skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once your site is big enough, it won't really be a problem.

In fact, it's unlikely to ever be a problem: if your site is small, nobody on a bigger site is going to care about a someone bitching about it, so the story will get buried. If it's large, any site worth its salt will delete a griefing post to avoid the inter-site grief (see: reddit deleting the posts that lead here, mefi deleting pretty much anything leading to LGF)
Classic counterexample: kuro5hin.
Are you mad?
Since when does age preclude anything.

Age=experience, which is something a lot of investors are looking for. If you have a startup "itch" then scratch it.

I have friends who have been in the same situation and have not acted. They played safe, but there is always this nagging in their mind - what if I had done it? That does not go away.
If you think your website is "worth enough", you can make it a paysite and raise the barrier very much: see Metafilter (which has a 1 post/day hard limit, except for the owner)
I also have faith in this even with threads about economics.
Well, currently a few people in the Arc community are building implementations of Arc.

It may actually be possible to include as an axiom a few functions that allow a closured function to be destructured.

For example, it may be possible to define a set of functions which can be applied on a function to determine if it encloses any variables or not, what number of enclosed variables, and the variable values (if not the names).

It would also be possible to add as an axiom a function to extract the "code part" of a closure, at least as an opaque (but uniquely-comparable) object. Speaking as an implementeer hacking on the low-level side, generally the implementation of a closured function is simply two pointers: a pointer to the enclosed environment, and a pointer to the code (of course, in arc2c it's just an array where the first entry is a reference to the code and the succeeding array entries are the enclosed variables).

Only the pointer to the enclosed environment needs to actually be considered: the code is constant (except for code updates, but one would expect updates to be rarer than actual invocations of the code).

If we can extract the data of each closured variable, we can determine if it's trivially serializable (e.g. strings, numbers, proper lists of strings and numbers), and if so, it is potentially possible to encrypt the values into the URL.

We can then also add some functions to reconstruct a closure, given only an opaque code reference and a bunch of data.

Since my Arc implementation, SNAP, will require the ability to serialize and deserialize closured functions (including code and data) anyway, I'll have to extend Arc that way.

The advantage of this is that you don't need to explicitly state what you want to close over: you just close over variables, and the base system will destructure your closure, and just encode the trivially serializable variables into the generated URL link.
textmate. vim.

gcc. python. django. it's all good.
That's what I'm worried about.

I've had three other attempts over the last 20 years, the first when I was 17/18. None of them really took off.

I've been sort of hoping this idea would go away (a sort of 'oh no, not again' feeling), but it won't!

Maybe this is the big one?
Summary of every bit of advice you've gotten, or will get, on this page:

* Install a good package manager

* Install all your dev packages

* Install what was missing by hand

* Install a decent terminal

* Purchase Textmate

* Find a hack to allow mouse button paste

* Realize you're spending time trying to turn your OS X install into Linux out of the box.

* Install Ubuntu.
Erm, no, installing things is a breeze. Either use MacPorts (where it is as easy as cd to a directory and type "port install") or you get a .DMG file. Double click it and it mounts a filesystem, you drag from there to your Applications folder, job done. And holding down a key on boot has been around, since, well, as long as I've been using Macs, the early 90s. There are obviously going to be teething troubles on a new platform but "I don't know how" and "it sucks" are not causally related.

For the record, on the Mac I use Carbon Emacs and various languages gotten from MacPorts (Python, OCaml, GHC). Back in the pre-OSX days I used CodeWarrior and Powerplant, so I'm confident I could use XCode easily enough - just don't do much C at the moment.
I find the opposite - but that may be more to Finder as a file manager compared to Nautilus, rather than Quartz compared to X.
Non OS X BSDs have far larger amounts of packages than MacPorts, and don't require all applications to be stopped and the kernel shut down for application updates, like Apple Software Update does.

OTOH, I think OS X has more usable desktop software than any other OS.
The post you're responding to is aware of Mac packaging software - you don't seem to have read it.
Perhaps I'm in the minority here, but I have far larger privacy concerns than a website being able to gestimate my gender.
I had this same experience and agree with all your points, minus the implication that "ladies" would naturally be impressed by my midnight viewing of Dark Knight.
The problem: this wonderful time of college is being dragged through the mud by my resistance to doing the work required (less for the CS, though). It's incredibly painful, not to mention cutting significantly into time to do anything at all. You can't let yourself go out and meet people - or hack - when you really need to do this assignment for tomorrow.

I do need to drop out to get the startup going, because trying to make myself do the work takes up all my time - and since I'm not willing to just do college work and nothing else, I'm in between a rock and a hard place.

And, the reason why I'm asking HN is to check that I haven't missed (even more) obvious pitfalls. And to see what everyone has to say, gather advice, etc. (Thank you all btw.)

Edit: why the downvote?
I think I have the skills. And I have some runway to burn (savings, that is).

