes them great, it's not necessarily their ideas, or the people behind them, but the will to succeed and the downright stubbornness that causes them not to give up.
Yes, particularly this post: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/05/01.html

But Windows Live Mesh is not just a way to synchronize files. That's just the sample app. It's a whole goddamned architecture, with an API and developer tools and in insane diagram showing all the nifty layers of acronyms, and it seems like the chief astronauts at Microsoft literally expect this to be their gigantic platform in the sky which will take over when Windows becomes irrelevant on the desktop. And synchronizing files is supposed to be, like, the equivalent of Microsoft Write on Windows 1.0.

It's Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can't stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.

And the fact that customers never asked for this feature and none of the earlier versions really took off as huge platforms doesn't stop him.
I'm not sure I follow the logic of the article that Microsoft has to develop these other segments of its business to be a leader in the future. What's going to touch Windows and Office?
Ah yes, I think you are right. Still a decent article, but certainly not nearly as damning as I first thought.
Have Scientists Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?
You're saying that everyone should have difficulties with payments so that the government can track criminals. By this logic, why have payment services at all? Then money laundering would be entirely impossible.
There was an article in the Washington Post (I think) about this very topic. It really is a harm to morale.
Down because the market is tired of apple sandbagging their quarterly results (seriously). All companies put out conservative numbers, but come on.
In Honor Of The Nintendo’s 25th Anniversary: A Few Of Our Favorite NES Games
The article completely drops the ball on the Xbox. The XBox is Microsoft at it's best and it shows. I understand trying to prove a point, but lets not be disingenuous.

It feels like Microsoft is 1 winning product away from turning the tide, or 1 loosing product from sealing it's irrelevance. I can't help but think how this article would've been written if Windows Phone 7 turns out to be a huge success 2 years from now. It's easy to paint a gloomy picture.

The only trouble I see for Microsoft, is one where they are not seen as a leader. One where reactionary product after reactionary product renders them as a technology company seen by the outside world as chasing technology and not laying it's bricks.
As a CA taxpayer, it certainly harms my morale.

Cheers,
Carson
Regarding point a, the Entertainment and Devices division included Live, which they are heavily investing in, thus giving out a loss. The true profit of the XBox is much higher than $679 million.

And what do you mean by 'Windows Phone 7 is not market ready, and it's already mid-October' ? They're launching in 2 days in Europe and in 3 weeks in the US.

Also, from your linked article you write that Verizon won't be bringing out a WP7 phone in 2010 or 2011. Source?
Our Clickpass application was done last minute in the lounge at LAX during the layover from SFO to Heathrow.

The deadline was going to be while we were over the Atlantic and I had written the application on the flight down from SFO to LAX.

I distinctly remember fumbling trying to pay for the stupid T-Mobile hotspot before hitting submit and running for the gate.
My salary is in a database just like this at a newspaper in another state.

Big deal.

I am a public employee. The public can, does and should know my salary. If they don't think I'm worth it, they (the public) should fire me.
Nice start and a good reaction to the information overload of book recommendation threads :)

A few comments:

- Zooming on image covers seems pointless to me (is it just me?)

- I'd like to see some kind of indicator of usefulness/relevance of books (books 1 person recommended vs books that crop up in every single thread), whether you just open it up to upvoting and downvoting, pull in review data, or get more complex

- One step further, crowdsource book summaries - let a contributor submit 'cliff's notes' for a book rather than just a review.
Several times faster during a major recession. Go chew on that for a minute.
We only want "accountability" because they can't be trusted to do the right thing otherwise.
US States by Poverty Level
Morale wouldn't be undermined if wages were fair and rules around raises applied predictably.

It's when someone gets bumped to the next pay grade without merit that you're going to get sour grapes among those not as fortunate.
Less than Grand GoodReads
Indeed, call me when you're using complicated string-returning lambda functions inside the brackets and maybe then I'll--well, probably just redirect you to an obfuscated PHP contest, but cheers.
It should be noted that this is a great way for the site owner/creator to make commissions on each purchase through the provided links.
Isn't this sort of thing supposed to be confidential?
And they can up their pension by working lots and lots of OT, this is known as "spiking." Nice. Another reason I wouldn't want to live in CA.
I don't actually know - I never lived in those places. The situations are complex, though: Haiti and the Dominican Republic are very poor and might not have the market, and Jamaica and Cancun are further from the mainland, thus shipping would be disproportionately slower.

