skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Were Woz and Jobs "friends"?

I believe the answer to that is "absolutely". They certainly weren't in it for the money at first. Woz had to be very explicitly convinced to leave his nice job at H-P even after they had built the first Apple PC.

If you insist that their friendship was somehow bogus because real friendships do not involve "shared purpose", I'm not sure I have any friends, by your weird definition. My high school friends had the shared purpose of playing games and entering math contests. My college friends had the shared purpose of graduating.
Jobs and Woz, as surprising as it might sound given the difference in personalities, were friends, based on what I've read, which is Woz's interview in Founders at Work and Sculley's Odyssey: Pepsi To Apple.
The hardest part of cross-platform stuff is the GUI, and the solution given here is "don't make it cross-platform."

Which is really the right answer. But it makes the actual cross-platform stuff trivial in many apps.
"Hi, this is Julian Assange" (story behind Warlogs design)
Easily "exporting" the last interesting colors via clicking is nice. A stack of boxes showing the last N chosen colors would help eyeball themes.
You know the law is fucked up when someone refuses to publish a book that tells the reader how to solder an LED to a device he owns.
Nice perspective, I can easily imagine finding one janitor with PhD in 200K town.

There is absolutely nothing surprising about this (in contrast to seemingly high 5000 PhD janitors in the whole US).
(I'm the author of the article...)

As one comedian said, "I don't come down to McDonalds and make fun of you while you're working..."

You might not agree with all my reasons or some of my thoughts. However, the indifference of great UI by engineers kills companies. I have sat in environments time and time again where lack of attention of detail creates horrible user experiences, and this affect the bottom line in a very real way.

This should read as, "you are bitting the hand that feeds you."

The best engineers I have met ask questions, and have a genuine concern for the user. They want to create great experiences. The engineers that don't want to get involved in a positive way without being a destructive gatekeeper, I have no time for them.

We have now reached a tipping point where most companies are recognizing the need for great user experiences, because poor one's cost companies time and money, both in lost customers and lost productivity.

This indifference by engineers is the reason why a UI Engineer position was created by many companies; they realize that most back end engineers just want to code in a way that most people at car manufacturing plants want to put the bolt on.

That mentality didn't work out well for GM and other car companies. It's also not working out for most technology companies.

You can bitch all you want, but if you aren't contributing to the bottom line, you're just a cost center. And cost centers get outsourced, plain and simple.
Fair enough - I guess I was taking the perspective that since things are usually portrayed unrealistically in a promo video like this, the perf must really suck.
It's a cool, bright space, in one of the neighborhoods to the west of Harvard Square (also within walking distance of Mt Auburn hospital vicinity).

It would be a great place for startup with about 10-15 people.
Looks sweet, albeit vague. Subscribed.
I think one of the problems that people have with entropy is understanding the concept of fractions of bits, and it would help to have a deeper explanation. It's somewhat easy to understand in a probabilistic sense, but it still sort of defies intuition that you can have less than one bit. You want to say, well you have to round up, right? A more intuitive explanation is that with an ideal encoding scheme, 100 non-vowel die rolls would take, on average, 258 bits to encode. This is still somewhat probabilistic, but it makes a bit more sense, because it's no longer necessary to have a direct relationship between die rolls and bits. And this idea of encoding a sequence leads naturally to the topic of compression, which is one of the most useful and most natural applications of entropy.
I think in this particular case, the devil is in the details. But, if we address your question in it's current black/white form...

Start by figuring out how long it's going to take to go cash flow positive. Double that time. If that doesn't leave time to do the rewrite, skip it. Instead, temp or hire a new guy who can back up your bottle-necked development.
It is my humble belief that you should care what you succeed at

I know how you feel, but if that empirically produces a lower probability of success then what can you do?
This is a bit of an oversimplification, but where CGI spawns a new process for each connection, FastCGI* starts the process once, then runs a loop to handle each connection, so the process startup, database connection, etc. costs amortize to essentially nothing -- many of the constant factors for working in a higher level language are eliminated.

FastCGI is worth looking into - a lot of popular webservers support it, and it's less of a complete model change than switching to an event-based system (e.g. node.js) or an MVC framework.

* Or SCGI, which is a newer, simpler design with similar goals.
So... what you built was a Facebook version of https://www.wavee.com/ (or any one of the other dozens of sites), which is basically a way of taking foolish people's money.

Replacing PHP/Apache fork/threads with a C daemon is a good migration, though most any language with an async sockets library worth a damn should be able to handle thousands of simple requests every second.
>Huh? How does Apple get a security update in its own software too late for GM?

Apple ships plenty of GNU code. What if an exploit is released between RTM and the ship date? That's the kind of thing I am thinking of.

