skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think he's trying to say that venture capital isn't the only route to typical entrepreneurial goals; such as self-fulfillment, being your own boss and a comfortable life.

Note that he doesn't say that every typical goal could be satisfied by a lifestyle business (goals such as changing the world in a matter of years, or making loads of money).
Ah, similar to how one gets "free" WiFi in the States by ordering some coffee from a Starbucks :) I am touring Europe in a couple months and will keep this in mind, thanks!
I'm not sure I agree with "Not that hard to get 10,000 free users?"
Thats a good point...thanks for the feedback!

Do you already know those friends' email addresses in these cases? If not, would you want us to get them from gmail/facebook so you can have autocomplete?

Thanks again for the observation.
The way to combat that campaign is not by defending an ancient reactor built on the cheap. It's not by defending the overly secrete save face first, save lives second approach by the authorities. Fukushima should not be played down. That is not the way to counter-act the FUD.
Maybe some people actually do want to keep most websites free and don't mind the Google ads and sometimes even find them interesting. (Yes, it may be hard to admit for some people but sometimes the ad is actually right what you want/need.)
Well if the artists start releasing albums that are worth buying, then this wouldn't be an issue. Seriously. Name an album released in the past two decades that is even close in scope and depth to Led Zep I-IV, or Dark Side of the Moon, Jashua Tree, Revolver, etc.

If you want people to buy more albums, the solution is really simple -- MAKE GREAT ALBUMS.
If it worked well to self-fund giant companies using the income from small ones, we should see instances of it happening in the wild.

We don't have much of a history to work from, and the majority of the enabling tools available to us simple did not exist prior to or during the emergence of the current economic and business environment.

I think developments such as Kickstarter provide a glimmer of where things are headed.
For every cycle and construction, there is theoretical efficiency limit inherent to it. Implementations will approach that, more or less asymptotically, but can't exceed.

A novel cycle and construction may leave more headroom for improvement, even if first implementation aren't particularly efficient.

IIRC turbines are usually highly efficient, but only in a narrow band, near maximum output; at low RPM they literally suck. Perhaps a novel construction could widen the gap considerably.
Agreed about illusory superiority and the Dunning-Kruger effect ... I'm pretty good at seeing people's strengths and potential, and so often am surprised to discover have a higher opinion of somebody's abilities then they do of themselves.

Also agreed that a lot of co-called A players aren't. Cultural and gender issues make it even more complex. In general I try to stay away from the whole notion of "A players" because of the connotations of grading (bleah) and a single scale. That said, I also think it's a mistake to hire somebody who think can't do a good enough job on your current needs; that's seting yourself up for failure.
What is Innovation?
If the article made sound easy to make $10k/month that was an error on my part. It is not easy, it's very hard. But no where near as hard as building a successful business on VC investment. Don't forget, after you get the investment you're only just starting out... 8 out of 10 VC funded projects fail.
Gas turbines have by far the best power-to-weight ratio of anything short of a rocket motor. And large gas turbines can be extremely efficient.

But they're expensive and the efficiency advantage largely disappears as they're scaled down to a size appropriate to power a car.

Probably the fundamental reason we don't see production gas turbine cars is that there are cheaper and less technically risky ways to remove weight from a car, and weight savings often isn't even the cheapest way to improve efficiency.
One reason why you wouldn't expect to see this so often in the wild is that by the time you get to be as successful as 37signals, the drive to make speculative bets on shoot-the-moon business plans is diminished. Presumably after your second supercar, you don't so much feel like gambling people's jobs on a Google-killer.

Successful businesspeople may not be risk-averse; they're happy to start electric car companies for the joy of it. Successful businesses, on the other hand, don't think like that.
If you don't mind me asking, how long did it take you to get to $2k? That's always the number I find interesting, since it's my mental threshold for "allows a person with no children to go on eating ramen noodles in a cheap apartment."
Ballet Tyrants Forbid Social Media
Actually, I had a microwave and didn't like it, hardly used it, eventually got rid of it. Even for your use case above. I instead have a standalone steam sterliser that's as quick as the microwave and a better user experience because it's much less fiddly and therefore quicker to load the bottles.

