skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have a friend that had a true nervous breakdown recently. He's been out of work for 2 years and was essentially living on the street because he has no money and no family to help. You are doing fine in comparison.

There is almost always no way to repair your feelings at your current gig. This isn't a recent thing you are feeling, its the weight of months or years of exposure to toxic materials.

But look on the bright side, you can collect a paycheck while you find an awesome opportunity to move on. Apply everywhere. Take your time. Get a couple job offers. Quit. Take a month off before you new job.

Don't worry about your friends. They can get out on their own.

I've been through this as an engineer at a toxic startup myself.
Not exactly. I can't find the citation just this second, but there was an article floating about showing that successful founders tend to be much more successful on subsequent projects than the baseline.

I don't think it's chaos or luck. I've argued it before, but there are traits that make successful founders successful. The one that always stands out to me is an absolute laser focus on analytics. These founders are 'obsessively analytical' which allows them to make decisions much faster than others.

Starting a company is a race. Your trying to reach profitability (or at least viability) before your current funding dries up. For boot-strapped companies that can be a matter of weeks. For VC companies that can be years. In each of the cases in the article they lost that race.

So starting a company is largely about managing that runway. Some people get lucky and just get it right. For the rest of us tracking everything and truly being obsessed with that data allows you to see patterns, opportunities, and problems much faster. I suppose that you could say that data-obsession allows you to achieve hindsight much faster.

I have one failed startup (out of three goes). In that one I failed to keep an eye on my data. In particular, I didn't realize just how slowly our development was progressing relative to the amount of runway we had. In the end we released a product that never found a market fit and simply didn't have an opportunity to pivot. We ran out of money, and with it the business went belly-up.

My most recent venture is about 3.5 years old. In that time we've had one massive pivot (think entirely new business that utilized about 20% of the code we developed). We managed that by keeping close tabs on our development schedule and releasing as early as possible. It became clear that our initial idea would work, but the cost of acquiring customers was far too high. We felt like we couldn't optimize that cost down to something reasonable in the time-frame that we had left. We did, however, find a new business model along the way and we've aggressively pursued that all the way to profitability.

Now we're looking at different data. Conversion rates, traffic, and ad-spend rule my world now. We track everything we can think of. We've found patterns for our business that have allowed us to optimize our spend while increasing traffic. We've moved our conversion rates significantly. We still have a long ways to go, but at this point we have a nice war-chest in the bank and are at the point that we can aggressively scale. Along the way we've pivoted, just less drastically. The product has changed significantly as we've come to understand our market. We're pursuing a couple of opportunities that we never even thought about during initial development.

I feel really good about our business. I think we're going to make it. We've done that not through chaos or luck, but measurement and optimization.
Tip: you can group the flags together like so:

ssh -fND 12345 foo@bar.example.com

Also, the -f flag will cause it to fail if you don't have passwordless auth set up. If you don't have it set to use private/public key pairs, just tunnel like so:

ssh -ND 12345 foo@bar.example.com
Your question would be more useful if you were more specific.
I have just made a To-Do list and I just used black pen, red pen end plain A4 paper. This what I use when I want to be meticulous for something that I have to plan only one time.

I guess Org-mode would be fine if you do not like good old paper
Perhaps they were acting out that gods awful movie Swordfish.

Then again, I really do not want to know.
This isn't really anything special. Using bugs to track email open rates in any kind of marketing-related email is standard procedure in any sufficiently large company. There are a lot of perfectly benign ways to use tracking bugs in emails, and it's somewhat silly to assume that AT&T is being malicious with it. If you hate and distrust AT&T quite that much, then perhaps you shouldn't be giving them your business.
Amen! Worthwhile reminders never go stale.
Roku provides a secured media player which supports the necessary DRM.

Right now none of the major browsers (AFAIK) are supporting a DRM'd streaming media format for the HTML5 video tag. Note that on the PS3 Netflix isn't just providing a webpage, they're providing the whole damn browser, so they can either add DRM'd support in the browser or can extend the browser to allow the ability to call a native PS3 media player which support DRM. Neither of these two paths are feasible on your own Linux system.

