skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've received a lot of positive feedback...already been in contact with several (seemingly) talented developers. On top of that, this hacker community has been so eager to reach out, introduce themselves, and offer advice, motivation, or to buy me a beer. This is truly a unique and very lucky community to be able to all work together and pull for one another. Glad that I've recently become a part of it.
> Any pointers or suggestions that you can offer will be appreciated.

Take a break from trying to start things. You said that you've been in your Python job for a year and it's "not as exciting" as before and now you want to jump into something else, but you don't know what. It sounds like you're just getting burnt out.

Forget about startups for a few months. Take your family on a vacation, exercise, or take up some other hobby.

If you're really meant to start your own company, an idea will come to you and you won't be able to get it out of your head until it's complete.
Is it a web application or just an ecommerce website. If you don't know the difference head over to google.

If it's a web app, find a technical co-founder.. if you can't find one and are dedicated to making something happen, start learning python/django or ruby/rails.

If it's just a website selling things online, you may be fine with a CMS system, look into Magento, Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress etc..
I've had much better luck taking my computers to an indie Apple certified shop in town. I can drop the computer off with the friendly receptionist and go back to work, and their tech calls me back later to tell me what's wrong and get me to authorize a repair. Then I go and pick it up without having to wander through a shopping mall. Warranty work gets billed back to Apple so I don't pay. The service has typically been better, it keeps money in my community, and best of all I don't have to make an "appointment" only to still have to wait around 15-30 minutes. Everyone wins.

Something about the Genius Bar concept rubs me the wrong way. They really seem to try too hard to be that hip friend of yours who "knows computers." Maybe that helps take the edge off the experience for some people, but I'm not there to stand around and make friends, I'm there to get my stuff fixed with as little trouble on my part as is possible.
Al Jazeera didn't invent the idea of foreign bureaus and local staff. Many organization have/had these. Unfortunately most have been forced to cut back due to budget constraints, since they don't have Qatar's ruling family footing their bills.

There's great irony in that being financed by oil rich monarchs ultimately allows Al Jazeera to appear more trustworthy to some viewers.
You're right – I used colorful, imprecise language. Yes, you should try to make your company profitable. I'm speaking in the context of exits.
I'd pick disaster-Japan in a heartbeat. I'm probably not alone here in that attitude, which is why there's such outrage about this.
All frontend servers do are move bits from one place to another -- from backend to client or from disk to client. This does not require much horsepower.

(SSL is probably the biggest drain on resources, as it is the only part of the chain that is doing actual compute work. I have never run a big site with SSL, though, so I am not sure how this works out in reality.)
Thank you for your response. Where would you recommend I begin looking for someone?
I've given a lot of thought to the UI and UX, and I would be driving the sales. I would need someone to build the website and help figure out logistics and payments.
When you look back on your life, do you want to be the person who got by and lived for your own happiness, or the person who brought happiness, security, and prosperity to countless others?

I think this is a false dichotomy. If not, then the word "countless" is important.

Most of these small businesses are "lifestyle businesses" because they purposely limit their market by focusing on a specific niche. This is one reason they're supposed to be a "safer" bet -- you address a need that you either already know well because you are a part of the market, or it's small and accessible enough that you can get a firm grasp of its needs and provide value.

Yes, these businesses provide value. That's what their customers are paying for. Is it not noble (or at least, not self-serving) to provide value to a few thousand, say, occupational therapists who need a particular service that they're willing to pay $10 a month for? Or is it only worth venturing to help "countless" people?

My father is a doctor, and his lifetime number of "customers" is probably a lot lower than a largeish web app serving some good purpose, but I wouldn't call it a wasted life.
Why, why, why?
That's going to need a citation.
I've been there twice, and only ever used public transport; it worked fine, much better than in the US. And there's plenty of good food.
They don't really need the SSN. If they press for it, tell them you're on a visa and you haven't been assigned one. Verizon entered 123-45-678 for mine and it let them create the account :P
Why would the IE team be more resource constrained than the Firefox team, who managed to add a spellchecker years ago? I'll admit that I've not gone looking, but I've not ever heard of anyone using one of these third party IE spellcheckers - it's just been a feature which I expect a decent browser to have that IE clearly lacked. 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?
How is it their mess?
Ask HN: B2B reward programs?
Hi HN,

Pretty soon the fashion start-up I work at is going to have a bunch of retail leads available to us at an event we're hosting.

I want to make a retailer plus program with incentives for stocking our brand. Does anyone have any experience with this sort of things, or ideas?
Presumably he meant that he saw people using those laptops, not just sitting there unused on a shelf.
I actually do that. If you sign up you get a filled out list that has 'create my mindwallet' crossed out and a space to put a todo list for the day.

