skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Free Money - The Other Reason Many Start-Ups Begin In College
Just got through re-reading all of Paul Graham's essays in the start-up library. He frequently comments, like many, the obvious fact that many start-ups originate in college. The obvious reason is that there's many talented people working together. However, the other component that everyone routinely fails to mention is that starting a start-up is easy in college because of all the free money.

In college, many students have at least one sort of scholarship. Even without scholarships, there's grant money and student loans. The student loans, as you find out soon enough, are federally guaranteed and payment-deferred. "Federally-guaranteed" means that not only can you not be denied the loans, but the government actually pays the interest on the loans for you. "Payment-deferred" means that as long as you stay in school at least part-time, you don't even need to make any loan payments.

So if you're smart, then the classes are easy, you don't need money because scholarships/grants/loans are paying for everything, and you can spend all your time coming up with new brilliant ideas to hack away.

The "smart people together" is the part about start-ups beginning in college that everybody mentions. But all the free money is also a major part of it. Smart people + government allowance - need for mcjob = start-ups.

Free money from staying in school funded at least one start-up project of mine.

Who else here has been able to fund a start-up by living on scholarships and student loans?

Patrick Keys
I highly recommend reading through this slide deck if you have any interest in cooperative threading and concurrency. They go into depth about how this feature is implemented in the compiler and libraries, and explain some of their design decisions.
Yes, Prop 19 will let you grow a small amount of marijuana for personal use. But it will certainly never be legal to smuggle drugs across the border.

Moreover the profit margins go way down because you are no longer covering the risk of arrest to those growing and supplying the drug.
Why? Drug cartels move tons of drugs at a time, and have the mechanisms to move them across borders relatively unnoticed. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine that they would be able to move other things too.
Why Google Doesn't Pay Taxes and You Do: Explaining Why it Wouldn't Work for You
No, it's not open source.

Not much in in Javascript - just the part that displays the ad. All the intelligence is on the server, mostly in Java.
Because numerous other FLOSS licenses, including others that are copyleft licenses such as MS-PL, do not run into problems if someone uses code under those licenses in an app that they distribute through the App Store.

The GPL ends up standing out as the "free" license that makes it hardest to actually distribute free software and reuse free code in other free software projects.
MFC, for one.
I think Knuths work might be too Mathematical in nature for you. If you wish to work on sematic web its better you start with Collective Intelligence its a good book to start with . However it uses Python for its examples.
As far as Computer Architecture is concerned do you imply Software architecture or Computer Architecture
Learning HTML:

Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML
"If someone wants to buy marijuana, then it only makes sense for there to be someone who sells it. Otherwise you still have a problem."

Should we legalize child porn (there is a demand)?

There are many things that have demand, but shouldn't be legalized. I'm not saying pot is one of them, but you aren't making a very good convincing argument.

"This is a problem that most programmers should be familiar with. It's a function minimization problem. Minimize suffering(x)."

Who's suffering? People that want to put drugs in their body? It's something you choose to do. You aren't born with a joint in your mouth.

"As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up."

Why can't pot smokers just admit that the reason they want pot legalized is so they can get high? It has very little health benefit. It might help people with cancer/eye problems, but those people are in the minority.

If there is no down side to becoming an addict, we will have more addicts. If you know that the government will just "rehabilitate" you, more people will be willing to try thinks like heroine and cocaine. If you know that it will basically ruin your life, you might think twice about it.

Opiates were legal in China at one point in time...until nearly the entire country was addicted. Why can't we just learn from the past instead of continuing to repeat mistakes?
I am just a beginner into this field, but I will really like to venture out into NLP and ML, what are the best resources that I should start with?
You're making two mistakes: One about how exceptions work, and another by not considering our constraints.

Exceptions don't just add an overhead when they're thrown, they add overhead for every function call. How else would the exception-handling runtime know to unwind the stack to the correct addresses? It is this performance degradation that we avoid. Why? For the PC, it doesn't really matter. The XBox360 doesn't handle the performance hit very well. The compilers for the Nintendo DS (edit: and the Wii) don't even support exceptions, and the PSP is so crazily architectured that things like floating point numbers or exceptions can cause a framerate to drop from 300 to 12. I've not worked on the PS3. You must understand that these consoles and handhelds are designed very differently from PCs, and are never as powerful.

We do check for errors, we just stay away from exceptions. And dynamic casting, when we can (the DS does a freaking string compare against the vtable!).
I really hope I'm wrong about this, but I think this was all but abandoned in 2008ish, and is missing a lot of what's in PS.