One mans killer feature is another's meh.
That's an interesting point: are there any big tech companies (in the top tier of "big") that didn't take venture capital? I can't think of any offhand.

It'd be an odd result, because there are big companies in other fields that grew by bootstrapping and then reinvesting profits. For example, as far as I can find, Wal-Mart took little to no investment before the IPO. I wonder what makes tech different? Is it somehow more capital-intensive, contrary to the usual assumptions? Or is it that it's a lot easier to get investors in tech, so people aren't forced to bootstrap? Or that alternative financing options are harder to use in tech (no equivalent to Wal-Mart's strategy of opening new stores by taking out loans with existing stores as collateral)?

Some interesting data to see would be: what's the biggest tech company that has never taken outside investment? Are there any significantly bigger than 37 Signals?
At that point they didn't have any users worth keeping anyway. The community had degraded to the point of irrelevance a year or two before the redesign. If anything the shift to reddit just harmed reddit.
> -Layer upon layer of bureaucracy (states, counties, districts, individual school administrators)

damage. route around it

> -Teachers that are reluctant to adopt new technology

damage. route around it

> -Students that are difficult to motivate

damage. route around it

i am serious
Bruce Sterling: Network Society Isn’t Compatible With Democracy
I still can't understand how to use the iPad. It doesn't do what my Mac Book can and I can do what it does on my iPhone. For eBooks I have my Kindle which is much better to read on. The only use I've seen so far that it excels in is in use in debates. The speaker can have more than one document up at a time. Other than that?????
I have one issue with this: I actually like clients being given only the files and configurations they need. Using rsync or git to propagate the puppet manifests implies that each remote host gets all the files, and in those there may be sensitive informations for the other hosts (database passwords for example).

In this scenario, if one of the hosts is compromised, much more information is leaked than in the case of a puppet server. How do you deal with this problem?
Maybe that's why she doubled it.
> A run on potassium iodide tablets on the US west coast is just plain silly, but the way to combat that is to discuss exactly how radiation spreads, not to try and argue that Fukushima isn't that bad.

How can I do one without doing the other, given the nice "radiation plume" graphics, in "arbitrary units" no less, going through the news?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2335273

I'm not trying to minimize the problems, I'm trying to be realistic about them. After the first hydrogen explosion, if you look through my HN comments, I warned that there were likely to be more. Those are very dangerous, but to the plant employees fixing this, but not to anyone who isn't nearby. Those people are heroes, putting themselves in danger to protect everyone else from further radiation leaks.

But I sincerely believe that nobody who isn't in Japan or in the sea nearby is at any serious risk.
No, one of the authors of the library in question was the one that raised the issue:

http://twitter.com/#!/therealkerni/status/48341474210881536
Compressed Sensing: Turn Lo-Res Datasets Into Hi-Res Samples (Mar 2010)
Heating up water for tea?!

I recommend never suggesting this if you ever visit England.
It's not that hard to get a fairly small volume of users (100-10,000) -- compared to getting a huge, YouTube-sized volume (millions of users). But it's still hard to get any number at all. It takes work, persistence, luck, and intelligence.
Product Development: How do you handle killing features?
> I don't think a joke like that should explicitly identify itself as such.

Ideally, you'd be right. The problem is that so many people also don't think a joke should explicitly identify itself by being funny.
Thats the best defence of newspapers I have seen in a long time, but that is still:

2 two years ago

almost certainly not the worst thing that has been done (and not even very close either)
You Need Good Parents to Make Good Children
> This feels a bit too much like a witch hunt

'zactly. It feels like a load of knee-jerk reactions to me. One mistake in a commit in public does not sound like grounds for a crucifixion.

Everybody chill out and hop off the bandwagon already.
Gruber: It is not an oversight or a bug, or the result of a single person at Apple wishing to hinder the performance of web apps.

