skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I can tell, no one here has posited the blank slate theory.

My point was that the conclusions we come to about the world around us are the largest factor in determining where we end up on the spectrum between mediocre and extraordinary.

If we really thought DNA was more important than our beliefs, we would spend less time trying to correct and inform each other on Hacker News and more time getting our genes sequenced.
As you mentioned in a later post underground water is not renewable, and about half the US uses underground water (pretty much all the western half of the US).

Only communities nears rivers use renewable water.
Is Twitter Bucket Testing A New Design?
It's is wasteful.

If you define wasteful as anything not critical to staying alive.

But then again pretty much everything is wasteful.
if you are asking the question, then you probably are not in a good position. but it has nothing to do with being 38
If this were actually a problem, they could circumvent this restriction by simply registering many accounts. A better solution -- as others have pointed out in the past -- would be a karma threshold for posting articles, but since it's not a problem yet, why bother?
“I'm thinking, as comatose_kid states, maybe this guy's not old enough. He should be taking advice and reading history books, he has no place actually giving advice.”

I think the text should be judged by the content, rather than the credibility of the author. Authorities can be mistaken, after all. Elaborating; if he were eighty years of age, I would still see it proper to judge his words as harshly as anyone else's.
A combination of older founders from this field mixed with idealistic kids outside the field could probably do very well.
DevCentral Weekly Roundup Episode 47 - Justifying Our Existence
Bloglines, about 150 feeds.

I use about 10 categories: must read, local, off topic, certain topic, like say Python, Javascript, etc.

It was a big problem before I started leaving unread categories for a couple of days. Now it is great. Read couple of categories on daily basis, then the other, when I have time, or sometimes mark them all as read (I hate myself for that later).

OT: Since when Bloglines became so unpopular? Or is it just HN trend? Does Google Reader rule the blog readers world now?
This is Al Gore's fault.
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove. —Antoine de Saint-Exupery
These are the right questions. People often pose the question as a matter of age, which is almost certainly not the determining factor. I will concede that there may be some loss of endurance with age that makes the startup thing harder.

I suspect that the OP just wants a bit of reassurance that he's not too old for this. Of course he's not. 38 isn't too old at all.

I'm 36, and I wouldn't try to start a startup right now. But that's mainly because I have, as you said, a pregnant wife, a three year old, and a mortgage. However, I know a few people who aren't even deterred by those things and do work for startups. I even know a founder in that situation. He is excruciatingly busy, though, and I know that it does take a toll on his personal life.

By the way, I think that working for startups and founding a startup are often completely different things. In the tech heavy bay area, I don't think that a talented programmer assumes all that much risk by joining a well funded startup, because if things head south they can often get a well paid new job within a month or two. Furthermore, "stable" jobs often aren't as stable as they seem - especially if they allow you to let your skills get rusty.

So personally, I think that working for a small startup that pays decently and gives you some nice equity isn't all that bad an idea. However, you won't (and probably shouldn't) get anywhere near the kind of equity that the folks who ate ramen and crammed into a 2br apartment for 18 months get. Instead, think of it as an exciting job with a nice potential upside (I know a few parents who scored that nice upside).
$120K is a lot for a YC-style startup (ramen noodles, web app, and no non-founder employees), but isn't isn't unusual in the larger world. Our seed funding was similar to that, and was basically a F&F round. And for a hosting company, I'm impressed that Engineyard was able to get going and get profitable on $120K.
For all you who love playing with math check out
Option Volatility & Pricing: Advanced Trading Strategies and Techniques by Sheldon Natenberg
DC Post of the Week - Application Health Monitors: Alternate Ports
"... At 38, am I too old for a startup? No ..."

So is there any logic behind this or just a quick response?
Pay a goon to wear a ring that has pi or lambda engraved/embossed and punch your face until you pass out.

He might do it pro bono.
Other than betting on cap & trade gov subsidies, I wonder how they plan to exit these positions...
That may be, but this isn't the place.
I think it will drop bit more when Microsoft buys Yahoo's Search, So don't expect next quarter to be good either and here after.
steak/sizzle
If Sprint Changed their name to MyPenis
the problem with civil action

is that you can't get blood from a stone. If you sue someone without assets or insurance, you probably won't be able to even recover enough to pay the lawyer.

I would argue that it is better to find someone with a good reputation, someone who is careful to preserve that reputation.
To repeat myself:

So, sure, Apple contributes to some Open Source projects...and that's a good thing. But Apple is hostile to openness on many fronts, and that is a bad thing.

I like that Apple is involved in Open Source, and I'm sure WebKit is more awesome than race cars and firetrucks. And I don't begrudge anyone making money from their software--we have proprietary offerings along-side our predominantly Open Source core. Nothing wrong with making money. I just find Apple's hostility to open standards and basic user freedoms, particularly in the mobile space but also in music and media distribution, to be wholly at odds with so many people considering Apple to be a benevolent force in the technology industry.

