skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"In coding if you run into the same thing over and over again, you use a reusable component or automate it."

You and I both know this to be true, but there are wide swaths of development jobs that cater to the C players they've hired and don't allow this sort of automation. Frameworks, more powerful languages and tools, even techniques like recursion aren't allowed because "not everyone would understand them." There's plenty of reasons to not like Rails, or Ruby for that matter, but "because Joe Blub three cubes over might not get it" is one of the worst ones you could give.

That sort of environment sucks, and everyone on here is right to say "if you're in that sort of place, then quit!". That said, it does exist in wide enough circulation that it's hard to sweep it under the rug when talking about the industry as a whole.
Use SOCKS proxy for tethering - problem solved. (OK, it is not that transparent for client, but the detection would be much harder).
Uh, I think microbusinesses may be more oriented towards "making a difference" than some businesses that go the V.C. route.

It would be unfair to tar all V.C. funded companies with the same brush, because many of them really are trying to create something awesome and make a splash in the world. However, when times get bubbly, people come out of the woodwork who are more concerned with making a fast exit than they are in building a business.

Whereas, if you're bootstrapping a microbusiness, you need to find some market where you're making something somebody is willing to pay for right away, so you're definitely "making a difference" for somebody, even if you're not changing the world.
Yeah, it's truly bizarre that Alex is at Amy Hoy's throat about this. Amy is utterly dedicated to encouraging more people who don't feel safe starting a business to GO DO IT. That seems like something Alex would be into.

Maybe because he's shooting for the stars right now with BankSimple (which I am SO excited about) he's feeling a little nervous about that strategy. Being pre-launch on something so anticipated and ambitious must be at least a little scary!
No, ssh tunneling would help, because the IP packets making up the ssh connection would be coming from the phone, not the laptop, so they would have their TTL set by the phone.
Video: The InnoDB Storage Engine for MySQL
PR campaign to paint Google as "startup-y" to slow the talent drain into Facebook and likes ?
Definitely good information to have. Lots of services and startups, especially those for payments, phones or other geographically constrained industries (which really need a good startup to disrupt them), never make it outside the US.
However, from the comments I gather you need some sort of US SSN to be able to get the Braintree account? Any other "hickups" to non-US citizens?
I ask because one day that might be the best solution for what I work on and expanding to the US.
My co-founder has fashion marketing experience, I've emailed you an introduction as well as some other marketing ideas.
Languages as Libraries
Startup Profile – Fig Tree Media
So it's morally superior to use your rad skills to get rich and make the world a better place than by simply using your rad skills to have a good life? Sure.

Are 99% of the people really swinging for the fences doing this? No.. they are trying to get fame and fortune for the fun of it. Nothing wrong with that; but let's not get confused about what we are talking about.

I am 28 and will probably never have to work more than 20+ hours a week doing things I enjoy for the rest of my life. I imagine far less than that in not too many years. I could really swing for the fences and bust my ass until I am 45; but that is 17 years of not engaging with my life in the same way I would if I weren't "working" all the time.
Check out Kickstarter. If you can provide a good pitch on it and ask for your starting round you may indeed be able to get it.

Post again here once it is online and I'll pledge :)
He/She could also use Shopify, etc.
5. The government requires every mobile carrier to sell access wholesale, at cost. (And, yeah, again, what cost?) Like line sharing.
For some reason, I've got it in my head that everything I show the world must succeed.

A project where failure is the goal sounds liberating.
I assumed he meant ssh tunneling from his computer to a home network or something in order to disguise his User Agent or anything else identifying on the application layer. This makes more sense...
Payne is not deep in the bubble. He just has a very, very firm grasp of what makes him happy. Consider:

"As above, I’m not talking about size or scale, or about maximizing profit."

"What matters is how you can help the most people with what you do."

"That said, there’s nothing wrong with starting small (we all have to, inherently), or even with staying small if that’s what best suits the mechanics of your business."

His argument is more nuanced than "start up and grow big." He explicitly says as much in his article.
See also WAL-MART. Wal-Mart doesn't purport to do anything better than its competitors really, and I don't know how they could; they all sell the same things, and so price is the only real competition (environment counts too, but it's a tertiary point). Wal-Mart is now one of the biggest companies in the whole wide world.
That's a pretty common abbreviation. Bankers use M for thousand and MM for million.
I think there's a really strong disconnect here that is really common around HN - basically, do you really want to change the world? It seems like people have a tendency to answer "yes" to this question because the alternative makes you look dispassionate.

This line of thinking makes the assumption that ambition is a necessary prerequisite for efficacy. I'm not exactly in a position to qualify this statement, but I would guess that the people who make the greatest positive changes in the world weren't necessarily setting out to have a huge impact, they were just doing what they knew to be right.