But I don't disagree that this is Apple saying "this is somebody else's problem now". I just wonder if that somebody is Adobe or the end-user.
Peruvians using Facebook to rescue one of hundreds of abandoned dogs
IANAL, but as far as I know intend is relevant in law.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intention_in_English_law
Is Microsoft Going to Go After the Chinese Government?
Higher than average intelligence is in oversupply, but super-genius intelligence never is. However, there are diminishing returns to ever-higher intelligence for most startups.
I bet you could get Alexis to manage it ;-).
Someone else commented on this too, and I'm not sure exactly where to go with that. Discussing block length and compression is deeper into that particular issue than I was really hoping to go in this, but I don't know of an easier way of explaining it. Any ideas?
I think you mean you used http://www.jobboardshq.com/ to create a site that collects jobs.
Thanks for the suggestion. I used to have a Skype number, but dropped it since I was only ever using skype-skype calls or calling numbers myself with it. If there's a free option out there, sounds good to me.

I'll probably get an Android phone sometime soon enough, though. But I tell myself that the longer I wait, the more advanced it will be!
The big networks block Google TV
What the hell? Fair use isn't a defense? Land of the free my ass. More like land of the almighty $.
I agree with every statement you have made highly, except for one small but significant nitpick.

Many of those people are not choosing not to make productive use of it, but failing to find a good way to do it. I have an acquantaince with an MA in English literature who was unable to find any job related to it, my own wife failed to find any reasonable job with a BA in History and is pursuing her MA so she can teach at the community college, hopefully.

You could say that they deliberately chose degrees that are hard to market and I would agree, but once they had those degrees neither of them chose not to use it deliberately. Also, I know that is anecodatal, but I strongly suspect a fair number of those PHDed waiters failed to find employment in their field rather than chose not to.
Apple has responsibility over the GNU code they ship. They had responsibility over the Flash code they shipped. By not shipping Flash, they no longer need to take responsibility for it. That makes sense. Apple never should have been responsible for Flash. Flash is a huge project, and Apple is not in the loop on Flash security updates.
What people miss is Oracle's customer isn't the small guy. Until you get Walmart or Amazon or someone escalating Java issues, the importance of it internally won't increase.
Look at it the other way. Why should Apple ship software it can't take responsibility for? Does Silverlight come bundled on Snow Leopard?
Golden Rectangle Grids for Creating Divine Interfaces
When does the social graphing across groups between interests begin?
As my story goes, I met someone about 6 months into my year-long startup experiment. As luck would have it, she had relevant skills... and she did help a lot with my startup, but not on the level of a co-founder. She isn't that interested in cleaning up the existing mess and the subject matter and targeted audience don't really interest her.

That startup sort of burned out, for reasons not worth going into. If we could find a new idea on a topic we're both passionate about (like travel), we'd pursue it.

Also, she's more technical (front-end) while I'm also technical (back-end), and neither of us have much business/marketing background.
http://www.amazeelabs.com/team

http://eighthourday.com/about/

http://getsatisfaction.com/team/bios

An about page I did: http://www.votereports.org/about

Not an about page but the layout could easily be done like an about page: http://grainandgram.com/

By far my favorite due to the style of the photos: http://mckinney.com/us

Edit:

I also like: http://www.steinway.com/about/

More minimal but extremely functional: http://grandpeople.no/about/

Spotify has a great one: http://www.spotify.com/uk/about/features/
Hate this. I look at titles all the time, especially in browsers.

I even dislike that Chrome only has titles on the tabs, which are almost always cut off.
Good point.

Motorcycle engines, with their smaller cylinder sizes and thus lower combustion chamber surface area vs. volume, have a much easier time cooling their cylinders and heads. This reduces hot spotting, making it easier to get away with larger displacements. I'm sure there was a healthy amount of overlap in your cam, since that motor was designed to rev to the moon.

Still, I did have a 14:1 piston in my single-cylinder, 450cc dirt bike motor and ran 91 Octane in it all day long without problems. Granted, I never took it below 4000ft altitude, which probably helped, but the cylinder, head, and valves were all designed for excellent cooling. And I had a really aggressive cam setup.

Either way, kudos to Mazda for pushing the limits here.
Amazon Will Soon Allow Kindle Users To Lend E-Books
This can be done by friends/relatives who are interested in supporting you without having the technical skills or free time to actually be co-founders with you.

AFAIK, PG's argument is that it's a lot of stress doing a startup on your own.
His argument is a fallacy.

A parking lot attendant or janitor does not require even a high school education. So does that mean we should stop investing in high school education too?

There are always exceptional people outside the normal parameters.

