skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey, secretagent -

I'm planning on taking two weeks off for my first child, although they will be staggered. My boss is actually expecting in March so he was very understanding about this - your mileage may vary. I'm taking a week after the birth in mid-May, and then another week in June for a trip to see parents and friends from back home.

When are you due?
"A few hours (and a pity party) later, I realized that this isn’t the end of the world. The concept has been validated"

This is an important realisation. Just because there is someone else already doing something isn't a reason not to do it. It seems like this affliction is curious to software, and possibly more pronounced in web based software.

In his post entitled "Making Ideas Work"[1], Chris Savage (CEO of Wistia) relates his experiences prior to starting Wistia:

"There are tons of viable startup ideas that get stopped before they get a chance to start. These ideas get left un-executed for a multitude of reasons including fear, money, and time. But, the most common roadblock I see is overestimation of the competition. The process goes like this: come up with an idea, google to see if it’s been done, find someone doing something similar, and give up.

As it turns out, this is the exact process we went through when trying to start Wistia. We’d think we were onto something exciting because our idea was so unique, then we’d find a company doing something similar and we’d give up on that particular approach. We continued this vicious cycle for 4 months until we realized that absolutely no one else had heard of the ‘competition’ we’d found. It turns out that it’s actually really, really hard to get people to pay attention or use anything. After this epiphany it was easy to forge ahead."

Now I'm not saying your book side-project is, like, your startup idea or anything but obviously you've fallen victim to a very, very common thing in our industry and that's to drastically over-estimate the value in being a first mover.

If something already exists, don't be afraid to compete! The "market" out there is unimaginably huge and people just wander round trying out all sorts of things. Not only that but it's constantly growing, not only due to population growth but the growth of the internet itself. There's room for everyone to get in there and have a slice of the pie.

[1]http://savagethoughts.com/post/1591677111
What does this post even mean? What is a front-end business vs. a back-end business?

As far as complexity goes, I believe Amazon touches some hundred something services before a page is even served. It's no surprise that they decided to make some of that into a business and start charging for it.
Dubé and Feeley went back to rework BIT after PICBIT: http://www.scribd.com/doc/49352760/BIT-A-very-compact-Scheme...

With the R4RS library it only needs 13KiB ROM and they claim you can run programs in less than 5KiB RAM. And it comes with a real-time GC. Not hand-coded assembler small, but the kind of development, testing and prototyping environment you get with Scheme is awesome.

The MuP21 sounds really impressive. 6000 transistors including video and DRAM is hard to believe.
It kinda makes you long for the days where the exit was a speculative IPO. At least some of the resources went to founders that way and they often retained a sizable chunk of equity (i.e. control of the product).

Related (Why Ten Million Dollar IPOs Matter): http://www.urgentspeed.com/applied_disruption/2010/04/why-te...
As an early 80s mom, dad, or child (the people who made the buying choices for video games) how do you decide what games to buy? When a dozen games are made a year and they are all generally good you can buy based on what looks interesting. Moreover, with such a small number of products the chance that someone you know has already played a recently released game and can give you an opinion on it is high. This meant that consumers had a high chance of getting something good just based on blind buying decisions and they also had a fairly easy time of learning about the gems. When the video game bubble hit full force the market was flooded with hundreds of games, many of them low quality, far too many for people to keep up with.

The system broke down, the chances of buying a good game just on chance were low, and thus the chances that any of your friends had happened to buy a good game was also low. It only took a few times of people getting burned for them to stop taking the risk and to curtail their game buying, staying content with the existing library of games they had. Even though there were still many quality games (donkey kong jr, joust, ms. pac man, and pole position were all released in '83), there was so much crap that people simply withdrew from the market. Moreover, the bubble was reliant on an unlikely massive growth spurt in video game buying, the game industry over leveraged itself, it would have crashed even without a collapse of consumer confidence.
Sensational Jobs for Designers
The design community is stronger than ever – there are tens of thousands of brilliant designers out there and a gazillion gigs from companies looking for a hot website or a sexy app. But you need a great tool to filter all this data and find the coolest jobs and the most talented designer. Enter Sensational Jobs – my new weapon of choice when it comes to hiring a web designer or posting design jobs.
Cellphone Use Tied to Brain Changes
Sounds great. You can email me at jim.jones1@gmail.com. The site I'd like to redesign is http://www.runfatboy.net
I've been here 10+ years. SV is about people and activities rather than touristy sights. It's things like Friday night bike party in SJ, midnight roller-skating in SF (first time for me was pure adrenalin-pumping, flying down the hills around Union Square with full traffic and barely know how to brake!). Bay-to-Breakers "race :) ". Inventor Fair. 9:20 Special Swing Lindy dance club (just watching the dancers is breath-taking in itself). Hiking up Mission Peak in Milpitas or Rancho San Antonio, Cupertino for some righteous views of the Bay.

