skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Exit strategy is the fundamental difference between a startup in the Silicon Valley sense and a lifestyle business or a family business.

Are you suggesting that there is a dichotomy here, where you are either a SV startup with an exit strategy or a lifestyle/family business? Can't we just start a business small, because that's where you start, and grow it over time in terms of customer base, employees, premises, and ultimately financials?

I found it rather sad when, on approaching a bank to open a business account for the first time, one of the first questions they asked was what our exit strategy was. It was as if the only recognised way we might get any satisfaction would be to start something and then sell it for zillions before we had to actually make it successful. Deriving satisfaction from building a long-term successful business that does something useful and makes a healthy amount of money doing it seems to be some bizarro weird idea that obviously only newbies would consider or something!

Curiously, our professional accountants, who deal with quite a few local startups and small businesses, had quite a different perspective: they figured that we should set up the basics now, and as long as we weren't cutting off options for later, not plan too far ahead in terms of things like dividend strategies and the like. Their reasoning was simply that as a startup with a credible idea but not even launched yet, you really have no idea how successful (or otherwise) you will actually be in say 2-3 years' time, and you might as well at least find out whether you're getting 100s, 100,000s or 100,000,000s of customers before you make any serious decisions on things like long term ownership, exit options, etc. After all, if you can build a successful business with a decent long-term vision, you are always going to have exit options -- including being a much better prospect for all these gazillion dollar acquisition exits that entrepreneurs apparently dream of.
Is Apple's iOS too static compared to Android, Windows Phone 7, or webOS?
I'm with you; but I can imagine a few reasons why people might not take it. Some really religious types might feel that it's "playing God" or somehow interfering with "God's plan for the world." Some really eco-focused types might feel that it's immoral to live that long and therefore consume even more natural resources. Some conspiracy nuts would assume it was part of a government plan to do $SOMETHING. And some people might just assume there would be some sort of unforeseen consequences.

Still, I bet most people would take it, and pretty quick.
The amount of money that it costs to outfit an office comfortably is minuscule to real recruiting costs.

How about paying $20,000 for a recruiter to find a world-class engineer and get them to leave Google to join your never-been-heard-about startup?

How about paying $50,000 to a recruiter to conduct a VP of Sales search and run the process for you?

Aeron chairs, cool pictures and desks all make an office more enjoyable, and are cheap by comparison.
WxPython: Showing 2 Filetypes in wx.FileDialog
Obama Links Expanding Wireless Access to Economic Recovery
A Small Example of our Broken Immigration System
I really should have phrased that a bit more politely. Sorry.

The cool part about learning to configure vim is by doing so, you are actually learning to both USE and enhance vim. It is definitely worth the effort.

My all time favorite "configuration" of vim is automatically reloading ~/.vimrc on save.

" auto-reload vimrc on save changes
au! BufWritePost .vimrc source %

With the above, you do have to be a bit careful though, since if you define something save/reload, then delete said definition line and save/reload again, it is still defined.

For me, and obviously many others, it is important for tab completion to be consistent between my editor and my shell. In my case using ksh for my shell, the above settings make tab completion in vim behave just like it does in my shell.

If ``:e /foo'' is used in a shallow and lightly filled subdirectory, like for some project dir, it's more usable and useful. On the other hand, if you have tons of stuff in your current (home) directory, it takes far too long. If you're not really specific with your search term, you'll get the "E77: Too many file names" error.

Though often wishful thinking, I prefer to remember where the hell I put the damn files. ;)
You appear to be under the impression that pinboard.in isn't a reasonably well-known site, as sites go.

It saw a huge influx of users the day the delicious end-of-life-ing was announced, and held up admirably.
This throws aside IMO the major contributing factor, that these big companies generally run in heavily commoditized sectors where the margins have been forced down by the competition. High volume, low margin.
Also, mice do not suppress their telomerase. Without telomerase, tumors have a hard time getting larger than a golf ball. This is why large mammals like humans actually suppress telomerase expression in most cells. We might survive a golf ball sized tumor. A mouse? No way! There's no value in a mouse suppressing telomerase, so they're designed to have it switched on all the time.

Would we want our telomerase to be switched on all the time? This would probably make us abnormally prone to developing cancer.

This is also why whalers find tumor scars in whales all the time, but never run across whales that are going die of cancer. It's hard for a tumor to get larger than the size of your head. For us, this would likely be fatal. For a whale, it's no big deal.
Why do they need so many people? Customer support?
I'd surprised there isn't a facebook app for dating. It seems such an obvious thing to do. (Or maybe there is and I'm just not aware of it).
I've noticed that often people who say they wouldn't want to live forever are those who have no long-term grandiose goals that they feel are personally achievable given enough time (e.g. become a billionaire, live on Mars, create the next Google, etc.).