But the higher the level of education in any social group the better off the entire group will be in the long term, whatever the individual variations.
But that's not what the DMCA says. I'm not sure, "I disagree with the law" is a valid defense for breaking it.
Oogling Warren Buffett’s Investment Scorecard
Target Launched In-Store Facebook Photo Printing
In my eye, ebooks are the big driver here. The core market for the Kindle is older, wealthier individuals (read: investors) and sales revenue from ebooks rose 173% last year, Amazon sells more Kindle books than physical books and so on. It's all pretty impressive to the casual investor, who can feel like he's making a good bet on the 'future of reading'. Even Barnes & Noble, who is shackled by it's physical stores and has falling profits is trading at a generous 23.5 P/E today. I'm passing on AMZN for sure.
I'd call those failures "failed experiments." Willingness to experiment is the hallmark of a well-run company.
> there is no such startup scene in eastern europe as in the US or the rest of the world

I don't know which part of Eastern Europe you live in, but in the part where I live and half way to the south of it there is very active start-up scene. I'm sure there's something to the south of that as well. Yes, it's not Silicon Valley, but there's no place like SV anywhere in the world, like there's no place like any other place. So keep on looking and consider that you might have to broaden your definition of "startup" to more than just another website like HN would like you to believe.

> how to start a career in the startup world?

Well, you have to hang around those companies and understand their needs, like with any other job search. But working at startup is not just a "career", it's a way of life with it's positive and negative sides. Make sure you understand what you're getting into before you do.

> I am feeling like loosing the perfect timing opportunity

I don't think you're losing anything. Take your time and look around, don't just jump into this world head first. Things might actually be much worse than they look now. But good times are certainly ahead :)
Moral calculus in videogames [2006]
Endless Trend of Bumper Stickers 
Truly this is the trend of bumper stickers. That is why online printing company offers full color printed stickers, the truth of the matter is that they are classical decals.
Sugata Mitra Shows How Kids Teach Themselves
Yes there are many penny auction sites out there. The whole reason to link it to facebook is so that you know its a real person you are bidding against. How do you know wavee has all real people bidding? You don't some of their users could just as easily be bots bidding items up automatically.
but why is improving their income tax bracket more valuable to you than improving their wellbeing by any other metric that person might choose?

One claim which is often made by advocates of education is that it causes productivity to increase, and that the gains from increased productivity are only partially captured by the educated individual. The remainder of the gains are spread about the general population via trade (i.e., a consumer surplus).

If the educated individual is happier but not more productive, there are no gains from trade or consumer surplus to be enjoyed by everyone. Thus, the standard rationale for public education does not apply to such an individual.
Amazon to add "lending" feature to Kindle
That is way to small of a data set to draw a conclusion from! ;)
Also, you need to answer the question, "what if I don't really exist?"
What Motivates Us To Do Great Work?
I think your eyes are playing tricks on you.
A lot of people seem to express your sentiment. I find that surprising. I would have thought anyone who went to University has done this sort of thing many times, for instance. As large bureaucratic organizations, they are infinitely 'hackable.' Education generally has lots of opportunities. I've added classes after taking the finals for them, for instance. You know that's not what they intend.

Any system that loves its rules is ripe for this sort of thing. My wife's mother was born in Canada but came over as a child and had to renounce her citizenship at one point. They changed their rules so we were able to get her citizenship re-instated and my wife can be a Canadian citizen too. She's never even been to Canada.

I always get a little thrill out of beating rules people with their rules. These things aren't harmful (generally) to members of the system, though these kinds of loopholes only tend to exist as long as they aren't too greatly used.

Now being a welfare cheat or talking about how much you like shoplifting is probably not a good idea, but doesn't everyone commit a little harmless loophole exploitation from time to time?

EDIT: The general weakness of institutions are rules. Anyone wanted to disrupt such things needs to know how to exploit those weaknesses.
We Just Dumped Firefox For Google Chrome, And So Far, It's Awesome
You can fail, pick yourself up, and try again. You can increase your probability of doing good, and accept the tradeoff WRT business success.

I should add that I think Paul presents a very clear vision of why he thinks this is not a problem: his mantra about finding a problem a real person needs solved and solving it (substitute actual quotation here). My objection is that where this leads you is to unexploited niches in the market ecosystem -- returning to Tim's language, to focus on capturing value rather than creating it. I suspect Paul tart rejoinder would be that a happy customer is much better evidence of value created than fuzzy dreams of do-gooderism are. I believe he is partly wrong. I hope he will speak for himself on this topic.
Or it could be a $269MM fine on top of a one cent tax bill.
In what ways did Apple control Sun or Adobe more than Oracle or... Adobe? What do you mean?
How to become indispensible
Groupon Trolls Alexia Tsotsis from TechCrunch
Could quantum algorithms shake up Google?
Neither has Microsoft. I know people are interested in anything that has to do with Apple, but I'm still attempting to determine what makes this newsworthy.
What Does The MacBook Air Mean For Processors?
I think some people saw this coming, but it's good to get another perspective on the topic. Like the pics as well.
Well, you had Cerise and IOWA for Ruby Web frameworks then, also Wee, though Wee was not so robust. But IOWA was quite capable of fast, scalable Web sites. For whatever reasons it never got the attention it deserved.
YR- send me a msg, I'd be happy to help guide you, or possibly invest in your startup in-kind.

max@maxhenderson.com
I think I went to the first Startup School (2005?) and I was invited to a party the night before at the Garden St House. It had such a nice flow for a party; it encouraged people to circulate rather than congregate in corners.