Yeah, this place is about doing things, I guess.
PHP code gets delivered to the customer :)
Two ways to look at what you just said.
Windows 7 is a very solid OS. I've been using it for the past year or so now, and this is the first time that i'm using a Windows OS that i havent said to myself on almost weekly basis, "I wish the OS could do X, or y or z"

The whole ecosystem is changing, and so maybe we dont demand so much from the OSes in themselves anymore, at least not in terms of feature-set itself.
i'm counting at least on EU to throw a legal hammer on it someday. iOS is a platform/operating system and i see much danger in this. Can you picture TV networks asking for commissions on sales related to advertisement? Developers already have to pay (annual fee?) for deploying their applications on the appstore
Hipmunk Releases Agony-Free Flight Search Tool for iPhone
Cell Phones Increase Brain Activity
No, you cannot.

Do you know about Big Bang?
Ok, let's say I'm trying to be a nice guy and download it to a shared drive for the PC/Techs. Let's also say I don't use Windows. Is there actually a link for that?
Funny you should ask:
http://lanyrd.com/

YC11
I think this has largely to do with the acquisition of Heroku and the notion of “you can mine for gold or you can sell pickaxes.” [1] It seems to me there is a gold rush for the pickaxes now.

[1] - http://cdixon.org/2011/02/05/selling-pickaxes-during-a-gold-...
Skills don't really compound, it's not like interest where you gain 10%/year on your existing skill set.

We forget stuff, and things we learn don't always enhance/build on things we already know.
Ask HN: Was almost published on Mashable, what now?
Last night we (@dshipper, @ajaymehta, and myself) almost got on Mashable with this app: http://wheremyfriends.be

For the past couple of weeks we have been hacking together web projects from our dorm rooms (two of us go to UPenn one of us NYU.) Yesterday, after an all-night coding session, we released a new app called Where My Friends Be that takes all of your FB friends and puts them onto an animated Google Map for you to look at and share on FB. We had some immediate success with our personal friend networks and generated over 57,000 friends "added" and a little over 260 actual sign ups on the first day.

Last night in an effort to publicize the app past our immediate friends we emailed Mashable and started to correspond with one its Senior Editors. The editor that told us he was writing an article about us, but wanted to make sure that we would be able to handle all of the traffic they were going to send us. Then we got some more emails back saying he ran into some possible bugs. Then said he will keep doing some research and maybe post later this week. He told us to keep him updated.

We are assuming that if we update him later this week with a story of continued good traffic he will be more likely to publish.

So at this point we have two main questions:
1) How can we continue to get exposure and gain traffic?
2) How can we make sure we will be able to handle the traffic from mashable.

RE 1) We submitted to HN earlier this week, but it didn't get much traction because for some reason Facebook deleted our app and it caused some errors. We've fixed that now.
But how else can we get some traffic? Other blogs to show? Listservs to email? Ideas?

RE 2) We are currently on a virtual dedicated server and have faith it in. We are also very prepared to migrate to either a dedicated server or managed cloud hosting on Rackspace. What other options do you see that will be seamless for us?

Thanks for the advice!
Impulse-based physics simulations
Ask HN: Who is hiring.. Sysadmins? (February '11 edition)
I've noticed an occasional job posting for Operations roles in the who's-hiring threads, but it's very easy for them to get lost in the sheer volume. Who are the startups specifically looking for System Administrators, Network Engineers, DBAs, or any other kind of Ops-focused people?

Previous thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1984473
So why does Yahoo buy these properties? While I'm sure we'd all like to think the decision makers at Yahoo since day 1 were all idiots who like to spend millions of dollars on companies and then let them die, but is there actually a rational reason?

Were they trying to keep them out of the hands of Google? Did they do it purely for the eyeballs and thought with no additional spending they'd get their money back out of the property in X months?

I just find it hard to believe they'd do the same thing over and over again for no reason, but to lose money.
Build a team beyond yourself and forge ahead.
If you only went once you probably didn't get anything from the 'secret' off-menu. That's part of the In-N-Out experience.
Yeah...on the one hand you want to keep your head down/keep the blinders on/trust in your gut and just plan on plowing through any obstacles that stand in your way. On the other hand, you want to try to keep your eye on the competitive landscape enough to make sure that you're not going heads down into a wall or that you're spending your time on the project that has the best chance for success.
What kind of new features are you looking for?
Thanks for your feedback! Very well put.

As we've been working on Banterly for the past few months, we've had a lot of the same thoughts. That's a big part of the reason we decided to focus our product on the Twitter community first. Our hope has been that as people discuss topics around various #hashtags that they will have a way to take the conversation to a deeper level rather than overwhelming their followers with @replies.

