skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dude.... Wil Schroter... right now, when economy is down pretty much everywhere around the world, is it really a good time to write a story about why startups are failing? You should write about reasons why people should start their own companies not vice versa! Don't you get it man? What's the point of helping people to do worse? Screw your boss if he/she is behind it... start your own Forbes magazine!
Then why not submit the direct PDF link in the first place? Or is it a 'helpful' news.yc antifeature?

(PDF readers actually load faster than scribed, provided you aren't using the vanilla Adobe one with all the plugins turned on.)
Everyone's complaining about this post, but it bothers me that anyone cares about the IPHONE or any phone at all in the first place. 99 percent of what a telephone can do, and makes it necessary, was settled before WWI. Let's keep some perspective.
It's a "helpful" feature. All PDF links are auto converted to scribd.
Please prefix her name with Rear Admiral, per proper usage.
I agree, deleting the story would be bad PR in itself. Better to correct any misconceptions because if one person is confused then many people are.
lol, if this was the case, then all those jocks from high school would be raising big rounds.
Network Distance: When Sydney is closer than Sao Paulo
trance, dance, and techno. Basically anything that sounds techy
I didn't have a problem with the layout, since I tend to use lynx. I thought it was a shame, though, that the author isn't a better writer. The content is fascinating, but it took some effort to follow along. (I guess I'm too accustomed to PG and JS :)
Bedroom-Bedroom accessories
Apple's MobileMe drops support for IE6
I'm also hoping that this is the beginning of a trend.
Companies trying to be memorable want to override a couple centuries of English history? Fuck 'em. The initial cap on proper nouns developed for good reasons.
I think google just want a good phone OS and proper browsers and fast net in everyones pocket. Android is just something to help out with that mission.
He also has the balls to rock double polo shirts on stage at WWDC. In lime and pink at that...
Showed the whale,

Jumped the shark,

Epic fail,

Nothing but carp.

Its all fish to me. :)
I'm also hoping that this is the beginning of a trend. Begone IE6!
The assessment of fund management suffers from the usual problem - there are bound to be some people who really are just that lucky.

For simplicity if you look at just the last two years and four fund managers, statistically one of them will have won in both years. He will rationalise this away (his 'system') and claim to be a good manager of money.

There are enough funds that quite a few of them are certain to have won in 9 of the last 10 years, further reinforced by the fact that losing funds tend to close.

Because of this effect I would say that past performance is a horrible predictor of future performance. Certainly I am happy to put my money where my mouth is - with the exception of sensible diversification (cash and bonds) my savings are all in low fee index funds.
xirium - thanks very much for your help. Unfortunately, most of the constraints are in the form of A>10, etc... I am using MyISAM now, but I am going to give MEMORY a try after some of the comments on this post. There are no ORDER BY clauses.
Since he brought up a number "European" policies, I felt qualified to say a few words on the subject myself, but it got sort of wordy, so I posted it here:

http://journal.dedasys.com/articles/2008/06/09/startups-gove...
All if his suggestions are great until it comes time to pay the bill for them. It's rather naive to suggest that universal child and health care and free college for everyone will make our country so much better without explaining the very serious effects (many of which we probably don't know) that paying for all of it will have.
Oh, I had to up-vote this because it is so funny!

But I agree with jraines, it should be called the "Fail Whale".
It's worked exceedingly well.

Have you been tracking Apple's stock price over the past 8 years or so?
We're talking about the phone company; "unlimited" means whatever they want it to mean.
Incentive: easier whatever (try the Flickr demo, it is quite cool)

Who's going to develop: Yahoo (obviously) and (hopefully) a flock of hackers (if _why is playing with it you can be sure it will attract a lot of crazy people :)
That's the real trick to learn - how to be so people friendly that people with money fall in love with you.

Boy is that not the trick to learn. Sam is a nice guy, but what makes him Sam Altman is that he is extremely effective. That's what got him onto the stage at WWDC, not being "people friendly."
great... now we can have all the posts that repeat every 3 months on programming.reddit repeat here too! YAY for signal:noise.
3g iPhone no-shows: Adobe Flash, video recording, copy and paste
> The more people move to Silicon Valley to start their venture, the more time will pass before its easier to do so in their hometown.

You're looking at it as a zero sum game with only one move. Some people may go to silicon valley, make money, or at least learn about startups and the culture there, and take some of that home with them. If they'd simply stayed home, it's not a given that they would have been able to start a company, or be as successful at it.
I agree with the gist but something like "RIM and Palm have their work cut out for them" would be more accurate. WiMo isn't even worth disparaging at this point. (I voted you up)
We're probably having the only public discussion of the issue. It should be kept, you're right.

