skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> If this came from Paul Graham, I would probably sit up and take notice but here, meh.

Right, because all wisdom in the startup scene flows from those that have made millions during the .com boom.

Really, people like Paras are running start-ups today and are making money today, not 10 years ago, and even if Paul Graham is a very smart and capable person if it came to picking someones brain about running a start-up today I'm pretty sure that there is value to be found with both parties rather than just with those that succeeded in the past.

> Still the blog is well written and the advice is worth a try if you are wired that way.

So, you disagree with yourself?

If you're running a start-up you should take your advice where ever you find it and weigh it according to the rules of applicability to your situation, no matter what the source. You can even learn a lot from failures, no point in limiting your input to just the success stories.
> Why are people still talking about this?

The post is from 2005 ;-).
Physical currency is really nothing more than an agreement between parties that the paper is representative of some value. In actuallity, it's really just another piece of paper, but it's considerably easier to exchange than goats or cows or gallons of fuel.

I'm a fan of their use of the 'Rock Band' typeface on the Trillion Dollar notes.
If you want an introduction to making Scheme games in a graphical environment that lets you iteratively code and run, you might try DrScheme combined with this book draft:

http://world.cs.brown.edu/1/

Note to Steve: your comment section does not seem to work.
Thanks Jacob! --Jason from FlightCaster-- The good vibe is much appreciated. We've got really sweet stuff we'll be rolling out soon...
How long does it take? If it takes 12 months, you can try 3-4 different app ideas in that timeframe, if you're good enough.

You're comparing two different risk profiles, and I don't think one or the other is clearly better.
I didn't know about function.length; the function overloading trick in the last section is pretty clever.
Using Google Analytics with jQuery Mobile
>Capitalism, and the income inequality it causes, has proven itself time and again as the most efficient organizing principle to create wealth.

Bizarre statement. Compared to what? Primitive cultures that didn't have money? At what do you mean by "wealth"? Fiat currency (in which case Mugabe has been the most successful)? Accumulated toys and gadgets?

Because if you're talking about anything else you're talking about capitalist countries. Sweden is capitalist, as in Denmark (despite both having over 50% tax rates). Hell, so is "communist" China.

The question is just how much regulation they use and where, but make no mistake: they are all capitalist systems.
No, you can hold on to a long position forever; the most you can lose is the amount you invested.
Ask HN: A native OSX app that combines chat and Twitter?
Is there an existing application that combines Google Talk-compatible chat with a Twitter client?

I like the idea of having all my "realtime communication" stuff in one place and as a developer it's nice having a native app that isn't impacted by frequent browser switching/restarts/purging/etc.
True, and I considered hedging that phrase. Then I reconsidered, as it's pretty much implicit in the notion of shorting.
Social Media Poll: Where do you fall in?
Comparing the IndexedDB implementations on IE, FireFox and Chrom
In fact M-exp where intended for Lisp code before S-exp (which were originally meant to represent data only). IIRC, the story is data S-exp were used for code temporarily because it was easier this way, and then they find it usable enough.
Oracle VirtualBox 4.0 Expands VM Support
Microsoft Starts Building Iowa Data Center
And just ironic that right at this moment the news about FlightCaster acquisition appear higher on the HN home page :)
Could Adium be what you're looking for?

http://adium.im/
You're basically describing a slightly more useful Wolfram Alpha. Is that really what you want?
How about looking for some remote work?
for a citation, the preface to the second edition includes this:

[A. Square] has himself modified his own personal views, both as regards to Women and as regards the Isosceles or Lower Classes...But, writing as a Historian, he has identified himself (perhaps too closely) with the views generally adopted by Flatland, and (as he has been informed) even by Spaceland Historians; in whose pages (until very recent times) the destinies of Women and of the masses of mankind have seldom been deemed worthy of mention and never of careful consideration.

In the preface to Flatterland, a sequel of sorts, Ian Stewart explains that ¨Abbott was, in fact, a social reformer who believed in equal education opportunity for all social classes and genders; Flatland´s narrow-minded social system is his cry of frustration¨ as he wished to ¨satirize the rigid social structure of Victorian England...especially the lowly status accorded to women.¨
It's actually more like saying a Lamborghini sucks because the steering wheel is square. It's a very basic feature of the language, and not one that you can avoid using.
I worked for a start-up that failed (as an employee, not a founder). We were able to get "angel" funding to keep going for a couple of years but not the big VC money that was needed for this domain (medical devices, so no "customers" other than euthanized animals).