I'll consider getting rid of the list. On the splash page. The more I look at it the more I realize it is too much.
RSA Breach: An Attack That Used a Social Media Booby Trap?
In fact, they're both implemented in the same way, using the "standard" JavaScript pattern for setting up a prototype chain. (With a few minor extra features). Here's the annotated source code:

http://documentcloud.github.com/backbone/docs/backbone.html#...
I dunno. pr0n.xxx seems like a fun one to play with, no pun intended. Or goatse.xxx, uni.xxx or ha.xxx.
Man you folks are more harsh than peer-reviewers! :)

And here I was thinking to myself when I wrote the post, "people don't want to be drowning in data; they want something interesting based on the data". Dang. I was wrong!

On its own, that chart would be shady, you're right. For the purposes of the data I was trying to show (that weekend and weekday rides are quite similar), that was the best way to plot the data.

Of course if I take a linear function, and plot its integral, it will be exponential. By definition. I recognize that.

But that's why I also plotted the weekly averages farther down. You can see the non-linear growth very clearly in that chart. In fact, if I log-transform the average rides per week, the plot is quite linear (as would be expected for exponential growth). r(ln(rides)) = 0.83

Your comment about the slope since last November being "pretty linear" is misleading, too, though!

If you take an exponential function, and arbitrarily select any sub-segment of it, that sub-segment will always have a better linear fit than the linear fit for the whole function.

So by definition, mathematically, you're right. Our growth since November has been more linear than the overall history of our growth. Just as the first three months were also more linear. Or during any other arbitrary time period.

So I happily submit my revised manuscript for your reconsideration. I hope I have adequately and thoroughly addressed all of the reviewers concerns. Thank you.
Actually, it was very different. A quote:

"However, Rustock’s infrastructure was much more complicated than Waledac’s, relying on hard-coded Internet Protocol addresses rather than domain names and peer-to peer command and control servers to control the botnet."

Read the whole thing at http://blogs.technet.com/b/microsoft_on_the_issues/archive/2...
He really motivates every YC applicant to become next big thing. He wants entrepreneurs to love the idea & grow it at its peak and exit.

or sell it to $20M and fund yourself for your next big thing. Atleast try to make this 2nd idea to touch its peak.
Here's my biggest fear:

An internet provider blocks the domain. At first, nobody will complain because "every other media does the same"; then someone will complain, but everyone else will scourge this person as a "perv" and before we realize we have a huge precedent against net neutrality.
> We should endeavor to improve the lives of as many people as possible in a lasting and significant way, making the most of our own skills in the process.

Why the qualifier?
I think you might be mistaking our load balancers with our frontends.

Our frontend servers run the Rails application (as well as other applications like the Sinatra app running http://jobs.github.com). Additionally, they also run all of our background jobs.
I'm using it for gmail, FWIW.
Yes, the ability to use native drivers on ReactOS stems from writing a kernel that mimics the Windows kernel API/ABI as closely as possible. The ReactOS userland, however, is provided primarily by WINE. You can think of ReactOS primarily as an open kernel compatible with Windows's kernel API, and WINE as an open userland compatible with Windows's userland APIs. ReactOS isn't rewriting WINE, they use WINE extensively. The main unique work of ReactOS is the Windows-compatible kernel.

Mono is helpful for pure .NET directly from a Unix environment. However, Mono is more of an open .NET development environment than a .NET compatibility environment; while Mono can run a lot of .NET apps that are made for Windows, that's almost incidental of compatibility with the CLR bytecode. There are important implementation differences that Mono is aware of and has no intention to correct because, unlike WINE, Mono is not really a compatibility layer.

Additionally, many Windows programs launch .NET programs directly, and afaik it's not very easy to get them to use Mono by default. For instance, I recently purchased C&C 4 on Steam, but it's a pain to make it work because circumventing the .NET-based launcher wants me to include an EA ID (I could use a fake auth server but just don't feel like putting that much effort in), and launching directly doesn't work because of the .NET-based launcher (.NET doesn't work). Further, more and more products are relying on .NET components, including Visual Studio, Office, and other big things. I think getting the .NET runtimes working well should be one of the main goals for WINE devs.
really? I think if your next idea sucks no amount of money will buy you "traction". $20M will run out pretty quick.
It's kinda sad; they used to be good, 20 years ago. They really made their mark covering Gulf War I.

Although I suppose I'm not sure whether they were good, or just better than other TV coverage of the time.
>It could be a bad algorithm

if it picks correlation enough to generate good profit it may be good enough for its purpose.

After all, how do we know how things are really connected, correlation and causality wise? ie. "The Sirens of Titan".
When I read through your post it was all going well until the part where you say:

"At the core of the pro-micro business argument is an idea that I find hard to swallow: that merely being happy should be purpose enough for a person."