Ars: Apple is aware of the issues, which are currently filed as bugs... are marked "not to be fixed by exec order,"

Well, this ought to be interesting.
Microwave = iPad
Oven = PC/Mac computer

Normally people wouldn't buy a microwave without also owning an oven... well, unless you're really cheap and don't care about your health!
Care to elaborate a little? I'll settle for links to previous posts if you have them.
Am I parsing the name wrong? I saw this a few hours ago and I still can't help but get the impression this is somehow medical related (the "cure" part).
How does this play with VC's coming into the Super Angel space?
Because "we" talk about it so much "we" are able to kill it and make it a non-issue so investors can focus on more imp issues.
How do you get into Silicon Valley
I think the first 10k a month app will inevitably be the hardest, but like Justin says it'll be a lot easier than becoming the next Facebook or Google. Most people chase/fantasize about being the next Google because they think it will buy them freedom. If you are lucky enough to get close, depending on how you play it, it might do exactly that for you. But I agree with Justin the odds are just so small it's difficult to justify spending your life in eternal lustful pursuit of such dreams.

I'm sorry to roll out the cliché, but gaining time is more likely to make you happy and free. And a few slow grown bootstrapped 'dipshit companies' are much more realistic and likely to provide you with that time along with a boatload more autonomy. Instead it seems everyone is aiming to be the head of the next big thing and indebted to VC's in to the bargain. What do I know though, perhaps it's not all that bad...?

I do think that with a couple of $10,000 a month semi-automated apps in your pocket you've got a lot of choices. Especially if you are young. It can give you the free time to really work out what you want to get out of your life. With time to think you might find it's not what your doing and/or aspiring to right now.

For me if my startup ever starts to make 10K+ a month it'll simply mean trying to spend a little less time sat behind my keyboard. Spending more time outdoors travelling and experiencing the world instead of too much time indoors reading about it sounds like a good plan to me.
I use flavors.me (which for all intents and purposes appears to be the same thing), and here at least was my rationale.

I'm trying to reduce and simplify my online presence stuff (basically the least amount of work I can put into it, and also what'll cost me the least.)

What I've settled on (and so far seems to be working for me, although I'm in the early stages of it):

Got rid of a VPS running my own web server, migrated email for both of my domains to Google apps for domain.

Got rid of Squarespace account and set up a Posterous blog and the flavors.me page (so I have a landing page at flavors.me and a separate blog).

My old website was basically a landing page and a blog, which was sort of a waste of an apache instance.

So now I've basically replaced paying $20/month and the hassle of administrating an email and web server for free services. If I get to the point where this solution doesn't do what I want it to, maybe I'll go back to doing it myself; but I'd rather not deal with it.
Note that there is zero mention of VRBO or Homeaway in this entire email thread. That's the real opportunity (not hotels or bed and breakfasts) and neither Fred nor Paul saw it.
I'm not sure why I read John Gruber anymore. I get my hopes up that perhaps I'll see some of the smart, incisive that I remember from years ago, but instead I see another pretty baseless apology for Apple's behavior. He may actually be correct in this case, but it's hard to take him seriously given that he seems to bend over backwards to interpret Apple's actions as charitably as possible. This post is certainly more defensible than his recent defense of Apple's 30% application revenue power-grab, but I am skeptical that it was written in any better faith.

With every thing he writes like this, he's behaving more like a fanboy and less like a reliable source of information. It's a bit sad.
Are Four Words Worth $25 Billion for Groupon?
Class methods are not so useful in python as in java and C#.

I think that classmethods was added only for java/C# folks.

In fact it's always better just to combine defs in module and use it as module.method.

I like the approach in Scala with "objects" (Scala-singletones).