When Microsoft can, without irony, claim to provide more open solutions to many common problems than another company, it's a really big red flag. If Microsoft is evil (and historically, on many counts, they are), then any company that is worse than Microsoft is...well...worse than Microsoft. Microsoft actually does offer significantly more openness in their mobile platform than Apple. If you don't consider this a serious problem (given that mobile devices are the future of computing, and the only way a huge number of people will ever get to the Internet), then we'll just have to agree to disagree. Nothing is going to convince me that Apple's animosity to openness on mobile devices is not a dangerous move backward for the mobile industry.
If you ask (really) seriously, then yes.

But if you only need some drive: the only part of us which really goes down every year is our body; all other things are able to increase, if you continue to train them.
I believe without empirical evidence that 1024 is the new standard. If it is possible, I suggest writing the web site such that it is browser-width agnostic; that it shrinks and expands gracefully. If not possible, then I conclude that the web site is some kind of graphically pleasing design which is probably targeting a specific audience, and in such case it is known whether the bulk of that audience will have modern screen resolutions. If this is not the case, I would simply stick with 1024 and bite the bullet. Good luck.
Wow thats incredible. I haven't seen a Neo in the flesh, I would love to get one of they work here in Australia.

I have an older iphone, I find its quite easy to read at that DPI, but the Neo DPI could be much better (I hear the kindle looks like reading paper, need to check that out, once again, we probably can't use it here yet !).

It sucks being in the "ass end" of the world sometimes.
And here I thought semaphores were well understood.
Studying a theory of knowledge for the past year hasn't left me with a bunch of definitions, but with models for the acquisition of knowledge that have proven very useful.

I'm sure someone probably told Newton that all that math stuff looked like more trouble than it was worth.
"Earlier this year GoDaddy won the rights to distribute domains under the extension .me, which belongs to the country of Montenegro."

Blast! I thought it meant "me" as in "myself" and that it was meant for personal pages and such... I didn't see Montenegro mentionned anywhere, in fact namecheap says .me is for personal pages...

I wondered why the heck I hadn't heard of .me before today, now I know.

So .me is officially for Montenegro but is a new de-facto "standard" for personal pages? Or I've been mostly conned out of 80$ (2 domains)?

edit: I'll still put those domains to good use eventually. One domain for me, one for my company, one for each of my projects. Perfect!
I tried registering a domain, and wasn't able to when GoDaddy's servers were being hammered. I'd used GoDaddy for years, but I have to say, I've seen the light, they've lost my service.

Why is it so hard for companies to take my money when I try to hand it to them? They had to have known that the demand was high for these .me domain names. There's no excuse for them to have prepared for this kind of traffic.

Heh, now that I think about it, Apple's iPhone situation is remarkably similar to this one. ;-)
Does that mean you have reached some level of success, at least in visibility to attract it? Can that help at all in terms of general business or investment (should you need it) ?
It's not your age that counts, but your level of PASSION (and the target market), as some wise man once said, "There's no OFF switch on a successful entrepreneur". Col. Sanders was in his seventies when he started KFC. But ... it really depends on your level of debt and risk aversion. And of course, if you have a significant other then he/she must share your passion otherwise you'll either drop out or your significant other with be very EX! Starting a business will not get you out of debt quickly (if ever) but further into debt until you start making more than you spend.
Banned Interview With Sprint’s Android Manager
Scaling Ruby on Rails to 1 Billion Page Views a Month
I will tweet and maybe blog about this. I really can't help him much with the money part, but the least i can do is show it to people who have money.
Forex Signal Provider? Which one?
We have developed an absolutely superb Forex Signal system based on detailed research, close market watching and careful technical analysis which has performed fabulously so far – bringing over 800 pips a month
I had just bought ping.me from godaddy, i got a successfully bought mail too but after 20 min I get a mail telling me, I can't buy it because it is already registered.

Then i did a quick twitter search and found 2 other people had also bought ping.me . Wondering who will get that domain.
I think that the argument there is that shared memory is not useful to transfer data from one process to another, but to share data between processes. Which is quite different use case.

Shared memory is fast, but it is just a shared memory. You have to synchronize accesses to it in some way.

When you want to transfer relatively small records from one process to another, it is probably faster to send them through pipe, because the copying overhead is negligible compared to synchronization overhead, which would be there in shared memory case too (and will probably be larger).

So to wrap up:

1) In most cases it is really needed to tell kernel that you are done and want to wait on some event in other process (relying on preemption or explicit timed sleeps to switch to other process is considered bad practice)

2) Writing once is indeed faster than multiple times, which is in this case of many small writes argument for pipes. Because pipe lets you hand over some data to kernel and let it do any low-level synchronization details, which it can generally do better.

