skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This Day in History - June 29
In May, Mr. Gladwell wrote that scientific discoveries are not necessarily the product of singular genius. He ticked off example after example of discoveries and ideas that occurred at the same time, independently. “Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus,” he wrote. “Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution.”

In other words, great ideas are often, as the title of the article put it, “in the air,” and true genius often lies with the people — whether mathematicians or musicians — who are able to snatch them down at the right time.
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"ideas that occurred at the same time"
so they are not genious because of the idea they thought because both thought at the same time

and then he sais

"snatch them down at the right time."
a genious is someone who makes an idea a reality at the right time.

thats a contradiction! what a waste of time to write such a bad article
Now you know, how it feels to be cheated.
Heading For The Exit Lane
"You think you can't sell the idea until you have a product. This is a major killer - you think that as soon as you have feature X or Y, you can start showing people your idea. One more time - if you can't sell the idea, you can't sell the product"

What a confusing statement --chicken or the egg

I believe most of the articles on startups are just noise.
What I think he is trying to say is that you should be able to test the concept/idea without building the full product.
I don't want into this debate, but I'd ask the readers to use a little reason and common sense here.

Pointing out that things will change over the next hundred years is not very interesting to me -- it's what I would expect. Pointing out that we effect the environment is also a non-starter -- of course we do. Assuming that since we exist and change nature that somehow we must "un-change" it is muddle-headed, in my opinion. It's a religion looking for a science. Since the first microbes colonized the oceans life forms have been changing the climate. It is a natural part of this planet's evolution. There is nothing immoral or unethical about it.

Now if we want to have some artistic discussion about what the global thermostat should be set at, let's have it. But let's be honest about what we're doing and not wallow around in dire predictions of global calamity. It seems to me the reason the environmentalists scream so loud is because they have such a thin case.

I'm only trying to comment on the type of political discussion we're having. The science may be sound or not. But science is just a prop in this discussion. The real issue is all around the religious feeling that we should feel guilty for existing, consuming, and changing our world to suit us -- basically for becoming an evolved species.
Taleb's statement about risk could be made succinct. Risk-taking appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success. That's hardly a damning criticism of either book despite being disguised as such.

Phil Mickelson is a prominent example of the unbalanced view that the general public has of risk-taking and its relationship to success. Before he won a major, he was roundly criticized for taking too many chances. After winning, he was renowned for his creativity. Little thought has been given to the idea that his willingness to embrace risk and to accept the possibility of failure might be critical to his success.
Read the article. It claims he's using certain technology to detect fake red-eye flash from real flashes when a photo is being taken.
Philipe Starck is not a modernist. He's not even an architect! He's an interior designer. His work has nothing to do with the likes of Le Corbusier or Van der Rohe. Your timelines aren't even right. The modernists all died in the late 1960s. Starck didn't become popular until the late 1980s. Calling him a crook because he's associated with the modernist school of architecture (which he isn't) is utterly beyond incorrect... it doesn't even make sense. In fact, it so doesn't make sense, I feel like I'm the victim of a clever troll. If that's the case - touche.
Yeah sure, but there has to be a reason readwriteweb.com deleted it. So this was more a question why this is gone...
This is a good idea. In the past, we got by with just giving everyone electricity and having them turn that into whatever they needed, but since it's inefficient to convert sunlight -> electricity, it's now more economical [1] to just pipe hot water to people's homes.

Hopefully they system can be enhanced with the ability to carry cooling water to the houses also.

[1] Actually, this probably costs a lot more than electricity right now, but it's the most economical way to get solar heat. Some day there won't be cheap energy, but there will always be sunlight.
That should be (funcall function). I shouldn't post code before I have coffee :)
He's absolutely right. Startup failures make a lot of these "mistakes".

But here's what's scary: Startup successes also make a lot of these mistakes.

Think of a successful software company. Google, Yahoo, Amazon, ebay, facebook, it doesn't really matter which. Then, with that company in mind, go back and read the list again. How many of these "mistakes" did they make? Probably quite a few.

You can do all the market research in the world, have great talent, execute perfectly, and still fail. OTOH, you can make 10 or 15 of these mistakes and succeed fabulously. Sometimes, no matter what you do, the marketplace and lady luck have their own ideas.

At some point you just gotta stop all the due diligence, bite the bullet, and plow ahead anyway.

I like lists like this. They do get me thinking. The problem with this one is that it really doesn't tell me enough to differentiate winning from losing.
Required Reading in Social Media
Your logic is broken; it's a little bit like saying that the Third Reich or the Apartheid wouldn't have existed if the jews and blacks behaved nicely.
People like it because it's blogging but with a captive audience, and the 140-character limit keeps you from writing Steve Yegge-style blog posts. You make a point, your friends are forced to read it, they can reply. That's twitter :)
assuming the original idea will probably change until you have a product, it is not really substantial to make that argument.

