skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
re: Getting by in high school - my last year of high school I was able to spend all of my time in the teacher's lounge or around the school (I helped paint a mural) as long as I got A's on all my tests. Perhaps you can work out something similar.
I was thinking of something that looked like let. Since you wouldn't be able to do it for all types, it seems like it would be better to make the programmer see the vars he was going to close over. Otherwise you'd run into the kinds of problems Lisp hackers ran into in the days of dynamic scope, where your code works (till it doesn't) by accident.
I have read thousands of News.YC comments - and your story about failure is one of the best in my opinion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=121413
I never had my own "startup" per se, but I did start a web business right out of high school, what I learned from that:

1. Don't give up easily. I had like 5k in revenue per month out of the gate and I shut it down... which leads me too...

2. Manage your money well. I mostly couldn't manage the business by myself, handling SEO, SEM & Other affiliated tasks, while packing/shipping orders, developing and paying quarterly sales tax, properly writing things off... which leads me too...

3. Find a good co-founder, but really truly, no matter what, be able to rely on that person and let them be able to really rely on you.
I don't mean to suggest dropping out, but it's not necessarily as bad as you imply. I dropped out at 16 (12 years ago) and still managed to go to a good college, and have had a series of good jobs.

More problematic things that I see:

You'll need an older co-founder. Justified or not, business folk and investors aren't going to take you seriously at 17. Not to mention that you won't be able to rent hotel rooms for business travel, or cars where need be, won't be able to open a business bank account, etc.

If it doesn't work out in the first go, which realistically speaking is probably for any first-off startup, you're not going to have a lot to show for it when you're, say, 18 or 19 and throw in the towel. Actually the worst case is it just stringing you along but not really going anywhere and it getting frustrating late to start college.

In my case, despite "making it", I still view dropping out as more or less a mistake. It didn't really screw up my life in any significant way, but looking back on it, it's just nine months of part-time, easy work. Nine months is nothing. I spent six months (while working full-time) just trying to learn what I'd need to know to jump into a start up before going full-time on it.

My brother was smarter about it. He just decided to not take any honors classes, set up about half of his time senior year to be internship hours and skimmed by putting in almost no effort. You could probably intern in your own company if you had an older co-founder...
Yuma: New scripting tool for web developers
Interview About Web 2.0
I'm not trying to flame you, but in what usage of the word can you call yourself an entrepreneur?
Walking the Line When You Work from Home
I'm close to getting my PhD in Computer Science. I consider myself a pretty good programmer, and the first time I did any programming, it was my senior year of high school. The first time I really understood code was my freshmen year of college.

When I entered college as a CS major, there were a lot of kids who already had programming experience, and they had an edge. After four years, that edge faded, and what mattered was the individual.
Go to college for at least one year. The act of finishing high school with decent grades and getting admitted to a decent college (a state university, at least) is a basic badge of competence that will serve as a useful social signal for the rest of your life. Among people who went to college, high school dropouts get zero respect; even the ones who are rich get only the respect they can buy. I know that's unfair, but that's society for you.

Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs went to college. They dropped out after a year, but I assure you that the first year is important. Among other things, you might decide that you really like college: It's completely different from high school, not merely because you're no longer in a minimum-security prison, but also because some of the smartest people on earth are literally eating lunch in the seat next to you.

OTOH, college is very expensive and you might decide you don't need it. But first go for a year and get the best grades that you can, given that you intend to spend every available hour hacking on your part-time startups. :) After you've been admitted to college and done a year of decent work, it will be that much easier to get readmitted to college, one or two or five years down the road. It will improve your maneuvering room, it will place you in the college-student social class (which might very well be the one you're marketing to, and the one your coworkers are in...) and it will be that much easier to tell the story of your life to a future employer, customer, or bank manager: "I did well in school and went to college, but then got distracted by my startup company and took a year off, but then the startup tanked so I went back to school for a couple of years before my second startup hit it big."
A Guide to Micro Seed Funding
Monema - VOIP hosted PBX Virtual office phone system
Everything is Miscellaneous ...
Here's the link to their two posts on TechCrunch before they were accepted to YC: http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/ipartee/
"An ancient philosophic truth - there are severe limits to what we know and can know"
It Takes a School, Not Missiles
I will explain. I work on my self. Most people around me waste their time. They just want to go get drunk or something. Some of them are ambitious, but most of them just say they are. A girl from my class says she wants to become a layer ant thinks that she can become one without any understanding of rhetorics or any other essential theory needed for that job. She doesn't even try to get good grades in the classes that she will need(she got some good grades but that is through obedience in school, not knowledge or any understanding of the subject). A lot of people around me are like that. They try to go the easy way. I am more ambitious. When i was a kid, me and my friends tried to make ice cream money through a lot of different means(some of them illegal too) Like selling sandwiches or cleaning houses and stuff like that. Most kids just watched TV, i was learning about the world, understanding my surroundings and looking for options. I knew from an early age that i had potential. My plan is simple. Go through school, and get in to a good university(all i have to do is get through a few math tests and i have a whole year to get ready) Then just study, have fun and meet people. Then if i actually get somewhere i might not graduate, but i think that i will get to the end probably(as a safety net) Then start a startup in Bulgaria, probably will not make a lot of money, but my hope is that it will be enough to move to the USA(or any other startup hub that may be existing in 8-10 years) and make money there. Of course it might not happen that way, so i don't make strict plans, i just try to learn to hack, its hard, because there are not a lot of good hackers near my town.
A great essay by one of the true geniuses of American literature. His books should be required reading for every high school student in the country.