I'm still getting a feel for the culture here.
Startups: government help and hindrance
> There are already massive, artificial advantages for large corporations.

And massive benefits for startups. The grass is always greener, of course, and people are most likely to see the advantages on the other side.

> Large corporations have access to the public markets and hundreds of other financing options.

This isn't some benefit that's dolled out by a controlling group, like the government. This is because people are willing to invest money, because they are much more stable. Startups are incredibly risky, and most will fail. If you give a "benefit" to investing in startups so that more people invest, someone is losing somewhere. It's equivalent to a government expense, which must be made up elsewhere.

The fact is, startups have just as many financing options as everybody else: the group of people that are willing to give them money all factors included.

> Furthermore, since IPOs are so incredibly painful now, M&A is the only exit for startup entrepreneurs

Incorrect. Startups don't have to exit, they have just as much ability to grow, become incredibly profitable, and turn into the larger companies, should they choose to do so.

> Large corporations have the risk of making the wrong hires aggregated over thousands of people.

That would be correct if you assumed that the talent pool is made up of mostly smart people, except that it isn't. The talent pool is made up of mostly average or stupid people, with increasingly few really smart people. Hiring thousands of people just aggravates the risk and increases the chances that you will hire even more poor talent (given that there is not an infinite pool of incredible talent).

> Large corporations have the ability to massively lobby themselves to other large corporations or the government, encouraging massive kickbacks and corruption.

Of course, isn't what this article is proposing another form of kickback? Why don't we just eliminate those all together?

> The major disadvantage that large corporations have is that in many areas they're not particularly suitable for creative work.

And that they're incredibly hard to manage, tend towards slow, bureaucratic work, have an incredibly difficult time innovating, are placed under high scrutiny and regulation (esp post SarbOx), and the list goes on.

I, for one, don't envy the position of large corporations at all.
Basic Instinct: Sprint Battles AT&T and iPhone with New Samsung Device
I can only assume it has gone up, but that has been due to the overwhelming success of the iPod as well as other peripherals. They've gained a little ground on the consumer PC market, but not much. I think Apple is going to do very well in the short-run with the iPhone, but in the long run I think Google has more potential because it is platform independent.
Hippie Expand and Autocompletion in Emacs
25 Tools to Compile an In-Depth Dossier on a Competitors’ Site
Operative words: "supposed to".

Also, Aaron specifically uses the term "basic minimum income", and describes a scenario where "you could live off the government-provided income as you got things started."

This sounds like the welfare office becomes your infinitely patient investor. "Well, yes, I've been receiving assistance for 20 years straight, and I'm not disabled. But you see, I've been working on my startup all this time, and I think we're just about to turn the corner!"
Business Plan Competition Directory
"forcing men to write more detailed accounts of their coding issues, and expressing their programming problems before each new block of code is written. Lovingly written."

Hmm.. I know I wouldn't last there long. My first reaction would be to explain my problems like this:

It was a dark and stormy node; the files served from torrents -- except for occasional intervals when checked by a violent gust of spam which swept up the subnet (for it is in the colo that our scene lies), rattling along the interfaces, and fiercely invalidating the scanty lines of the caches that struggled against the load.
What exactly does effective mean? I have the book "7 habits of effective people", and I read parts of it, but this book does not answer the core question - what does 'effective' mean?

For example, say I have an idea for a great product. I work on it effectively by spending time on the important features and ignoring the unimportant features. I release the software and my site rises to Alexa Rank 600.000, the slowly fades away. I was an effective programmer, but did not have any idea about marketing or sales or post sales or customer acquiring or viral growth or any of that stuff. That's not a lack of effectiveness, that's a lack of information.

I may have the ability to complete a task effectively, but if I do not have enough information about what tasks need to be done to be successful, I cannot apply my 'effective' skills on those tasks.

Do you get what I'm saying? Sam may be effective, but he's also knowledgeable about a wide range of topics, and so is able to know where to apply his methods towards. He knows about these topics because he is likely more intelligent and widely read than the average other startup founder. He is more widely read because he is more intelligent and it is easier for him to absorb more information.

What you call effectiveness is actually just applied intelligence. What you're actually saying is this: become more intelligent and learn how to gather a wide range of information, and then apply this information as effectively as possible, given the constraints you have to work with.

What I'm saying is this: this 'effectiveness' you say Sam has, it's not replicable, because it's made up of intelligence and a talent for applying this intelligence. And those are not available to everyone, unfortunately.
He likes guys? That's fine with me, I don't care, but why bring that up, and how would YOU know?
Why VC Websites Stink
Why VCs May Call
Has The Bubble Burst? The Four Stages of Bubbleness
The Lockdown: Locked, but not secure (Bump Keys)
Want to Try Out MobileMe? Check Out SproutCore
Why the rich don't keep getting richer
Very few of us have extensive experience in more than one library. JavaScript muddled along without standard libraries for a long time.