I've heard that there is a big longevity community in the valley.
Yes, sorry, that's exactly what I mean about "clean it up". No more 30-step dance to get all the individual pieces up and running :). Right now I'm using "screen" to launch the different pieces and keep them running, and then restart them as I make code changes.

The download-build-use cycle is pretty brutal at the moment, but shouldn't take all that much work to get it in better shape.
Microsoft's Bing Gains on Google in U.S. Search Market in January
Faces of tomorrow: a composite person by city
From my reading, there were multiple efforts in play -- he was 'infiltrating' Anonymous with multiple personas, and (if my reading is correct) trying to correlate that information with Facebook data.

Otherwise, none of it really makes sense. You can't investigate the friends of somebody on Facebook without knowing WHO the somebody you're investigating is. So, he had to at least have ideas for leads for people to start stalking.

I think we can all agree that correlating random activities across all Facebook users (whose profiles are public, which is of course another catch) would be really close to impossible with one reluctant developer and an 'analyst'.
This is exactly the logic that our mteam used in the '99 bubble when we built out offices on 2nd. I'm not saying Dropbox is extravagant, but this isn't a compelling argument to me.
TechCrunch as HGTV just doesn't do much for me.
It is very much off topic. However, my interest in what this community has to say about it is of abiding interest.
Firewho? IE9 Only Has Eyes For Chrome
Me neither, but you get a better class of conversation here than elsewhere. I don't object to political stories as long as they are (a) rare and (b) important ones.
Who says it really was CommanderX behind the facebook profile?
What was behind Thursday's Apple stock flash crash?
While you probably wouldn't want full-on telomerase in your 20s might be worth the risk if you're pushing 80 :).
From where should a justice system derive its just powers?

Why is mob justice any worse than a justice system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge?

Why is mob justice any worse than a system that allows secret evidence which cannot be questioned or examined by the accused?

Would altering or abolishing a system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge be a good thing?

Either the justice system approves of this, or the rules of the system prevent it from taking action, either way it's broken.
I'd think it's more steep than this.
> Anyway, the answer to this type of conundrum is simple and well-known: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_test

I prefer the Voight-Kampff test:

1. It’s your birthday. Someone gives you a calfskin wallet. How do you react?

2. You’ve got a little boy. He shows you his butterfly collection plus the killing jar. What do you do?

3. You’re watching television. Suddenly you realize there’s a wasp crawling on your arm.

etc.
Agreed. HP is pretty behind. Sure, they put out a ridiculous number of devices when you count computers and printers, but I think I have ONE friend using a Palm phone...though some folks are now even recommending the TouchPad over the iPad 2.0

HP is definitely showing some commitment to an idea here, though.
Use frameworks for prototyping, but build from the ground up once you know what you're building.

Isn't this contradictory to the idea of using boring well-tested infrastructure?
Also: http://methuselahfoundation.com/
I don't understand your criticism. All that the article says is that there are benefits to using well-understood technologies that have been around for a while and have proven to be fairly stable.

As someone who works (during the day) for a government agency with well over a million employees, this is something I understand well. Granted, we're not Twitter - but we do serve a silly amount of data using old-fashioned and "boring" technology, and we're glad that we use it because it's proven itself to be reliable.
Awesome office. Dropbox is doing better than ever! I wonder why they just went 1.0 though--they've been around forever.
I thought they already played jeopardy before and won?
Stepping up one meta point, a lot of people aren't actually teling you what they want, they're just flashing various social signals. As you say, put the pill in their hands, and, well, don't leave any of your body parts between their hands and their mouths if you don't want a nice new red welt.

Yes, there are some who would not for real, but one wonders how even they would feel five years in.
And I for one am glad you made it. When I finally ditched Delicious I looked around and your service seemed to be the best.
As if founders have to be selected or hired by others. Founding means hiring yourself. Founders have to be ready for a protracted struggle against the status quo, not special adoption by it.

I had to laugh when the Founder Institute's admission of Lecole Cole was mentioned as taking some kind of educated chance. Lecole had a proven track record before that experience and didn't need any special treatment. But he absolutely took advantage of every legitimate opportunity that came his way.

"Disruption is fine as long as it's caused by white, male, Ivy-league hipsters in skinny jeans." - as if people sit down and examine new things in light of who made them. Customers want value. If a feature will save them $5 a month, they'll trade with martians if they have to.

Those that don't like disruption are the established market players. I'm pretty sure they don't decide to yield their markets because the disruptor looks like them.

One only needs to meet people that have made it to the US that have struggled to achieve elsewhere to get the sense of how much opportunity there actually is here. And those who sit on their hands waiting for the light to turn green are going to have a long wait.
> Full disclosure: I work from home. It's confusing and I'm hoping to get a separate office soon.

