skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As a parent myself I would like to turn it around a little.

The question is not whether you should or shouldn't pull of your first startup after you have a kid, but what you want your kid to know you as.

Many parent's cocoon once they become parents and become very risk averse.

But there is no more risk doing a startup than there is keeping your job. There is no jobs that are safe. No certain income.

By forcing yourself to become more risk averse (which starting a company perception wise would be) you are actually making yourself and your family a favor IMHO. You grab the bull by the horns and build a situation were risk is an active part of the game instead of being the pink elephant in the room.

Living in Denmark we obviously have many more safety measures than in the US (and also rather high taxes) but as I said at the end of the day you are not more secure in a job than you are in a startup.
My reaction to your post wasn't one of sexism, but that I don't believe you are a parent yourself. Once you are a parent, the most important thing in the world is (or at least should be) your child. You're asking the wrong question (and probably not in the right mindset to be a parent yet, which is totally OK) if you're thinking "Why can't I have my wife be the mom and I can just show up for dinner?". As a new parent myself for the first time, I find myself every day thinking "What can I get done in X amount of time so I can go be a daddy".
I would say it's obviously a joke. Do you always assume the worst of people?
I am using PHP, Scala(Lift framework), Javascript and Adobe Flex
Rumor: Samsung will announce the Nexus Two on November 8th
Oh no! I realize that... but you're offering him the knowledge, confidence and support he needs to be able to make a lasting and positive change in his life.

If he's on £17k/pa and you're billing out £350 a day, then he only has to work 50 days per year to come out in the exact same place he's in now.

As long as he gets from you a list of those "first steps" on how to find the contracts. Even if he starts out billing only £50 per day (for fear of not finding work, in order to build a client list) he'd literally be no worse off than he is now (of course rent in London is much higher so ... I think he should at least bill £100/pd).

It sounds like he is a skilled developer with some niche knowledge in the auto market. Suffering perhaps from a lack of confidence (are my skills really worth that much?) and a bit of Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt (If I quit this hell-job will I have to go on public assistance? will I be homeless?)

He's got to make the leap and get out. No question of that in my mind ... but he also needs help and encouragement to do it.

That's what I saw you offering (not the job) ... it's just the seed of that mighty Oak that I've seen planted - but - I've already assumed that there's a happy ending to all this.

What can I say? I'm a dreamer and an optimist. Probably why I spend so much time reading HackerNews :)

Teach a man to fish and you've fed him for life.
What browser would you take with you on an isolated island?
As not a side note: Thanks to my wife (and all the other wifes/husbands/friends) for your support!
> "I learnt to decode them so that I could check my screens for alignment and spacing etc."

That's just amazing, but I guess it makes a lot of sense... since your display is not 2d-based in the same way as standard screens are and you can read the code itself (i.e. the display is consistent). I'd upvote you a thousand times just for how cool it is to workaround difficulties in so leet way :)

Of course it also reminds me of... I don't see code, just blondes, brunettes, redheads...
I once saved my old company about 300k(dollars) in fraud charges. They were a telecom company and were experiencing massive fraud on some of their toll free numbers from Brazil and the Philippines.

Using a web app I developed, I suggested removing these numbers from all public sites and advising customers to call the help desk for them. You'd be surprised how much pushing I had to do and how much resistance I faced, especially since I was working in the marketing dept.

Anyway, they finally implemented my idea. Total fraud for 2009 was approx. 300k. For 2010, its approx. 50k.
:D - my misunderstanding. Got confused between user-names.
Sentiment stands though.
my advice: dont be a solo founder. chances are that you get totally sucked into your idea without realizing that you're project is going to fail. if you're doing all the work yourself, make sure you release early and dont fail too hard (the longer you wait with the launch the harder the 'waking up' will be). if you got a cofounder chances are a lot higher that you might be building something substantial.

but kudos to you for sticking to your project, it takes a lot of dedication and that's ultimately what makes an entrepreneur.
Yes and no. It's complicated... and it's important to find the right balance for everyone. Perhaps the woman is happy to be a stay at home mom and dedicate herself to that. Perhaps she wants to do that for a year or two and then go back to work. Or perhaps she has aspirations of her own that, to be brutally honest, conflict with having a child to some degree, especially if dad wants to dedicate as much time as possible to a startup or his career.

Of course, you can talk about this stuff beforehand, but once the baby arrives, everything can change in any case.