Note its not Linux which is the problem, its the lack of necessary support built into the media players which run on Linux which cause the problem.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1781013

quoting from PG's comment on that post:

(= gravity* 1.8 timebase* 120 front-threshold* 1
nourl-factor* .4 lightweight-factor* .17 gag-factor* .1)

(def frontpage-rank (s (o scorefn realscore) (o gravity gravity*))
(* (/ (let base (- (scorefn s) 1)
(if (> base 0) (expt base .8) base))
(expt (/ (+ (item-age s) timebase*) 60) gravity))
(if (no (in s!type 'story 'poll)) .8
(blank s!url) nourl-factor*
(mem 'bury s!keys) .001
(* (contro-factor s)
(if (mem 'gag s!keys)
gag-factor*
(lightweight s)
lightweight-factor*
1)))))

-----

or simplifying a bit:

Score = (P-1) / (T+2)^G

where,
P = points of an item (and -1 is to negate submitters vote)
T = time since submission (in hours)
G = Gravity, defaults to 1.8 in news.arc
His company is over 3 years old. It is no longer a startup.
there are so many, you need to be way more specific.

why are there so many? probably because they are so easy to create. i'm working on a templating system and we whipped up a simple functional to do application in about 15 minutes so... what do you need?
That's a really vague question. Do you need to know about fundamentals? Like what a capacator/resistor/transistor is? Do you need to know how to solder and assemble components? Are you interested in messing around with micro controller boards, maybe adding a temperature sensor or servo here and there? Or designing a board completely from scratch?

If want to know fundamental electronics, start with one of those corny radio shack kits where springs hold the wires in place.

For microcontrollers, I like NerdKits more than the other stuff out there. The LCD display gives you a lot more feedback than assembling some other kit, and finding out you can only make two LEDs blink.
See a doctor.

I repeat for emphasis: See a doctor. This is treatable.
Ask HN: is buying an old site, very dependent on SEO, a good idea?
im thinking about purchasing a site that relies on SEO for almost all of its traffic (not too many returning visitors). im a web developer but not really experienced in alot of SEO.

id prefer not to mention the domain, since the sale is pending, but here are some more figures:

Price: $100k
Domain Age: 8 years

Monthly Stats:
Uniques: 100k
SEMRush rank: 55k
Google SE Traffic: 30k
SE Traffic price: $17k
Revenue: ~$3k

i know initially, the thought of spending $100k on a site that makes 3k a month isn't the smartest idea, but the potential for the site seems pretty big.

it ranks #1 in google for alot of general keywords, has a community on the site that can be revitalized, a 20k email list, along with the possibility of injecting alot of social media features.

my main concern is, if i purchase the site, and try to revamp it, would this kill the traffic built up over the years? what if i still keep the urls the same?

or would i be able to change them, and do a 301 to maintain rankings?

is it even worth messing with the dinosaur content, or just keep the domain and build a new app with a subdomain beta?

any sort of suggestions would be greatly appreciated, even if its related to scrapping the idea in purchasing the site at all - thanks!
Well I was looking for software. I know there are plenty of programs out there. But that means, that I can't check them all out. So I was hoping to get some recommendations.
Actually there are millions of people who have gone out of their way to disable Flash in the browser.

Flash blockers are extremely popular these days.
Yes but I think it's still a significant issue for open sourced web applications -- there's still room for improvement. It's usually a lot of extra work to make deployment on new systems completely automated, so developers don't bother. For my last Django project, I have a Fabric script that will deploy an update to the server with one command -- that was worthwhile overhead to invest time into, since it will continue to save me time. But I had little incentive to spend time on automating the initial deployment, since it's something I'll probably only do once, so doing it piecemeal by hand wasn't much of a problem.

