skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm suspicious about people who put too much importance into their language choice, maybe because I'm tempted to be one of them. You can love beautiful programs, or programs that get things done.

The former people tend to gravitate toward things like Haskell, which is very pure, conceptually beautiful, and feels like using the LHC to crack nuts. But hey, you're using LHC, great fun.

The latter will pick whatever ugly PHP framework is closest to the final product they want to ship. Most great startup ideas aren't very sophisticated algorithmically wise: existing mature libs in ugly languages beat writing/adapting everything in a cool one, although the latter is a lot more fun; an active and friendly online community, which is familiar with problems close to yours, beats having macros and first-class closures in your language; etc.

In theory people could love both beautiful things and getting things done, but in practice I find that the more strongly they feel about one side, the less they care about the other.

A corollary is that, in fun-to-use languages, everyone writes fun stuff rather than useful ones: frameworks, meta-programming stuff, continuation-based contraptions, etc. So you end up with a dozen half-baked neural network libs, but no decent (and _de facto_ standard) HTTPS client.

TL;DR: the overwhelming majority of startups are about social and economic hacking, not about software hacking. Over-focusing on the language issue is a clue that one hasn't come to terms with this sad truth.
Other - Go (http://golang.org/)

I'm writing a high-performance webapp that requires some specific data-structures and algorithms to achieve the speed needed.
I tried prototyping in RoR first, but even simple test requests ended up taking minutes to answer.
Then I conveniently attended a guest lecture by Rob Pike on Go, and had one of those all to frequent "oh cool, gotta try that" moments.
I must say I don't regret it one second though. Go is a surprisingly nice language for writing all kinds of things in. The features of the language combined with the rather extensive set of standard libraries, (IMHO) makes it ideal for high-perfomance webapps.

I tend to do these thing just as much to learn new things though. So I'm not saying it couldn't have been done in another language instead.
You are right. The article is a muddle.

I think they meant: the quadratic lower bound is the highest yet proved -- not that it is "better" than Knuth's unproved conjecture.
IBM, European Union team to swat electronic vampires
> He tells me he has to justify our "team"'s existance to his dad whenever he sees him.

Okay, so I don't want to go off at the deep end here, but I think the general consensus is correct: this isn't healthy and you're best bet is to leave.

It seems to me that his dad bullies him and he in turn bullies you. Also, if they really thought you don't add value to the company, they would fire you. Clearly you do, so they are just jerking your chain and making you feel dependant on them. They are lying. They have you in what has been called a sick system [1].

[1] http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html
2 months is not that long dude. I am a single founder and have been going hard for over 3 years. The key to it IMHO is to really love what you are doing so much that it does not
seem like work. I dont launch either. Just iterate. See article: http://www.marketing.fm/2009/11/17/never-launch-just-iterate...
That's just hearsay. It's pretty hard to believe in the days of Pantone that two high-scale vendors cannot match colors.

There were also rumors that it had something to do with light and the camera (iow, white doesnt absorb light as well). Who knows?

Although I use their gear, I'm not known to say a lot of nice things about Apple, but I think this "fiasco" isn't. I applaud them for their apparent eye for QA in the matter.

These sorts of QA blunders are virtually routine for competitors like HTC, Motorola, and Samsung.

It sounds like Jobs announced the white iPhone 4 a bit too prematurely. Lesson learned, let's ditch the White i4 and move onto the next thing.
I am now almost embarassed to share my screensaver story

Saving a company money is saving them money, it is a great quality to have. I admire efficiency more than almost any other business trait.
Wow, that's a fairly sexist comment!

I write in a gender independent style (unlike your comment!).

That is why I didn't bring up a "my wife" or "your wife." Many of the folks who responded to the email were women running startups who have stay at home dads, or dads as primary caregivers.

Additionally, there are families with one parent, three parents, four parents and any number of gender permutations. (Think divorced folks who remarry/re-partner... thus the child having 3 or 4 parents).

I tried to address the issue of a startup founder and a baby, and figured it was implied that your partner (or partners) need to buy in.

You are correct in that you need your partner(s) buy in, but incorrect in that the person has to be a wife!

Finally, it's wildly offensive to say women should not run a startup. I'm guessing you are troll in order to get a reaction here, since you're making such an outlandish statement AND saying you won't discuss said outlandish statement (in a discussion forum).
Thank you for the advices. Once the website starts to make some form of profit, top of the todo list is to hire a professional designer.