It's not easy, but hugh3 is right, if nothing else, about the fact that the woman plays a huge role in things (duh:-) and not mentioning that is leaving out some of the story.
Why IBM, Cisco, Intel are not building smart phones AND cars or aeroplanes?
Ask HN: Are you embarrassed by your failed projects?
Everyone goes on and on about there is no penalty for failure... However, over the years I have launched a few side projects, and I have eventually shut them all down. They were met with disinterest or in some cases only casual interest... the worst part is the people that actually liked your product. they are the ones that always bring it up. has anyone else had similar experiences? also, how do you deal with promoting your next project in light of all the past failures?
Jason Scott is a pretty cool dude; random story:
He was doing the JetBlue unlimited month of travel and showed up in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago to talk at CMU. He was giving a talk at Seton Hill college the next day (about 45 mins away), and posted on twitter looking for a ride. A friend of mine forwarded the tweet to me, and I got in touch with Jason and ended up giving him a ride the next day. I had very little clue who he was before I met him, but he gave me a copy of Get Lamp and some good discussion in return.
Not exactly sure, but I think money had something to do with it.
No worse than any other helmsman :-)

Which is to say with the boat heeled over or the jib up, the helm is reliant on the bowman and the rest of the crew keeping watch anyway, you can't see much forward.
can't you select multiple answers?
What about POUT (plain old unit testing)? Ie writing he test after the feature?
I am glad that I checked this thread after a fag and shit break without any one even noticing in the office. More than yourself, I couldn't have been lucky today. I am working for a small company, sole developer, more than 2.5 years now. I directly report to my director who's monitor is just behind my seat and who himself doesn't come from a technical background. But he is one of the most reasonable person I have come across as a boss, too excited about technology and gadgets, recently bought IPads for every suitable employee. Just like you sometimes I am overloaded with tasks and we are about to start one, two new projects in few months. We have just started looking for candidates via agencies and I have been given the responsibility to hire suitable candidate. Finding someone on HN, who has at least heard about Node, couldn't be more exciting for me. Here is the deal.
I can offer you a min £25k salary, can go up to £35k, based on the skill set. We have 25 days holidays, private health insurance, pension scheme and sponsorship for training/courses. We are located close to Reading about 45 mins on train from London Waterloo. I can help you with finding an apartment close to town centre and railway station, if you are willing to move in. If interested, please email me at hanifkhan@gmail.com.
Recent projects have been in Python, but my current project is written in Go.
I took the CTO position at a company AccessUSA now HotelBeds which is a travel consolidator, they had a very old system built on fox-pro for the reservation system. The original developer had pretty much abandoned any updates to the system and was just sucking licensing revenue out of it. It was a totally closed system, so it could not be modified from an external development team and all advances made towards the original developer met luke warm responses.

Several consultants had came in and told the CEO that there was no way to graduate out of the system, that it would require a total rewrite of the system. The CEO had went through 3 failed attempts to build a new system with external vendors the second of which folded shop and then the CEO got a call from an Indian company saying that they had been working on the system for over a year and had not goten paid. Apparently the front company that folded was subbing everything to offshore firms without letting the customer know.

Anyway, all attempts failed and the one most critical business issue was that the rates and allotments for hotel rooms needed to be available to customers like Hotels.com, Travelocity, and Expedia in real time. It was a read only problem. I set up an export from fox-pro to a database cluster (I can't ever remember which one now (Oracle or MSSQL). Built some web services on top of it to expose the data and published the WSDL. All tolled we (2 people full time) spent a week building the services and added over 30 million in revenue, the first year. I have done some others, but that is probably my best time to money ratio of my career.
I'd recommend to have children early too:

1) The wisdom that comes with age does not really help much dealing with kids, but that wisdom would definitely help to run successful startup.

2) With age it's harder to have healthier babies. Especially for women.

So it's better to slow your start-up development (or even postpone it if necessary) and have kids first.
That's fine, but a bit of mathematics...

Roof area of an average new house: maybe 100 m^2?

Peak solar flux: 1 kW/m^2

Take into account the existence of night, cloudy days, and the fact you're probably not at the equator: divide that by four.

Efficiency of these solar cells: they have a "goal" of 10%, so let's optimistically assume they make it.

So we're collecting, on average, 0.11001000/4 =2.5 kW.

Actually, y'know, when I started this calculation I was anticipating something ridiculously small, but that's a not-insignificant fraction of your usage. Am I missing a factor somewhere?
I believe JavaScript and Python are the most popular choices here.
I ususally find myself working in bursts. I have been on the knowledge gathering burst for the past few months. I went all crazy, bought books, read through most of them. Read HN posts etc.

But now I am kind of getting sick of it. I am now at a stage where I don't want to be on HN. And I am shifting into application mode. Now I will be focusing on applying what I have been gaining. Once I get sick of it, I will switch back to gaining mode.

