skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've been a "solopreneur" for almost ten years now. It is only in the last few years I have had significant (where I take "significant" to mean an income in the top 10% or so - which isn't a massive amount, but enough to live well).

The important thing I've found is to build assets that have the potential to creative passive (or near-passive) income and then run those in parallel to your more experimental ideas. Ideally, you can then sell off some of those assets when you need more time or more cash to put into other ideas.

On my part, I started a code snippets repository a few years ago. Only took 24 hours to do the first version, then it got another few days work a year on. It made about $800 a month for a couple of years, then I sold it for $30k. Not giant money but that's just one of many projects. I sold another one for a lot more just several months later. Having savings and a passive income that pays all your bills makes it a lot easier to work on the bigger and more experimental projects!

As to the "why".. I as in full-time work for almost a year after leaving school, and it didn't click with me at all. I wanted to run everything. So I became self-employed, and despite earning a pittance for the first few years, it was totally worth it. Besides, none of my friends are technically or academically minded, and I don't know anyone like that who lives nearby, so I'll be dreaming and working on my own for the foreseeable future :)

I should point out, however, that when I reach a point where I need other people to launch larger scale projects, I will happily hire them.. online! Just because you're on your own doesn't mean you do everything alone. You always have to rely on other people and companies, whether it's for your hosting, graphic design, printing, or whatever. If you live in the general economy, you're never as "solo" as you think.
Maglev train from L.A. to Las Vegas gets boost
There's a simpler answer: MySQL was a company with a product and a marketing budget dedicated to MySQL whereas PostgreSQL is a project whose code base has been adopted by companies who generally focus their marketing efforts on what they do beyond what you get with PostgreSQL.
The history of programming language (+ poster)
Permalink:

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20080606_0050...
I just heard about Plurk. Funny. Looks like it's a new thing. I don't think it's going to last. Its problem is that it adds on complex, unneeded features to a simple idea.

That's what made Twitter so huge: its astounding simplicity. It lost points for being TOO simple and for having downtime, but that's what made it huge. Tumblr has that feel to it: that feeling that it's as simple as it can get, with a few exceptions. It's an exhilarating feeling.

Plurk doesn't have that. It feels to me like Twitter with clutter.
I think it matters who your customer is and the value they derive from your product.

Open source makes a huge difference when your product is intended to be embedded in your customer's product. When their business depends on yours it's obvious they need to pay you or ultimately suffer the higher cost to them of having to maintain your code-base themselves.

When you're talking about some dinky utility a non-technical end-user may use then you're probably smarter to go the shareware route.

One thing to worry a little about is how to protect yourself from competitors that may try to compete with you using your own code. If you're the sole owner of your core technology and there isn't any significant secret factual information in it then you're probably safe going open source with the appropriate licensing.
"The singularity is a religious rather than a scientific vision"
Probably just you, since it's blue.
The lowercase g is a direct rip from their current logo. They actually did very little restyling of it, at least for the purpose of the favicon.

It's kind of a clever variation on the "make your favicon just a piece of your real logo" trend. Using the second G instead of the first is, in some respects, pretty playful. Sucks that it's hard to recognize.
Google and the Myth of Universal
crowd+cloud = clowd.
I found it ironic that a book that raises issues and concerns with Google's digitization of material available in public libraries, itself digitized on Google Books.
Very interesting reply, indeed! And you are right, you're never alone in the general economy, and there are many professional services you can hire / buy to help you with the work. Thanks a lot for your interesting comments!
Also, J. K. Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, got her honorary degree from Harvard together with JMC. Very surprising.
The selection of that particular font was made by Ruth Kedar, who's no design lightweight.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-01-14-n16.html
Why Amazon Went Down, and Why It Matters
I did Google advertising for over a year with very questionable returns and then I added a new landing page, tons more graphics and screen shots all over the web site, worked on the first 5 minutes of the game play experience a bunch, and added a lot more key words to the Google campaign and reduced my bids by a lot so I was only basically getting the dregs, but getting them cheap. All these changes took the ROI on advertising from about 1:1 to about 3:1 where it is now. It seems to be almost all about the landing page and the web site, at least in my experience.

Before I focused on marketing, I spent a solid year just improving the game with negligible financial effect. The first month I spent enhancing the website had 10x more effect than all the game play improvements I've ever done.
Correctly Implementing A Simple C++ Class That Uses A Pointer is Hard
The title should be "Why did Amazon go down?" because they don't really have any more idea than the rest of us do.
It is always better to get into a market that has significant consumer interest and fight for market share, than to get into a market that consumers don't care about and fight to convince people to change their minds.
Nature Gave Him a Blueprint, but Not Overnight Success
Futurist Ray Kurzweil Sees a Revolution Fueled by Information Technology
We do have a number of companies that depend on our software for some pretty core processes within their businesses. Still, because our software is stable, over time the value of an under-used support contract goes down in their eyes. In several cases, they simply haven't renewed support because the product didn't need it. So we only really hear from them when upgrades are available for them. So I'm hesitant to recommend a support-based business model for that reason (unless they're making unstable software ;), and for the fact that most software falls outside of the "core business process" category, which would likely make support a really tough sell.