I've seen projects where this kind of environmental coupling led to the developer not even bothering to open source their work, since they knew it would take too much for others to use the code.
My hypothesis is that people with poor eyesight or cheap monitors might have problems with Bing. The low contrast is very beautiful, especially if you have a great screen, but maybe not optimal in all situations. I would love to see that tested.
What's holding us back in our attempts to simulate a brain is that we don't know how the brain works. That's a much more important hurdle to overcome than performance, I believe.
What I learned from reading this post: Nothing
(Reuters) France seeks to bar hosting WikiLeaks website
Buy it before Apple destroys it (or buys them)!
Find your happy place, wherever that may be. Stay there for a while.

Both for your own sanity and for the sake of getting some perspective on the whole matter. It's easy to say "take a step back and look at everything"; it's a lot harder to actually take that step.
Has anyone played with Dapp? http://dapp.kerofrog.com.au/

Does the same, costs the same, and has been updated as recently as this week – unlike Interface, which was last updated in June.
I know Things is the most used software, but actually I don't want to pay 50$ for something I can get for free. And I think Things is a bit to complex for simple allday using..What else?
This reminds me of the Toughest Developer Puzzle Ever:

http://www.toughestdeveloperpuzzleever.com/begin/
A chemical imbalance may be involved.

But better biochemistry doesn't necessarily produce better living/feeling.

Depressed emotional/behavior state < -- > biochemistry. [can spiral upward or downward together]

A psychologist/ licensed counselor / psychotherapist [ i.e., "talk therapy ] can be really important to help your cognitive processes, keep you on track with reality checks. "Meds" are not magic bullets, do not kick in immediately, and it may take several tries to find one that helps you. Meanwhile, if you don't have sufficiently supportive/sophisticated social network around you, it's important to pay for an experienced professional. Been there. Best of luck.
Hacker News, where TC is "mainstream".
This also reminds me of pg's RFS5: Development on Handhelds

http://ycombinator.com/rfs5.html
I destroyed my career in response to a combination of overwhelming burnout and probable depression. My advice is to take some time off, seek a therapist or psychiatrist, and only after that contemplate leaving your company.

Your responsibility is to yourself and your family, not your company, not your boss, neither coworkers nor employees.
HTML 5 is amazing.
It costs them both money though. I doubt L3 gets a significantly better price on switch gear than Comcast does. Let's be serious though... peering itself is dirt ass cheap. Comcast's attitude should be to deliver the best experience to their users whom are the reason they can even turn the lights on. Peering with L3 ensures Netflix streams are delivered with decent service levels, which satisfies their customers. If Comcast has to build out extra capacity to shuttle Netflix streams from the network borders to their customers' homes, that's Comcast's problem, not L3s. The same rules should apply to L3 though, if indeed they are screwing Cogent on the other end.

Everyone has cooperated amazingly well thus far, and these few greedy fucks are starting to turn something that has never been an issue before into a big deal. Ultimately it will probably culminate in fucking us all with some kind of draconian FCC regulation and/or ridiculous network issues that will drive prices up.
You prob won't learn much from the simulator itself.. but try pspice if you just want one to play around with. Most simulators are based off of spice, so you can find a variant. LTspice http://www.linear.com/designtools/software/ltspice.jsp is also pretty good

As for learning the theory, this site has helped me alot. It has everything you need to know to go from 0, to a highly functional level

http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/
I know it's fashionable to hate Calacanis, but must confess to not finding too much wrong with the paragraph. I have worked with quite a few people who wondered "is my name in lights yet?", while wanting work/life balance at the same time. My personal thought on it was: "we are trying to make a dent in the world, and it takes something extra, and you have to really want it, cause it's hard (and tiring), and if you would rather have work/life balance now, then maybe another job would be better".
Oh man, don't get me started on that job-hoppers fiasco from a couple/few months ago.

That thread put people into hysterics.

You had people rallying behind the opposing flags of "work like damn dirty apes and love us for it!" and "we want our paternity leave and paid vacation!".