Because everyone loves statistically unproven case studies, I offer Penny Arcade. PA launched a webcomic in 98. Five years later, they launched Child's Play - a charity that has raised ~$9M to fund research and facilities for children's hospitals.

When asked about it, Mike mentioned that, when they started Child's Play, neither of them were parents so they didn't know how effective their efforts would be, they just knew it was the right thing to do.
Actual link:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2011/03/18/video-the-inn...
$10k/month is most certainly enough money for me to quit my 9-5 and live a comfortable life doing what I want to instead of what I have to. That's FU money as far as I'm concerned.
Why would the IE team be more resource constrained than the Firefox team

Because they have fewer people working on the product? I don't know. But presumably they have some constraints on resources that prevent them from doing everything -- hence having to prioritize.

Surely that perception hurts them more than the cost of a few developer-months to take one of their existing spellcheckers and drop it into IE?

So then what do you cut? Dev/test time doesn't just appear magically. Do you cut flexbox? Text shadow? History?
Will this also act as a TLD for triple distilled spirits?
Find a local seamstress, market to local retailers, promote that the clothes are made in city of your choice. Also sell on etsy.
Oh, man. I remember tethering my Zaurus over IR on the train, trying to keep the Zaurus and the phone lined up so it wouldn't drop the connection. I think I did that just once.
The word STARTUP is starting to SUCK the life out of me. It is now as bad as "epic" and "fail" with the word being used in 1/8th of every headline on HN. THANKS!!!!!!
The Public Computers section is really interesting. Homeless people that come in to do webcasts? Kinda cool.

People changing keyboard settings to Russian? Pfft, everyone knows the real evil genius is in setting it to Arabic -- not only is it illegible, but the screens are flipped
IPad 2 components may be in short supply following Japan earthquake and tsunami
Then why would you care if you work on it at all? There needs to be some motivation factor.
"Even if one’s contributions are comparatively modest, we should admire the individual who tries to help others in significant ways."

Effect should be judged more highly than intention. We all know what the road to hell is paved with. And the vast majority of the improvement in the human condition has been unintentional, as a side-effect of selfish actions in the free market.
Electronic Leakage-free Fart Gas Collection System
That is the single phase that is common in most residential service in the US. It is separate from the 3 phase service you find in light industrial and large office buildings.
Social Science Palooza II
LPs care about IRR and liquidity. That causes VCs who are concerned about satisfying their LPs to also care about fund IRR and liquidity.

Sometimes, there is a tradeoff between liquidity and IRR. Groupon could have sold for $6bn, or perhaps they could IPO at $15bn. There, the board members decided that the prospect of improved IRR exceeded the delay in liquidity.

It's not an accurate representation to state that VCs only care about liquidity when a company isn't going anywhere: given that it's a tradeoff, and that liquidity has heightened importance the older the fund, VCs will push for liquidity even in investments in companies that are certainly doing better than "not going anywhere". The IRRs might be good, but their LPs may really want their money back after ten years, and are willing to sacrifice the IRRs to such an extent that a pretty good return just isn't good enough.
> "There's a huge chasm between using Xsan over Fibre Channel and a USB drive with Time Machine," Brady told Ars. "That middle piece is what we're looking at—users that want the convenience of a device like a Drobo, but with more reliability and [easy verifiability]."

So, ultimately, this is a hardware play, then. That makes sense, because most of the features of ZFS don't add any value to a Mac with a single internal drive and at most one or two USB drives, which is how almost all Macs are used.
Side comment, but perhaps an important one:

"it is generating revenue & profit, a couple of hundreds a month. Enough for me to cover my hosting expensives, and working less hours at my day job."

It is generating revenue, it is not generating profit. This may seem like a subtle point, but it really isn't. Take the amount of money you make in your 'day' job, add in all the benefits your day job has as well (paid vacation? health care? life insurance?)

You mentioned your wife doesn't want to work at this business, so treat it like a one-person shop. Next you've got a hosting service, do you host on a virtual host? or do you have your own equipment? One of the nice things about things like EC2 and their ilk is that it aggregates a lot of operational costs that you can then consider in bulk (no need to depreciate equipment for example). Presumably you have your own computer (or computers) that you do development on, those you should depreciate because you will replace them as needed.

Take all the money you make from this service, and put that on top. That is your 'top line' revenue. Now take all of these costs operational (hosting), local equipment, your salary, your benefits and that becomes your 'burn' rate or recurring expense. Subtract them from the top line. The ratio of that number (the difference between revenue and cost) and your total revenue is your gross margin. Obviously if its negative you don't have any gross margin.

But if it is negative (and I suspect it will be) work backwards and make revenue a variable 'x' and your gross margin say "20%" Solving for x says your revenue has to be 20% higher than the sum of your costs to maintain a gross margin of 20%.