There's where subscription-based services shine, because support is expected with it, but it's distributed over exactly one installation instead of hundreds, so fixes are made once and apply to everyone. This way you're essentially selling access to the software plus support over time, making residual income, and cutting down the amount of effort it takes to support many customers.

While that's not the right model for every type of software obviously, many companies have shown it can be made to apply to a surprising number of cases you wouldn't think it suitable for at first :)
Contrarianism, communities, and the color of the bikeshed
Search was NOT hot when Google came out. Lots of SMART people were convinced that you couldn't build a huge business on search and that the real money was in personalized home pages (portals).
The Web 2.0 Show: Blaine Cook
If your back end is Java, use GWT -- that gives you statically typed RPC calls between your client and server, which makes life easy.
I've played with MochiKit and jQuery. Like them both but have been doing more stuff with jQuery lately ... can't comment on the others :P Checked them out quickly and none appealed to me :P
A 3G iPhone running iChat would be revolutionary.

No one has a great videoconference application (i mean, Nokia, Samsung and any Windows Mobile phone has terrible ugly experience developing videochat applications, and the main driver of 3G IS videoconference)
Yes... there's nothing really wrong with Prototype; it's just that jQuery feels far leaner (both in terms of API and in codesize) while doing most of what I typically need out of Prototype/Scriptaculous.

I'd say either of them would be fine, but there does seem to be more momentum behind jQuery as of late.
If you haven't even used any of the libraries, how do you know whether they help or give less "satisfactory" results?
Ok, I guess I'm officially grumpy.

"The routines in your code should be treated like tiny, highly polished diamonds, each one more exquisitely polished and finely cut than the next."

This makes no sense. Each routine can't be more exquisitely polished than the others. And if you try to make it make sense by interpreting 'next' strictly, to mean 'next in sequence', then it means your functions should get worse as development proceeds. Even if you replace 'next' with 'last', to try to turn it into a semi-coherent statement ("Each routine you write should be the best routine you've ever written") it's still bad advice: You should spend your time on the important questions, and not every function is equally important.
It definitely looks blue when it was blown up in the TC article, but in my browser tabs it looks purple to me too.
I saw this type of technology a few years back when some people from georgia tech's mobile group (they have some name i forgot) were showing off the same thing. You call in and start playing tetris with your phone.
The technology behind it is fairly old, aside from the cell phone part. My understanding is that it uses DTMF signaling, which has been around for at least 30 years in normal phones. I guess it's a lot less fun with a land line, unless you happen to live across the street.
SourceFire circa 2002, purveyors of Snort via OSS and hardware appliance, now IPO'd? Not a startup.

Sleepycat software, purveyors of Berkeley DB under dual GPL and commercial license, acquired by Oracle? Not a startup.

Splunk, purveyors of Splunk, open source core and proprietary commercial extensions, with over 20MM in VC funding? Not a startup.

Hyperic, purveyors of Hyperic, which is OSS end-to-end, with a 6MM B from Accel? Not a startup.

Zimbra, purveyors of OSS Exchange clone Zimbra, acquired by Yahoo!? Not a startup.

Astaro, purveyors of one of the top 5 "UTM" (IPS+firewall) boxes, now profitable? Not a startup.

None of these companies are services businesses.

Your characterization of MySQL is laughable, too. The "cheap advertising version of MySQL" you mention accounts for 99% of the real-world usage of MySQL in the marketplace, and anybody on Hacker News wishes they had the market power MySQL did.

So, my response to you: name an equivalent number of companies any of us has heard of with an open-source product that is services-driven that isn't Red Hat or IBM.
If you make a development component, you can dual GPL/commercial license your product, like Sleepycat.

If you make an enterprise product, you can sell an appliance or a VM that runs it, and GPL the programs themselves, like SourceFire.

If you make a web product, you can GPL the code and sell the hosted version, like WordPress.

If you make an extensible product, you can GPL the core and sell the bells and whistles, like Splunk.

If you make an end-user product, you can GPL the core and sell the UI.
Phil Greenspun wrote at painful length about what killed ACS, and it certainly wasn't open source.

Now, provide another example of a company that screwed up by "halfway" doing OSS without "proving the addons were worth the cost". I've provided plenty of specific counterexamples.
It was a great experience in DC. We met many nice people. I don't know that the startup will survive, and there were less than a handful of exceptions. But in the end it was good to feel the energy and connect with other like-minded people. I recommend it.
If you sell to large companies, open source is an awesome business model.