Other cheaper options I have explored so far include;
- Buy a theme from ThemeForest or WooThemes and Mod it. ($40)
- Hire a designer to create the PSD, then use PSD to HTML/WordPress service. ($200)
- Use crowd sourcing websites such as crowdspring/99designs (min $500)

But to hire a designer at such a early stage could set me back at least $200, for a new gig it's hard for me to justify the cost, especially when design is so subjective. One might like it, others might now.
Ronald Reagan had a long lead-up to running for Governor of CA and eventually President. Sarah Palin did the mayor => governor path that happens a lot. GWB did a lot of behind the scenes work in Bush I's White House which followed a pretty normal political path. Clint Eastwood ran for mayor in a pretty normal fashion.

Some of it is Democrat's looking for inexperience or Republican's trying to be seen as "outside the system", but it is a pretty normal path taken by pretty much everyone listed. It matches the Democrats on about an even basis. Look at the actual paths of people and not what the media tells you.

For example, The last election had both top spots as Senators with no executive office experience in a lower rung of government. This is generally not good when you know that neither had done a budget cycle from the executive prospective (e.g. mayor, governor). This lack of experience, probably lead to some of the problems seen with the federal budget cycles.

// I do believe the same probably would have been true of a McCain admin even with a VP that had been through it as a mayor and governor.
Other: not a member of any dating site, but love the statistics articles coming out of OkCupid. They are insightful and funny at the same time.
Once I got up and running with sbt, I really took to it. You only need to be concerned about the net when you add a dependency that you want it to resolve by fetching remotely. If you want alternative web frameworks, I think scalatra looks promising.
It's more likely that the person who wrote this article doesn't even know what a lower bound is.
Same story, different source, lots of comments:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1841827
You are massively underpaid for what you do given what you describe.

You are also not valued by your boss. Probably because he doesn't really understand what you do.

Get a job with a company that has some conception of what developers do and rewards them accordingly.

If you like your boss as a person, but not a boss, then try to keep him as a friend. But working for him does not sound like it is doing you any good.
Outstanding advice.

I can really empathise with the OP and to be honest, your advice has helped clarify a few things for me so if the OP takes nothing from it, rest assured that I have taken plenty!
That sounds good man. Drop me an email.
I'd modify those slightly: 1) I'd say that age-induced wisdom does help you parent well. Years of watching other parents have their mistakes and successes and the vicissitudes of your own life add perspective on human nature and parenthood. But it's not the be-all, end-all of parenting. 2) It is harder for women, and that's a major consideration, maybe the biggest one. For men, not so much. One of the benefits of being male is that you can keep having children (disclosure: my wife is significantly younger than me).
Ask HN: Where to find market research stats?
I'm making a business plan draft, so I'm searching for some basic stats:

* Number of small businesses

* Number of small businesses started in the past few years

I'm currently reviewing OECD Stat extracts and their Factbook, but I'd like to have more detailed stats about USA. I've been doing some guerilla surveys, although I'd really appreciate a stats resource with a greater sample and more integrity :-)

Where do you collect your market research stats? Thanks
The OpEd is authoried by a guy who said that newspapers would have a better chance of survival if they removed all of their content from the web. A year and a half ago.
Yes, of this I know what I speak!

http://cache.gawker.com/assets/resources/2007/09/jasonheartb...
Other: Married to someone I met online, but not through a dating site.
Offer HN: I Can Help You Sell Your Product Through Customer Discovery
Does your product fly off the shelves when you give it away but stall when you start charging?

I can help.

I will try to sell your product, but not with the normal hard-selling approach. Instead I will present your product to customers and then engage them in a conversation about how and who the product can help.

This zero-pressure approach turns customers into partners instead of adversaries, and is powerful. The idea is to explore the market and to "discover" where your product's unique value proposition lies.

In every case the real market for your product is not the obvious one.

Every good product has a lucrative market but it is not immediately obvious what it is. It requires getting out of the building and trying to sell the product. And in most cases it requires no change to the original product -- just a change in the positioning.

I have done this type of customer development for small businesses and startups before and I can do this for you. I can help you discover your real customers.

My real value-add is the kind of free-associative out-of-the-box thinking and brainstorming that is the fuel that makes this process work.

Background: I have an MBA from the University of Washington and have worked for 12 years in software.
We still build in Coldfusion with core modules in Java. In its tag based days it was annoying but now that you can work in pure CFScript it's a lot cleaner.
I know a blind python programmer Krishna kant Mane[0], who works with pylon, is a FOSS evangelist, leads a foss project GNU Khata[1] and an awesome speaker[2]. I loved the way he uses all free and open source tools to work on his laptop, program and deliver. Hats off.