So I would suggest, if you know that you also have a similar pattern (of working in bursts) then just do it until you get sick of it and then shift to application mode.
I was thinking that too, but I wagered there would be a way to give representations to white-space which act as a way of dealing with it.

Although, it would seem to me that it would involve a lot of counting of white-space.
Can you have a puppy and a startup?
I don't necessarily disagree, but it can harder to find a new job if you don't already have one. You also have to explain to your new employer why you left your previous job, and "the place was a nightmare," even if true, is rarely a good thing to say. Your new employer may wonder if you are dependable.

Whatever you do, do not accept a counter-offer, and do not let your boss guilt-trip you into staying. When you decide to leave, you are gone.

The job search can take a long time, so don't get discouraged if you don't find something immediately -- prepare yourself for the fact that it may take a few months. If it happens any sooner, then you will be pleasantly surprised.

Good luck.
I've used resource allocation and scheduling quite a bit. It's amazing how much of Operating Systems bleeds over into the real world
This is such an excellent offer! I would definitely need your help.

I've been working on a project of mine, where I need to the webcam to take a photograph of the user.
something like chatroulette, but i need users to take only the photo. then send it back to my server where i'll do further processing.

I am an ActionScript noob, so any help in libraries/sample code or approaches that you could offer would be immensly helpful.

Thanks!
> Roughly nine years after walking through that first door, finally get a chance to create your hit sitcom.

I don't remember this show at all, but after some IMDb sleuthing I think he must be referring to "Frannie's Turn" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103418/). It looks like it only lasted around six episodes.
Nice post, but 2 months?? Try 2 years! Try 60 hour coding sessions! Try getting your first paying customer! Then we can talk!
>I'm not going to argue morality here with you any further, you apparently have a bee up your bonnet about this, but as they say, no good deed goes unpunished, there is no reason why this would be an exception.

I'm arguing the application of copyright law (I'm not for the law as it stands incidentally) and for the moral rights of producers of copyright law. You appear to be arguing that it's fine to break the law because how you do it makes some people happy. The same rationale (at a different scale) makes speeding OK for teenagers if it impresses their mates and they're lucky enough not to have killed anyone yet.

The problem is that if we allow what you've done (which I don't dislike, indeed I'd consider myself an admirer in general of what I've seen of your work) for anyone then we allow copying other's blog posts adding adverts and putting them on one's own website, we allow copying books that are still in copyright and republishing them, etc..

It's a technicality but important to the case in point IMO. The email from webmistress is grateful for you saving her from not having properly backed up her work, not from having infringed copyright. If you now copy her current website and display it as your own with ads, will she be happy? I'd warrant no, not until the point at which she deletes it all by accident and comes to you because she hasn't backed up. Is this an argument against copyright, probably, not a great one but still it is one.

The fact that you're hearing the positive results is going to be largely selection bias.

If you've bothered reading then thanks for your responses and for not going ad hominem on my ass.

Peace,

pbhj
Great project! Travel companies usually dive straight into the latest res system when they often don't need to with the beauty of web services. Sounds like you both saved and made them a packet!
I routinely test web applications with screen reading software; I am partially sighted so I have an interest in developing things that work well with screenreaders. I highly recommend "being blind" when you test the things you build, and the idea of blindfolding yourself for a day just to see what it's like is a good idea. It gives you a little more empathy. However, please keep in mind that it's also not as bad for the blind, as they have a lot of practice using assistive devices, technology, etc. The human body and mind are incredible, adaptable, wonderful things.

P.S. I did a video of a screenreader and twitter a few days ago - you can see the thread for that at http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1799246
Our base language is PHP, but since we are working with teaching programming we are working with a lot more Javascript, Actionscript,C/C++, Java, and lately we have been testing/working with haxe.
I use base six, with one hand being 6s and one hand being 1s. It's a tradeoff between counting capacity and ease of calculation.
It's not that easy.

Being a daddy means many things. In the early years obviously your kid will need nothing but your attention. You could be banging cucumbers on your head and you would be bonding.

But as your child grow older shouldn't you also stand for something? Be someone they can look up to be inspired by?

My kid is the most important think in the world, but exactly for that reason I am not stopping everything I have build up so far. I want that to be an inspiration, not just someone he can play hide and seek with.
Why the New Rich are turning their backs on "Atlas Shrugged" [video]
The wikipedia article might have been useful too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Lorre
A lot of people are saying "no, it's possible", but as far as I can tell none have already built a successful company (by Silicon Valley standards) while raising a baby; they are all "in-progress".

Has anyone actually done it and care to share their experiences?
Nope. No better way to learn what not to do.
Yup I agree. I'm 1.5 years in to mine and I've had some amazing times, and also stayed up late fixing stuff I broke many more times than I wanted to or trying to meet some over-ambitious goal I had. The first time I added an extra server I screwed up quite badly so nobody could sign in (and stats weren't updating even if they could). And my biggest user emailed me to ask why it was so bad.