The #1 and #2 problems you have with large businesses is lead generation and qualifying prospects, so that you aren't wasting $5,000-$10,000 of time and expenses on sales leads that don't pan out, or $50,000 going to conferences that won't result in a single sale.

With open source software, the geeks that infest every Fortune 1000 company bring your software in house just to play with it. If you get them to register their email addresses, and you follow up with them inside-sales style, and just 10% of them love what you built, you just converted 100 Fortune 1000 companies to customers.

This is exactly the model SourceFire used. It's not a "strategic platform"; it's a go-to-market plan, pure and simple.
You don't stop being open source when you start selling closed-source software. Is GPL'd SugarCRM worthless?
Also: by your definition, Reddit and Octoparts? Not startups. Good call, Colin.
I use Dean Edwards's base2. I like it because it is very simple, and because it adheres to standards; that is, rather than creating a map and a forEach of its own, with its own semantics, it implements them according to the Javascript standard (or proposals, don't recall if they have yet been adopted) for browsers that don't yet support them natively (anything but Mozilla, I think). It also cleans up DOM manipulation so that you can use standards-compliant methods and it will work on non-compliant browsers (all the way back to IE5).

Similarly, for DOM querying, it implements the W3 Selectors API rather than reinventing the wheel.

I really like this approach. base2 doesn't provide anything in the way of widgets (though I think there may be some code along these lines in the Subversion repository, implementing some of the HTML5 components) -- for most of what I do, widgets aren't available anyway or would need to be extended, so I end up writing my own. And it's easy enough to use a YUI or other widget with base2 when it makes more sense.

For animation, I've used animation.js and found it simple and fast.
TileStack: HyperCard comes back from the dead and onto the Web
Mozilla Firefox 3 New Features Screencast
Don't Be Better than the Competition
Ransomware virus that uses 1024-bit encryption key
Cellphone jammer = clowd control
in my broswer - ff 2.0 - and with the white highlights it comes off a purple to me [damn that is why I never match]
Prototype is terrific. The problem is most developers dont utilize 90% of the functionality. Thus making it a bloated library. Read through the documentation frequently. You will pick up on nice new functions that will make life so much easier. Go with JQuery if you are looking for basic use prototype if you want the extra goodies.
The Talk that Got Me Thinking
Generation Y - Welcome To Their World
Why In-Game Ads Won’t Kill Video Games… They Already Exist
I started my current project in ExtJS and a few weeks in, I switched to YUI. The ExtJS components look great, and are fairly easy to use if you use them in the standard way. However, I found that as soon as I wanted to do something custom I got totally lost in the 'ExtJS' way. While the YUI components are not quite as polished looking, I have a much easier time extending/reworking them. One thing I like about both frameworks is they provide layout management, so it is very easy to have a 100%width/height viewport layout that the framework manages (YUI's LayoutManager is in beta...so I guess I hope they don't scrap it before it reaches production level.)

I will add that the ExtJS forums are very active and pretty helpful...as are the YUI ones. I've asked several questions in both and gotten good responses each time.
0-day WordPress exploit in the wild and lots of sites seem to be affected
I really like jQuery because it's lightweight but I think it really fits your needs perfectly. For DOM manipulation in jQuery you just use CSS selectors, so... :

$('a.hide_these').hide();

Would hide all anchors with class 'hide_these'. You don't have to do any iterations or pass any anonymous functions. Traversing works the same way too:

$('a.hide_these').parents('p')

Would find all the paragraph tags that are parents to those anchors.

I've only used a few animations from jQuery (like sliding/fading) but the framework also lets you do your own custom animations using CSS (your element will gradually morph to the styles you define).
Twitter Can Learn a Lesson from my Non-Tech Girlfriend
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=208114
Plurk Unleashed!
What features does Plurk need to kill Twitter?
Great tips, the first one is the one that I didn't know about and wow, now I understand why that happened in IE the few times I saw it!
Google Web ToolKit
Not having used any so far, I have to say from the demos I'm most impressed with Dojo and extJS.
Cell Phones Pop Corn
Ruth Kedar On Designing the Google Logo
He's blown away? Probably never seen any flash/flex applications in his life...

Maybe i'm a bit harsh :)
From the webpage: "Feel free to join CPUShare to immediately start earning your first CPUCoins and to potentially earn real money by selling your CPU resources."

Anytime real money is involved or potentially involved, folks should be using the defacto certification companies that browser all agree on.
> "[W]ould you rather spend your development efforts on duplicating the competition's every feature so you can say "yes" when asked if you have it, or would you rather concentrate on building the features that will solve your customers' problems? I'd much rather be thought of as great than as just better than someone else."

So very insightful. I think it's easy to get intimidated by your competition, when really it's not about beating them as much as it is about solving the user's problem. Solve it well and the user won't even look for alternatives.
Flex is in a completely different department. Flex is impressive for sure, but to see what this crew has done with Javascript, it really is impressive.