I use Ruby on Rails, which has support for Prototype/Scriptaculous, so that's what I use. I like it a lot better than straight JavaScript. The thing that the libraries do well at is papering over browser differences. One good aspect is they collect "fixes" and tricks that have been spread all over the web and concentrate them one place.

I'm mystified why Prototype doesn't download in minified format. It's easy and useful to do but I'm sure most folks don't think of it.
What about OpenMoko? The second major revision of their hardware just went into mass production and is supposed to be available Real Soon Now.
Wealthy Entrepeneurs in Emerging Markets
Do we really need to worry that much about derailing threads when we have nested replies?
I'm less concerned with cramming as many users onto a single box as possible than I am with insuring a high quality of service for each active user.

If you have 5000 concurrent sessions in a single OS-level process, you better have some pretty damn good fault-recovery mechanisms built into that process.

When you get right down to it, this is the same basic argument gets used to support Erlang: namely, that it supports large number of cooperating, isolated processes, rather than shoving everything into a single monolithic server.

I trust that the Linux (or BSD, Solaris, or other reasonable OS) kernel can handle scheduling a few thousand processes smoothly, so long as those processes fit into available RAM.

What kills big Apache (or other fork()-driven) server environments isn't context switching between backends, it's swapping.

That being said, you're right about it being all about scale. If you're like Google, or Facebook, and can afford to hire engineers who do nothing but worry about scaling to 10K sessions on each HTTP host by moving your critical-path code into hand-tuned C++ or Java inside the polling server, more power to you. If you're in the normal world most of us live in, where scalability via hardware is more economical than via developer time, then fault isolation may prove more useful than raw throughput.
I think they said it'll be the first 64-bit Mac OS. So, hey, good on 'em.
A startup requires a lot of effort. If he is still excited by the idea and can work on it, then go for it. If he is finding that he is a different person, that's fine too. Everybody responds differently.

I know that with the loss of a family member, the general guidelines are not to make major choices for a year or so. If he is graduating from college, then that may not an option.
"Supposed to" means they do have people in place whose job is to prevent fraud. It's surely not possible to prevent it entirely, but if you're just sitting around working on a startup, I think they'd probably catch on.
It has been about 1.5 years since I investigated bug trackers, and the software packages may have grown features/fixes since.

In my mind the choice of bug trackers comes down to who is the intended audience for it. Is it used for tracking issues by just the developers, or do end users also have access to it (You need a straightforward reporting method - users get very confised)?

You didn't say if you want to use a web-based tracker, or a desktop based version.

Briefly some of my thoughts on some web based trackers:

- Flyspray - I discounted this because it didn't support custom fields at the time. A quick googling shows this feature is in development.

- Trac - Horribly confusing for my bug reporters. Has so many features that's easy to get sidetracked into other parts (such as wiki) and content sprawl. Difficult to theme if you have a standard layout for a public site. It has a very cumbersome flow from visiting the tracker to getting an issue filed properly.

- Mantis - At first it looks really ugly but I've been overjoyed with it. It supported custom fields like I wanted. It was SO customisable. A limited amount can be done through a GUI but there are an insane number of items that can be configured through the config file. A downside to mantis was the awful documentation.

Mantis does have some SVN integration if you're willing to dig through the source code and set it up manually. It's possible setup a SVN commit hook to automatically resolve bugs in the tracker that contain strings like "fixed bug 25" (again, customisable through regular expressions) or a bug is referenced in commit messages, that commit can be added automatically as a note to the bug. (This is in the manual)

I also really liked mantis security groups. It's very flexible when you look at the config files (useful if you have end users submitting say sensitive attachments and only want devs/admins to access it), etc...
More importantly this means no T-Mobile iPhones. All iPhones will be activated at the store.
And people wonder why Steve Jobs and the Apple engineers get worshiped like gods.

Here's Andy Hertzfeld, from Triumph of the Nerds:

Steve was upset that the Mac took too long to boot to boot up when you first turned it on, so he tried motivating Larry Kenyon by telling him: Well, you know how many millions of people are going to buy this machine - it's going to be millions of people - and let's imagine that you can make it boot five seconds faster. Well, that's five seconds times a million every day. That's fifty lifetimes. If you can shave five seconds off that, you're saving fifty lives. And so it was a nice way of thinking about it, and we did get it to go faster.

