skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the above quoted passage, PG is not talking about issues such as supporting family (which he does acknowledge as an important issue elsewhere). It's just about the correlation between commitment, effort and success.
Using a reversed proxy (e.g. nginx's built in, or maybe varnish) is a much easier and dynamic solution then to render things to static files.
That's what AWS was developed for originally - running Amazon's products.
$250,000 is certainly not chump change for most people, but it's not a fortune in the startup world. They did the right thing by turning it down. If their product is good they should be able to make that back + more in a year or two.
1. Not that I know of, but it's just two clicks to the right on the home screen - I usually just leave it running all the time, so it isn't much of a problem.

2. No idea. If I had to guess it wouldn't be harder than the original jailbreak, and potentially much easier.

3. You can use your iPhone/iPod touch's Remote app to control the ATV (the remote it comes with is a pain for text input) [No jailbreak required]
Cloud Drive Sidesteps Legal Obstacle to Ubiquitous MP3s
We spend far too much time in the industry debating on what to name things. Naming things, or preventing things from being improperly named, does not build stuff or sell stuff to customers.
It's all well and good being entrepreneurial, but (in the US at least), health insurance has to be in the picture somewhere. Scavenging it from a parent or spouse, or just running barefoot, isn't a safe long-term strategy. Work it into the business plan, or work to change the business environment/law.
Nutrition facts for humans might be fun, too. Useful for vampires at least.
Its also possible to quit your job and still only build a half-baked company. At least you can call yourself a startup by this standard.

This smacks strongly of someone who is fostering elitism.
You should consider using some of those "secrets" on your own site. :)

Kinda ironic, huh? I made the decision to leave all that dirty work to Posterous, with whom I've been very happy. Every once in a while it gets sluggish. Perhaps one of them will read this and speed it up when no one's looking.
Peak Oil is about an inflection point after which the expense of extracting oil rapidly accelerates. It's a cost issue. And those concerned with Peak Oil are afraid that acceleration will be faster than our ability to switch to alternatives, causing a period of cramping where energy jumps from being dirt cheap to tremendously expensive, until we can build out the alternatives (a process that will most certainly take decades).

There will always be oil; we just won't be extracting it after a certain point anyway. 2050 is an easy target for that.
I'm referring to the Times of India group, and I was referring to India. Sorry about the mix up that caused. :)

The Times of India is the largest circulated English-language daily newspaper in the world, across all formats (Broadsheet, Compact, Berliner and Online)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_circulation

I always assumed that WSJ appealed only to business and finance types who needed it for work. I'm surprised that the WSJ is that well circulated, does this mean that it has broad appeal? Or is it that the WSJ can be expensed to the a firm, driving up its circulation?
> With amazon's EC2 service, I'll be able to deploy as many temporary mirrors as I need in just a few minutes

Can you go into detail on how does that work? I thought you had to have your site originally hosted on EC2 to do that ...
Actually who cares what they should call it? If I can make it to a point where people will pay me to use my products I'll consider it as an accomplishment. Is it a startup, company or whatever, I don't care.
I'm not at all familiar with Linode's iPhone app - but the bottom graph looks an awful lot like a system load graph, and not a CPU utilization graph.

"CPU utilization never exceeded 3%"? Really? Maybe the system load was at 3.0 for a few days?
Well, I think if Igor from your story could have done a much better job of selling his concern.

And it _is_ selling, even tough you know Truth ("This damned design does not scale", for example), you still have to sell it. It matters little if you are correct if you are just going to get yourself fired (or transferred off the team) for not knowing how to sell your know-how.

I say this because I face a similar situation where I am at. I am the old fart who remembers 10 MB hard disks and has a ton of experience. I am surrounded by young people who started tinkering with computers at age 7 and are very smart, though unexperienced. I've learned to frame and sell my experience to them in a way they can appreciate.