(check date of newest files http://sourceforge.net/projects/pash/files/)

It's really too bad, as there are some interesting tools written in Powershell-only/first mode. I was on the hunt for something like this a little while back when I had some cool VMware tools that were only in Powershell, but wanted to run them from Linux.

Would love to hear I'm wrong about this, or that there's another ps implementation for those on Linux/ Mac.

Here is a more recent thread pining for cross-platform Powershell.

http://go-mono.com/forums/#nabble-td1573385
Notice that subsidizing the 'best' foods basically gives the poorest people a break ONLY when they eat good foods. Which may not be such a bad thing. Notice food stamps already do much the same thing. I personally know I would much rather subsidize a poor guy buying milk and bread than a poor guy buying donuts or alcohol.
This is absolutely what I think HN gives them too little credit for.

Their first release, they released on time, as promised. It was far from a complete release, terribly buggy, full of security holes. But they shipped. They're updating on their status, they've fixed all reported security holes with their first release, and they're announcing a second iteration soon, inspite of such negative feedback the first time around. All of these are the qualities of a successful startup, they were simply hyped too much, too early. This doesn't mean they're less capable as a team, just too open to scrutiny.
No. A lot of my former classmates from Stanford work at Google and Facebook. Among the engineers, there is a pretty clear trend that the more hacker-like ones are at Google (or Microsoft Research) and the more financially-motivated ones (primarily concerned with prestige, nice car, nice house, meals @ the French Laundry) are at Facebook. Maybe it's just that the latter couldn't get into the former company, I'm not sure. Among the non-engineers (human resources, etc), the employees that I know look a lot more similar.
Anybody comment on what the situation is in Amsterdam

Just a note of caution - while looking at what other places do definitely brings information to the table, you can't always say "if place A does X, doing X in place B will make it like place A".

The classic example of this is alcohol. Alcoholic beverages are not prohibited, but if you walk through an Italian town center at 11pm on a Friday night you won't see the scenes of public drunkeness and alcohol-fueled disorder that you see, say, in an English town center at the same time.

While I don't necessarily disagree with the larger point, in these kinds of policy area there is a level of unpredictability as to what will happen when a previously controlled substance is legalised, because patterns of consumption are convolved with local social norms.
Thanks for your advice. So what is the best stage to read Knuth's work? With computer architecture i basically imply software architecture, but I want to know the basics of computer architecture too.
Nobody is trying to protect people from themselves- they are trying to protect themselves, those close to them, and those unable to protect themselves.

It's not too often you see such a blatant contradiction in the same sentence.
There's an odd mismatch when a person says: "I'm tired of people emphasizing youth, because actual experience is more important. And I'm only x years old!" - it undermines what you're saying.

It'd also help to link to specific examples of people getting press coverage because they're young. Otherwise it's easy for me to say "Nah, those stories usually say 'Blah blah didn't have much experience, being so young, but they still came up with a good idea and had the maturity to follow through on it, wow.'"
I suppose that matters if the team plans to move to / stay in or is already in California. I personally don't have any opposition to it, but outside of California, it's much less forgiven by the legal authorities.
I like that bit at the end about entrepreneurial age, it hits home in that business experience really is a matter of "decide you'll do it and start working," vs. a "pay your dues and get the credit" credential; it even has "level ups" when you make some breakthrough or realization on how the process really works. This could be developed into an essay on its own.
Just as with any field, I think competition in the distributed social networking space will only be beneficial in the long run. Why should Diaspora adopt Appleseed if they want to tackle the problem space in their own way, with their own ideas? More importantly, why should Diaspora hijack the work of Appleseed, simply because they're a more popular brand?

I agree that it would be much quicker to start the movement away from Facebook if Diaspora leveraged other people's experience, but I'd be remiss to dictate how they should run their startup simply because they became popular so fast and I want to use them as a flagship for distributed social networking. This movement will eventually succeed on its own merits, whether or not Diaspora succeeds itself. In the meantime, let two teams with great potential (Appleseed and Diaspora) continue to develop their ideas about how they'd accomplish it.
"If you want to fix the alcoholic parent problem, create a society that reacts to them in a compassionate manner instead of throwing people in prison."

Why, so we can continue to enable them? If you coddle someone and are compassionate, people will never stop.
Just bear in mind that prohibition remains official federal policy for now, and that immigration is also federal. Immigration officers evaluating visa renewal, adjustment or naturalization have wide latitude to make decisions affecting a person's future in the US, and may not agree with your inclusive vision of civic life.

Electoral activities in particular are tricky. Voting or claiming US citizenship without the right to do so is almost always a felony, and can easily result in mandatory deportation and permanent exclusion (mandatory as in not subject to discretionary or judicial review). Campaigning is generally not illegal, but would probably attract unusually close scrutiny during review. Mistaken decisions can be appealed, but that's a long and expensive process.