It might be interesting to look at when passenger routes died out. For instance, there is only intermittent ferry trade with the Bahamas from Florida, even though they're very close - but the market is marginal given the low cost of air travel right now. I would guess that passenger routes to Puerto Rico were eliminated before those to the Bahamas, but ... I don't really know. This is an interesting point - but wow, it would take a lot more research than I'm able to do in order to answer it.
Our company uses it. :)
Ask HN: Any prospect in this site made in 4 hours?
Frequent reader, first submission. :)

I had an idea which turns out to be similar to yousendit.com and built out a prototype at http://www.volatilefile.com

The idea is to give out free file sharing up to a certain file size for 5 downloads or 3 days, which ever comes first. A small fee of maybe a couple bucks would be charged for large files (to be implemented). I read about how bit.ly analyzes data and sells it, so I was curious if anyone sees any monetization of this site other than advertisements? I store the file name, remote IP and time stamp, then move the info to an archive table when it is removed. I do not store the files themselves for more than 3 days.

Any feedback is appreciated, even feedback about my horrible design and no logo. :)
How did all those CHP's get over a $100K raise from 2008-2009?
Steve Job's Epic 5-Minute Anti-Google Rant
No. The Freedom of Information Act (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_information_act) allows anyone to request the salaries of government officials. Usually this means that newspapers request the salaries for all government officials and put it in a public database. My local newspaper does the same thing (http://datacenter.courier-journal.com/government/salaries/in...), and I presume yours does too, providing you live in the United States. Try searching for "$YOUR_NEWSPAPER_NAME salary database" in your favorite search engine.
OMG, why are these salaries so high? What's considered entry level for CHIPS? How much is that salary?

Is this type of pay typical nationwide? I've been looking to get out of programming ...
Disclaimer: I'm a Mac user (iMac, iPad, iPhone 4, MBP, AppleTV... yeah... I know). Linux at work.

I actually think MS is doing really well with it's online initiative. Windows Live software is actually really nice, their Windows Live website actually does a great job integrating a large number social networks. MS Office still sets the bar for office apps (and no, OOo still suffers from missing out on basic functionality). Visual Studio is light years ahead of the competition. Windows 7 is really, really slick. And Windows Phone 7 looks nice. It's not a clone, they seemed to actually push forward with their Metro interface style. On top of all of that, you have XBox.

When you combine all these efforts together, it's very ambitious. Just think, though, for a second, what will happen if they get all these pieces working together.

That being said, I'm hoping for something special the 20th from Apple. They have the hardware, now they just need to get the software right (MS has the software right, they just need the hardware to bring it all together). Apple has the mindshare, but MS has the numbers. Also, MS has put a lot of work into it's developer tools to make app development across all these platforms incredibly easy.

Anyways, what matters to me is that whatever happens, I benefit. I want a strong MS only because it means Apple is forced to innovate and not just rest on it's laurels (which, to be frank, it feels like it's been doing for some time now).

But yeah, it's getting really interesting out there. All sorts of fun. =)
It's not a "waste", just a learning experience.
In 2005 cancer deaths were about 23% of all US deaths.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data_access/vitalstats/VitalStats_Mo...
Microsoft's 2019 Future Vision Montage: Envisioning the Future
I wonder if it would include something like injury compensation / some law enforcement-specific hazard pay... seems like it'd fit these large payouts.
Why it’s a terrible time to start a Consumer Web/App Startup
No, it's not overtime. At least not being reported. if you click on a name they break it down, these guys are earning most of that in the 'other' category.
Ancient Grains Show Paleolithic Diet Was More Than Meat
I wouldn't trade jobs with a CHP officer either but I do have to wonder about the skill level. I'm sure it's harder than I think but the job still boils down to parking on the side of the freeway, spotting violators, chasing them for about a minute and then writing them a ticket. Is that really worth $48+ an hour?

Because that seems to be around the average pay (The CHP has a very powerful union so their base pay hours are capped at an average 40 per week). I'm not for big cuts but cut $20,000 a year off each salary and they're still making $80,000 a year which is pretty respectable
Indeed, “modest” is very much an understatement to describe Mac sales :)

Everything is relative, and in the greater market context, Macs are strong. But among Apple’s products, the iPhone brings revenue equal to Macs, and arguably greater potential greater, with the iPad not far behind — likely catching up to Macs by 2012. [1]

[1] http://aaplmodel.blogspot.com/2010/09/ipad-to-exceed-mac-rev...
The explanatory text says:
"Gross pay includes overtime, bonuses, housing allowances, sick leave payout, vacation payout and multiple other forms of cash compensation"

So "Other" would be everything but base pay and overtime. Admittedly "multiple other forms of cash compensation" leaves lots of possiblities.
Mint's pre-launch pitch deck can be found here:
http://www.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-dec...
Five tips for getting rid of crapware
The only reason he says it that way is because of his accent. And SQL stands for Structured Query Language you fucking idiot, there is no pronunciation.
It's funny, one thing led to another earlier today and we found ourselves looking at the salaries for county workers in our area. Most of our county positions -- down to the road workers and clerical staff -- make more than I ever have.

