skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree that experience can be a benefit in many industries (and I'm 33, have been working around my current industry for about 10 years, and I think that's been a big benefit to my current startup), I also think naivety can be a far more powerful defense than your comment would indicate.

Not knowing about the old boy networks and the "way things are done" can be a benefit to a small and nimble startup. The fact is that economics and the requirement to get things done will occasionally be able to trump "the way we've always done it", and by the time you've signed on two or three clients that way, you can find your way into that network and learn how things are done. And, in the meantime, you've built products that offer better value (because you had to, and your competitors didn't) and a business that is run very lean (because you had to, and your competitors didn't).
Meebo's new product provides web based chat for social communities
Why? I don't really see the correlation... Unless it's of the basis that it is morally good to do things you find enjoyable?
has anything to do with genetics

Well, I would never say genetics is 100 percent responsible for any products of the mind. You seem to think that genetics is zero percent responsible. This is an untenable position, and not one Jared Diamond would hold either, at least not when he was researching the importance of testicle sizes of different races [1]. (You have to actually read it to get a laugh. Anyone have a nature login?)

I am so tired of Jared Diamond. It seems like there's always some sheister, Stephen Jay Gould, or Diamond, or somebody who propagandizes effectively enough to come up every time a subject is raised.

[1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v320/n6062/abs/320488a0...
Battle Productivity Brain Drain With an Idea Budget
I can't beleive its so complicated to integrate your tests into cabal. Almost every other build system makes it trivial.
Morality = how to live.

Other things being equal, following economic incentives makes you richer than if you didn't, which is pretty clearly a better life (everything else being equal). It means you can buy a better education for your kids, or for kids in africa, or a million other good things.
Why Google Doesn't Provide Earnings Forecasts
38 is not old
The Story of the Fail Whale
He didn't say that, I did. He just pointed out mistakes they made, including not subjecting their results to a basic sanity test.
"Is it sufficient to simply not target growth as a goal?"

Growth is a big part of the problem. It's much the same for movies. You can either appeal to a more discriminating audience, which is inherently smaller, or go lowest common denominator. Actually, the pattern is to start out appealing to the discriminating crowd to get a "cool" cachet, then expand and go mass-market.

Another big problem is the monkey-see-monkey-do nature of Homo Sapiens. Over time, you will see more noise in the form of attempts at imitating signal instead of true signal.
I wouldn't assume, as this author suggests, that PG and Spolsky are blogging less frequently because of the tenor of their reception. Perhaps they're just really busy.

One of them is running a company and a popular site while composing a new version of Lisp, the other is running a company and a weekly podcast while co-developing a site... And those are just their publicly known activities.
lisp? you mean arc good sir.
I'm not sure how effective a bayesian filter would be at classifying news stories as interesting/non-interesting though. Has anyone tried this?
You say that jokingly, but spam filters would probably work if someone was willing to slog through the digg front page long enough to build up a decent set of training data.
If you think you're too old, then you probably are.

Age is a state of mind.

Actually, at 41 myself (and 3 months into my own startup), I find that as the kids get older (7 and 11), I'm getting more time again to pursue my passions.
This is a myth about enterprise IT products. I'm calling the whole space "enterprise", because that's what Graham would call it, but we're talking about all products that sell for over the ~$60k to justify direct sales.

That may include crazy stuff like SAP or PeopleSoft --- ew --- but it also includes Splunk and Palo Alto Networks and pretty much every security products. The buyer is the user for almost all of these products. Quality is very much an issue, although it's again stunted by VC.
Well we were starting a new clustered, virtualized hosting environment so we had hard cash needs to get our first set of servers and equipment and data center space. So it's a little different then starting a software company without the same hard costs.

We basically built something like ec2 but with more advanced features like load balancing and clustered, posix compliant filesystems. And we shipped before ec2 came out or was even known about publicly. This kind of system costs $$ to do right so the 120k went mostly to hardware and data center costs to bootstrap us to the point where we could take customers.

We started planning in february of 2006 and shipped in september 2006 and it's been a wild ride since then.

ps - sure, no problem. Let me know if anyone has any other questions.

pps - yeah one of our founders started Parallax who made the BASIC stamp.
Please PG: Enable SSL for YC Application Form
Because we're paranoid.
"These problems are going to be solved by capitalistic means, not moral ones."

What precisely is a 'moral means?' I can see the term 'moral means' in contrast to 'immoral means,' but not in contrast with 'capitalistic means.' Are you implying that capitalism is immoral? Or, do really mean 'emotive means?'
Speaking as a 36-year old in the throes of testing his app I bloody hope not! If you're sufficiently clear of responsibilities that you can do this, well, you'll always regret it if you don't.
My thoughts on the Last.fm Redesign
I'm still clueless as to how anyone ever thought they'd be able to make any money writing annoying apps for a free platform targeted at kids and young adults with no money...
I would have nothing against this whale if it hadn't put the cat with a screwdriver out of a job.