The comparisons to Convore are more at a feature level and prompted because many of our original ideas were geared toward giving the IRC community something more "up-to-date" (though it's hard to say whether or not open source programmers currently using IRC will ever really leave for anything else anyway).
Employer contributions should be discounted based on the vesting schedule. Because many employer matches vest over five to seven years, your access to that money is questionable, particularly in a high turnover industry. Only if the contributions vest when they are made is employer matching a straight up winning proposition - otherwise your investment return is more closely tied to the market.

I believe this article gives a good picture of long term investing [previously posted on HN] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/01/02/business/20110...
A buyer might think they're buying your users, or your technology. In either case, the possibility that these things can become devalued if not further invested in might (wrongly) never enter the thinking. If you don't change anything, how could the value of a user or a technology depreciate? (This is obviously wrong, I'm just trying to paint a possible line of reasoning.)
Keep going, nothing has changed. A startup beat you to the punch, not a multinational behemoth (e.g., Google obsoleting Kiko). You both have zero revenue and face the same challenges. A million things could still go wrong for both of you.

They got some good press so you're going to quit? Whatever motivated you to start still applies.
What about the process is broken? Did you read the code and find bugs? With a total commit count of 929857 missing a single commit to round out to a perfectly even number of commits in each language is insignificant.
Illustrating the plummeting cost of genome sequencing
Virtualization for databases (bad idea)
An awful lot of acquisitions end up this way, though. Consider the firms acquired by Amazon or Google or Microsoft. People remember IMDB and Alexa; Android and Youtube; Hotmail and Bungie... past that not so much.
I agree. It's just hard to stay interested when they update their stuff only every 3 years or so.
What specifically do you think is missing? Remember, it's only the 20 most popular films in a given year.

Oldboy (Korea), City of God (Brazil), Pan's Labyrinth (Mexico), and Spirited Away (Japan) are all on those, and that's not an exhaustive list.
We're working on that right now. We have persistent XMPP based chat with embed support. Try it out, my email is in my profile if you have any questions.

http://onehub.com/try/beta
Thanks for reminding me again why I don't bother reading these forums. One day I'll quit clicking links too.
Is there a right way to do this?

Yes.

a. Make it a fully owned subsidiary.

b. Don't fuck with it.
I thought about this as a complication, but my assumption was that this would be a solvable technical problem. Is it really not feasible to add an accelerometer to the GPS data (which does include altitude), and end up with at least somewhat more precise data?
There are maybe 10 to 15 ways the normalization doesn't manage to do what it's supposed to. Certain committers happen to use profanity more, for instance. Commit style and frequency. Tendency of programmers of language X to be acculturated somewhere that dampens their natural tendency to curse when frustrated.

For instance, my style of coding means I branch off, commit early and often, with flippant and meaningless messages, and then I squash and rewrite my entire change as a single, formal entity before releasing it for coworker consumption. I curse up a storm in my commit messages, but you won't see any of them unless you look inside my computer before I delete the working branch.

This is fun and funny. Nothing about it even starts approaching validity except for one statistic: "210 out of 929857", and even that gets shot down. The entire thing would have been better if he had included "hate" as a curse word.
Definitely on our todo list.
Talkies ruined the cinema piano, culture has never recovered since.
Sure. For every requirement created by the management people, it must create a datapoint that can be measured in terms of business success, as that's what they're there to foster. Employee morale should be one of these, and an important one in terms of obtaining and retaining talent.

Changes that don't improve the business should be removed. If management can't provide improvement, management should be removed.

It's as simple as measuring effectiveness and making changes that work.
I think they're talking about ways to get both $12k amounts (for the referral and the candidate).
I had a torn ACL in the US while uninsured. I waited a few weeks before I saw anyone in hopes that it was some kind of major sprain. I finally made an appointment with the Ohio Orthopedic Center of Excellence (I highly recommend it), and the first doctor I saw (a non-knee specialist, for $85 for about a half hour) said it probably wasn't a torn ACL, but he scheduled an MRI anyways.

The MRI was on the order of $1200, and another appointment later (this time with a knee specialist), it turned out that I did, in fact, have a torn ACL. By now, however, it had happened nearly a month prior, and the doctor recommended waiting at least two more months for the swelling to fully subside.

Reluctant to make such a big investment and being fearful of such a major surgery, I waited about 9 more months before I finally had the surgery. Since I didn't go to a hospital, the costs were actually reasonably low: ~$2500 each for the facilities, the anesthesiologist, and the surgeon. From diagnosis through final checkup, the cost was about $10K, and I was fortunate enough to have my doctor advise me on personal rehabilitation (I didn't go to a single session of rehab).