Blood was spilt. :(
Agreed. I would be shocked to see an email from any mass mailing that did not include this kind of tracking. If you don't like this sort of thing, turn of images and HTML.
I agree with some of what you said, but not total equality. There are differences between the genders, and I think some gender roles are more helpful than harmful (and some are undeniable, until we invent male pregnancy at least).

And yes, I would also protect my male friends. As it stands though, they are not the ones being sexually assulted (mostly - and in those rare situations, generally the guy is able to get himself out of it), and the article only talked about male on female assault, so that's all I really addressed.
You might also be experiencing the onset of chronic fatigue from stress. its not always medically recognized. If not treated soon, it could become a more permanent condition. if you lose your health you really aren't going to do so well for the company any way. I don't know if you should stay on, but taking care of your health has got to be a top priority.
Seems more like a replacement for Interface Builder. And quite a useful one. I'd love to be able to work on an iPad interface on my commute, come into the office, and start hacking away at the actual code at my desk.
> I have only experienced being tired a couple of times in my life

I would love to impart my congenitally low blood sugar to him so that he can know what it's like to have to battle chronic fatigue 24/7 with diet and exercise just so you can function and not feel depressed all the time.

Managing that is probably 50-75% of my personal effort in being a productive programmer.
Maybe you should just stop being a f$#@*& P*&%$
Clean version is here: http://inoveryourhead.net/maybe-you-should-stop-being-such-a-damn-wuss/
There are people who prefer to write out all those CGRects by hand? Interesting.
What will you do when Xcode 4 comes out? ;)
> And there are larger men (example: me at 6'5", 275) who can literally wipe the floor with most other _men_. Of course, I have to protect them, because they are weaker and smaller.

From other people your size, yes.

> Can anybody say bullshit?

Sure, but it's not coming from ZoFreX.

If person/entity A is being coercive towards (or just randomly assaulting) person/entity B, you should generally intervene to protect person B if possible. This applies to men protecting women from other men, stronger men protecting less-strong men from other stronger men, the police protecting the general populace from violent criminals, the various forms of consumer-protection laws, employment law, civil-rights protesters and some revolutionaries, teachers breaking up playground fights, ....
"Google Appengine has a lot of limitations"

Well, that is kind of exactly what this question is asking, right?

"and is still sees frequent downtime."

Ok, so downtime is a valid reason.

"GAE is simply not a viable solution for a site with reddit's traffic at this time."

Again, not sure if I can learn anything from this sentence.
Hubcap: A GitHub client for Mac OS X
huh?

*edit: oh, i get it. i meant the reader should use viewtext, not everyone should submit viewtext links...duh
Nothing beats pen and paper in my opinion. As for software I use 2 Do on my iPhone on the go - http://www.2doapp.com/
What breathtakingly dishonest article.

If you bother to read his book (The Truth About the Neutron Bomb as I recall) or anything based on it, you'll see that the concept was very simple and not the least evil:

Villages in the Fulda Gap are about "10kT apart". So if you use an Enhanced Radiation Warhead (what they're really called; also used e.g. for the Sprint missile) with an explosive power of 1kT and a lot of its energy directed into "prompt" (immediate) radiation, the villagers will be fine if they're in slit trenches or the like and you'll have taken out 10 or more Soviet tanks. And the villagers' property will be spared, which is important in the longer run.

As the comments mentioned and as he ends the book, revealing "the secret", we didn't build and field that concept, the blast yield was 25kT or more. Very much a city killer, both buildings and people. Not a "Neutron Bomb" at all in the usual sense of the propaganda.

Lies and propaganda.... Who were the victors, if they ended up writing the history.
It does make you wonder how hard it would be for NF to offer the same browser to people on linux that they could use just for NF steaming?
-------------- NO TESTS ----------------
You must work at a startup.

Brilliant.

Hype.la is also pretty slick. Maybe it will become the blogroll of open-source projects.
Contribute much? If you're going to take issue with what I said, explain your stance or don't respond.