RIP Kurt Vonnegut Jr.
How to stay awake when coding all night?
How do you know it's salty?
There are several places in this comment where you forgot to write "that I know of".
This post really should have linked directly to the site of the people actually making the fonts rather than to some blog copying it. They seem to have dozens of fonts available -- although with really specific terms of use:

http://kevinandamanda.com/scrapbook/fonts/fontsforpeas
Books for Entrepreneurs: Bargaining for Advantage
Filtrbox Dials the Noise Way Down
Bankrupt at 20, proves useful in my 30's
I'm not sure what you mean by "handle the tables internally", but as a really rough exercise, you can think of just raw table reads.

If you have 6 tables that need joined, you're going to need to "look through" each to find the ones with a matching id. If it's all one table it's essentially just one read.

Now, there are many many caveats to all of this (how indexes are setup, relative sizes of tables, etc. but in general it is more computationally expensive to do more joins).
Not sure I would ever pay for software to tell me where I am spending my time.
> the mindset for coding (anal retentive, OCD, borderline autistic, you know the type ;))

Sounds like you've been reading too much Slashdot, not enough HN.

Seriously, I'm a hacker and not any of those things (not that I am or ever was Mr. Popular either). I think there likely is some cognitive secret sauce that makes some people much more likely to be competent programmers, but I don't think it's maladjustment. [The Camel Has Two Humps](http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/paper1.pdf) paper I saw linked somewhere (probably here) seemed like a promising approach for showing who has the sauce.

The authors are now working on describing the sauce more carefully, and it looks like they're providing some of the testing materials they're using at http://www.cs.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/ .
Sheesh. How long until WP, with regular, excellent upgrades surpasses Drupal, which is loads more "powerful" but has a much slower development cycle and a lousy, awful UI?
Paint Servers: SVG and Canvas
I'm with you. Nothing needs to be done that urgently that you need to do drugs. I put little stock in the "no side effects" voices. The body wasn't made to do this sort of thing, forcing it to just can't be good.
Signs, of a certain type:

1. A post about relational databases where the word "relation" is never used. Resulting in...

2. Missing the whole idea/point of relational databases--that relations are logical data structures, not physical data structures. Resulting in...

3. Thinking that normalization applies to the physical table structure, rather than the logical relation structure. And...

4. Not realizing that there are only 3 relations being represented by the 6-table representation. Resulting in...

5. A lot of writing about an absurd false dichotomy.
It's not mentioned in the article, but I think the advent of services like Amazon SDB and Google App Engine's datastore (ala BigTable), where traditional joins are not possible is effecting application design.

It's probably a worthwhile exercise to think about how you would model your data if you needed to port it to GAE/AWS SDB, just to figure out where the faults in your original data model were.
In theory the db could keep the separate tables in one table internally. But granted, probably it won't always do so.
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!

OK, part of the motivation is to learn from those with more recent experience and within the context of a startup.

Another part of the motivation is to highlight the importance of failure to two close friends of mine who have undergone the shutdown of their own businesses at the same time.

It's sometimes tough to trudge onto something with a fresh spirit when your expectations (evil little things) are squashed.
This depends heavily on implementation details. If you are using Oracle (rare, I know for any company not in the Fortune 500), then just make a materialized view and you are set. Oracle will pre-compute most of the data in the view and ensure consistency (<<-- Not an oracle DBA so some confirmation here would be nice). Furthermore, some database engines handle joins and the kind a lot more efficiently than others.

Furthermore, some kind of query caching mechanism will always be a better choice than de-normalization and most decent databases have that inbuilt (and if you really want, you are welcome to add memcached on top of that though that is not guaranteed to be correct). Either way, there are a lot more options than straight out de-normalization.
Voting Begins For The 2008 Open Source CMS Award
Eh. The medium is the message. There's a reason that the verbiage changes as you go from "Go Dog Go" to "Getting real" to "Reader's digest" to "The NY Times" to "Nature". It's not all conceit on the part of the authors.