The founders were serial entrepreneurs with a good track record and a lot of clout. I would summarize the reasons for failure as the following:

1) Obsessive efforts on patents, sucking up valuable time of key people.
2) Not enough nitty-gritty technical folks. Literally half of the staff were "Vice presidents"-- if you can even imagine that.
3) I remember reading Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 rule (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html) and laughing at what were putting on-- more like "200 slides - 8 hours - 10pt font".
4) We shoulda made a more convincing prototype. We could have done it if less time was spent on patents and bullshit.

The founders had been successful in a much smaller domain. They made a lot of money and, I think, wanted to raise the stakes. It was a reach and it didn't work. However, I don't think anyone has/had hard feelings. We tried, learned a lot, and got to do some interesting stuff.

I now work for a boring company to pay the bills and do moonlight freelance with a buddy. If we ever go down the start-up route, I doubt we would ever attempt getting VC funding. I prefer keeping things small, manageable and profitable-- even if the profit is small.
Link isn't working...
Not sure if it was a failure or not, but my last venture didn't go as planned.

A partner and I decided to create an iPhone app just as the App store starting booming. The idea behind the company was to create simple fun games. As we started coding, we quickly discovered that neither of us were artists. Since we were bootstrapping, we could only afford a finite amount artwork and the game we were designing would require a ton of art. So we built a simple animation builder that would greatly reduce the amount of work. Once we built this thing, we thought it would be a great idea to make the animation app a consumer product. The idea was to let you make animations of your friends using only a picture.

We programmed the app and kept on adding features. After a long year, we finally decided that it was time to release it into the wild. We submitted it to Apple and waited. While it was in review, we received a number of great reviews from cultofmac and others. Then Apple rejected it. It took us a week to find out why. We removed the offending content and re-submitted. It then took Apple 6 weeks to finally review it again. I think they finally got around to reviewing it because Gizmodo wrote an article about it. At this point our morale and wallets were empty.

When the app was finally approved, we set about marketing the app. With an advertising budget of zero, you have to be pretty creative getting your idea out. We created about 100 animations of prominent tech journalist and sent it to every known email address of theirs. The reception was dismal. We even received some take down notices (which we promptly abided by)

After a few more weeks of more failed marketing attempts, we decided to throw in the towel and get real jobs. The app is still on the store: http://itunes.apple.com/app/itouch-my-friends/id335338942?mt...

Main points learned:

- Ship early!!!!
- Don't let events that are out of your control get you down.
- Getting press about your product is hard. It is a lot easier if it has some controversy around it.
Actually, it makes more sense to read up series:
http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/not-future-i-signed-part-t...
http://buddycloud.com/cms/content/not-future-i-signed-part-1...
Show HN: Just launched our side project Precorder, new way to record iPhone vids
@jasonrr and I just launched a side project we've been working on over weekends for the past couple months: http://airshipsoftware.com/precorder .

Precorder is a video recording app that constantly saves the past few seconds before you ever hit the record button, so you can wait until something interesting happens to start recording without worrying about missing a precious moment or winding up w/ hours of boring footage. The website explains more w/ pictures of dolphins and stuff.

This is an experiment of ours in many ways. All advice welcome.
I don't understand his description of why SFQ + TBF is disastrous. "Well, given that SFQ has inserted a whole bunch of fairness into the queue and the packets are no longer bursty... your interactive session has about a 50% chance of having its packet dropped by TBF." But, er, the situation he's talking about is one where your interactive session contributes only 1% of the packets, and no matter how much fairness SBQ inserts it can't make the next packet as likely to be from your interactive session as not.

The reduced burstiness seems more relevant: suppose your bandwidth hog session is only using 10x more packets than your interactive one overall, but it's using them in bursts; then "when there's been too much data lately" that's probably because you're in a burst of bandwidth-hoggery, so there's much less than a 1/10 chance that the next packet is from your interactive session.

Only, that doesn't quite make sense, because for the bandwidth hog to be hurting your interactive session the latter needs to be trying to send/receive packets while the bandwidth hog is being a bandwidth hog, or at least soon enough after that the buffers are still full of hogswill. In which case, that next packet is surely quite likely to be from your interactive session after all.

Network experts: What am I missing here?

[Edited to add: My best guess is that what I'm missing is that "soon enough after that" may be quite a long time after. In any case, I don't see any way for what apenwarr wrote to be right.]
I think a side community project is perfect given this potential concern (even though likelihood is unlikely). Oracle's not going to sue Apple for something like this.
Clickable: http://www.airshipsoftware.com/precorder
...or using 'a lot' for anything other than an auction.

Which is odd because 'a lot' is correct.
In the Netherlands we have DigiD [1] which is used by most government sites.