So I was lucky to get into a good facility with a good doctor and get reasonably-priced care, and now I'm stuck in a job I don't like with high credit card bills in order to pay off a large cost for a fluke basketball accident. Call me crazy, but I'd be interested in taking my chances in Canada or the UK. I've only just now (a year later) paid off the anesthesia, and I'm halfway done paying off the surgeon.
Good questions are non-obvious and not simple to Google. It was a good question.
I think we may have some history in the making here. This is the first SP1 for an MS OS release that I have no interest in installing. I probably will at some point, but my system is running so well that w/o new features I fail to see what the upside can be.

Who would've thunk anyone would say about Windows... "No need for SP1. The original version is working like a charm."
Hardly boring. Updating provided me with adventure of traversing the clusterfuck that is the Dell website and re-discovering all kinds of interesting drivers, only to be told they're 'not compatible with this version of Windows'.
Plancast is more than just conferences, but you can find out a lot about what's going on through the site. Especially if you follow the right people:

http://plancast.com/

There are also various public Google Calendar calendars that specialize in different industries, etc. For example, there's one that is just AI/Machine Learning conferences.
Ask HN:Is it possible to bootstrap a business in any industry, like say Finance?
I would like to know the answer to this too, and what are the differences?
Perhaps it's exactly the same equation as VCs use. You can have 9 acquisitions that crater, as long as your tenth is a Doubleclick/Overture/Alibaba [1].

[1] Although this seems to be bombing somewhat at the moment.
I think, once you're in the VC system, you have to compare an acquisition to what happens if you go through more funding rounds and lose control over your company that way. Many of the same symptoms.
Note that you don't need the 1.9GB file linked there to install this on one PC. You should be able to get it from Windows Update. I needed to select it, it was listed as an "important update" but deselected by default.
I'd love to read a book/blog exposing "the mind" of the corporate acquirer, much like the book "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" supposedly does for the sexes.
I am probably echoing many when I say: Great job! How can we rate individual books?
I think any entrepreneur owes it to him- or herself to consider what "competition" actually means. You shouldn't assume it's a zero-sum game, and only one company can exist. If you look closely enough, you'll also see that competitors don't mirror each other as much as you would think, and they leverage their differences to their advantage.

Launching at the same time as a competitor creates more static in the press. I remember when the movie "Deep Impact" was announced close to "Armageddon". I thought to myself "Jesus Christ, this is too much". I don't think that whichever was the last one to hit the big screen was riding the coat tails of the other, or that the earliest one deserved my attention or money more than the last one.

Should Pepsi have called it quits, because they knew that Coca Cola were doing a coca beverage? Of course not. A competitor can be a pain in the ass in some ways, but it also makes for a great way to analyze your market and customers without looking inwards, which can be very difficult for anyone. If they gain traction, you'll know that there's a market.

If they die, you'll have their example as a cautionary tale; if you don't have a lighthouse to navigate by, navigate around the ship wrecks ahead of you.

I think he's annoyed that Convore launched a similar project and received some good press and community love (as little as it is outside the distortion field of the Valleysphere of Techcrunch and HN).

I always think of ReadWriteStart's mantra that "the early bird gets the worm; the second mouse gets the cheese".

"Is it important to be the first one out with the 'same' idea" is one of the many inane theory-crafting discussions that serve little other purpose than discourage people from launching.
Of course there are reasons, too many to count. I'm very close to one of the acquisitions on the list (as an early employee I made a modest profit). It comes down to a combination of:

- Team: the acquirer likes the people and believes they will add value if convinced to stay on board.

- Product: they like what they see, and they believe they can incorporate it into something they have in a relatively painless way. They think about what it would take to build it and it's mostly a time thing. They can spend the money but generating the momentum to build it would take too long.

- Traction: this basically determines the price, because a company like Yahoo believes they can plug something they like into their properties and get traction. Having traction already is proof that the product is great, and it commands a premium.

- Keeping it out of the wrong hands: yes, it's scary to imagine what would happen if a one-of-a-kind company fell into the hands of your competitor and they executed perfectly with it.

- Need to spend M/A budget: if you are the M/A person at a big company, your job is to buy what you can't build or hire. You can't say "there's nothing out there worth buying" because other people are buying companies (herd mentality if you will).

There are more factors, and there isn't a single one that determines a decision. A lot of people need to feel good about it and agree on the perceived risk and reward of the investment.
Good idea.

I also tend to prefer work that is not too many time zones distant.
If I were in your shoes I would Ignore the echo chamber, listen to your customers, find a unique market niche and go really fast.
Smashing Magazine seems to have a post on these at the beginning of each year.

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2011/02/14/upcoming-events-a...