Aside from that, 37signals tends to posit rules of thumb as if they were categoricals.

http://gettingreal.37signals.com/ch03_The_Three_Musketeers.p...

"For the first version of your app, start with only three people."

This seems to assume that an audience consisting of programmers is ignorant of the facts that...

1) Multics started with a huge team.

2) Unix started with a team of three.

3) Linux started with a team of one.

...and so would presumably realize that no rule of thumb on the subject of team size can be made. In fact, successful projects have wildly varied geneses. Were I to make a rule, I would account for that fact and say, "Start with the best people you know, who are willing to commit to a project". Does this make more sense? Rest assured I am no genius for saying it. It's common sense.

But it's common sense that 37signal's almost always consistently lacks, despite their 'tude for simplicity.
Was Cube Runner Pulled from iPhone App Store?
I found a great game on the iPhone called cube runner and now it's not there anymore. What could have happened?
While I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to (depending on the price, I may be one of them -- I'm a big fan of RescueTime), my understanding is that they are targeting businesses with their paid version.
I've tried Provigil, and found it wasn't really all it was cracked up to be. The only thing it really does is make you less tired. I guess that's great if you want to be awake for 40 hours at a time, but for mental clarity and sharper thought: Drink water.

Drink a LOT of water. I bet that half of these guys taking Provigil because they need the 'edge' have never forced themselves to drink a gallon of regular old water in a day. Soda, coffee, and tea don't count. You'd be amazed how many people spend years in a state of mild dehydration.

Drinking water has given the biggest improvement to me mentally, far and away. In second place is not eating meat during the workday; but that pales in comparison to just drinking enough water.
$8.59 per gallon of gas - is this math right?
Ah found the answer, http://andyqua.co.uk/CubeRunner/News.html

No Apple conspiracy I guess :-(
High school is evil. It is satanic. I hated it too. Still, I'd at least get a GED. Also, I myself did not finish college, but to "offset" that resume-wise, I got a couple of those COMPTIA certifications. If one doesn't do much on the education side, balancing it with a couple of certifications is always a good thing. At least that is what I have heard from other people, and is what I did myself. (I got the A+ and Network+ certificatons). As for programming I started with a "teach yourself java" book myself, but if I had to do it all over again I would have started with c/c++. Currently I have a job writing test scripts in silktest which has similarities to both java and c, so it all works out, lol. Good luck.
Can you back up those broad claims?

What broad claims?

I think I can see why it turns into "you vs the world".

Sounds pretty much like you're making a "claim" yourself. Care to back up what you "see" with a little data?
This has to be among the cooler things I have seen. Really like what Radiohead, Trent Reznor, etc are doing. In the synth community, there are quite a few programmers developing synths, scripting various sampling engines etc. Hopefully more of them (the lesser known ones) will get some props for their coding skills
Domize: Visualize your domains
IPhone Web: Multitouch JavaScript “Virtual Light Table”
Boston-based startup VideoIQ Raises $10 Million in Second Round of VC
Along with majority of comments, I agree, stay in high school. I would go even further to say, go to college because it is like elven paradise and will help in your startup adventure. Here's why:

A) Smart people. It's not a perfect filter (not everyone is smart), but you'll find some folks in there who might be willing to join your fellowship. Oh, and everyone lives really close to each other- and perhaps you could even live together.

B) Resources. You'll be blessed with many gifts- economies of scale to help you out here. You can work with professors on cutting edge nerdy stuff, get free bandwidth from the school, be able to snag a few servers, get the school's PR department to work for you, and get some money to start a "startup club" to pay for your pizza when you're working.

C) Education. You can't program. Neither can I, but for god's sake I wish I had just taken a few classes to get me started because self-starting is tough and you hit some road blocks. If you do that, then you will be learning from people better than you and perhaps can make more friends for your quest.

D) Time. Instead of partying like Bilbo Baggins, work on your startup. School does get in the way, but you have more vacation time and free 3-day weekends to get you going. If you do just school and your startup, you'll find your startup will take up more of your time. You can time public release to the school year- 3 months (about the same as YC). You should be able to make something each semester and get progressively better.

F) Failure. You might find out that you don't like this startup trip to Mordor. In fact, you may find you don't like the software task at all. Well, you have a lot of other things to learn and to enjoy.

G) Success. If you're successful, then you can easily leave college. In fact, many colleges let you defer indefinitely. I think Sam Altman is on leave from Stanford still... :)
8 Reasons why XML Sucks
This is a great post with a lot of good data that oughta be very interesting to people here. Possibly the best kind of post we could have. I'd like to see a lot more of these. Thanks, Tony!
Well, if Zen didn't kill you...
At 17, you probably don't have a very realistic idea of your capabilities. Most 17 year olds are a lot better at dreaming than they are at accomplishing difficult things. (Some 37 year olds too, ahem.)