I actually have an idea that a friend and I have been working on for a while. I'm not satisfied with it yet - but it's getting closer, with each mulling, I think. It's college-related, so we're launching it for Fall term. I'm pretty sure he'll drop out of college with me for the idea, esp. if it works or if we get YC. There's also a hacker friend in princeton who I might be able to convince to drop out with us.

I've thought a lot about going it alone, and it's incredibly scary, but I think I've got the guts for it, too. Of course, I'd rather go with the plan above, until it falls apart, anyway.

Edit: This was very devoid of replying content, sorry. I think I've just had enough of college and want to try something else, mainly because I don't have any spare time. I only barely have a few of the things on your list though - so the real question is, should I still take the jump, and what should I look out for?
I'm a CS and math major already, but I'm at a liberal arts college. I've learnt a lot forcing myself to write english literature papers, but I think I'd have fared better, academically, if I just went to MIT.
Robert Scoble's "Lessons Learnt" from the feed:

1. Have a story.

2. Have everyone on board with that story.

3. If anyone goes off of that story, make sure they get on board immediately or fire them.

4. Make sure people are judged by the revenues they bring in. Those that bring in revenues should get to run the place. People who don't bring in revenues should get fewer and fewer responsibilities, not more and more.

5. Work ONLY for a leader who will make the tough decisions (see above).

6. Build a place where excellence is expected, allowed, and is enabled.

7. Fire idiots quickly (didn't happen at PodTech -- even if you count me as one of the idiots).

8. if your engineering team can't give a media team good measurements, the entire company is in trouble. Only things that are measured ever get improved.

9. When your stars aren't listened to the company is in trouble.

10. When your stars start leaving (Gillmor and Owyang left before I did) the company is in trouble.

11. Getting rid of the CEO, even if it's all his fault, won't help unless you replace him/her with someone who is visionary and who can fix #8,9,10
Ask HN : best laptop keyboard
Extremely frustrated with my HP laptop keyboard. Briefly used a gateway laptop and even the gateway had a better keyboard. Any suggestions on a laptop with a good keyboard?

Thinkpads supposedly have the best laptop keyboards. Any others?
Company ignores giants, sues small fry over wishlist patent
I think 'doing things my way' probably defines me as a person - if anything, college has shown me that I absolutely flat out will not do it not my way - at least, without some serious, serious self-grinding.

The CS classes have been good, but pretty mindless, unfortunately. It's a good school and a good program, but I think I could do most of the classes in at least half the time. Except the math ones. Granted, I haven't taken that many higher-level ones yet, because I've had such problems fulfilling the first-year requirements.

Really, I'm just throwing the question out there and seeing what comes back :)
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Guaranteed human rights reduce the speed of technological and moral development.
> ever-increasing variance in quality of those users

I'm not sure it's necessarily the quality of the users. Call me an optimist, but I think most people in general are decent and most people that bother to come here are pretty smart.

I think the problem with size is the same reason everyone else is a crappy driver but you. In a normal day of driving, you are surrounded by mostly good drivers, but a couple of them are bound to make really stupid mistakes (just by random chance). Since this is your only experience with them, you label them a "bad driver" and it overshadows all the good driving around you. If you only drive on lightly traveled roads, you are less likely to see a stupid mistake, but get on a major interstate highway in a major city and there are enough people that something is bound to happen.

Likewise with large social news sites. Every user is a 'good user' 99% of the time, but has that random moment when they do something trollish or get carried away with an argument and say something mean. (I know it has happened to me before.) When a site gets large, the probability of this happening on any given thread rises accordingly, and since everyone focuses on these instances, it seems like every thread is full of trolls and angry people.

I think anonymity also plays into it. Large communities are by default anonymous, and small ones are not. People in small towns don't cut each other off or tailgate each other, because you are likely to know the person in the other car, or at the very least be headed to the same place. (I know, I'm from a small town.) In a major city, you are never going to see that other car again, so no one cares if they act like an asshole.
I have an older macbook (Intel Core Duo 2 GHz, 2 GB RAM, 93 GB hard drive) and I have similar feelings about my laptop. When I develop, I need linux :)

Ubuntu does install rather well though, so I agree you should give it a try. Just 1) install Mac OS X (leave space for linux, or resize current), 2) install rEFIt, then 3) install Linux (ubuntu for macbooks is recommended). Otherwise virtualize (VMWare Fusion is better than Parallels IMHO, but either suffice).

I'll give you a tip: Every time I move over to Linux on my macbook I miss all of the little things that just work under OS X.
The one on my (little over a year old) macbook pro. Its the best.