Now look at your customers, if you have N customers and you charge them x/N Euros per year, will they still use your service? If the answer is "no" then work that one backwards as well, if your N customers are too few, for what n will the price per n be low enough to meet your revenue and margin goal of 20%?

Lets say you figure out that you need another 1000 customers to meet your goals, do a sanity check and ask "Is there really a thousand additional people who might use my service?" If so then you need to reach them, so try to figure out what it will cost to "talk" to them (this takes various forms, going to a trade show where likely customers would go, advertising in a magazine or on a web site where likely customers would be reading/visiting Etc.) How many do you have to talk to before one signs up? One for one? One out of ten? out of twenty?

Anyway, you get the point. Running it as a business is very different than running it as a hobby. I was trying to give you a sense of what you might think about in your question "What next?" to see if you wanted to make your hobby into a business. This can be a winning strategy, if the business is sound, because you already you know doing it is fun (since you started doing it with no expectation of return). Of course you may also find that trying to make a viable business out of it takes all the fun out, and that would be a bad thing.
From the article it sounds like $60
They can detect this only by listening traffic. Isn't this require some court order for wiretapping? =)

Also, what's about if I setup permanent openvpn connection from the phone to some dedicated server?
This. I want this!

Hard disks are the only part of a computer that is not replaceable. Everything that improves data integrity is improving computer usage as a whole. Improving data integrity is improving user confidence in the machine. This is something that OSes should have done years ago. All any user ever does on a machine is manipulate and work with his personal data. Absolute data integrity should be paramount to any computing technology.

Alas, it is not, and we all have (hopefully) several backups. Again: Anything that improves data integrity is improving computing as a whole. I want this.
Back in the day - there was an article I read about "The never ending sex.com battle" which was about the sex.com domain squatting/stealing debacle...

I thought it was a great name... so I registered neverendingsex.com thinking I could easily monitize it based on the fact that sex.com as a landing page was making several million per year...

But I didnt do anything with the domain and let it die, and someone else grabbed it.
Inspiration behind LetsLunch.com idea
For a data set in the mere tens to hundreds of GB (in MongoDB, if anyone's curious), is there any reason I shouldn't conclude from this that I should use instance storage only (with multi-AZ replication and backups to S3, both of which I would be doing in any case)? Moderately slower recovery in the rare event of an instance failure seems better than the constant possibility of incurable killing performance degradation.

(Edit: I hadn't considered the possibility of somehow killing all my instances through human error. Ouch. That probably warrants one slave on EBS per AZ.)
I'm based in Phoenix right now, but I'm happy to work in a distributed way for now. At some point, we'll potentially incubate somewhere. And when the time comes, we'll have to set up offices. But right now, I am just looking for people who are really excited about the space, and we'll figure out a way to make it work!
"Building a business around maximizing your individual happiness is not particularly useful or admirable." says different to me.
I am not entirely sure this is true. As a young serial entrepreneur with one 7 figure exit I can tell you that most people I meet have no idea who I am or what the company I sold even did. So while an exit does probably help I don't think "much easier" is exactly accurate. That said I see the main point from the author of this post, but I believe he missed some things.

I sold my company for less than 20 million because I came from a middle class family, I had never had money, my parents were the epitome of middle class and I lived a modest life. The amount of money we settled on was enough for me to life for a very long time without significantly changing my lifestyle. It gave me a sense of security and a parachute in case I was to fall on hard times later.

Even at a young age I knew i was giving up alot of possible future profit for a short term payday, but that said i have never really regretted selling because it gave me the freedom to do anything I desired, as it turns out what i want to do and what I was already doing arent terribly far apart, but the projects I am working on now are EXACTLY what I want to do and will make money as time goes on but do not have to be rushed or turned into something they are not.

My current project I would not sell unless my percentage of the exit netted me over 250 million probably however I am a long way from that and just having fun right now.

Though for the most part I agree with the author of the original posts I just think people should consider that there are reasons why some people choose to exit for smaller amounts, some make perfect sense and others make very little however as long as the person selling is happy with the outcome who is to judge?
"Secondly, the 'vocal' people are the people trying to make you start a big business."

As a guy who respects both paths (and has gone down both), I'd say I see more people advocating against a swing-for-the-fences path ("VCs will eat your babies, take control, force you to take insane risks, make you work insane hours, and you'll die penniless 99.9999% of the time!") than advocating against a happy-lifestyle business path. In fact, Alex's post is the first time I've ever read anyone actually saying, "If you're smart, DON'T do a small business that makes you happy! Aim higher."

The lifestyle zealots, to me, seem a lot more vocal/angry. The go-big zealots honestly just seem puzzled... If you're going to quit your job and start something, why wouldn't you attack a huge opportunity? They just don't get that some folks have different motivations than money/fame/world-changing.