I understand and agree with the substance of what you're saying, but 'the ethic of the society' and the letter of the law don't always match up. In immigration matters, the burden of proof is almost always on the non-citizen rather than the government. So he's not just making excuses.
The situation in the US now and in Portugal then is very different. Everything from the culture and structure of society, to the motivations behind the reform and the actual reform itself are different. The decision by the socialist government in Portugal was based on pragmatism, born out necessity, rather then ideology. The idea was that, instead of further victimizing the addicts, they would be able to get help. As the law no longer would stand between those in need and the resources of the government. That's why it still isn't legal to sell drugs in Portugal and why you as an addict can be called to mandatory counseling. I'm not saying on reform or the other is better, but they are still very different.
Javascript Jems - Lambda expressions
AFAIK, pot isn't actually legal, it's just decriminalized, and not very strictly enforced.
If you're adventurous enough to try out the 1.3 alphas you'll find the stack traces immensely improved.
"Personally, I think the solution is to legalize all drugs, and to put the money that we're spending on the war on drugs into medical treatment and education. It's obviously a difficult situation, but I'm glad to see that we're making progress."

So we make it easier for someone to become an addict and then pay millions to treat them? I also fail to see how education is going to work. The education people need is to tell them to stay away from drugs in the first place.
Knuth's TAOCP may be too much too early. Here are some links that will help you further your study.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/194812/list-of-freely-ava...

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/78955/what-are-the-best-p...

The first is list of free online books, the second programming related blogs.

Fair warning, programming is a life long learning job. I am not trying to discourage you, but you need to understand that you will need to LIKE learning to be good at programming. Good Luck!
But you are paying, for drug enforcement and imprisonment. Plus increased taxation, because people who are incarcerated generally aren't working steady jobs, but are stamping licence plates or something stupid like that.

> Also, businesses should have the ability to fire a drug addict at any time. Even if it doesn't directly affect productivity.

Would you fire someone who drank? or smoked? or was obese? They're equally addicted.
How would that sell more Apple hardware? A $300 AppleTV isn't going to sell as well as a $99 AppleTV, particularly to people who just want to watch TV.
it's probably meaningless by now... my guess is that the reason why google doesn't publish stats, they simply don't want bing or yahoo or someone else claim to have the biggest index and gain cheap press coverage... after all it's not about how big index you got but you are doing with it
"I think that people who think this way tend to smoke pot, not the other way around. There are plenty of fully functional pot smokers without conspiracy theories."

Smoking pot makes many people paranoid. This is fact. It's not that far of a stretch to imagine that these people are conspiracy theorists.

"This is like sitting in a bar listening to the same sob stories repeated week after week at a local dive bar and saying all drinkers are defeatist losers."

When you hear the above from many different groups of people in different parts of the US/world that smoke pot, it really makes you wonder.
As Lisp is very good at adopting paradigms from other languages - the only design tradeoff that I've consistently heard is the syntax - and this usually from people too blind to realize their syntax is hardly better.

So what do you see as a fundamental design tradeoff for Lisps?
TAOCP is awesome. If I had been advised to read it when I was 15, I probably would have either studied it as hard as I could, or given up after the first few pages. It's pretty intense material for a beginner, in my opinion. But only you can judge for yourself. Take a look at a copy of it, if you can, before you buy it. TAOCP focuses on algorithms and other microscopic aspects of programming; it may not offer much insight into building whole software applications.

Also, you might consider looking at Don Knuth's book Concrete Mathematics, which is a somewhat more casual coverage of the math chapter in the first volume of TAOCP.

You mention in a comment that you want to learn software architecture. I really like this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Software-Architecture-Primer-John-Reek...

If you're into web applications at all, perhaps the best book to understand the basics of design is:

http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/

Either way, don't give up on TAOCP. Whether if you're ready for it now, or if you want to wait a few years, it's great that you're interested in reading it, and I would encourage you to study it as much as you can, if you discover that you are indeed intrigued by the topics it covers.
Horrible website. No support e-mail address, or any e-mail address on the site for that matter.
No, you just need to avoid doing it in a half-hearted manner. In the case of Holland, why shouldn't there be drug tourism? Why is it any worse than, say, coffee tourism? or wine and food tourism?
15 years ago you could smoke in bars and restaurants too. Next year may see restrictions on smoking in beaches and parks, although I have my doubts about how effective that will be.