The less time it takes to make IE6 officially obsolete, the more developer lives will be saved.
Must have been an interesting job though. :)
It's not about why startups are failing - it's about understanding exactly what happens to you personally when they do. When I talk to a lot of people about starting a company, they tend to be freaked out about "losing everything". I try to explain to them that it's rarely as bad as they think (the downside). Everyone I know that's "failed" has recovered in some way. But my data set is limited, so I'm reaching out to get other's viewpoints.
The "Smalltalk community" needs to get over it. Not everybody can be bothered keeping up with the capitalization conventions of every obscure language.

If he were claiming to be a Smalltalk expert but didn't know how to capitalize it then that would be a bad sign, but if he isn't then who cares?
Something I have learnt the hard way: Comments are bad for you.

I used to be a big proponent of comments too, until I realized that having the right variable and function names makes for much better documentation. Any time a chunk of code gets complicated enough for you to feel you need to comment it, you should just abstract it into another function. If you look at arc.arc it is very much written in this fashion.

The problem with comments is that they are not tightly coupled to the implementing code .. if someone comments something and then someone else comes along and changes the code without changing the comment, and then someone else comes along and tries to figure out the code by reading the comment ...
Kid's intro to programming: ideas?
I've been extorted into introducing the neighbor's daughter (and possibly her slightly younger brother) to programming concepts this summer. She will be entering sixth grade (middle school) in the fall. I'm aware of a few possibilities which have educational materials:

- Storytelling Alice (Windows only, I'm Mac).

- Scratch, built on top of Squeak by folks at MIT (I'm currently leaning towards this).

- Squeak itself.

- Hackety Hack, for Ruby. (Currently Windows only, and apparently on hiatus. Looks really neat though).

Any other recommendations? Where's "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" when you need it?
Vim is massively useful for one simple reason: remote editing. I use BBEdit and Emacs for local files, but when I need to SSH into a remote server, there's nothing quite as fast and easy as firing up Vim to edit a config file.
> For me though, the biggest surprise of the keynote is that only 4000 developers are out there.

You mean, only 4000 developers were approved by Apple. Over 250K downloads of the SDK and 25K developer key registrations says to me that the bar is being set pretty high to qualify as an authorized iPhone dev shop.
I'd forgive folks for thinking that you need more than a one-line argument. Last I heard Blackberry sales were significantly higher since the iPhone's introduction, possibly because the iPhone helps attract attention and energy to the entire smartphone market... and because not everyone in the world has the same desires in a smartphone. Some people, for example, seem to be addicted to hardware keyboards, and hey -- more power to them.
How I ended up selecting Python for my latest project
I'd say that iPhone is a pretty impressive hack friend. Well worth mentioning on HN.
Sorry for your loss too.

It's doesn't have to be a counselor, but it can be easier to deal with a professional. I wish I had, because in my situation, I didn't have the right friendships to be able to handle this.

So share with friends. If you have friends that can get you through this, treasure them. Friendships can be a tender thing, and there aren't many people that can handle this easily, let alone with the stress of finals. With this in mind, make it clear to them that they shouldn't feel obligated to be your support. This should help avoid misplaced guilt that they couldn't do more, as well as help you avoid worries about being a burden. Most people have no idea on how to deal with something like this, and even if they do, everyone responds differently.
Just don't upvote the submission. If it's a major dupe, it will get off the front page very quickly.
They had better not charge full price for what seems to be a glorified service release!
>And with this additional risk, comes a reward.

You're getting the cart before the horse. One reason a given reward can exist unplundered is because no-one has taken the risk necessary to get it. There are rewards that don't require risk, but they're quickly taken.
Blinds-Roller Blinds
I think the comments here do a better job of reflecting the problems women are up against as coders, than they do of reflecting the constraints this particular woman has imposed upon her team.

Despite the fact that absolutely no details were provided in the article about her standards, or what she's trying to achieve (other than a few "pithy" interpretations by the author), you've jumped to the conclusion that it's "micromanagement bullshit". You've also taken the most absurd interpretation of her remarks. Why? I'm quite confident that any experienced developer knows the difference between your example, and good documentation practices. Since this particular woman has managed to rise to a position of high authority, perhaps we should give her the benefit of the doubt, hmm?

Anyway...if they weren't so sad, the anguished geek cries of "sexism" in this thread would be hilarious. It's hard to be oppressed by discrimination when you're in the clear and obvious majority.
Voted up to start a trend. IE8 beta 2 is going public this August for christ's sake (aimed at general public, not developers)!

I can't endure this IE6 crap for too much longer.
Pingdom shows Twitter's June 2008 response time at over 3000ms...
Interesting too, because Google is starting to drop the hammer on sites that have long response times.