Sadly, the 'delicate' mouse button broke and the Geniuses (no pun intended) at my local apple store can't locate my extended warranty.
Rumor: News Corp. buys TechCrunch
Thanks for the tip. Will checkout macbook pros at a local store.
Sure, it promotes Seedcamp, in the same way it promotes YC or TechStars. These programs are increasingly the smartest way for first-time founders to get off the ground with their ideas. Plus, at least here in Europe, there's still a huge group of talented hackers who don't know about them, so spreading the word is no less important today than a couple years ago.

Full disclosure: I work for Seedcamp.
MIT has compulsory English Lit etc too, AFAIK.
A Nazi can do perfectly good rocket science. But can a Nazi be trusted to do good science when it comes to race, sexuality or disability?

There are times when a person's background and motivations must be weighed against their position.
Regarding OS X rendering, yes it's really juicy but I think I've grown to like it. Default fonts in Fedora/CentOS look alright to me, not terrible enough for me to seek out a solution. Under FreeBSD, I wrestled with font rendering for literally a few days, but I don't remember what I did with my resulting config file. The fonts looked crisp and pretty.

I find more importantly is my xterm command line. Under most systems, the following xterm looks good enough for me to do anything in:

xterm -bg black -fg white -fa . -fs 13 +sb -geometry 95x24

But any way, I shall also be watching this thread.
Xiaonei Rips Another Page From The Facebook: Opens Platform, Launches Developer Fund
I don't like the new name, 'pressflip' makes it sound like it's focussed on newspapers. Presumably the idea is that you 'press' on things you like and 'flip' things you don't, but then shouldn't it be 'clickflip'?

Also, if anyone actually got around to creating an account, what do you think about the Google-style settings/signout thing in the top right-hand corner of the screen?
Oh. Well, I know nothing about MIT. I was discouraged from applying there because they don't have good financial aid - for international students. It turns out I'm not international after all, but who knew.

I quite liked english literature, actually. I just like hacking more... much more.

The thing is: I find liberal arts a very good idea, almost in the stereotypical way. I think by comparing perspectives, and doing lots of different disciplines seeds one's mind with lots of different ways of looking.
So - I code on stuff for my startup (http://www.bionicbooks.com) across all 3 of a g5 mac, an xp pc and ubuntu on a thinkpad. I use java and the major downside of OSX is that you cant use the sun jdk, you have to wait for apple's version which is inevitably at least 1 major release behind (and generally forces you to pay up for the new OS release if you want it). Additionally you have to deal with the odd keyboard arrangement and unconventional home and end key things which might be a hassle if you're not used to them. Package management on the mac is more of a nuisance than ubuntu; installing mysql, php, whatever, is always much more of an effort (of all 3 machines the mac is the only one where i keep notes of how I installed things).

I've seriously considered getting a Mac Air but for my stuff I couldn't live with OSX full time, I'd have to install Linux. And if you're going to do that then you might want to look at other SSD laptops; rumor has it that Lenovo are going to launch an X400 based on Centrino 2 (Montevino) which came out this week. Whether they do or not, the X300 is still an option.
The Long Tail and the Dip
This is a nice comment but i still think it is a rumor, it might or might not be true yet.
Nick Carlson, though make a good point in that, quoting a prospective TechCrunch acquirer, "We're worried about buying it and him leaving, and we're worried about buying it and him staying."
But a malloc ain't one.
The fact that index funds have gone down recently should not cause you to be careful. If you believe the long term value is still there, the best time to buy is in fact after they've suffered losses.
Does anyone remember the time when 37signals main product wasn't an ideology? That was neat.
What's the argument(s) against just dropping out now and starting something up?

As someone currently on indefinite leave from college to work on my startup... I think you have the order backwards. Get something going first, and when it is going so well that it would be foolish not to work on it full-time, then take the plunge. College is an excellent (and safe) place to throw a bunch of ideas at the wall and see what sticks.
Except that roughly 90% Of the sites I try to register don't accept the + (including liquidID by the way)
Maybe you should have gone to college in England. 3 year Bachelors programmes, but you pretty much do only what you're majoring in, which you decide in advance (i.e. when you're still in high school, which we call 6th Form). I did Mech Eng and I think we had the option of doing one course a year (out of 6-8 courses/year total) outside the department, and quite a few people didn't even do that.
First words, "Open Prediction" ... in small print. Is click-whoring an olympic sport now?
Yup - I've heard that I would have liked Oxbridge very much. Apparently they just give you the syllabus and a reading list and meet you once a week to keep you on track? If I had known that when I was choosing colleges, I'd have jumped at it immediately.

I didn't consider the English system (though I'm somewhat a product of it) since I didn't want to specialize. It turns out not specializing was more excruciatingly difficult than I thought it would be, so now I'm deciding whether to run in the opposite direction.
What if you have no time to throw ideas against the wall because it takes all your effort + time to do college work? It's a safe place, but very, very painful to be in.

I'm in the process of throwing an idea against the wall right now, we'll see if it sticks.