If you drink alcohol on the street other than at a licensed outdoor event, a police officer can make you throw it away or issue a citation resulting in a fine. This seems pretty effective overall.
maybe try cloudapp ?
http://www.getcloudapp.com/
Can the plane stay strucurally stable when a chunk of it has been blown off. Blow up in the right spot and you have a plane split in 2, and it doesn't matter if it's depressurized.
"But you are paying, for drug enforcement and imprisonment. Plus increased taxation, because people who are incarcerated generally aren't working steady jobs, but are stamping licence plates or something stupid like that."

Generally, those people would otherwise have low-paying jobs and wouldn't be contributing very much anyway. The people in prison aren't your daily pot smoker. They are dealers and people who committed crimes while under the influence of an illegal substance.

50% of the population already doesn't pay federal taxes. If we are going to go after revenue, we should start with this.

"Would you fire someone who drank? or smoked? or was obese? They're equally addicted."

Smoking cigarettes and obesity don't get you high, which has profound effects on your state-of-mind. If someone drinks on a daily basis and comes in hung-over..then yes. All of these also shouldn't be under the same category as "discrimination" because they are choices you make (freedom can have consequences) not uncontrollable qualities that you are born with.
He said "just as easily." Smuggling coke is much easier than children.
There are people who think the Earth is flat, but they aren't called physicists; yet Marxists are still called economists.
"They would not be able to compete with regular businesses if the price weren't artificially high due to prohibition. We stopped seeing gangsters like Al Capone in the liquor business when Prohibition ended."

If we make all drugs legal and they start resorting to other illegal activities like kidnapping/ransom, can we make them illegal again?
My company — workhabit — has been building the same services for Drupal (which is one of the major platforms we do). We have a full iOS SDK we call DiOS (Drupal iOS), which basically allows you to plug Drupal as data services into any iOS application.

Of course it's Open Source:
http://github.com/workhabitinc/drupal-ios-sdk

We're going to be adding some white label applications and "officially" releasing it later in November with a new site launch (as well as an Android followup), but it's definitely another approach to this. We wanted to do something to connect the HUGE open source system Drupal to the colossal iOS and Android markets, and after a few months work, here it is.

Hopefully it could be a useful alternative for those of you interested. We also have a testkit here which makes it easy to debug your sites:
http://github.com/workhabitinc/drupal-ios-sdk-example

Love some feedback from HN about it.

To the original poster, I think it's a good idea. There are a lot of competitors out there, and there is a lot of momentum in the space to connect up mobile apps and web to things. I would definitely test-market and see if there is interest. Personally, I think your idea may have merit — there is a giant demand for data services on phones, and anything that makes it easier would be great. I would encourage you to look at models where you could drop the "whole kit and kaboodle" because I think data services are going to commoditize extremely quickly.
While there are many fine features of the Bay Area, as someone starting a business here who has spent most of my life living elsewhere, I don't see any greater freedom. If you are concerned with obeying the law as written rather than merely avoiding it as enforced, I think it has the least freedom and most regulation of anywhere I've lived in the US. That said, perhaps there are social values associated with lax enforcement?
> If we are always held back by our own fears and self-limiting beliefs, then we aren't really free.

Similarly, if we are controlled by our desires, we're not really free. An addict is not really free because he can't control himself.

> Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Drugs are definitely not essential.

> prohibition also provides a multi-billion dollar subsidy to violent criminal organizations that threaten our physical safety and security

Crime networks exist not because of strong government or strict laws; they exist because of moral corruption in the society. A strong government, strongly connected coherent society with powerful social moral values actually reduce the size and power of crime networks.
> You'd probably be arrested out of sheer spite

You're probably right, and this makes me very sad. For all the supposed rights US citizens fight to defend, both the TSA workers and air travelers are just rolling over at the threat of being called a "terrorist".

Keeping the public terrified makes for easy prey.
Thanks, and which language should I focus on the most? Currently I know PHP and lately have started playing around with python too. Should I stick with pyhton or try out C or C++ before too as I have really less experience with C.
I am impressed. My wife got tenure having two kids, so I have been there for the nights and the "honey I have to work late so this paper gets out" more than a few times. Now we have three kids and two companies. Its hard, but it can be done.
Governments could buy up large strategic reserves of grain and twinkies. They've done this since Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat.

Overproducing beef and corn syrup won't be as efficient. In fact, it might even bring on the "random failure", by screwing up the water table.
Ask PG: On-time YC application form replaced by late one?
Will the application form I submitted before the deadline be overwritten if I submit a late "updated" application as well?

I want to make certain YC has the opportunity to hear my vastly improved (and shortened) product pitch as well mention material progress I've made.

But...I don't want to lose out on a full review by ending up in the "late" pile.

Suggestions?
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