Yeah, I'm a hopelessly sentimental collector of stale memes, but I still think that cat had a can-do spirit that the whale lacks.
I think overall it is pretty solid, they are just having some server problems, which I can forgive on the first day or two.

The home page stinks, though.
I never got any of my porn through websites.... I mean... uh, what's porn?
Yes! It will get those dogs next door to shut up.

Then again, whose business is it really to decide what is wasteful or not? Value is ultimately subjective. Maybe I value drag racing more than my life, whose business is that really?
I think just not compromising is good enough to keep the quality of the site. I don't see HN doing any deals with NY Times or getting a ad deal with Google. They have kept it simple, just pure news and it is surrounded by smart bunch of people who want to keep it that way.
Hell, I'm 62, and I just started a project which may well turn into a startup in the foreseeable future. Go for it!
Relaunch and Open Sourcing of TimeCert a Timestamping service
Just a small point - you can use WP as a CMS and make money doing so. I've actually been using WP to house technical documentation for over 3 years now. I've got a couple of plugins built for this purpose available here:

http://almosteffortless.com/wordpress/
Got CLUTTER.ME, I'm happy :)

Also got another 11 three-letters, and one four-letter. Looks like the frenzy has died down by now, godaddy is slow but all my domains processed right away.

One annoying thing is godaddy stopped accepting coupons for .me domains halfway through... so I didn't get any discounts for the last few. Ah well.
I found the study in question:

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Lawn/

And does admit the limitations:

> The satellites that can identify such small areas only observe small areas at a time, and the images they collect are expensive.

So the author of the study created an equation and plugged in some numbers. Hardly actual research. The actual methodology is cute, check the sat for lights at night and then predict how "urban" it is and that means there is less lawn. (Though ironically on her map NYC is the highest concentration of lawn in America.) Too bad the results don't pass a reality check.

She claims more lawn than farm, which is absurd (the CIA World Factbook shows the US at 18.01% arable land which is a cool 600,000 sq mi).
That excites me. I am also a newcomer from Reddit. I believe I'll stick around now, since, being a student majoring in computer engineering, this interests me. Feel free to ban me if my comments become too low quality. :)
Ask Hn: Do you think the TechCrunch50 DemoPit is worth the money?
We got offered the TechCrunch Demo Pit, but it cost 3 thousand dollars so we arent going to do it since it is about half of what we got left.

We asked them if they can work with us but they said the fee covers their costs and they cant lose money on the deal.

Does anyone have an idea of the estimated value of the exposure?

I'm thinking for 300k we can get pool 100 companies and do our own launch in the midwest or east coast. Anyone Interested?
It is not sufficient simply not to target growth. But not targeting growth removes what is otherwise one helluva tough design constraint for a filter system. Imagine writing a spam filter when you're being paid by beancounters whose bottom line is maximizing the number of messages. Even, sometimes, beancounters who face strong temptation to maximize the number of bytes of email this quarter and worry about the longer-than-a-month-term consequences later.

Also, some kinds of filtering (and related things, like informal community norms) don't scale, so if the community hasn't grown too much, the problem might tend to be easier. Hacker-oriented mailing lists with 100 posters don't seem to be too hard to moderate, but I'm not eager to try 10,000 posters.
See how many editors it really takes to turn bloggers' open content into a viable weekly magazine, nonprofit or otherwise.

In other words, reinvent the NYT or Newsweek, but start with zero employees and move up rather than starting with hundreds and struggling to figure out who to cut.

There are lots of smart bloggers writing things. There are, for at least the next thirty years, lots of relatively rich, politically connected people who grew up with print, prefer print, and instinctively trust print. I've always had a feeling that one should be able to make something out of that situation, and the NYT printers have the numbers I would need to do the math and see if it seems feasible.
Shanghaiist: Chinese blogs are where it's at
Couple of my college classmates started a financial software startup straight out of college.

They had connections though - one of the founder's mom is a hedge fund manager. Oh, and his aunt is Heidi Fleiss, the famous Hollywood madame.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_27/b3991043....
I despise it. It's an effective way to eliminate idiots though, "plz send teh codes" being the canonical example.

I find 'plz' and 'thx' and 'tks' and '10x' and so on the most annoying though; how the fuck is it polite if you can't even be bothered to spell the complete word? If you want to show gratitude, 'thanks' or 'thank you' are much better, and english already provides 'ta' as a short form.

Sigh. People treating IRC like AOL make my sad.
Don't get me wrong, for a sophisticated investor this is an excellent time to make money in the market. The thing is, I believe that many 'sophisticated investors' who come along for the ride in a bull market are unprepared for bear markets.

In bear markets the bias is down, up, and sideways at times - but mostly down. Most investors do not participate on the downside and so are biased against the trend.