Edit: (I'm not trying to be rude/argumentative btw - I'm sorry if I was. I'm a little confused now, and will go think more.)
/Applications/Mail.app

I highly recommend it to anyone on OS X Leopard. Mail doesn't count unread RSS entries as unread mail, so RSS feeds become more of a "you could potentially look at this when you have nothing to do, and these are the entries you didn't read". It's good.
If growth isn't a concern why not force people to wait a certain amount of time after signing up before they're allowed to post?

That way new users can get a feel for the community before they start posting and you only get users with a real interest in the stories posted here.
This should take care of the problem no?

http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/10/prism/
New AMD chief knows the chips are down
If you're going to play the "startup lottery" then you better damn well have something that is worth more than the time you'd spend towards getting a degree.
Google Deliberately Sells Fewer Ads and May Have Gone Too Far
No one mentioned Dilbert's 9-point formula?

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?guid=%7Bbe5...

Won't paste it here, but it's worth a look. The first bit of advice is make a will (yes, even if you aren't married - give it to the old hackers home).
"The problem: this wonderful time of college is being dragged through the mud by my resistance to doing the work required (less for the CS, though). It's incredibly painful, not to mention cutting significantly into time to do anything at all. You can't let yourself go out and meet people - or hack - when you really need to do this assignment for tomorrow."

Sounds like you need to work on some self discipline. If you can get your social life, studies, hacking, and business efforts under control, THEN I would suggest you should go for the monumental jump and "drop out". If you think you'll have more time when your startup takes off, think again. If you are interested in VC funding at some point, then you might find it challenging when they step in and start calling shots and start telling you directly what you need to do in order to make things successful - some of it might be stuff you will resist in the same way you seem to be resisting your college work.

You sound like a young, intelligent, and energetic guy...see if you can get yourself organized such that every aspect of your college life is organized to the point of efficiency. If you can accomplish that, then you surely will have the management mettle to make a startup successful. Self discipline is an extremely important quality when undertaking something ambitious such as a startup. It seems to me that you should acquire self discipline and other important skills that are not directly related to the technical aspect of doing a startup before dropping out.
Twitter Chokes Unauthenticated API Requests By IP, Sites Gasp for Air
good find.
I think I'm more idealistic than that - I've spent a lot of effort trying to get a degree, and I just don't see the point in it. When I don't win the lottery, the tentative plan is to hang around and badger startups until they let me do stuff for them.

When that doesn't work, I suppose I could always come back to college, financial aid willing.
Agreed, however the article already acknowledges that approach (read near the end about the flower).

Luckily, unlike text, which follows a very constrained set of rules, (eg an X will always be two lines criss-crossed), the same doesn't apply to 3D objects, where you can have 2 images of the same object that look entirely different, a simple example being the chair, that comes in all varieties of shapes but still easily identifiable to a human.

So this would automatically require human input in respects to identifying the object, you can't create a program that would 'learn' new objects, at least, not yet.

Also, the silouhette strategy can only be applied when a shape remains relatively constant, moving the camera a little to the left would render a completely new silouhette.

Add that the bot would still need to be told how to answer the arbritrary 'How many legs does the chair that the man is sitting on have?' questions.

The fact that so much human input is required just to identify /one/ object in the captcha, the fact that once that object has been compromised it is trivial to switch in another one (which is impossible in text captcha because there are only 26+10 amount of characters that the whole world knows) means that this is a damn effective captcha.
Could it just be that college doesn't really fit me?

I have learnt some self-discipline, actually. I'm sitting down, but I'm not working. Everything takes 10 times longer than it should, and every minute is very painful. I can count on two hands the number of times I've gone out and partied. I don't hack when I have stuff due.

I've had the 'perfect point of efficiency' vision in my head for a while, but I'm stumbling on the first block. I have a pretty good head for being organized, but the execution is lacking. I also have ADHD, apparently (I've learnt an awful lot about software engineering by failing to (be able to) follow through plans to do assignments, actually). So in some ways I'm trying to get around the executive functioning problem by doing something that I clearly want to do, instead of something I'm doing because it's what you do when you finish HS.

Of course, it might just because I'm dumb. Other people seem to think I'm smart, though (case in point above), and that's the only measure, aside from schoolwork, that I've witnessed.

I'm not dropping out to buy time, I'm dropping out to buy a task that I'm more willing to do.
I've been very satisfied my the MBP keyboard also. I even found that I got used to the MB keyboard quite easily (I have 1 of each).
Exactly. Another factor when you subscribe to a lot of feeds is overlap. I subscribe to all sites I find interesting so more often than not the articles I probably wouldn't want to miss show up on multiple sites. This way I can hit 'Mark all as read' without feeling like I've missed something.

From the trends page on google reader: "From your 114 subscriptions, over the last 30 days you read 9,483 items."
First tidal power turbine gets plugged in