I think that the key for the old guys is to not expect people to welcome your experience with open arms. You have to be wise about selling your viewpoint; and sometimes you gotta let people fall flat on their ass for the first time so they will listen to you before the second time happens.
Is the U.S. Ready to Negotiate With the Taliban?
Evernote Makes Web a Priority With New Redesign
Howdy. I wrote down a few ideas about this topic this morning.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2382448

You're going to have to identify the influencers/experts in the community you wish to serve, and then come up with a compelling reason for them to contribute.
I don't see any reason to replace logos with text, even if it can be done. You did it reasonably well, I just don't see the benefit.

Couple that with your abuse of stylized text (why is everything blurred?) and width that doesn't fit in my preferred browser size, and for me the 2009 site is WAY better.
Because circumventing that filter is even easier than installing the filter in the first place?
At the same time, the average individual's ability to commit to something of any duration has decreased dramatically.

Citation?

It wasn't unusual for a (home-schooled) pre-teen in the 1700s to know Greek and Latin.

Bullshit. Pre-teen or not pre-teen, in the mid-1700s, the majority of Europe didn't know how to read and write.

I don't think it's reasonable to make sweeping remarks like this without real statistics to back them up. I don't have many friends who sit on their ass playing WoW all day and night, and I doubt you do either. Just because these people exist doesn't mean that the whole world is going to shit at record rates.
Witnessing a Steve Jobs keynote in person appeals to a lot more people than chatting at one of Apple's developer labs.

That plus the usual large-company conference boondoggle explains why WWDC has a lot of non-developer attendees. To make the conference 100% developers, either Apple has to get a lot less cool or the keynote needs to be moved out. Put the thing in Pac Bell Park and sell keynote-only tickets, and you'll get what you want.
"some conversations will be different?"

...and that's worth building an entirely new product and trying to move select people from HN to it?
BBC news has more detail on why the UK are rejecting this proposal:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-12879566

"It is right that the EU sets high-level targets for
carbon reduction, however it is not right for them to
get involved in how this is delivered in individual
cities"
No, just for fun.
$49.99 sounds about right. I would also try something higher, like $79.99, see how that goes.
It's creepy how the Facebook does the Enron moves. And with Goldman Sachs.
JungleDisk isn't a missing feature in Amazons product, it's a full product in it's own regard, and as thus, Amazon doesn't have a clear way of shutting them down or are even in a particularly beneficial position to compete with JungleDisk.

Also, JungleDisk already competing against a whole slew of worthy competitors, some of which run on S3, some of which don't.
Amazon Cloud Player Released
I concur about the title being linkbaity but the piece gives a fair and balanced background on the judge with good links to reporting on the state of these P2P cases. No conflict here, though, only an appearance issue (and federal judges have enormous discretion on recusal except in cases of an actual conflict).

For what it is worth, this judge does have an impressive background and is eminently qualified to serve on the federal bench.
Ah, finally, a way to legally upload a ton of pirated songs and share login credentials so that hundreds of people can download them without hitting up torrents and thus placing 90% of the cost onto amazon.
I've heard good things about them too. Probably just some broken widget between my desk in Sydney and their servers somewhere in North America.

I'm kind of interested in the way many of those large-scale sites have to prioritise availability over response time due to their architecture. At least, that seems to be the way services like GAE work. They guarantee uptime, but latency for things like database queries tends to be fixed and not that fast.
The conservative party isn't solely to blame. The 11 year stint with labour didn't exactly lead to a host of improvements.

Furthermore, normally people banning cars in cities are in favour of improve internal city travel via local buses, metros and bicycling. It's not really about the kind of services that National Rail provide.
What you need to do is research, ship, measure and respond.

FTFY. Research first, and make damn sure there's a viable market there before you sink time into the idea. This is essentially what a business plan is, a documented view of the market and how you're going to make money from it. Without it you're not really building a business…you're building an app.
Why Functional Programming Matters`
I'm a netflix user who's had a bandwidth cap for a while, so I only watch movies in SD not HD and you while you can notice the difference in quality it's worth it for the amount of attention I pay.