There are exceptions though and there are more options available to individual investors than ever before. One simple way to play both sides of the market is synthetic ETF index funds such as those available through ProShares and others. (no formal affiliation, but I do have ProShares funds in my portfolio)
With that disclaimer, here's a link: http://www.proshares.com/funds

These funds let you participate in either the short or long side of specific market indices, market sectors, or geographic regions. In some cases they even offer 2:1 leverage allowing you to say, gain 2% for every 1% drop in the DOW. This sort of investment timing generally is not recommended for an average investor. It is very risky stuff.

For the average investor, my advice is to buy gold (gld,xau), silver (slv,slw), and other scarce commodities. Over the past 5 years alone, the US dollar has already lost 65% of it's purchasing power as measured in gold (http://www.kitco.com/LFgif/au1825nyb.gif)
Launched via Hacker News only:

It was submitted at 12:54 pm on a Wednesday, received 54 hits in first hour. First comment on HN appeared at 1:20 pm, after 27 hits. It got 68 page views during the first 24 hours, and 0 after that. As you can see, almost all the hits came during the first hour after submission, and drastically tapered off after that. Also, none of the visitors subscribed to the RSS feed.

I theorize that there would have been more hits if:

1. There were more comments. I think there were 3, and two were mine. Often, a conversation in the comments can drive traffic

2. There was more content. It was a blog, and I only had two or three posts. I was looking for feedback on my idea, which was all in the first post, but more content might have gotten people talking.

3. There was accomplishment. Kind of a tricky one, when you’re looking for feedback on an idea. A chicken or the egg problem. If I had put my idea into practice and accomplished something and then posted, people would be talking. But it can be helpful to get comments on an idea before you put it into practice, so it was helpful that way to.

Basically, I'm not in a hurry to get things done, so this was a great experiment for when I will be looking for press, hype or feedback. I'm taking my time with my project, so I was very happy with my numbers overall. I will actually be blogging about these numbers one of these days, because thats basically what my idea is all about. Experimenting.
PodTech Sells For Less Than $500k
Would it be cheating?
I think the key for me is subscribing to more posts than I could ever possibly read, and giving myself permission to not have to read all of them.

Much like I used to read a newspaper, I've turned google reader into my information aggregator. It alerts me to daily podcasts, local/regional/national/global/financial news, interesting articles, etc... I read what's interesting, throw the rest away, star whatever I may want to revisit or leisurely read on the weekend, share whatever I want people to see on my blog, and 'mark all as read' when I start my weekend.

I skim whenever I'm waiting on a build or have a spare minute between meetings, but I separate out into categories things I'd like to read and things I may read if there's extra time. I spend about 2-3 hours a week in google reader, but much less time wading through comments and ads for a net gain.
Darn, "help.me" is already taken. Should have read Hacker News before I went to bed last night!

Checking feed.me
Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 0%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 100%

Oh.
We can't downvote stories here...
File or threaten to file a counter-suit for abuse of process.
You might be.

...I don't think many people have the physical stamina much past that age. I used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night, seven days a week. I don't know if I could do that now.

-How to Start a Startup
Math Lip Tattoo

I wonder if the guy knows he's walking round with the A as from the set square of Freemasons.
If you have to ask, then you are too old...

If you feel too old, then hang out with younger people and ask them as many questions as you can. Really put yourself in a learning position where the twenty somethings are your teachers.
That's an excellent question, and you've already received a few good responses, but here's my view :)

The answer to your second and third questions are both "yes."

A lot of developers take pride in building complex software. Bad developers do it because they just shut up and code, and turn software that should be simple into a giant pile of fragile spaghetti code.

That leads to a high maintenance overhead, so adding features becomes a lot more labor intensive than it would be with a good piece of software... hence higher cost.
...and as the kids get older, they may even be interested in helping on the startup!
Why should it even matter?

Ask yourself these questions:

1. Do you have passion behind your idea?

2. Can you execute your idea to fruition?

3. If not now, when? When your 50? 70?

Don't live life asking yourself "What if?"
Give it a try before you dig yourself into a deep hole.
Doing this for SHA1 isn't a good choice. SHA1 is already broken.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/02/sha1_broken.ht...

Also, blog posts are not worth much in a patent dispute. Articles in academic journals and patent applications work. A rigorously kept lab journal might do as well. Hmm, perhaps an online Lab Journal service might be a good online business?
Your arguments are orthogonal to speed.

> Don't diss the pipe

I guess you've been smoking.

You don't make any sense when it comes to "buffers" (writing to shared memory IS writing to a buffer); a pipe doesn't give you a "big picture" to "properly optimize things" (a WTF "argument"), and no syscall is needed to "transfer control", unless you're talking about futexes or some other method to clue the kernel in, in which case, you do indeed have a way to clue the kernel in.