3) In UNIX, pipes/sockets are the most flexible means of IPC. And in case where you have server that reads large chunks of data from multiple clients using shared memory, synchronizing accesses to this shared memory by sockets/pipe is good idea, because you can use select(2)/poll(2) on such socket. Using mutexes or semaphores or something like that would in most cases lead to busy-waiting or unnecessary convoluted code.
Confirmed (as weird), it works fine for me.
Yahoo: Carl Icahn isn't just a tech-ignorant speculator - he's a bad speculator
AMD CEO Steps Down
I guess the reasons PG and co recommend youung-uns are mainly:

1) Energy (physical, I guess)
2) No serious financial obligations
3) No family obligations.

I think #2 is probably the biggest. However, if you are older and have no debt/mortgage, plenty of everything, they why not. #3 you can't do anything about really, but as long as you don't mess with #2, the #3's in your house won't be too upset.

Also having kids teaches you to sleep efficiently and economically (you sleep when you can).

I find it fascinating to watch startups, I think its an awesome thing to do.
I am doing the same, sent out a series of Tweets. A blog post will follow tomorrow
I had no problem .me-ing at dynadot.
I think that Doerr may be betting that if he throws enough money at enough different startups, one of them is likely to come up with something that is economically competitive with fossil fuels, and can replace it over the long term. The worldwide oil market is in the trillions; it's not like there's a lack of money to be had.

It's basically a high-stakes gamble with other people's money. If he wins, he goes down in history as the man (well, the guy behind the man) who saved the planet and ushered in the solar era. If he loses, his reputation is toast, as his clients' money.

I'd give you about 10:1 odds that he loses, but considering the payoffs to himself, Kleiner, his clients, and mankind as a whole, I'm glad he's taking that bet.
Ask HN: Recommended books for usability, workflow/project management, IA and more
I'd like to do some broad background reading on a range of subjects such as website usability, information architecture, project/workflow management of large website builds, management of functional tasks, etc. to supplement existing knowledge through common sense, small project experience, anecdotal learnings etc.

I've got 2 books I've come across that I'm considering purchasing:

Don't Make Me Think!: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability:

Web Redesign: Workflow That Works (Voices That Matter)

Does anyone know these books and what do you think of them? Otherwise what would you recommend?

I know it's a broad list but these are the areas I need to cement my knowledge in and fast!

Thanks.
Very likely. I've also noticed that whenever you put a hacker into just about any non-technical field, they can very quickly spot dozens of areas of inefficiency that could be resolved with a little technology.

Often, the problems aren't even hard. Barcodes added to all forms being filed by customers, or added to "things" in the warehouse, or organized in a database rather than on the shelf (like Zappos does), etc. And a lot of non-technical industries make a lot of money...saving a few dozen companies a few dozen million each year via automation is a recipe for a beautiful lifestyle business.

I did IT work for a guy in Austin that served court papers...a totally low-tech industry. Individual guys (and a few rugged gals) drive out to peoples houses and personally deliver divorce court summons, etc. The guy I worked for began automating his company in the late 80's or early 90's, several years before anyone else, and by the time I stopped working for him, I believe he had the largest process service company in Texas (and, probably the nation, since Texas is mighty big), though all are privately held, so it's hard to say for sure who was "biggest", but he covered nearly the whole state and almost everyone else only covered one or two cities, and had several million in revenue from ~30 or so employees and ~100 independent field agents. Anyway, there was tons of low-hanging fruit in this industry because it had never been automated before. And because he had lots of process servers on his payroll and many lawyers/legislators that he worked with on a regular basis, he got to shape policy with regards to how it all worked. The state opened up electronic filings with many of its legal papers around 2005, which gave him an even bigger leg up on the competition, because all of his data was already going into a database.

I'm just saying that technical people might be well-served by looking at currently non-technical industries for their golden goose. There are plenty of industries still to be saved from tedium by making computers do more of the work.
I could have probably worded that better - I just meant it was a lot of money to raise from friends and family.
Its a ballsy move, I think its great. Death or Glory !

(if Death means you retire in shame, comfortably retire of course !).
Okay, you may be too old.
As a leading brand in England says.. "every little helps", I'm sure they'll reach their target if everyone chips in one way or another.
This is fascinating, thank you very much for posting it.
Me too, I've moved to Dynadot for my domain needs after this incident...
Why was this banned?
Hmm donated via paypal but get this after reaching mysql's site:

Checkout
Cannot checkout because you have no items in your cart
I agree with you but I think your odds are way too generous :). Vinod Khosla is another high profile VC that has taken some heavy positions in clean tech as well but he has kept his ear to the ground and has invested in quite a few of internet/tech startups as well.

Problem with clean tech is that most of it is capital intensive and many times you have no idea if something will work until you spend $10M on it. You just can't fail fast. After you do your R&D, few years will pass. Then, if you have something, you will have to raise another huge round so you can build it out. That's very cap intensive and again, takes long time.