I'm 100% with you on that one. Working from home, particularly with the same equipment and environment for both fun stuff and professional stuff, is really weird and I find it can dilute my sense of when I'm wearing my professional hat and when I'm on my own time. The result is that both can get disrupted by the other more often than I would prefer. I sometimes get to the end of what feels like a long working day, and find that I have only logged a few hours that are billable to a client. Several other things happened during the day, and while I hadn't registered how much time they were using up before, the time sheet does not lie.

We've actually been setting up a new home office just these past few days, because not having a separate space finally got too weird now both of us are working from home. Just walking into the room, where everything is perfectly tidy and the shelves contain business stationery and the books are technical ones and the hardware is serious business stuff, changes my perspective and makes me want to concentrate on getting useful stuff done Right Now. I still wear suits to meetings with clients for much the same reason, even though I know they wouldn't care if I was just in jeans and a T-shirt: it's my professional face, and it brings with it my professional mindset.

I once read about a guy who had an office in his back room. Every morning he would get up, dress in his work clothes, walk out the front door, walk around the side of his house to the back door, and let himself into his office, even though he could have just walked through the home. I wouldn't go that far myself, but I totally understand why he did it.
Jacket is a nice addition to Matlab, which like any interpreted language is inherently slow. I've seen a 40x slow down for the same application versus a Fortran implementation.

In my view Matlab is great for testing your ideas, but for an industrial application you will translate your code to C/C++ or Fortran.

I'm curious to check how much speed you can achieve using Jacket versus a native C+CUDA code. I doubt Matlab+Jacket can run at the same speed as C+CUDA, but I will give it a try.
What I want to know is how these engineers at these startups avoid visual distractions? It seems to me that a lot startups create environments like this. It's clear that Dropbox has the money for cubes/offices. Is it a cultural thing? What gives?
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This seems like it is because 37signals is a primarily design driven company, while zappos is more of a backend engineering company.

The design folks, like the article says, are more concerned with a clean presentation and tidy appearance, the programmer style is more concerned with being a place that they can feel is surreal and comfortable enough that they can just work there continuously and feel comfort in the geekiness.

That being said, I work squarely in the latter camp and am glad that I don't feel obligated to take part in the corporate sponsored 'whackyness'! Maybe because I don't like feeling obligated to be in the office more, than necessary. I like having random stuff at my desk, but this reeks of Office Space style flair.
I went to their site at http://letscrate.com ... I don't like that I have to drag a file from my folder to the browser to upload it ... doesn't seem like normal workflow .. but it could catch on I guess.

Would be really cool if I just clicked and my OS file selector opened up for me to select a file ...
I wonder how much can be attributed to: the larger you get, the less transparency, which contributes to the greater likelihood of hiring someone who is "corrupt".

Most of the work I've done is at large corporations, and some of the things I see there, I can't fathom there not being a brown paper bag full of cash being involved somewhere during the decision making process. I was having lunch with a friend of mine the other day, and according to him, in his industry, it is routine for employees to take kickbacks in the form of "unrelated" consulting gigs through their side companies in exchange for choosing a certain vendor. That's just the way it works.
Ask HN: List of people willing to be mentors?
There is a lot of people on here that have a lot of experience and expertise to offer as a mentor. What are peoples thoughts on keeping a spreadsheet of people willing to be mentors and their areas of expertise?
Yes. It makes me very uncomfortable when the fact that "Anonymous" is committing some fairly serious crimes is apparently just glossed over because hey, we didn't like the target, so thumbs up!

It also makes me uncomfortable that I'm a bit nervous posting this point. This is not progress. This is not good. This is mob rule. We should be fighting this, not applauding it.
His methods were flawed in that he thought he had pinned CommanderX as a leader of Anonymous, not that he couldn't figure out who these people were. He was trying to make Anonymous this centralized group when it isn't.

For a parallel example, look at Al Qaeda. People keep trying to make all of these Al Qaeda in X groups as one giant organization when in fact the only thing they have in common is the name and idea. 50 years ago there'd almost always have to be a personal connection for a group's idea to spread to another group. Now with the internet and other means of cheap and easy communication, it's easy for these ideas to spread anonymously. Anyone who identifies with these groups can take the ideas and run with them without the original group even knowing.

Law enforcement and governments are going to have a hard time figuring out how to deal with this, as their old tactics of decapitating the group's head doesn't work when there is no head.
Ah; I am using bash. I'll take a deeper look at ksh.

It's really fine, I don't know how to configure vim. To be fair, there are a lot of options and you can get a long way just figuring out easy ways to do things you do all the time; while never really bothering to study it in depth.