I assume a product is something you can sell, so it's natural that attitude towards making it succesful will make you realise the need to alter the idea or how to make it appealing. It's something like a prerequestie.

I say most articles are noise because the advice is generic. A more precise post "how I reacted to situation X" is probably more worth.
Taleb's statement is a much stronger claim than your summary that "Risk-taking appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success"

Your summary allows for the possibility that there are other factors besides risk-taking that can help ensure success, and in particular your statement leaves open the possibility that these factors could include working harder, being smarter, etc. etc. Taleb's statement explicitly rejects that possibility, arguing that the factors which distinguish the successful and the non-successful are ones you don't even have control over.
Ask YC: Ethical Question, possible fraud
Background Info:

I am a coder at an angel backed startup.. we have a couple paying customers and a handful of full time employees including a few founders. I started a few months ago after i saw an ad for the job, I did not know the founders previously, the company has been around for about 2 years. We sell software to fairly large corporations.

Ethical Dilemma:

The past couple weeks, I have overheard the founder of the company exagerrate/lie about key facts of our company to potential customers. ie. claiming that we have 20 customers worldwide. claiming the we have multiple offices. and 2-3 times the employees that we actually have. claiming that certain parts of the software are in use by other customers when these parts have never been used in production.. not positive about this but possibly misrepresenting investment incoming money as sales in financial due diligence documents or at least not going out of his way to make it clear that thats where incoming money is coming from.

I understand why he is doing this, because the kind of companies we deal with do not want to take the risk of working with an unproven brand new product.. but it seems wrong. Clearly unethical, but is it illegal too? Could people go to jail for this kind of thing? ( This is in the USA )

What would you do if faced with this situation?
ToString() is Evil
I really don't get it...
I did a summary of this article here:
http://mind-logger.blogspot.com/2008/06/why-social-networks-...
You could definitely lose face, but i don't believe it is a jailable offense to exaggerate the logistics of your operation.

If he is exaggerating to get investors then he is most likely violating the law. This is really bad policy, since due diligence will wipe those illusions clear.

If exaggerating features of a product, again bad policy, if you are selling something you don't have you are going to end up with an unhappy customer.
In this case exaggerating number of employees would be exaggerating features if he is selling support as a feature, bad policy to make promises that are not true.

Overall as long as they arent asking you to do anything you feel is not just, i wouldnt worry about it to much.
These lessons usually end up making teachers out of themselves.
well its understandable why the guy is doing this...gotta survive + almost everyone is doing this. But if you feel uncomfortable about it, just go looking for a new job.
Software is a funny business. I've known guys to run full-page ads for software that didn't even exist yet. The theory goes -- if the orders come in, we'll build it.

Some people are naturally prone to exaggeration. Immaturity comes in to this as well -- once you've been around the block a few times you realize that fake posturing is easy for customers to spot.

If it's not investment related, it's not criminal. I'd have a word with the guy, something along the lines of you can't lie your way into trusting business relationships. After that, I'd make a call as to whether it was worth staying or not. I wouldn't.
Returns in the 70s weren't quite as bad as the DJIA graph suggests, because the companies in that average would have been paying substantial dividends.
Sounds like a salesguy!

But seriously, it's a no win situation for you. People will say a lot of things to close a deal, and even more to make payroll.

So either your founder is:
1. Desperate and willing to say anything, which means you might want to be cautious about the general health of the company
2. Just a sneaky and over the top exaggerating salesguy (ok, a liar) because that's the only way he know's how to sell. A shame, but you'd be surprised what salespeople will do to close a sale.
3. Has a 'corvette' complex. His lies are not about what amazing things his product will do and how it will transform the customers business, which is more common for a salesperson to 'embellish'. Instead, it's about how big and successful his company is.

If the company isn't healthy, and he's desperate, I'd figure out a way to either help or bail.

If the founder is just a liar, I'd go elsewhere. The thing about liars is they lie about everything, sometimes for no reason about absolutely trivial things. Life is to short to be around them.
And the saddest part is that his customer might be looking for a nice, small company who really wants their business and will jump through hoops to get it as they would be a highly valued customer, not just one of many.

If it's the 'corvette' complex then run. He's starting a company to prove something to the bully in the playground.

And the bully is probably mowing lawns for a living.
It sounds like you know what the right thing to do is. So, why aren't you acting on it?
He's not just an interior designer. He does design physical objects.