[0]http://www.blogger.com/profile/07891377863557367515
[1]http://gnukhata.gnulinux.in
[2]http://gnunify.in/speaker/profile/108
There are two notions of lower bound:

lower bound like you are talking about (the function always takes longer than this to run for an input of size n)

lower bound across all inputs of size n (the function never runs faster than this, given any possible input of size n)

The two are different
The important question isn't the percentage recyclability. It's the amount (if any) of chemicals which cannot simply be put in a landfill, and the amount (if any) of scarce minerals used which cannot be recycled economically.
Is there a Chrome plugin that shows images/video inline on HN?
If not, someone should make one.
Embarrassed by my failed projects? Not really. I just pretend that they never happened.

Not if someone directly asks, of course; but in my autobiography the failed projects rather drift into the mists of time. The same goes for most creative people: You hear about Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, but you never hear about the books he started but never made any progress on.
To echo what other's have said here, it sounds like they have you in a sick system [1] and it's basically abuse. You should talk to your GP; they should be able to get some proper talking therapy/counselling instead of random people on the internet. This will help and is nothing to be ashamed of — I've had it myself.

Also, 17k is a pittance for a qualified developer, which you are. Find some new adventures, you can do it. If where you is is so remote, then move, or commute, or telecommute. Your very resistance to leaving is a sign of the damage they have already done to you.

[1] http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html
I think the difficulties I've personally had with embracing TDD come down to a slightly different set of experiences:

TDD: Spend an hour writing the test (sometimes more if I have to figure out how to properly work with a third-party library). Spend 10 minutes writing the code. Decide a few days later that I need to rework the API a bit on the feature, so spend another hour rewriting tests and 5 minutes writing new production code.

No testing: Write the feature, 20 minutes. "Test" while writing it (refresh a web page or run something at the CL). Realize a few days later I need to rework things, spend 10 minutes doing so. In the rare instances where something breaks, spend 20 or 30 minutes tracking it down and fixing.

Don't read this as an argument against TDD. It's more that I have a very hard time actually realizing an increase in productivity or code quality when using it. TDD-backed code generally takes me longer to write and pretty much nobody on the business team I report to notices any difference whatsoever, except that feature X took a week longer than it probably would have otherwise. The few bugs that do creep into production code are usually dealt with promptly, and I'm not sure TDD would result in entirely bug-free code either way.

Anyhow, that's why this conversation has been quite valuable to me. I am convinced that if I can clear away real-world obstacles in TDD I can do a better job of embracing it and realizing the productivity benefits that everyone always crows about. For now, my personal experience is that it's a means to marginally improve code quality at a high cost of time.
It's pretty funny to read an article written by someone in a $500 per hour and thirty-percent-of-the-award profession denigrate those who work in a six-percent-only-upon-success profession.
>I'm sure he's not making much money of[f] them - if any - but it looked like a perfect fit.

I think you're being disingenuous here. You've argued that you have a right to the content and to put your ads on it so why bother trying to spin that action as a minor benefit.

If it's no benefit then save yourself and everyone else the bandwidth and remove the adframe. If it is a benefit then keep it and stand by your conviction that that is justified.

PS: for your mate, the .logo {padding-left: } looks to be about 7px too much so it doesn't align with "Bring happiness [...]" strapline and the body text. I'm using FF3.6.11 on Kubuntu.
Thanks to everyone giving me the "Just 2 months? That's nothing" comments.

I don't mean that facetiously. It's actually pretty inspiring that you guys made it through that honeymoon phase and into something real. Hopefully this venture will be around a year from now, and I'll be able to dish out the same kind of inspiration.
> He's right to add that they use up a lot of your energy.

I've done two startups during our three years and two kids of parenting and the whole situation definitely requires large amounts of energy and effort.

But one cool thing that also starts to happen, for me it was after the parental bonds had started to strengthen and it did take a while, is that I've noticed myself actually drawing energy from them...

There's no other feeling in the world like looking at some little person and knowing they love you unconditionally.

That new project you worked months on that has zero traffic? The VC who walked away? Grief from your wife because you've done two unsuccessful startups now?

None of that is larger than the fact that your kids love you. Which for me, is awesome.

:)
As the co-founder mentioned above, I'll just add that it's important to have the support of your spouse. It works for us because my wife understands that I'm only going to see the baby for an hour or two if at all during the week (I help more on the weekends). My wife doesn't work and she feels lucky to be able to spend all day with our son. I think it might be harder as a baby turns into a child and wants a little more attention from both parents.

With the proper support - definitely possible. I think doing a startup as a single parent with a baby would be near impossible.
Yes I was thinking the world ended for Lisa in 1984 when Steve's skunk works project came to fruition.
Microsoft PDC 10 Live Stream
personally I find all these dating sites to be completely useless for guys...too much competition.

when you hit on a girl in the real world...at worst, you are competing with the 10-15 other guys who've had the guts to talk to her in the past week.

with online, you are competing with pretty much every guy within 100-150 miles...and since most play the numbers game...you are just one of the hundreds who've messaged her.
I can't tell for OkCupid (they are not covering my country well), but i was inspired by it and built a similar app for Russian social network and it worked very well for me.
Can you please send me some screenshots of problematic pages to my mail (konjevic at gmail com). I've created account, but honestly I don't understand anything about your app, and it would be great to see how layout looks with data.
Get Out Now.