All that being said, I downloaded and ran ksh; and I don't think what you've said is capturing the functionality of

:e **/

It's not usually a matter of 'remembering' where I put my files; it's being in /modules/module_dir/specific_module/module.file and needing to edit /views/view_name/js/some_shit.js

,esome_s<tab> is a nice way of jumping to that file
Which specific thing should be permitted to only mobs that is not permitted of individuals?

Or is that a vacuous snark?
Free 3 year sub to MSDN for startups
I believe Vala is the language that the Gnome/GTK devs want most programs to be written with in the future. Which is basically how Windows' GUI works: C core API (win32) for backwards-compatibility, with higher-level .NET bindings to them for newly written programs.
The attacker would have access only for that session.
So how do the couple collect their monies from you?
"The error was estimated to occur once in every 9 billion divisions. (I doubt any large program has ever been written that is as bug-free as the buggy Pentium chips.)"

That is assuming uniform distribution of divisions. That assumption is obviously false since we can cause the FDIV bug[1] to occur every time we calculate 4195835 / 3145727.

(The parenthetical editorializing is hyperbole as well. "Large" is poorly defined. If one calculates the number of bugs exercised per instruction executed, the probability of a bug occurring is going to be extremely small. In addition, there are "large" programs with very few bugs[2], none of which have occurred in real life[3]. Yet.)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentium_FDIV_bug

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Flight_systems

[3] http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bonachea/294-8/hw1.html
I like everything he had to say in that article and share his beliefs. It's easy to lose yourself in the myriad of fancy new technologies and stuff where you go to extraordinary measures to hack together a solution.

Simple is good - it's mature, it's easy to understand, it's easy to optimize, and it works. And you don't need to spend a bunch of time and make a bunch of mistakes learning it.

Scale: 120+ million people a month.

Stack: IIS + SQL Server + MongoDB, glued together almost exclusively with C#. The only part of my stack that's remotely cool is MongoDB, and I only use it on a little bit of my platform and I outsource it to MongoHQ.
Why have people downvoted fletiz's response to -1? I don't necessarily agree or disagree with it (I'm staying neutral in this discussion), but please - stop downvoting replies that you disagree with. This response, as far as I can see, was reasonable and considered.
Open works spaces are far better for collaboration. People avoid distraction with huge monitors that take up a lot of their field of view and headphones. Such offices are actually very quiet.
Sorry, I'm nerdy but I guess not nerdy enough to be in on the joke. Could someone explain it to me? I'm "the business guy" in my startup, though I'm actually a girl.
New iphone 
verizon connect from iphone
Even with the assets cached, there's still an 8-10 second loading time (I just timed it). Compare that to a static HTML page showing the same content which would probably load and render in under a second.
here is a link to the actual report http://plf666.limewebs.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=18
"Ok, so your saying that Kurzweil's prediction is simply that exponential growth will continue until beyond the singularity?"

Why don't you stop waiting for me to tell you and spend some honest time with the ideas? Of course you don't see how there is any logic to his claims, you haven't seen his claims at all.

Or, alternatively, realize you don't know what they are and decide not to worry about it. This is fine too. No joke. There are all kinds of times when I take this option. It's not bad to not know somebody's opinions, or criticize them when you know them; the problem is in the criticism when you don't actually know them.
These browser wars are funny. They have been going on for so many years but neither is there a cler winner nor an idea of what the prize would be like. Does winning this war really matter any more? I am not sure why GOOG and MSFT are really fighting it in the first place.
Do you get a custom url with a paid account?
That is an interesting trade off.

Still good new though, in my opinion. Cancer seems much more tractable than aging. If we can reduce the problem of aging to something that only requires us to additionally solve cancer, I would be ecstatic.
More to me like having people buy software even though they already paid for their computer.

Instapaper is the backend. The app is the added value. Likely the 3rd party app isn't going to eclipse the brand of Intapaper so they'll be selling their added value directly to existing Instapaper subscribers.
Rate my startup: Tea for iPhone
Hi everyone,

Although I meant to to submit this app as part of the November Launch commitment on HN, I had serious reservations about how usable the app would be. Instead of submitting, I went back to the drawing board the past couple of months, worked with a designer and am pleased now finally to share Tea for iPhone.

As it turns out, this is also my first major software project since beginning programming a year and a half ago after graduating college, which is when I decided that I was tired of hunting for technical cofounders.

Mainly I'd like feedback on this page as a landing page, the concept, and how approachable the presentation is. Any other comments are welcome.

http://www.teaapp.com
Although I have never been a fan of HP or Palm. I really like webOS and hope they become a decent player in this market. We can use competition, especially with what looks like the death of Symbian.
Quora's opportunity to disintermediate journalism
ACCC : companies responsible for dodgy testimonials on their social media pages
What's 3.55?
Google sucks in results recently.