But you're right. Starck is about as far as you could get from totalitarian city planning. Which incidentally would have been just as bad with or without modernism. Speer's Berlin would have been at least as nasty as Le Corbusier's Paris.
> ... They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck.

Ah sure. Does this mean hard work and taking risks is useless? Nope, because without hard work and risk taking you wouldn't ever get the chance to get lucky.
Perfectly in tune with On Intelligence - go read it if you found this article insightful.
Why does Technology Review think harvesting pageview is a good idea? People don't like to click 10 times to read an article, nor click on Print to see the article in single page. I had it enough with their site.
On a 10mbit pipe that's around 3000GB/mo max - the "non-unlimited" (for a bit less $) would have been 2000GB.
Bill Gates did this stuff dealing with IBM et al.

If you CAN do X, and the only thing stopping you from getting the deal is the other side's perception of you, then influencing their perception (i.e. lying)
can save the deal, save your company, and solve their problem -- all at the same time.

It can OFTEN be in BOTH your AND your client's best interest to lie.

And ask for forgiveness later after they are happy with you, IF it ever comes up...
Ha. Ha. Ha. Not funny, unfortunately.
Unlocked LG F3000 Silver Unlocked Triband GSM World Phone On Sale Buy
You can watch that prime-testing regex in action. Here it is matching 49, showing it is not-prime:

http://regex.powertoy.org/?pat=/%5E1%3F%24%7C%5E%2811+%3F%29...

And here failing against 47, showing it is prime:

http://regex.powertoy.org/?pat=/%5E1%3F%24%7C%5E%2811+%3F%29...
There is a fine line between fraud and salesmanship... This is actually one of the things that lawyers learn at law school...

What I would do is not listen to that. They have their job (selling the software) and you have yours. If they commit a fraud, you will not go to jail for it.

Do you hear the car dealership mechanic tell the customers the cars was NOT really driven by an old lady to church every Saturday?

Now, where you KNOW there is a fraud, you have a legal obligation to disclose it. But fraud is very different than what you are describing.

I'd keep my mouth shut about it. It might not be what you would do, but it does not sound illegal.
There is potential in the idea but your execution is well, bad. Sorry to say but read some of the above comments and take them into consideration.

I went to the site and the red hurt my head. I didn't know what it was about, and it just looked plain boring.
Ever heard of WinFS?

A good personal moral compass in such situations is whatever helps you sleep soundly at night. Life is rarely black or white, more shades of grey (can't remember where I read that).

Curious to know, what would you have said in the same situation, would you have said we have 2 customers, one office, couple of customers, you would be third if we are lucky and hey guess what you are going to beta test our product.

Also, think about the second order effects of this deal not going through. Can you company make payroll without it? Is this deal the break your company has been looking for?

I did technical sales for 3 years, first real job right after school, the 2 things that really helped me sell were:

1. Tell the truth and

2. Put your customers interest before your company's

Good luck!
Remember to have some money saved up, and line up a new job first.

At that point, you won't have to face the dilemma of doing the right thing vs. making rent.
> Does anyone here actually know anyone who was ever hit by a bus?

Yes, but not because of forgetting to look both ways before crossing the street. A bus went through a building my father was in. He was paralyzed but is fine now (this was before I was born).
Thanks djm..we've cleared most invites, did you get yours ?
If you've signed up you can catch me at http://kwippy.com/mayank
Cheers !!
Ah, yes, but how do we know you weren't traumatically teased by the author in high school and are now stalking him online and trying to discredit him with vague insinuations? Huh?
I thought that the DJIA divisor was adjusted for dividends so that the pre-dividend and post-dividend index values were the same (essentially, acting as if investors took any dividend and re-invested it by buying shares of the DJIA constituent companies).
First novel by a former lisp hacker gets top reviews. May become a classic book. You first heard it here.
Stay away.
Ask for a raise.
Start job hunting.

In that particular order.
I can't advise you to leave b/c that's just the way sales happens -- you aren't going to escape this sort of thing even if you go to work for a non profit. Non profits often exaggerate the amount of good they do and how important their cause is -- and how efficient they are or are not.

The bottom line is that it's tough to bootstrap a company and sometimes the salespeople will "throw the ball ahead of the runner" a bit.

The morality has to do more with whether or not the founder believes that what he's saying will be true soon enough that telling the customer that info isn't misrepresenting the company.

If you went to work for a big company you'd sit in a cube and not hear any sales conversations, but they'd probably be much more distorted -- at least in a startup everyone can help make the dreams (of the founder and the customers) a reality... there is much more of a team mentality.

When you hear the founder say such things you should be thinking "wow, he really believes that we can do that" and feel motivated by it. It's part of the entrepreneurial psychology. He has you on the team b/c he believes you can make whatever he says true.