As a complete aside, the party was fun but I didn't know anybody and I was alone. I'm a very open person, but I still had trouble getting people to talk to me. We all wore silly name tags, so I changed mine from "Matt" to "Linus Torvalds". Suddenly I was popular! Then PG saw me and said "you should probably use your real name, I think that's lame" or something like that. Ah good times :)
Times are definitely changing and playing the "old game" may actually lead to extinction (reference in text) - although I like the reference about moving from physical power to brain power. True, true
Looks like amazon needs to hire google's accountant.
Curated internet?
Project Stargate is Live (always-on link between SF & DC)
It's okay. As we've seen with earlier releases, it's better for a few innocent people to die than keep some of this information secret.

"Some of them probably even deserve it"
I'm not not thinking about repeat customers. I am thinking about competitors and people looking to gather industry information.

The point, as stated by tptacek, is that sites quite often leak information.
Wikipedia calls it "relative satisfaction." I'd call it "personal benefit or gain."

Considering that, it's clear why we'd use money as a proxy. Not a perfect one, of course.
Definitely needs a location filter and/or location displayed in the list view (like 37signals job board does). Sometimes you just can't use a filter – for example, being in Europe I would be willing to relocate to London or Berlin, but Seattle is more unlikely (because of distance and paperwork involved) – exact filter would be less helpful than an additional column in the list.
Seth Godin writes about similar tips/ideas, but he is a bit long winded at times in Linchpin. I like the brevity of this - and of course, the ideas too. Good work.
Great article. Suggestion #1 and 2 are easier but 3 and 8 I am not sure how to implement yet! But at least I am aware and can do more/better!
As a "technical" person, this is exactly how to attract us. Bring knowledge, contacts, customers, reputation, something to show and actual feedback. This shows you have value to add. These are the things we cannot program up out of nothing.
Nintendo's PowerGlove taught me an important lesson 20 years ago: Even if hand tracking becomes perfect, it doesn't matter. What matters is that holding your arms up is exhausting. After a minute, you are resting your elbow on something. After two, you are resting your wrist on something. A minute later, you really wish you had a mouse.
I'd rather be moderately successful doing something that matters than very successful selling sugared water.
I second this recommendation. This is required reading for any fiction writer.
> 3) Deprecate all non-Apple-controlled apps on Macs by introducing the store

Seriously? Providing an additional distribution platform declares that "non-Apple-controlled" software is DEPRECATED?

Yarr.
This surprises me: You do not however want the kind of determination
implied by phrases like "don't give up on your dreams".

I would put it diifferently. Don't give up on your dreams, but ask
yourself which is more important to you: to have a successful
high-growth startup, or to do something in particular? If there is a
specific thing you want to do or build, then be prepared for the
(likely) possibility that it won't make a good startup. It might make
a great hobby or even a successful lifestyle business. That doesn't
mean you shouldn't do it -- it just means YC will not be able to help
you.

But maybe your dream is to have a fast-growing, high-impact startup,
and it doesn't matter so much exactly what it is, as long as it's
somewhere in the general area you're interested in. Then perhaps
YC may want to get involved. You're still pursuing your dream, I
would argue, it's just a different kind of dream from a particular
project that someone else might want to do.
Maybe find a US angel group investing in primary care solutions, your expertise in the UK market would probably be quite valuable to their portfolio companies looking to expand abroad.
on the other hand, in many cases this information is revealed, to no apparent ill effect.

Look at Linode's display of how many servers they have is available. They are giving away how much business they do in a day, but is that hurting them? if anything, I think it helps them.

several other popular companies here on HN post their revenue numbers publicly.

So yeah, while you should be aware of such things, and make a conscious choice, well, for many of us, this isn't data that really needs to be kept secret.
I really like the idea. It's something different than all the expensive SEO sites. And I know how hard it is to get visitors on the page for the first time.
+1 for this.
And: I know it's off-topic, but I really liked Skreemr. What are the reasons for taking it down? And is it possible to get the source code?
I've always wanted to know whatever happened to Bill Budge, who wrote a pinball simulator that was called the best ever 8 bit program.