But I have a hard time believing "will use 2/3 less data on average, with minimal impact to video quality" that's a pretty major advancement in video encoding.
A Generic Parallel Collection Framework
GBridge is pretty decent if you use windows http://www.gbridge.com/
Not a bad idea actually, and it'd be even more effective if Google also penalized sites that link to other sites with unreasonable T&C.
Real Time Edge Detection in Haskell
For me, it was just an experiment. The blur is just an attempt at shadow effects. I know I've insulted the style gods with this one, but I'm just messing around. I don't consider it anywhere near my best work, but I learned something from it.

This post on HN is just to round off the whole experiment and get some feedback before I put up something more permanent.

I'm glad you like the 2009 site!
This title is completely off for this article and it seems to ignore more general cases by focusing on silicon valley (which is fine, just misrepresented because this isn't even close to true everywhere else).

I've heard tons of stories from people who have taken jobs at startups to learn to run businesses themselves so I don't think that being up front about providing employees with what they're looking for anyway is a bad thing.
The photo is 40 gigapixels (40,000 megapixels); 280,000 x 140,000 pixels; made of 2947 images joined together; used a Canon 550D and 200mm lens; print size 23m x 11m; stitched file size 280GB [...]

Can someone shed light on what file format would use 7 bytes per pixel (280 GB / 40 Gpixel = 7 bytes/pixel) for something like this? Is it HDR, i.e. more than 24 bits of color?
I'm a fairly old guy and I found myself getting bored 1/3 of the way in.

When we were younger, all of us ran into a grumpy old guy (or gal) and told ourselves, "No way I'll be like that." Then we get a little older and many of us realize that we're turning into that same guy. At that point we all have a choice:

1. Figure out what's important (here's a hint, it's not pre-teens learning Latin) and learn to communicate it in a manner that will actually move people to action regardless of their age.

2. Become a cranky old guy and wonder why no one appreciates your wisdom and brilliance.
Well, I'd submit it's just as true for HN readers - with the caveat that the strategy here tends to be that if you can't find the company you love, you make one.
Curse you SkyNet!
"Not trying to sound militaristic, but it used to be when a national emergency beckoned, you'd have to beat people off to keep them from volunteering. Now the volunteer is an unusual animal."

Has anybody told Mr. Markham that the US has had an all-volunteer military since the 1970s, or that the biggest national emergency of all was largely met with draftees? (Also, to keep an eye out of double entendres...)
As an old guy myself (47), I've found that it's easy to get frustrated when you see youth repeating the mistakes you've made. While I've learned many things over the years that I enjoy passing on to those less experienced, the skill most valuable is the ability to convey that information in a positive and constructive way.

The irony to me is that so many incredibly talented "senior" engineers and business people have awesome lessons to impart but they never acquired the gift of communications. They don't present themselves as the sage elder that deftly imparts wisdom, they feel a sense of entitlement from their age and it shows as soon as they open their mouths.

That said, I really enjoyed reading your blog post Daniel.
Other than awesomeness, what is most striking is that you can almost read the text on the covers of the books next to the people, which is way on the other side of the room. Pretty incredible. If only our eyes could see that well :)
Why mapping toilets is a great use of government open data
How are phones robots? Doesn't robot imply that it has actuators as well as sensors?
> What if somebody jots down an idea on a napkin, spends the next few months of nights and weekends creating a first version, gets ramen profitable, quits their day job, hires a dozen workers, and sells to Google for $20 million.

Then they've got -- at the very least -- $20mm and experience running a 12-person company. This includes paying salaries, making sure the books are kept properly, and all the other jazz that comes with running a company. These are experiences you likely don't get if your business is selling ads on a blog.

> Looking back, was it not a startup until they quit their day job? Of course not, it was a startup the day they put pen to napkin and started coding.