[1] http://www.digid.nl/english/
Best News Bloopers on YouTube
Something to keep in mind in the B2B market is you can charge a lot. Do your research and find out how much time your software will save the company and price your solution closer to that than what it costs you to produce and support. You'll never get a consumer to pay $1,000/m for your web app, but if you can save a company 25 hours a month they're getting a steal.
It's a headline, so generally, everything except articles 'on', 'to', 'the', 'an', etc, are capitalized.

Here are the basic rules: http://www.newsletterfillers.com/archives/grammar/capitaliza...
They are planning an update by the end of January:

http://blog.boxee.tv/2010/12/31/vudu-arriving-next-week-netf...
How long until the novelty of seeing your friends' "Likes" wears off?

If it's the ultimate advertising platform, where's the money?
Most languages parse in to a parse tree that looks something like S-expressions, but that parse tree isn't always made of the language's own data structures nor available to the user at runtime.
Remi's arguements were an attempt to get Apple to change the 'personal non-commercial part' of it's licence to something more open.

But I suspect that Apple removing VLC has more to do with controlling what formats you can play, and so where you can buy content, rather than a desire to protect VLC's GPL contributions.

Interesting that the super hacker cool Apple have effectively banned GPL from their popular platform and with the Mac iStore may soon be banning it from all their machines. While MSFT is announcing more open source support. Looks like the lightsaber of the dark side has been passed on.
Ugh. The reasons Russia's communism failed is an incredibly complicated and still debated subject. Throwing it all to "people's inherent desire to be better than others or to excel" is completely wrong.
Retrocast, poor man's version of a Gaming on Demand platform
I’m a sucker for retrogames, great and emerging technologies, experimentation and hacking. This idea of doing a poor man’s version of a streaming gaming on demand platform was ringing in my head for quite some time, so in a rainy weekend I decided to take matters with my own hands and glue this thing together.
This, I think, is the source code which accompanies this book: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596529321
Not my usual HN style to link to an old gag-of-sorts, but this is kinda relevant and somewhat smart funny: Tom joins Facebook

http://failbook.failblog.org/2010/12/17/funny-facebook-fails...
"With a funky web app, at least your friends and family might understand it and think it's cool."

Perhaps if you're in college, or keeping up your day job. But none of my friends or family thought it was "cool" when I quit my day job after we got a little bit of traction. They thought it was something more along the lines of "completely batshit insane". As I recall, it actually made my parents cry.

The point is: it's pretty hard no matter what you're working on. Everything becomes boring after a while, and outside of the valley it's hard to find a culture where people will actually support a decision to quit your day job and work on a startup.
Apple iPad: A Linux Administrator’s New Assistant
I don't give a crap about what your site looks like. I'm on the Internet for content and quick access to that content. The "quick access" is the part that means a site should be easy to read, understandable and accessible.
How to Build Web Apps - Club AJAX Video
Ed, thanks so much for an alternative view backed by experience. It's good to remember that advice is good for picking some heuristics, but the devil is in the details.
I'd read it, except the cacophony of colors in the background makes it a total disaster. (Not to mentioned the rather stupid web interface.)

Ah well, I'll try again post-coffee
Remember when Myspace was worth billions?

How quickly the next hot thing comes crashing down: http://thenextweb.com/socialmedia/2011/01/10/myspace-to-lay-...
Maybe this is too small scale to be relevant, but i recently designed a site for a rockabilly clothes webstore, with a complete panel of tools: myspace (traditional friending, exchanging thankyous), facebook (fanpage & paying ads), google ads and twitter... And since day 1, myspace has been the nr. 1 referrer (to such an extent that bandwidth quotas exploded, and my customer had to upgrade their hosting plan). So I would say that for some niches, myspace is still nr. 1.
Also, coding css for myspace is really fun, if you like a good challenge
> what evidence shows that the US government can

Re-read my post.
Not really a failure since I still believe in the idea and use it. But the project has been a failure as I was unable to get it across to the users.

I started with http://fefoo.com some 4 years back and finally launched it one and half year ago. I got some good initial feedback but almost very little coverage in blogs or twitter.

I completely failed in promoting it to the target audience. Since it looks like Google the comparison would inevitably come up and most "bloggers" would not even give it a second chance. It was for people who use more than one search engine, but without the right promotion and zero marketing skills it almost never got any coverage.

Its still not dead but I am keeping it alive as I use it and a few hundred people seem to use it.
Some other neat "I'm a psychologist and my magnum opus will be to decompose the human mind into N elements" theories:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enneagram_of_Personality

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/16_Personality_Factors

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belbin_Team_Inventory

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_Capacity_Analysis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keirsey_Temperament_Sorter

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartman_Personality_Profile

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humorism

http://www.quizopolis.com/which-twilight-character-are-you.p...
> While MSFT is announcing more open source support.