The idea that EITHER group tells you what you should do with your life is disgusting to me. For what it's worth, raising venture capital and working VCs made me perfectly happy. My first bootstrapped business actually made me pretty miserable. For the right startup, I'd raise money again in a heartbeat. Whether you raise money or aim big depends entirely on what you care about and how much cash you need to pull it off.
I think that was jraines's point: if you're going to be reductive about how you measure impact, your conclusions are going to be silly.
There are a ton of reasons we have not tried to raise funding.

It sounds like it would be easy, we have proof of concept (after 8 years), but raising capital is very intensive. We feel like we do not have time to take our eyes off the ball. Also, if we are correct and we can build this out to a $20M exit - an investor would most likely need to take more than 10% for their $500k - and - $20M exits are not very interesting to most investors.

We are growing at a decent pace organically and now through M&A. We believe there are a lot of other M&A deals out there for us and our time is better spent putting those deals together.

If someone knocks on the door we will talk...but we don't have time to knock on their doors.
Heroku all the way.
6 Startup Founder’s Syndrome That Can Kill Your Startup
Very true but I'm currently taking the fork.ly "launching soon" approach (http://blog.forkly.com/post/2341870004/a-viral-launching-soo...).

This is dry testing at best.
The 1 Major Difference Between Rich & Poor Entrepreneurs
Word in the industry is that AWS is insanely profitable, so they've got not problem finding the money to hire the help.

My gripe with EBS is that hiccups in EBS cause my Linux instances to "lock up", consume 100% CPU and become unresponsive. AMZN is providing their own Linux distribution and drivers for the EBS devices so they can also attack this problem by patching the Linux kernel.
MiWi CEO Says AT&T Has It Wrong With Tethering Efforts
Come on. How many of these companies improve anyone's lives? I doubt the world is any better thanks to Twitter, or Facebook, or Foursquare, certainly not thanks to the various clones, mashups and "me three" companies you see in TechCrunch every day.
Tokyo Hackerspace could use some help
Presumably, because most botnets consist of Windows computers. If Windows security were better, building a botnet would be difficult.

That said, most botnets consist of old unpatched Windows computers or spreads via third-party software (e.g. Flash/Acrobat Reader), and MS' market share means that it will be targeted even if it their security is no worse than their competitors'. Windows security still could be better, but I don't think blaming Microsoft is as justified as it was before e.g. XP SP2.
Did you guys find a better cloud service, or did you roll your own in a datacenter somewhere?
Applying to Y Combinator: Tips for Standing Out
But then you are not really domain sharking it, are you? You are actually using it (or planing to do so).
First off, what is his dream right now? What projects does he work on in his free time?

It's wonderful that you want to help him, but unless it's something that he's passionate about, will he want to do it?
I've always assumed that "fast-paced" meant that you weren't going to encounter a company moving at corporate-speed -- you know, where a project takes 6-12 months (min.) of meetings, tiger teams, blue ribbon panels, design by committee, political posturing, ad nauseum.
Right. Very large companies are still tied to XP, and therefore Microsoft is. IBM's standard load is still XP, and I haven't seen any Vista or 7 plans yet. I do suspect that they'll skip right to 7 when it's considered "mature" and they allocate the resources to clean up the enormous technical debt accumulated with the in-house applications.
Could you also comment on the following aspects:

How easy and practical would it be to have developers in India while staying outside the country? Would it help if a local manager is hired?

How secure would be the IP developed? Given you mentioned lying on resumes is rampant...

Thanks.
Ray Hightower Interview: Chicago Tech, Ruby on Rails, Warp Core Stability
I think making the lives of some segment of a market a little easier is changing the world. Maybe not all at once, but little by little. That's all Facebook has done, really - it has made the part of our lives where we try to keep up with people we care about a little easier. And since it's easier, we do it more often.
We went with a managed hosting provider who built us a private cluster. Basically a private cloud. But that way we could get a dedicated SAN and move our DB servers out to dedicated boxes with whatever disk configuration we desired.
The fact that they're changing policies without much community discussion is certainly scary to any twitter-based company. Luckily, it appears that they're primarily opposed to clients, which is only one of the many possible applications people can build on top of Twitter.
>then repeat aloud what they're told while showing disaster-porn imagery.

Pretty much standard for a royal wedding then
Were both in the same availability zone?
But you can't tether with those, right?
We've seen in the past that Apple is willing to adopt superior technology. They saw the potential of adopting a unix system as well as adopting an Intel chip. This allows them to provide the same user experience while providing those users with power, should they want it.
One could argue that Google have always been 'startup-y' and any 'drain' reports can be attributed to media exaggerations and over-echoing of separate cases - as the media often does.

Regardless this shake-up is set to streamline management which will accelerate the company's decision making
Now Apple just has to buy them and make it standard.
Thank you! Working on my application now and digging up all the advice I can get.