No, it was a startup business they day they started accepting money for a service. Before that it was just someone's project.

> Not saying there aren't a ton of poorly run startups led by founders who aren't truly committed to them. But let them call themselves and their "projects" whatever they want.

How about "projects"?

Are you accepting money and providing a service? Congratulations, you've got a business. This can be by selling ads on your new video game blog, accepting VC to fund your crack team, or selling subscriptions to your SaaS product. You can be dedicated enough to devote everything to your business, or you can be content with keeping a day job and running your thing on the side. Some folks aim for millions, some folks are fine with a little boost to their income. Some folks learn how to manage teams and hustle, some don't.
This page crashes my computer. Not just IE7, my whole computer. Any idea what may be causing it?
Too much has already been written about how easy it is to get some sort of MVP out there, but the real gem in steveblank's article is this:

"until you actually commit to them by choosing one idea, quitting your day job and committing yourself 24/7 it’s not clear that the word “founder or entrepreneur” even applies"

Many hackers fail because they spread themselves too thin, firing at multiple projects until finally realizing that they're performing suboptimally for all of them.
I have no idea if it's "worth it." What you see is the sweat of Stu's brow, not mine. All I can say is this: If you celebrate the idea of founding things, then you celebrate the idea of building entirely new things and finding out if it's worth it, and dealing with people who complain that the old thing is good enough.

Also, I could be wrong about this, but I don't see people moving to it any more than people moved from HN to Facebook or vice versa. Different communities for different purposes.
Time for a new job!
It wasn't unusual for a (home-schooled) pre-teen in the 1700s to know Greek and Latin.

I'd love to see some actual evidence for this. A solid command of either language would require on the rough order of 1000 hours of work (or perhaps only 350 if you had a lot of raw talent and studied effectively). This is entirely reasonable for a member of the educated classes in any era. But were ancient Latin and Greek ever common skills among your stereotypical pre-industrial dirt farmers?
The "I don't trust you" syndrome
Has this ever happened to you?

You have an idea for a new startup, you keep on thinking about it. You start planning in your mind each and every page of the new website: what the user will see, what he will do, how you will get new users, why this idea is so cool, etc.

Then the "I don't trust you" syndrome clicks in and you start to worry that someone else might copy your idea. You don't tell anything to your friends (just a "guys, don't be surprised if you will not see me around...I have this idea that will make me rich"), you don't tell anything to anyone.

But you need someone else to build the idea. With this syndrome it is very difficult to find anyone, as you will think about others stealing your idea, you will think about coders copying the code and launching the idea before you, etc.

Finally, one day you find someone that you can trust and usually you bind them with a super strict NDA and you watch their back while they work with you on the idea.

The day comes, when the idea finally launches and...you just realize that the idea was not so good, that nobody is interested in it, that you just thought about the basic features of the website and you did not develop the core of it, etc.

You basically understand that an idea is nothing, that you should show your idea to as many people as possible to get as many feedback as you can, that execution is everything and that nobody becomes reach only because of an idea.

What do you think?
It's more like walking into a store that has a tiny book on the floor inside the door that, if you open and read it, tells you that by having already entered the store you've agreed to be prohibited from telling anybody about anything you've seen inside without written consent.
It works for me and my oldest daughter and we're 31 and 7 respectively.
Well, all the songs you buy at amazon get stored for free. So that addresses some of the points you made.
Since the storage gets upgraded to 20Gb after you buy an album it would be at least enough space for my music.
What's "sniffy" about it? Is Blank not praising the napkin projects effusively enough? It certainly looks like praise to me.

Read the sentence in context. He's trying to explain where all the startups are. We are awash in napkin experiments; why aren't we similarly flooded with startups? Well, because there's a significant risk barrier between one and the other.

And, yes, he doesn't downplay that risk barrier. That seems fair. It doesn't do your audience any favors to elide the significant difference between a napkin experimenter and an actual founder. People can and do go bankrupt over that difference.
Precise GC, JIT and images all give you more speed.