Most funds operate on a 7yr timeline. With cleantech, you'll be lucky if you make an exit after 10 years. And still, the biggest issue, as I pointed initially, is the lack of exit points. IPOs are very hard these days and who knows what the future will look like.
There are cons, but a lot of people have a PayPal account - a lot of people who otherwise would not enter their credit card info to donate.
They were obviously losing money. You don't sell out for 15 times less than what your VCs have put in if you're banking.
Apple iPhone 3G Black 16GB Unlocked
The Apple iphone 3g comes in two colors depending on how Gigabytes of internal memory you choose. If you opt for 8 Gigabytes then you’re stuck with black, but if you spring for 16 Gigs then you can choose between black or white.
As if building a popular blog was something they were able to do only by being bitten by radioactive spiders

Obviously, 37s had to do something more than simply getting bitten by radioactive spiders; but it's a good start!

:)
The average age of a startup founder in the U.S. is 35.
I should give credit Andy Beard and Social Browse~

Andy: http://socialbrowse.com/profile/view/915/
SB: http://socialbrowse.com
My SB: http://socialbrowse.com/profile/view/276/
You can when you get a high enough karma.
"Is there anything that people don’t know about Android in general?

People seem to have the right idea, but here are three matters to set our expectations: (1) Android has stiff, astute competition that is reacting to its plan (2) Android isn’t providing unknown magic other OSes are quantum leaps behind on. In many cases their competition is ahead. (3) Android’s strength as an internet-centric device is wildly exciting, however, mobile devices that render the internet experience like that of a desktop are going to be higher-end devices for the foreseeable future (5+ years). This is due to a myriad of technical and business reasons."
I think for most applications this isn't accurate. It is true that simplicity is hard to achieve, but if you can deliver a compelling result without a lot of setup or initialization (e.g. three month professional services engagement) and without large changes in customer behaviour, you can capture much more of the value you are creating for your customer. It's when they have to put their best people on it for weeks to months to make it work (which they include in the calculation of the total cost of acquisition and ownership) that you are imposing additional costs that are subtracted from the value you create.
Theories about persuasion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=249087
That would be a bad idea since submissions follow a powerlaw , meaning that the majority come from a relatively low number of users that submit a lot. Check http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nickb for an example.
for when that day comes...

http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll
I agree with "simplicity is really easy to charge for." People will pay more for a simple path to a result that they value. This makes your demo easier to understand and actual time to adopt faster as well (fewer, easier to follow steps).
I got the same, probably just because they've hooked it up using their default paypal options.. Got the receipt for the donation though so it goes through fine.
Really? What's the number?
Persai launches, now called Pressflip
I'm currently exploring a "What If" idea.

I'm designing my first web site.

I can only do it during nights and weekends.

I'm happy.

I'm 35.

I will never quit.
> You have to synchronize accesses to it in some way.

Pretty simple.

> it is probably faster to send them through pipe, because the copying overhead is negligible compared to synchronization overhead, which would be there in shared memory case too (and will probably be larger).

There is still synchronization overhead -- just because it's hidden from you in the kernel doesn't mean it isn't there. You should check out the source of your favorite kernel and see how much work is done behind the scenes to transfer data over a socket.

So you have an extra copy, PLUS extra synchronization overhead. The only reason people ever think that method is faster is because of operator error, e.g. creating and destroying shared memory segments thinking it's like malloc.

> 1) In most cases it is really needed to tell kernel that you are done

man futex

Or just busy-wait, or do a nonblocking "read" like you would anyway when reading from a socket.

> kernel and let it do any low-level synchronization details,

Look at the code. Really. It's a lot of overhead compared to userspace solutions.

> In UNIX, pipes/sockets are the most flexible means of IPC

s/flexible/common

Obviously shared memory is the most flexible because you can implement whatever scheme you want with it. There's always shared memory somewhere anyway, even with sockets, it's just hidden from you in the case of kernel code.

> Using mutexes or semaphores or something like that would in most cases lead to busy-waiting or unnecessary convoluted code.

Busy-waiting is done in multiple places in the kernel. If you're blocking on read anyway, what's the difference -- and if you're not, it's no more convoluted to check a shared condition variable on each pass than nonblocking reads and accumulations.
I don’t think age is a factor for starting a company. I think age is a state of mind. . Anyway, if you have the passion for the idea, nothing can stop you from achieving what u want. It is this passion that has been driving some of the great folks in the industry
I use safari's built in RSS reader or Google Reader. I usually read the whole feed unless it is quite large and then I skim them or read the first 10.
I'm not sure. But I have enough karma at 85. I think the number has changed over time, but I'm not sure.

Maybe PG will share it with us or someone has recently hit the magic number?