Erm... They may support it in some instances.
The price of the deal wasn’t disclosed.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/10/next-jump-acquires-flightca...
Visualizing Deletion Discussions on Wikipedia
If format control was what Apple cared about, they wouldn't have approved the app in the first place. Really, they would have left it at that.
Opera is not listed among the supported browsers, but everything I tried works fine (version 11.00). Did you forget it, or does it actually have show stopping bugs?
There were several papers over the past few years about using traffic analysis to figure out what's going on behind a NAT. I'm sure that the US government could manage to do this with all of the ISP-level snooping gear.
#1, "Object Oriented structure should always map to well defined mental concepts in the problem domain," is a recipe for producing excessively complex code. You end up focusing on the parts themselves, instead of their interactions, which is actually the important part.
Agreed.

I look at it this way: you can afford to do something which is just a lot of fun but not making any or lots of money, as long as you are not in debt from other people. The debt can be in the form of money (borrowing from friends or family, investors) or time (ignoring friends and family).
The gist of this is that people don't internalize a concept if the interface guides them through it.

That's a decent objection if the goal is to teach thought process, danger avoidance, or moral behavior where internalization is the intention.

That said, it also behooves people to try to make some things more universally safe.

For example, I was in Ottawa, Canada a few years ago. They have a lock to go between rivers in the middle of their city, being on the junction between rivers. This concrete structure is in the middle of town with walking trails around it, and features a 5-10 meter drop to water with no guardrail or edge around it.

To my American eyes, this looked quite dangerous as an inexpensive preventative measure could be added to prevent what could be a common accident. On the flipside, not having a guardrail would cause people who were aware of it to become more aware, and general raise their level of awareness, along the lines of this article.
There's a difference between equality of wealth and equality of opportunity.

Genuine equality of opportunity is unequivocally something to be desired and should be the ultimate goal of any society.

Equality of wealth cannot and should not happen, because people are different. Enforcing equal wealth means limiting opportunity for those who want to take advantage of it. I would argue that this is a fundamental fact of human nature: even in a ideal communist or utopian system where there is no money, wealth would just take the form of respect and influence.
That's pretty short term and pessimistic thinking. If you no longer had the burden of providing for yourself and your family would you seriously not do anything productive? Do you seriously not have any projects or things you would love to work on but never will because you can't easily get paid to do so?

Further, capitalism can't possibly be the solution to every problem. For example, capitalism will probably never take us "to the stars". There isn't enough money in it to cover such a massive expense. But yet, going to the stars is the only possible way to defend against the thread of a "planet killer" meteor/asteroid. The only time there would be money in it is when we knew such an event was imminent but by then it would be too late.
The single most important anecdote I've ever heard about software is this:

In the early days of VisiCalc, Dan Bricklin travelled with his Apple II, demonstrating his software to potential customers. The response from 'computer people' was generally fairly muted - they didn't see what spreadsheets did that they couldn't already do in BASIC. People with no experience of computers assumed that computers could do damned near anything, so they weren't impressed. The response from accountants was quite different.

There was one particular instance at a trade fair, when Dan noticed a smartly dressed older gentleman paying very close attention to his demonstration. At the end of the demo, he approached Dan with a cheque already in his hand. Dan noticed that the man's hands were shaking; Although at the time an Apple II was an expensive purchase, the gentleman looked like he could comfortably afford it.

Dan asked him if he was nervous. The gentleman responded with great excitement, explaining that what he had just seen would completely transform his job. He talked about his career as an accountant, how his work had been changed by the introduction of tabulation machines and electronic calculators; He explained how this new invention would free him from countless hours of tedious calculation, allowing him to effortlessly play with numbers.

To Bricklin, VisiCalc was a clever little piece of software that paid him a good wage. To the gentleman, it was a complete transformation of what he did all day, a liberating technology, even a new lease of life. VisiCalc restored his interest in his work and made him genuinely excited to get up in the morning.

If we see functional business apps as boring, it is only through our own lack of imagination. Few of us are likely to significantly change the computing industry, but each of us has the very real opportunity to transform another industry. As software developers, we are uniquely privileged in being able to turn some small part of someone's work into play. As Steve Blank so often points out, when we look beyond our own walls and see how we could help people do things, the possibilities are limitless.
Far more useful than looking at inequality in wealth or even income is inequality in consumption.
Microsoft's Xbox Kinect beyond hackers, hobbyists
Why Groupon could be bigger than Google
Charge a $5 tax per trade on stocks held less than 24hours. That would slow the volatility of the stock market quite a bit. We should probably have a speculation tax on commodities too, to quieten the wild swings in prices we sometimes see.
Using Bundler for Ruby Gem Development