Also, how do you like HN Office Hours? Any ideas/suggestions?
True, but you can't really 'optimize' the search engines and make a nickel off ad revenue if you just link to an interview directly.

Just like me you fell for the submitter's SEO trick. Now Google sees another link to that blog here and will bump his blog up a notch on the results page.
I worked for him for the first 2.5 years of Mahalo. I got hired right after dropping out of college. During my time there I was promoted twice, got to spend 3 months paid to live over seas and went to a party at the playboy mansion.

Say what you will about him or his style but my experience was was a net positive and if you turn the clock back and I'd do it again.
How we earned two long-term partners for our $10,000 mistake
I just glanced at his traces, and it appears GC is taking on the order of seconds near the end. Since he had only 1 client, I'm guessing it's more a problem with garbage collection than with file descriptors. Of course, only a test with the newer version of Node will tell...
I feel your pain. I went thru the same and stayed longer than I should have. Things turned out better for me but I payed a high price since I am still in/out of depression and it is affecting my performance.

My recommendation is to be confident that one way or another you will find a better place. Be calm, but do not stay longer than you should have.

...and yes some people are assholes and they can bring down whole companies. Don't carry that on your shoulders.
I guess it depends on whether the DoD wants to open it up to NASA. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37. And to be fair, NASA did have a hand in its development prior to 2004.

I don't think it would make sense to use it to replace the launching payloads and humans role of the shuttle. Since the X-37 needs a DeltaIV to launch it. Easier to just put the payload or a CEV on an expendable launch vehicle (Delta IV, Falcon 9, etc).

On the other hand it seems purpose-built for a science experiment platform, and possibly for robotic repair. NASA would do well to buy some for its science directorate. NOAA would also benefit from the chance to test their sensors on-orbit before integrating their big, expensive, weather satellites.
Google buys DRM company
How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves
Domain age counts for something, as does the rich mat of links that a long-existing site has.

On the other hand, the price looks high for a site that gets that much traffic. I can pretty consistently create SEO-oriented sites that get that much traffic & revenue in 1-2 yrs with an investment of my time that's more like $10-15k. (Working pretty intensely for a month, and mostly waiting for the link network to mature)

(Of course, I've gotten tired of that and now I'm trying to break into making sites that are 10-100x bigger than that)

Changing a successful site is always risky. There are two risks. (1) is that you might go from something that works to something that doesn't work, and (2) in theory the ideal way to drive up your traffic would be to make small incremental improvements, watch your results, then make more changes. Google's very happy for you to do that if you're using AdWords, but they don't like you doing that in SEO, so there are things built into the system that can (sometimes) zap your ratings if you try to revamp an old site.

Personally I can think of better things to do if I had $100k sitting around, but if you like this site you should think about trying to negotiate the price down. I think a multiple of 8 times earnings is fair, so something like $25k more like it.

Of course, his operating costs are low, so like your average domainer, he can probably sit around a long time to find the guy who'll pay too much.
If we knew precisely what was holding us back, it wouldn't be holding us back. You're asking a question you can always just move the goalposts for. (I'm not saying you will, but you can.)
holy shit. life ain't worth it. head straight to the CEO and tell them how you feel. if they have a hissy fit, tell them to fuck themselves. life is way too short. then take some time off and do something awesome and fun. when you come back have a plan that you think will fix this. follow it. if it doesn't work... LEAVE.

so i didnt feel like capitalizing anything because I am typing with one hand.
How do I prevent identity theft?
Identity theft has become an increasingly concerning problem for many people these days. There are continually new ways to have our life and information on the go with us but this also presents new security risks that were never present before.
Great blog post by Abby.
The reason domains cost what they do is that providing them costs (with the current infrastructure / policies). The current cost price, for the registry, to register a domain is anything from $3.50 (for TLDs with 10M+ registrations) all the way to $20 (for TLDs with ~50k registrations). A SRS, a backup SRS, all the extra services (thick Whois, support, billing, backups, administration, auditing, legal etc) don't come for nothing. Obviously scale makes a big difference to price.