About "self": I don't understand you. Can you show me a language with optional (not forced) OOP, that lets you bloody patch objects and classes that deals with this problem in better way?
I've read all the arguments against the iTunes activation step, not many for to be fair, but I believe I represent the silent majority that just doesn't mind that imposition. The iPad is book matched with it's sync software, ipad owner will then continue to use their sync software because it provides all the access to the music, movies, photos, apps, ...
As I remember, my US Robotics palm pilot did work without the initial sync, but I wouldn't have like to have trusted my data without sync and backup.

What's your particular problem with the initial sync stage?
Maybe, but the iPad is a microwave that will only heat Apple certified food.

And while Apple said it will only use their certification program to prevent the heating of cats, it took only a few days until Apple prohibited heating aluminium foil, then raw eggs, alcohol (bad for you anway!), and finally - any meat. Tofu and mineral water is fine by Steve, though...
The basic (and only) credit card my CU offers is fantastic. 10.90% flat APR on EVERYTHING, and absolutely no fees. (This even includes cash advances.)

To me, credit unions are truly a "hacker's" bank. No frills or gimmicks leaves room for more savings and better customer service than commercial banks. Kind of like getting a barebones unmanaged VPS compared to managed shared webspace from GoDaddy.
I'm sure you're right.
Shouldn't Paypal just be able to give a yes or no answer to the question of if any donations came from California, without turning over all the records to Sony? If the jurisdiction is really what is at stake here.

But... I am no lawyer, so there must be issues I don't understand here.
I only added that comment because I was thinking about PHP/JS vs...Java or Objective-C. It really makes sense to switch out of Coda and into Xcode.
+1 for niche ad networks that know their audiences.

I recently added Influads (similar to carbon) on one of my side projects, and I actually got a complement about the ads from a user! That was the last thing I expected.
I'd love to know how I can get one of those consulting/programmer-for-hire jobs for $10k/mo.

Do these things really exist? How do you find them?
> "Get the W3C standard changed to fit IE6" (listed as a goal of the site)

Please correct me if I got it wrong, but it seems HTML 5 is a bit similar -- ``let's make a list of features our sponsors support''. Only the sponsor base is wider.
That terseness is how Fred writes every email, it's not unique to this thread with Paul. When you try to reply to a couple hundred emails a day, this terseness is the result.
in a year or two

And yet the stocks have bounced way up in under two months. The only way that wasn't going to happen was if Jobs died, or perhaps if he announced a permanent retirement. Neither of those things were going to happen so quickly after the announcement, otherwise they wouldn't have announced it the way they did.

So yes, the market was pricing that possibility, but it was obvious that in no time at all it would forget about it and go mad over the Apple's short-term future. Sure enough, it did.
I wish there was a checkbox on the top right something like:
"[X] Available on my selected services" so I didn't have to look at stuff that would cost me money if I don't want.
But that's the opposite point...

The original article seems to be arguing $10K is something like a "sweet spot" where lots of micro-entrepreneurs could comfortably stay. I would contend that if an entrepreneur is able to get to $10K/month with ease or with difficulty, they've probably got the resource to go to $20K, and then $40 look promising etc. That requires extreme hustle of course but so does staying at $10K.

IE, there's no "sweet spot" or stable spot. It is more like either failure or "lift-off".
"Nobody is saying that this situation is "minor""

Yes they are.

Earlier in this very thread, alextingle wrote:

"This relatively minor accident has come at a very unfortunate time."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2337966

And that's far from the only time this sentiment has been expressed on HN.

Lots of pro-nuclear advocates on HN have repeatedly said that the Fukushima accident is minor. This was especially true a few days ago, but even now some are continuing to maintain it's no big deal.
I think the argument of the article applies not just to the iPad, but also to similar devices (I'm thinking the coming Android tablets), which provide the same combination of instant-on and touchscreen.
It was pretty amazing. I couldn't call or text anyone for quite some time after the quake, but the internet connection was totally unaffected. I was talking to people around the world on Facebook, and even made some phone calls through gmail. The telcos could learn something from the ISPs.
I really, really need to get this fixed, we're in the middle of selling a web-based ipad app to a very large client, utilizing the local caching. This is a terrible bug for me :(
Make your own stickers for decorative purposes
Idsketch.com offers a top class service in the shape of allowing you to make your own sticker. You can make your own stickers in any way you want them. You can get various products in this manner, like you can make your own bumper sticker if you feel more artistic
But they took about 15 years longer to get there!
(Also, I'm running 10.0.648.151: was there a 'regression' or are you running something custom on top of Chrome?)
I'm not sure "simple" is the word I'd use, but yes, I think it's definitely do-able.