You'll probably have an 'exit interview', during which you can suggest that you'd continue to do the current major projects for 75% of what they're paying you now - but you'd be working off-site, against a set of milestones (just like a real contractor).

Benefits to them : They'd save on paying you to slack off... and on the various National Insurance stuff too. It would be a win-win.

Benefits to you : You'd get the opportunity to say NO, which seems like it would be a novelty. Moreover, you'd have time to pitch your services to others to fill up the other 50% of your time. Don't sign a non-compete, unless you're getting paid to do so.
I see it like this:

Success is relative, yet you can measure success. The more projects you've done, the more successful they ought to become (although some variance on that graph is perfectly normal, I presume). If you don't improve in pulling off your projects, you are doing something wrong, and then you should revise on what to improve upon in order to progress.

Having failed before is actually an indication that you're more likely to succeed (relatively).
I look forward to his next article, expanding more on the theme of "look at how easily I can get into a building by using the open door."
For a long time I expected to marry someone that I met online, since I was meeting lots of friends that way. I finally found love at the bookstore I worked at.
I consider myself a religious man, and always find myself getting frustrated with protesters/sign holders/judges like the ones in the video. Not only for their blatant disregard for--in this case--the Gospel, but their incredible insensitivity.

Not sure if the OP is the father in the video, but to you, good sir, I tip my hat. If I were in such a position, I know I would not have been as calm, and would probably have included far more curse words for my own good. To the couple in the video, I wish you the best in trying for your next child.
Dup: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839277

Different site, identical article.
I'd also like to see a node.js/html5-based irc client. the cgi and java ones I normally see around, well, really suck, and it's not like someone hasn't already written an irc client lib.
It depends on why they failed.

I was involved in a project that failed because of a moral mistake I made. You could blame it on the culture (my whole team, my boss, my bosses boss, and the director of the organization were all "fired" because of this incident) but I was the one person who could have stopped it. And I didn't.

To be fair, I probably would have lost my job had I done the right thing. On the other hand, I would have kept my integrity and, retrospectively, I know I could have gotten a new job very easily at that time.

I was very embarrassed by that, and it screwed up my life for a while... Hell, I gained 40 pounds as a result.

The big picture is that you have to ask yourself, "What is the cause of this failure?" Sometimes you gamble, sometimes you get a "2-7" with nonmatching suits and you go all in before the flop. People have won the WSOP playing like this... People also lose big playing like this.

Myself, developing web sites on my own account, I've noticed that most web developers (in the sense of a real estate developer) create something that 'maxes out' their potential) and they never make anything that cool again. Personally, I'm trying to be more systematic and gradually make things that are bigger and bigger.
5 years as a solo founder here. Would I do it again? Maybe, but definitely differently. What I do know is that coming out of the other side that there's very little in a small business I can't do.

I'm certainly prepared for my next project, whatever it may be. Keep it up, and best of luck.
Cool. Didn't see that. I think the line-by-line comparison was interesting. I looked at it very carefully and there is no doubt this is either directly copied (and edited), or directly "transcribed".
Those fall into the "other" category. As I write this, "Other" has 5.91% of the votes (52 / 880 votes)

Give the guy a break. You can't list every possible choice and based on these numbers, it doesn't look like very many people use the technologies you listed.

If we (generously) assume only half the users of those languages actually voted, that would change the "other" group to 104/932 = 11.16% which would edge out Java's 6.55% and PHP's 10.84%. It would still fall short of Ruby's 13.95%, Python's 15.13%, and Javascript's 20.71%

Check out this thread for people voting "other" http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843229
When I joined my company the app I took over development for was hosted on Amazon EC2 at about $700/month (Windows 2008). The app wasn't even done yet and was being used by about 3 people, so I switched us over to shared hosting at about $60/month. The shared hosting is even providing us better throughput and the app is now noticably faster than when it was on Amazon; and I don't have to worry about the details of securing/maintaining a Windows server box. Not gigantic savings, but still $7600/year for basically no work at all isn't too bad.
How do I make my offer appear here? I just posted an offer at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1843501 but I don't see it on http://news.ycombinator.com/offers
The tendency of people explaining their ideas to draw diagrams on paper / a white board. Once a diagram was on a computer there are tools to help him understand it, but it took a while. So, the only way for him to keep up with a free flowing discussion is to follow what people said.