Writing once is faster than writing multiple times. That's why shared memory is obviously faster than not sharing and copying. Time needed to set up shared memory segments is negligible if done right -- once, at the beginning, and then re-used as needed.
Arc is a Lisp.
Then why sell now? Were they losing money? I am not to familiar with podtech.net but with 7.5 million in venture funding, a 500 grand sale is a huge hit.
fries, cheeseburger and chocolate shake.
Simplicity is really easy to charge for. Tons of people want to pay for Dropbox because it makes getting files places easy when it wasn't before.

Simple, on the other hand, is very difficult to charge for. If you can't demonstrate a substantial amount of added value, people will want it for free or won't use it at all. And if you do try to charge, competitors will come in and quickly replicate what you've got, but undercut you.
I'm an online professional poker player and I'm a bit stunned by this article.

I had never seen anyone talk so openly about the existance and programming of online poker bots.

Thumps up to the writer.

I'm going back and reading the first article of the series at the moment.

http://www.codingthewheel.com/archives/how-i-built-a-working...
This is going to be unpopular advice, but I would suggest algorithms in C. You already know how to make web applications. Any reason you want to know how to make web applications again? Will Lisp or C web applications make you happier or more productive?

What will help you is probably a better understanding of algorithms/programming and I personally like C for that job. C doesn't hide stuff like higher-level languages do. It makes you think about how the computer processes the information and uses memory. I'm not suggesting that you ever use C for one of your webapps. I'm suggesting that knowing C and good algorithms will make you a better programmer in higher level languages because you will understand more.
I'm 39 and I'm not old!
Gmail and Google Calendar making the leap offline
Fabric: simple pythonic deployment
Eventually you will grow and you will need to start making things bannable.

What you also need to have is a probation system where you can't post for anywhere from 4 hours to a month depending on what you do. That acts as a warning. Get put on probation too many times and you're banned.

That's how it works at Something Awful, and they still have pretty good quality after almost 10 years. And they are for-profit.

Also, it might be desirable to extra strict during certain times when people are likely to go berzerk and act really stupid (the SA moderators call this the "banhammer" and make a sticky thread notifying users when it is in effect -- what would normally be a warning becomes a ban).
how much will the cover of the New Yorker cost a year when Obama doesn't get elected? how many more will die in Iraq for no reason? How many innocent Iranians will die from McCains bombs?

These are the questions you should be asking, New Yorker!
> Setting up the TLB and handling the page faults,

Should be done once, at the beginning, and the segment re-used.

> then doing the interprocess synchronization

There is IPC anyway when you are sending information between processes. If you delve into the kernel you may be surprised at the number of layers of operations it takes to present data from one process to another using a socket.

> but the constant and synchronisation overhead for a write() is smaller than an mmap()

You're assuming the pages needed are already mapped in the former case. If you're writing anything of size, the pages will probably need to be faulted in anyway. If you're writing something small, then setting up your shared memory at the beginning and then re-using that memory is obviously the way to go, rather than getting and destroying shared memory segments every time you need them.
Actually, as Nintendo DS enthusiasts, they form part of my application test department already! ;-)
This paper gives data showing that 38 is not too old: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=180204

(That submission got no votes at all, which greatly surprised me, given how often people discuss this here.)
How ironic to read this question this evening. I'm 38. Right now I am finalising the documentation pack (16 documents in all!) to sell my second company. It's two-and-a-half years old. We sign the documents in 12 hours time. The company took no VC, but just a small amount of trade money. We're selling out to our largest customer because they made us an offer we couldn't refuse.

At 38 you are most certainly NOT too old to startup. At 38 your personal circumstances may mean that you cannot take the same level of risk that you could at 28 or 21. But if you are happy, healthy, and have a means of keeping a roof over your head and your dependents' head, then go for it.

The very very worst that could happen is that you could find yourself looking for a job in a few months time. But you'll be looking for that job with a bunch more experience, and credibility, than you would have without having tried to start something.

Best wishes to you. Enjoy it. And if your luck works out, you'll make a fortune. If your luck doesn't work out, you'll hold with you a great experience that you'll cherish forever.
Putting up some unsolved problems would have been cool(not) - like the Riemann Hypothesis.

Have anyone done this for website URLs?

I got a big one of tattoo.me today on my face.
Stamina comes naturally when you are in your teens and 20s. Assuming you are in good general health, in your 30s and later it's a matter of staying in shape and eating well.

Carlos Lopes of Portugal was 37 when he won the Olympic Marathon ('84, Los Angeles). If that's not stamina, I don't know what is.
I'm hopeful - but there was a time when #3 was true of Reddit, too. Now if your Reddit comment includes the word "fap", you're about guaranteed to be upmodded.
Probably safe enough for them to always say "male." The hit rate would be pretty high given the type of person hitting that page...