2 months is like a shiney new relationship - you're totally absorbed in each other and you're that couple that "never fights".... but you're going to.
I've heard that too, but it's just hard to believe that a company that can pack so much stuff in such small spaces (be it iOS devices or MacBook Air's) and is praised for its industrial design and great hardware engineering, can't figure out suppliers to have matching colors for a button.

(note: I'm not saying that's not the case, it's just surprising)
Google Sites now integrated with Google Apps Script
15/20. Always been told to watch the eyes.
I'm not expert on landing page optimization, but there are few things that will surely help.

1. Remove animation on frontpage. As you said, your customer want to know how it works and how much does it cost. Leave only how it works slide.

2. Add call to action

3. Create FAQ page where people can read about your service and put very visible link on frontpage.

I created a mockup of this solution and you can find it at http://212labs.com/retro/longlongago.png . I think this should already help with bigger conversion, but you should probably do some A/B testing to find right formula for your customers.
Your notion of everyone having 'something seriously wrong with them' holds true everywhere. It's a core tenet of what makes us human, it's not isolated to people on dating sites.

Have you never heard the phrase 'no one is perfect?'
Quite fast then I want one :)
That quote omits that during Bush's two terms, Lynn Cheney appeared on "The Daily Show."
RDML (Rapid Development & Maintenance Language), a 4GL which generates C.
That article appears to be partly wrong and partly misleading. The game is described in a way that makes no sense and so the significance of the new proof is not made clear. I think this is more accurate:

In topswops we start with a shuffled deck of N cards numbered 1..N. In each move we reverse the order of the top K cards where K is the number initially on the top card. (After that reversal, the original top card, K, is now the Kth card down and the formerly Kth card down is now the top card. Any cards in between have reversed order.)

The game terminates when the card number 1 comes to the top. (For reversing the order of a single card has no effect.)

Here is what the article leaves out: If, when 1 comes to the top, the deck is sorted 1..N, you win. Otherwise, you lose. This is a very tedious form of solitaire.

Note that if your shuffle produces an already sorted deck, you win trivially with 0 moves: the deck is already sorted and 1 is on top! If the shuffle produces a reverse sorted deck, N..1, you win trivially after 1 move!

If someone hands you a different shuffle, you might be playing for a very long time, uncertain whether you will win or lose.

For every deck-size N, there is some number of moves - call it ENOUGH(N) - such that if you haven't won in ENOUGH(N) moves, then you will not win with that deck. For example, if the deck has 12 cards, and you've been playing for 64 moves ... why you might as well quit. We know for sure that any shuffle that wins ends after at most 63 moves for a deck of size 12. ENOUGH(12) is 63. [supposedly, I haven't double checked the brute-force proof]

What is the formula for ENOUGH(N)? or at least an approximate formula?

For values of N up to (the article says) size 18, ENOUGH(N) has been computed by brute force.

Knuth gave a formula KNUTHTOPS(N) and proved that ENOUGH(N) <= KNUTHTOPS(N). His proof was interesting because, asymptotically, KNUTHTOPS(N) is lowest upper bound known. You can confidently stop a losing game after KNUTHTOPS(N) moves -- but it is possible you could have stopped earlier if you had a better formula.

These new guys gave a formula, HALnLINDAWOPS(N), and proved that HALnLINDAWOPS(N) <= ENOUGH(N). HALnLINDAWOPS(N) is interesting for being the highest lower bound known. Don't even think about stopping until you've made at least HALnLINDAWOPS(N) moves or you are guaranteed, in some cases, to quit part way through a winning shuffle.

The number at which you can quit safely, no fear of stopping a winning game, is between HALnLINDAWOPS(N) and KNUTHTOPS(N) (inclusive). The main advance is squeezing that range from below with a new proof.
My Main tip:

Keep your incomplete crosswords, get the answers, and fill them out with a different pen. Try to understand the answers you didn't get.

Other bits:

Always try to think of different ways to read words. "flower" to mean "river" (i.e. thing that flows) is an obvious, and common, one.

Learn the vocabulary of particular setters. Private Eye (my favourite, link below) has a very distinct language.

Regarding cult references - many of the trickier setters are fond of Shakespeare and Biblical references. Either accept that you won't get them, or try to get acquainted with the principal characters.

http://www.private-eye.co.uk/sections.php?section_link=cross...
I saved a company I was contracting for 5k a month in wasted adwords expense in the first hour of looking at thier account. They were happy to pay my fee. :D