They key (as someone who has done it) is to look for niche B2B opportunities. Find a need and fulfill it better or cheaper than existing players. Exploit newer/cheaper tech or SEO knowledge that the existing guys don't/can't get.

Think of it this way: you need 500 businesses to pay you $20/month to get to $10k/month. If you can get 1 signup a day, you're there in < 2 years.

One example: we run nextproof.com that lets wedding and portrait photographers sell prints online (think of it as a shopify for photographers). There are way bigger players in the market (pictage, smugmug, printroom, etc.) but we have ~2,000 users. Half of them are on a paid plan at between $9 and $99/month. The other half are on a free plan BUT we still make money on them through transaction fees. So, after 3 years, it's well over $10k/month.

Another option is premium content or tools targeted at these niche businesses. This could be in the form of WordPress themes/plugins, eBooks, DVDs, etc. We did an SEO DVD for photographers and sold 1,000 @ $79 each.

Most of the "ideas" I come up with are along these lines. I have tons of them.
SXSW Startup Bus unveils joint entrepreneurial winners
So, even if he's right, he's wrong?
Digg is like that once-cool friend who goes all weird overnight leaving his buddies wondering 'WTF happened?'.
The government may have wrongfully initiated the legal action, but this is not certain before the trial is over. Remember, in the case of guilt (context: when someone is guilty of violating an objective law, so this doesn't apply to all of today's laws), it is merely retaliating.

This stuff isn't just an academic issue: "Shrinking funding and access to resources for public defenders and court-appointed attorneys is only making the problem worse." (See: http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/Bad-Lawyering.php)

I support most of what the Innocence Project does, but I think that charity is the answer here (being a selfish person doesn't mean that I don't support charities; it just means that I don't think that such support earns me moral credit). If the government didn't pay for public defendants at all, I think that the Innocence Project might have an easier time raising money for more and better attorneys.
I have always supported a philosophy of patience when it comes to being right. When entering a new organization, make your case(s) known, but don't push them. If you are proven to be often correct, over time people will see the pattern, and you will earn respect. Even more so if you don't say "I told you so."
On the flip side, if you are pushy and turn out to be wrong, you just shot yourself.
Apple takes steps to insure that proprietary App store is potentially more profitable than universal HTML 5. Film at eleven.
i suspect you have a few of those in your gmail archives to andrew ;)
Just go back to the job that used to pay you $6K/month...

In other words, the consulting jobs exist but they are for "niche markets" - companies hire back their most senior workers on a consulting basis. Also those explicitly trained by SAP and the like at one time could get the bucks. I don't know if that's still true.
i'm in a data gathering phase on this comment thread
A different way of looking at it is that there are disruptions in progress (less capital required to reach 'giant', new funding options) that are making this significantly more likely.
We were already meeting our users over the previous year, including at the DNC and Inauguration. We had ambivalence to continue to do so city-by-city because, as we were warned by others, it didn't scale. PG gave us permission to continue these efforts, and to "do things that don't scale." It was one of the greatest pieces of advice we ever received.
It could be because the industry is relatively new. 37 Signals is about 12 years old. How big was Wal-Mart after 12 years?

Edit: Wikipedia says Wal-Mart was doing $340.3 million after 13 years.
I agree that "similar devices" might live up to become as commonplace as microwaves.

But if the iPad with its control freak attitude stays at its 90% penetration in this market, I've got no trust in humanity anymore.
I think the site explains things much better now. It took me two visits to realize how cool Embedly was; I can't remember if that was from version 1 or 2.