Wow.

Doesn't everyone have the goal of being in an non-state of pain and suffering. Which, is basically the same as being happy/content/satisfied.

If _your_ "non-state of pain and suffering" = you need to be a billionaire... then, there was NO point in my original article that said "you can't be a billionaire". So what relevance does that point have to the article?

The main point I was trying to make (and it's my lack of good writing that didn't get this across) was absolutely nothing to do with what your post talks about.

I was proposing that we would all have a better ultimate chance of fulfilling our entrepreneurial goals if the very first thing we did was to build a micro business.

Build a micro business. Make it successful. Then swing for the fences.

The advantages are:

- You will have a more rounded understanding of "business"

- You will be financially free and able to pursue your other big risk ventures

- You will loose less % in any future investment deals you cut because you will have proven yourself

- You will ultimately have more control and less people to answer to

"The waste" that I was referring to was that by taking the other route (chasing after golden ticket investment) is a waste of potential real world business learning.

Sure we all learn with every route we take, but the faster and more immersed we become in dealing with ALL aspects of business - the better we get.

The beauty of a micro business is that it's far easier to see all the facets of business. Any other route... there are bound to be some facets that we miss out on compared to a microcosm of a total business experience.
HN: please help me help my father
Dear HN users, a long time poster here. Please help me help my father.

My father, 58, living in a European city, lost a job recently and it's very hard to find a new one for him. He used to be a CEO (a couple of times) in an agricultrure business (small biz, max 50 people). He got fired last year and it's hard for him to find a job in a smaller town (population of 50K people) he lives in. I am an entrepreneur and have some cash available (to fund an average salary of one person in my country for 3 years). I'd like to help my dear father = maybe there's a way I could fund and create an agriculture startup? Or something else? I am worried he might not be able to find another job before his retirement age (at the age of 65) - I know this is a very hard situation for him and I'd like to help him since he helped me a lot in my life - I owe it to him. What would you hacker guys (or girls) do? Maybe there's something I could do for my father. Maybe have him create a real investment project (a small house) (which I'd fund) and have him build it and sell it? Or something else?

I want him to feel he is useful and that his life still has a lot of purpose.

My father is excellent at managing people and generally overseeing a business.

Thank you for listening - this means everything to me!
Your comment:
"All I want to do is solve a real problem for some segment of a large market and make their lives a little easier."

My article:
"That drive to make a part of the consumer world better is the mark of the entrepreneur."

I'm not saying everyone needs to cure AIDS. I think our sentences seen side by side align quite nicely.
Yup, less is more. Especially on an application main page. If you explain it somewhere else, just put a huge pretty button to click to find that guide, and don't give them directions anywhere else except the FAQ/Documentation page you have.
I don't think he's saying selling is bad... but that the goal is to build something great. If you believe in it and are driven by your vision of making it great and you succeed, people will want to buy it. Then you'll have options.

If the goal is just to build something that will get bought, you might be able to get... stressed and frantic about that. But you usually won't have the same type of passionate, intrinsic motivation that drives founders who are in love with their idea.
And you're right that it was a little absurd for me to wind up in Silicon Valley doing a startup. I'd be glad to write a follow-up post about how that all happened.
Where are you based?

I have sent your link to a buddy of mine who would be perfect for your Gardening CoFounder...

He is in Marin (SF Bay Area)
would you need 8 morons to accompany you on the trip, or better them being distracted somewhere else?
You're monitoring from AWS US-East it looks like, you'll want to mention that to give people some context around the latency numbers.
I work in a fast-paced environment for a project.

You know what fast-paced is - ideas thrown at you that invalidate your previous architecture once every 2 weeks. And I don't know how you can get any more fast-paced than that.

If I hadn't enough experience to make the architecture flexible enough or to do unit-tests or to choose the right moment to start from scratch, I would probably go mad.
The F-35: A Weapon That Costs More Than Australia
Mobile Application Developers. Who needs them? :)
Or, significantly worse, someone writes a law making it illegal to host "adult content" outside of .xxx domains. It's a lot easier to legislate/enforce filtering when all the "bad stuff" is conveniently on a single TLD.
Where Apple went wrong with free apps
I don't know, I think the article was off-putting to Alex for the reason that he states: it focuses on achieving personal happiness rather than improving the lives of as many people as possible.
"My father is a doctor, and his lifetime number of "customers" is probably a lot lower than a largeish web app serving some good purpose, but I wouldn't call it a wasted life."

I would disagree. Doctors help save and improve people's lives. Those people then go on to continue to impact people. Doctors most certainly help "countless others" :)
I think that his comment about AmyHoy's app was childish and his comments in this article are both naive and megalomaniacal ("I'm trying to touch more people's lives than you, so I'm better!").