I'm struggling every month, growing a business, working a ton of hours, and these goons are drawing at least $50/month from every taxpayer in our county.

I had to go outside and play for a while after that. It was extremely demoralizing. Coming back and seeing this didn't help.
Those numbers look highly improbable, especially coming from such a small subset.

This article shows the number of Office online users in just the first 100 days after launch as 20 million, compared to 25 million for Google Apps.

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/microsoftpri0/20130869...
Pay me $48/hour to camp behind an overpass with a box of donuts and a radar gun and I'll probably get over it.
Some of these services seem like they failed just for happening at the wrong time.

Constant Ads sounds just like the advertising system used by reddit which is very successful as far as I can tell.

ioFeed sounds like it could have been the replacement for Facebook that Diaspora wants to be.
The timing of this release couldn't have been any worse; Apple reports yet another record-breaking quarter on the exact same day this gets airtime. Ballmer must be trying really hard to destroy MSFT shareholder value.
I see an exciting future in journalism that consists of building tools to help users navigate and manipulate data.
The people over $100,000 a year seem to be making a lot in the other category. But the base pay seems around $85,000 to $100,000 for most...

http://www.sacbee.com/statepay/?agency=CALIFORNIA+HIGHWAY+PA...
HTML/CSS/JS don't solve the problem at all. As they are used today, they target a small set of viewers which happen to go out of their way to provide a fundamentally similar presentation on different platforms. If the viewer happens to deviate from how the most commonly used viewers render, they tend to break horribly (see, for instance, a heavy javascript site viewed via lynx). It's easy to do "write once, view on most viewers" when most viewers try to act more-or-less the same and freely break underlying OS conventions because users have learned to expect that web sites will look and behave the same regardless of the underlying OS conventions.

On the other hand, when you're natively targeting several platforms with radically different UI conventions outside of the browser, it's a lot harder to provide a single language and library set that can cover up those differences. You could go for the browser strategy and attempt to convince users that your application is exempt from the underlying OS conventions because it's special, but that's a steep uphill climb (especially with users bases known to be hostile to applications which deviate from expected conventions, like the Apple community; god help you if you're trying to sell an Adobe Air app on OS X).

Like I said, there is no silver bullet here. You can't get polished interfaces on multi-platforms if you're not willing to polish your interface separately for each platform.
We don't live in a Democracy. Its suppose to be a Republic. But that died a long time ago. Even Google says so. In fact that's the whole point of the pilots protest.
The Google bomb: A campaign weapon
nope, they've discovered that physics is wierd.
Blu-ray DVD to MP4 Ripper
Ask HN: is there still a place for a consulting company?
There are many 'hobby' ones, but few professional-grade.

How to differentiate? How to paint ourselves out of the corner?

Edit: word clutter
> Having been an Apple employee, it's funny to me when people describe Apple this way. If you think of their operations as perfect, godlike, or seamless, you have no chance of really understanding them or replicating the good parts yourself.

A completely agree, so I think you may have missed my point.

It's worth noting that I think Intelligent Design is horseshit, so god leaps neither from that argument nor from Apple for me. For reference, here's the background:

Flagellar motor (real):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flagellum#Evolution_of_flagella...

Irreducible complexity (horseshit):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irreducible_complexity

Apple, of course, did evolve from a much less complex organism than it is now, but the overall harmony of its successful products is impressive and demonstrably difficult to replicate. The easy route is to ascribe supernatural powers to Apple's success, but of course the history demonstrates methodical system planning, keen insight, hard work, a bit of fanaticism, and some good timing.

The difference between Apple and other organizations is that while in-fighting and conflicting agendas may exist (as in any human system) this doesn't seem to get in the way of a coherent user product. Compare that with Sony, which can't muster a coherent consumer strategy to save its life. (Well, absent saddling every last product with the proprietary storage device du jour.) Apple may itself not be seamless but the overall experience for users of Apple products is shockingly so, especially when compared to competing gear.

What internal back biting can you share from your tenure at Apple, though? It would be interesting to learn just how aggressively leadership must filter and otherwise confine these impulses to end up with the focus, profits and product mix we see today.
More likely Apple's feverishly working on a 7" device but it wasn't ready to be announced yet. This is a recurring trope in Steve Jobs's speeches -- slag an idea as being unworkable or undesirable, only to announce it at the next major conference.