Precise GC is asymptotically more efficient than manual allocation; you need to use other approaches, like arenas, to get back that lost time, but they are not always applicable or easy to introduce.

Optimizing virtual method calls at runtime (e.g. monomorphic or polymorphic inline caches) is rather awkward without JIT. Similarly, C++ templates cannot be instantiated at runtime, meaning less efficient, more general and indirected code needs to be used instead.

Images optimize startup hugely: they completely remove the need for any initialization not directly related to acquiring external resources. For example, this is one of the biggest reasons Chrome is so quick to start up - it uses freeze-dried heaps in V8 (its Javascript engine).
Actually, I don't believe anyone had created an Android music player that pulled songs from S3 and allowed purchase from the Amazon store. The opportunity was there, but it was not taken.
I'm curious about this too. I'm imagining he adds a redirect to the EC2 instance in an .htaccess file for the page that is getting hit hard?
Tough one... I know that Reddit faked all their submissions (eg submitted their own links) early on. Helped them get going.
Jewelry for Nerds
In your zeal to make it clear that file sharing isn't a crime like murder, you managed to utterly miss his point.
There is a difference between Entrepreneurship and playing the lottery. It seems like the author is upset about the lack of quality entrepreneurs instead of entrepreneurship in general. Lot of innovators creating real businesses is good while lots of people trying to strike it rich with the next big fad is probably not that beneficial.
Great work!

While I don't know what sort of traffic and/or other benefits it'll yield, I'll be happy to place your banner at the site below, let me know if you're interested:

http://www.TheDrinkMaker.com
FB became a problem for me some time ago, and I soft-deleted (deactivated) my account. There is a deletion feature now.

There's a big difference between a bug in the deletion of status updates right now, and permanent deletion which takes a couple days. Tape backups will always be around, though.
Is it true that such projects aren't companies? He lists "run it as a part-time business" as an option but isn't that already happening when "users can visit, use and even pay for" the project? Or is it not a company until a user pays and then it becomes ok to call yourself a founder?
Very true and an excellent point. Even so just taking the cost of production into account, if us would-be buyers are unable to afford what's available then we've still run out as far as being able to drive our cars in the city is concerned. I just hope we can expand our use of alternative energy forms quickly enough so that we don't still have all our eggs in one basket.
No. Stop it. Never ever scale your blog.

It sounds like the author was making the same mistake that pretty much everybody makes: Treating your blog as though it were dynamic content. But it's not. It's static HTML, and you should never have to make any modifications to anything to make it scale.

Step one: Have your blog export all entries to plain HTML.

Step two (optional): move your imagery out to S3/Cloudfront.

That's it. That will allow your little out-of-the-box slice handle all the traffic that we can throw your way.

Scaling is an issue that you're meant to have with your product. Because your product actually needs to talk to databases and do things, it may have trouble doing those things when lots of people hit it at once. A website hosting a blog, on the other hand, needs to serve files. And that's been a solved problem for fifteen years.
I think this corner of the flame war is pretty uninteresting. Balance is everything. Have a good idea and do it well. Or just get lucky.
I feel like back in 1999 with this Amazon Cloud Storage/Player. Any case, Amazon is like a giant grocery store which is always selling something. It feel creepy to house my files at their store.
Does rtm trade files, or are you suggesting that owning up the Internet with a worm should be decriminalized?
No, because that would be stupid.
Monkey patching is bad software engineering, but it happens because it also works in many cases, and because it's fast. The fork and fix approach is a pretty heavy weight solution to an often trivial problem. Just because git (and lets face it, ruby and git go hand in hand) lets you branch to your heart's content, doesn't mean you should.
Café computing: iPads, Atrix Lapdocks, Chromebooks, and MacBook Airs
Facebook Prepares to Add Friends in Washington