I get the feeling that he doesn't understand the different types of glue that hold together the various scales at which society operates.

This coupled with yesterday suggests a childish acting-out of sorts.

I prescribe a healthy dose of spending time with people instead of trying to change the world from your computer desk.
Google Reminds Branding Guidelines To Chrome Extension Developers
Not such a good thing, if it forces you to upgrade to Vist. It didnt and I didnt. To paraphrase Apple, "XP forever."
WakeMate (YC S09) is looking for a Django/Python developer
WakeMate (http://wakemate.com) is dedicating to improving the way people sleep. We're taking algorithms and ideas developed in sleep labs and bringing them to mainstream consumers in a low cost, easy to use way.

Building a product people sleep with is a big responsibility, but having that kind of impact on our users' lives is amazingly invigorating. Nothing motivates you to work harder than 5 paragraph user emails saying -- "Wakemate is a necessity that every single person should have access to" and "I am getting ready to sleep with WakeMate for the third night tonight. I cannot explain the excitement I have just to go back to bed just so I can feel so good."

We want to work with someone who also thinks building software/hardware to help people sleep better is damn cool. We want you to be good at what you do but don't care if you would describe yourself as a ninja, rockstar or whatever. If you're excited about what we're doing, we want to talk to you.

The role you would be filling is a pretty large one. It's a lot of work and responsibility and we want you to feel like WakeMate is your baby. Because of that we're expecting to give you a significant amount of equity. You'll also have as much say in the direction of the company and the decisions we make as anyone else.

______________

We're a 4 person team looking for someone willing to work in our office in SF and experience with:

- Django and Python
- SQL and relational databases (we use postgres)
- Developing and maintaining REST APIs.
- Data mining or statistical analysis experience a major plus
- E-commerce experience also a plus

We're also cash flow positive and have some great investors including Y Combinator, Mitch Kapor, Gary/AJ Vaynerchuk, Matt Mullenweg, Dave McClure, Matt Cutts, Gabe Weinberg (epi0bauqu), Alexis Ohanian and others.

If this sounds like something you want to be a part of please email jobs@wakemate.com.
Fukushima Disaster Upgraded to Level 5
All my female captains had baritone voices.
Ask HN: Where do i go to find an investor?
I've got a unique clothing line designed, have mock ups and samples made, built an ecommerce solution on my local computer, acquired all relevant usernames on social sites, have a business plan, have pro forma financials, formed an s-corp...

Problem is, i need about $20k to make the first batch of clothes (i don't have $20k). cafepress and the like won't work, all pieces require custom tailoring.

1. how do i find an investor?
2. or how do i do this without an investor?

thanks.
Ha! Point taken!
After how long? This was one of the first alternative TLDs to be suggested.

I am curious to see how they price the domains.
They're probably on Tracphones or similar pay-as-you-go phones.
Do you want to impact as many people as possible because that is what makes you happiest?
If the goal is just to build something that will get bought, you might be able to get... stressed and frantic about that. But you usually won't have the same type of passionate, intrinsic motivation that drives founders who are in love with their idea.

Fair enough, and I agree with that. I don't want to "build a company to flip," but if - in the process of building what I hope will be a billion dollar company - I get an early / unexpected chance to walk away with a nice chunk of bank; it would be hard to turn down. That's all I'm really getting at.
One company I worked for had the same problem - because the (Oracle) database was also linked to their payment system and because they were a big company, the simplest change would require 2 or 3 weeks of approvals (by law, not really their fault).

And you know what my department did?

We've managed to setup our own database servers, so changes became independent of any payment system and could be done on the spot.

I know things suck in corporations, but sometimes it's your fault for not doing anything about it.
Your article made my heart race; all the way through I was thinking "That's US"! Especially the "touch of insanity" part because we are selling our house and taking some pretty big leaps to make this thing happen.

We only learned about YCombinator about 2 weeks ago, within days of having decided to go "all in" but it's too great of an opportunity to pass up so we're scrambling to hit the app. deadline while getting the house on the market, planning next steps etc. But we are so energized everyday by the possibility of bringing our idea to life.

The Ron Conway quote was right on time for me -“real entrepreneurs aren’t thinking about exits; they’re thinking about changing the world”... I always feel a little nuts for being sad when people say things like "you'll probably sell to...for millions"... but from now on, I'll think about you, Ron Conway and changing the world and smile because clearly, I'm not the only one! Thanks a bunch for this post.
All It Needs Is Love
Fred Wilson invented Embedly: How we got a Y Combinator interview
Damn me for not noticing that. I can already hear it: "think of the children!"