If you have a track record of completing long term projects that you wanted to do (not your teachers, not your parents) that's evidence that you're an exception. If you don't have that kind of track record, take a little warning.

Either way, you should still go for it.

School truly sucks, but I'd get the HS diploma at least, and encourage your friend to do the same. If your venture doesn't work out, you'll be a lot less stuck if you've graduated. Treat school as a system to be gamed and worked around.

Learn to program. See "realistic assessment" above. If you can't program at all, you're not likely to do well running a code based start up. You don't have to be a brilliant coder, just reasonably capable.

(On the other hand, I've heard Ryan Carson doesn't code. Don't know much about the guy. Exceptions, rules.)

Good luck.
The home built "cluster" is not something new. A lot of academics have been doing this for years, sometimes in their labs, sometimes at home. The small cluster is pretty much dead (as per Chris Dadginian). If I wanted to do a lot of number crunching, the way to go would be to get a dedicated 8-core machine and likely use some kind of accelerator (GPU or other). If I wanted more juice, it does get tricky. A serious number crunching cluster needs some fast interconnects, etc, which are not cheap.

The fact that he is not familiar with now much parallel code is written in Fortran is a little troubling. I wonder how much he knows about Infiniband, high performance storage, cooling, etc, the tricks that lead to real high teraflops --> sub-petaflop performance, cause if I am not getting that, then his offering has limited use.
How to make a font of your handwriting with free software
I wouldn’t have been able to launch without Modafinil...

How do you know? Did you try?
Filtrbox's own FAQ describes Filtrbox as "a value-add layer between the millions of sources online and your browser or desktop," whatever that means.

At $200/year for the cheapest premium option, seems far too expensive. The free option limits you to just 5 "Filtrs."

I'm not sure what this is exactly. The linked article above makes it sound as if it were a glorified feed reader, but I signed up for a trial account and there's nowhere to import OPML. I can import Google Alerts, but that's it. More digging reveals I can import specific feeds, but not OPML, under the Account->Content tab of the dashboard (strangely not under the Sources tab where I first looked).

As a side note, the entire "Getting Started" instructions are all videos, with no text description anywhere that can quickly be skimmed or searched. I see videos as a fine complement, but not as the primary means of instruction since not everyone can always watch videos (e.g. no speakers/headphones/low bandwidth).

Finally, it takes the main filtrbox dashboard takes a while to load, as it is apparently one massive piece of flash.
At my old school they tested incoming freshmen and sent many of them to a pass / fail English 050 class. It seems odd that most schools don't have such programs.
We use the original: http://instantdomainsearch.com
On Uselessness of VCs and Consultants (part of the article)
I think a lot of people also completely miss the fact that there is more then one way to have a normalized DB. Much like OO design, there's a big gap between smart,good, efficient implementations and the rest.
The most helpful grade I ever received on an essay was an 'F'.

It was in my first year of university. I knew the course and knew the material but couldn't have been arsed to put together a paper which adequately addressed the subject.

The comments the professor wrote were scathing and it was a wonderful full slap on the face that I'd better get my act together and actually deliver what was expected of me if I ever wanted to accomplish something of value.

I did. Thanks for that 'F'.
Know when to quit. Sometimes the business just isn't there, but you're in denial. In the end you just run yourself into the ground and it take a long, long time to recover.
Seriously, you're better off actually getting sleep and writing code once you get your mind back. If you need to pull all-nighters all the time, it's a good sign your time management skills need tuning.

Debugging code from a coworker who thinks he's a hero when he commits incoherent garbage at 4 AM is a waste of everyone's time. Don't encourage it.
The World As I See It
>What broad claims?

>Any stimulant, I don't care which (food, drugs, etc.) has another side, i.e., what goes up must go down.
You're a good friend. Some of these are pretty good stories, and I think just hanging out and talking to your friends (dare to delve into feelings) might be better for them (maybe avoiding the pep talk).
The VPN is a policy tool, not a security tool. There are no good security tools for managing SSH sessions; you might as well just not have a firewall if you allow it in.
I'm not sure I agree with you 100% on your police work there, Lou. SFTP is its own protocol; it runs over SSH, but is substantially more complicated than "scp". "sftp" is not just user interface, like scp is.
College is a LOT of fun, and getting rich is no replacement for enjoying life moment-by-moment.

I'd finish school, AND go to college. Try your hand at being a CS major. You really do have enough free time at college to start a business if you want. If your buddy is really so determined, go to the same school together. Drop out only if you get traction.

Walking a tightrope is safer if you have a safety net (education) to fall back on. Not only that, but reading these startup stories, you get the mistaken impression that quitting/dropping out is some mystical talisman that leads to success, but there's a selection bias. The people who burned their bridges and failed aren't in any founders at work stories, they're often stuck in relatively menial/low paying jobs or back in school.