If you don't like spirited optimism, I hear the IRS is hiring :)
It sounds like they only consider stock dividends that are effectively a form of split.
>What would you do

I would leave. No dilemma there. But I won't judge / advice. There is no absolute morality.
Wired.com is the largest item in that cloud. That's kind of interesting. I wonder why Wired.com is mentioned so often. Advertisements?
Ask HN: What do you want in a software PM?
I have been a project manger for a while know, and really enjoy the work. However, I'm sure there are things I can do better - and as HN seems to have a high concentration of talented programmers you seem like a good bunch to ask.

So, what do you guys want from your project managers? When should they leave you alone, and when should they bug you? And most importantly, how many beers is considered fair compensation for pulling a late night to hit a tight deadline?
Biometrically Tracking Penguins
Why would you consider this suspicious of being made up? I think his path to success is far more realistic than almost all of the web 2.0 stuff out there.
Studies Show the Value of Not Overthinking a Decision
I will change the design and colors. I'm working on a "tutorial video" that will have a link by the logo, which will hopefully help explain what it is about.
seconded... you certainly don't need the feedback of strangers to justify your decision... just act on your gut.
How Jokes Work
Reminds me of one startup I worked at, the boss even went as far as putting on funny accents on the phone to make it sound like there were more people. He would even pretend to be someone else and tell whoever was on the line that he was in fact in a meeting/on the other line/with a customer.

And that sort of thing, while a little weird, doesn't really harm anyone. It was when he started putting in ads in the trade press that we did things or had things that we blatantly didn't (and couldn't) that things started to get a bit dodgy. I left shortly afterwards.
If the company signs the deal based on these claims the founder made, its called misrepresentation and misrepresentation = fraud. So should something screw up, and they want to get out of the contract they can use that as a basis,or even if they dont feel like paying. If they have proof, they will most likely WIN.

Firstly, i have to ask though was this put in writing or just while talking?

Secondly, there is a difference between almost closing a deal(Customer has show interest and you reassure him with the numbers) and the customer hasnt made a choice and you use the lies to convince him. In the second instance it's fraud.

If it were me, i would leave.
He has programmed in Lisp, Java, Perl and a few other languages. I don't see the connection though.
let me just clear one thing up
Misrepresentation for financial gain = Fraud
as an example:
I Tell the bank i earn $10,000 when i only earn half that to get a higher loan

or
in the case of a company:
Reporting higher numbers to investors, reporting high userbases/install bases to convince other customers

Yes its fraud, thats what enron did.

It's a bad sign. And to all the people saying it's ok SHAME ON YOU,
Woz might be a better model for most hackers. What made Bill unusual was that in addition to being a fairly good hacker, he was really into business. But while someone who cares about both is a formidable force, I don't think "pay more attention to business" is the best recipe for most hackers. For most hackers a better recipe might be "build lots of great new things."
Not Being a Real Person
Official Google Blog: Using data to fight webspam
Louisiana passes first antievolution "academic freedom" law
If he's putting false claims into written advertising or solicitations he's crossing state and federal "truth-in-advertising" laws.
Number 2 is kind of abstract. There are a lot of ways to interpret "putting your customer's interest before your company's." You could make the software cheaper, for example, but you probably won't.

I've thought a lot about how far to bend to customers demands the past few weeks as I've been working on a fairly large project geared toward companies that are used to influencing product design and direction. In enterprise sales, when the Vice President of Marketing at a company ready to pay a few million dollars says, "Can I check my data from your website while I'm on my jet?" what are you supposed to say? Sure, we could rig some complex system to download the data for him, but that's a terrible use of our time.

On the other end of the spectrum is Apple's dealings with consumers. Apple very rarely does things people ask for-- I wish I had a card reader on my MacBook Pro, for example, but I don't. They're geniuses at distilling the most useful things that most people will use and then developing them to absurd levels of perfection beyond what the rest of the industry is used to.

I'd much rather build a product with a few amazingly awesome features that help a wide number of people than one with tons of OK features (including the ability for one person to view reports on their private airplane!).

Both of these ends of the spectrum can be argued for putting the customer's interest first.

(sorry for the digression)
Curious to know, what would you have said in the same situation, would you have said we have 2 customers, one office, couple of customers, you would be third if we are lucky and hey guess what you are going to beta test our product.

The opposite of "telling lies" is not "emphasizing your weaknesses" (besides they might not even be weaknesses).
With digital cameras having preview screens, I suspect you'd notice pretty quickly. Besides, this won't scale well to multiple flashes going off in succession. As for monetisation, uh, I don't see the potential, but if people are willing to pay for the tech then I can't argue with that.
15 Questions To Ask During A Ruby Interview