If someone blind-folded your screen and told you 280Slides was a client-side app, you'd believe 'em. That's powerful stuff.
Few libraries make me curl my toes in pleasure like jQuery does. I'm absolutely enamored with it!
Although virus designers are the creeping crud in the moral bucket, they come up with some uniquely creative ways to piss people off.

This model is particularly good. The pain of losing your important work is almost greater than the pain of paying off the hostage company.

Again, good reason to back up your stuff (especially offsite!), but until it bites you, people won't do it. Eventually, OSes need to do backups by default. The bandwidth, connectivity and cheap drive space make this a no brainer.
Food production carbon output far outweighs food transportation
It was a major failure to redo the icon. Change all the other property's icon, but leave the standard search engine icon alone.

To me, it smells like someone trying to keep their job. My brain instantly recognizes that icon. I skip back-and-forth to that icon hundreds of times a day. Now I'm left fumbling and angry at Google. Sure, I'll survive, but it'll be there at the edge of my brain for a while.

It's always the small things. We need a Steve Jobs like character at Google that gets how important design is. And that means not changing it for change's sake.
CACert isn't really unrecognized, it's just that they haven't worked out a deal with Firefox. There's a 5 year old bug about this, and they're just waiting for the company to do something before they add them.
"The blogosphere overflows with Google Pundits; those who pooh-pooh, with a few search queries..."
Has anyone tried this yet on their own?
How does that follow from the above definitions?

I don't agree that if you build open source software, you aren't a startup -- but I do think that a big part of being a (VC) backed startup is the potential to achieve "hockey stick" growth, and that can be hard to do through support contracts, consulting, and certification alone.
The question, Paul, I have for you (and other Googlers/ex-Googlers reading along) is this: Is it really the perks or the people that make a successful company recognizable? Shouldn't a company's actions and performance always speak louder than its scooters and ping pong tables lining the hallway?

I think this causality (smart people -> smart idea -> smart execution -> profitability -> more tweaks -> dominance) seems more realistic than what the author intended to document.
If favicon is important part of an online company's identity there must be something seriously wrong

Why? You're stating an opinion, not an argument.

Surely you would agree that Google's logo is an important part of their visual identity -- I think the favicon fits into that. It is seen billions of times every single day, shows up in bookmarks for the site, and will likely be propagated to many other sites that need logos/images for stories about Google.
Yeah, the "Y" favicon is really good.
Moog releases its first guitar
Ask HN: Bet the farm. Python or PHP?
1. Extensive support of libraries and frameworks.
2. Excellent community.
3. Rapidly develop and deploy.
4. Capable of scaling quite well.

Python and PHP score well on all four of these points.

I am about to embark on building a web app; calendar/scheduling/notifications with some social networking and people matching/search functionality. The site will be highly configurable/maintainable by it's community from establishing/interacting within groups to tweeking page layouts.

So far, I have chosen this stack:

Ubuntu, Apache (dynamic content), thttpd (static content), MySql, memcached.

I'm quite experienced in Perl but just a beginner in both Python and PHP yet I am determined to use either Python or PHP in my latest project.

I'm looking for the pros/cons and any other tips from the HN community. I'm at a fork in the road and I guess that once I make this choice, it'll be quite difficult switching after the initial framework is built out.

I'm not sure if I have/haven't given enough information to go on but I would appreciate everyone's input, not only on PHP or Python but on any of the other technologies I have chosen as well as critiquing my (currently vaporware) web app.

So which is it; PHP or Python?
Python, It is more responsive than php.
By more responsive, you mean from rendering the html/css/js sent back to the browser? Or more responsive when connecting to the back-end MySql database?

If you could elaborate, I'd appreciate it. Thanks!
Why throw away Perl? You already know Perl, and Perl has lots of things that PHP and Python don't. Before you ditch Perl, look at DBIx::Class, Moose, and Catalyst. And the other 10,000 libraries on CPAN.

Then look at the 500 or so libraries available for PHP.

Perl has a really insane library culture, and it's very hard to give that up. I like the syntax of other languages better (Lisp is my favorite), but it's hard to give up the millions of hours of free work called the CPAN. Perl also has great tools for testing (see how many Test:: modules there are), and it has a culture of testing. So the libraries you download from the CPAN aren't some untested i-hacked-it-together-while-drunk snippets of code; they're all very carefully tested. What it boils down to is that when you move your app from development to production, you'll be reasonably sure that your libraries (and app) still work.

One line summary: Perl has more features and libraries than the alternatives, and you already know it! I think the choice is a no-brainer.
"yes, you will opt in to all of this... you ask before it takes these matchmaking liberties" -- Says who? If the information available computationally increases as this article suggests, it's fantasy to imagine that your current notions of privacy will be respected.