skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"This work must be done now and I'm the only one who showed up for work today." Ergo, JFDI. That's a valuable outlook for anyone. Among single founders, it's baseline.

And I agree with the earlier posters - age is a big factor here, and not just because of the additional self-discipline and knowledge that it tends to produce. Assuming that you're starting something in a field you already know well, you probably have a lot of people you can call on for advice, help, resources, etc., not to mention more than a few credits in the favor bank. In other words, you're really not as solo as you were in your early 20's. Nor are you as likely to spend as much time trying to define your market, identify your customers, and work out your acquisition costs.

In other words, your need to iterate is probably a lot lower, since and older founder is more likely to be operating with a measure of specialized or otherwise hard-to-get insight, and are aiming for something specific that isn't low-hanging fruit, and that may depend - critically - on well established relationships.

From what I understand, the tech world is one of the few places where founders are commonly so young. I've lost the citation, but I believe the average age for start-up founders in the broader economy is 38.
First, the reviews inform people that the books are available cheaper in other formats, which they might not have known. Second, if the reviews do cause the publisher to lower the price, that will presumably result in more sales, and there will be more consumer surplus gained than producer surplus lost. Boom, market improvement.
Is a personal touch more effective than about.me and profile.io?
Cycle Computing fires up 10,000-core HPC cloud on EC2
Scaling(?) at Wealthfront
I like the idea of keeping people closer to what they are good at. However I'm afraid this strategy will backfire on your employees if they are forced to leave to another company for whatever reason. In an environment where every company does not have this flat hierarchy it is strange to see a person who has spent 10 years in one place and has not advanced to some managerial position. New employer will think that he is unfit in some way (even though the opposite is the case) and will probably not even give the person a chance to explain themselves.
Can the Internet make you healthier?
Breakfast with Tony
Way to reward the one critical person who actually has to do the hard work of interacting with your customers AFTER they've been sold and paid you money.

That's the hard part because it's only dealing with problems and never "great to have to call you".

I guess customer service these days is disposable and easily replaceable.
Georgian granny disconnects Armenian internet
I've got the feeling that it's getting more frequent in the last few years. Just like you see more people dressed in traditional garb (in beer-related festivities here in Bavaria for ex.). I think for a while anything "traditional" was regarded as way too conservative, but we're moving beyond that. Tattoos and Lederhosen...

But yes, some kind of umbrella organization would be quite neat, some organized internship outside of colleges. A "communist" consultancy…
Cisco CEO: 'We have disappointed our investors'
I would say in high-output environments that a PM is a good thing, if the PM in question is good at being a PM. I've met a few, but many more terrible PMs unfortunately.

Oftentimes PMs (or better, their organization culture + workflow) have thrown a wrench or 2 into production and caused cascading failures because they forgot a detail, or couldn't admit to fault. The culture is surely to blame amidst most of these catastrophes.

The fact that you can admit that your PM skills need work already makes you a frontrunner for being a much better PM than most.
I kind of read that to be:
First press on the 71,
Second press on the 74
Third press on the 75
Join the mobile crowd? What about WP7?

/sarcasm
This isn't really tech-related, but life-related. I hope HN enjoys that kind of thing.
Oh noes - they've stolen the internet
Great, that's what was missing. Thanks for writing the end of the article!
They accept individual donations and corporate sponsorships, and they also sell some stuff: http://getfirebug.com/contribute

(You probably know that already but I am mentioning it for people who don’t. I had never thought of Firebug and donations myself until I saw a message during an upgrade about a month or two ago.)
For me the "socializing" is loosing relevancy as the number of types of media I can create increases.

I'd love to see social networks function as pathways for my media in a better way than Facebook currently does it.
IBM sniffs around Fortinet
There is no open source version?
I replaced my auto-forwarder to about.me (and later profile.io) with this little piece of self-aggrandizing marketing. It took basically no time, and it feels better to me, but I'd like an outside opinion
Node.js is especially interesting because it can be suited to a person like me (with a system administration background) to learn and use Javascript. Most system admins I know don't usually have a need or care to learn JS under the DOM, now that we can create network system utilities using JS with ease it is an attractive alternative to Python/Twisted for some of my projects.
Palo Alto's utility company did the same thing while they rebuilt their bill pay site. Really frustrating as a user, especially for a city at the heart of the Valley.
Hmm, mono is a really curious thing to me. Maybe someone can explain this to me: Why doesn't MS commit to it?

One of the tenets of .NET was that it was to be platform-agnostic a la JVM but the story seems to be that they just didn't...get around...to implementing a Linux or Mac stack for various reasons (tight coupling to Win32 and existing COM servers, maybe?).

Now, Mono is reaching a state of extreme maturity. Why doesn't MS invest in this? It seems like their best way forward is dropping their single-vendor-stack mantra? Or perhaps they don't need to do so strategically yet -- once people really start demanding *nix and mac support they can "suddenly" change heart on mono?? This confuses me...but I'm not much of a strategist.
Open-source Pitch Deck for Tonika at MassChallenge
Fred Wilson On Startups
What’s Your Product Cadence?
What I often find to be the case is that a course in college only loosely follows the assigned book. Professors like to navigate through the subject material in a very personal way, which will often not be the way that it is covered in the book... if it is covered in the book at all!
For this experience, I would suggest going through lecture notes and, when necessary, supplementing them with a book.

While books are certainly valuable in someone's education, I think we are forgetting about the projects. It is very instructive, not to mention very satisfying, to implement an operating system, a compiler, or a transport layer (that interoperates with real TCP!). Moreso than reading the books of a college course, I recommend doing its projects.

To get started, I recommend the Pintos operating system, designed for Stanford's operating systems course, CS 140, traditionally thought to one of the more difficult programming courses in their undergraduate curriculum.

Some links.

http://www.scs.stanford.edu/11wi-cs140/
http://www.scs.stanford.edu/05au-cs240c/
I wouldn't suggest LinkedIn recommendations are all that exclusive today...The way it usually works is that you ask Sue for a recommendation after giving her one (per the way LinkedIn promotes it). It's always tete-a-tete, so in my mind the recommendations are not as valuable as they appear on the surface.

One way recommendations would be more valuable, otherwise it's like saying, "Yep, Sue & I are friends so we gave each other good marks for working together..."
Have you noticed the publication date, in the abstract?
Exactly how I would envision it. Thanks for the response!
How did the employees feel about the various bits of organisational experimentation carried out? Did any balk at the constant change?
So is the paid version the only way to go here? Since everything else in the Mono world is mostly free and open source I was hoping for the same with the mobile versions.
Another Microsoft billionaire, Paul Allen, has done some pretty cool space related things like SpaceShipOne.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceShipOne
Your understanding of this subthread is very different from mine. I'm talking about practical security options for practical websites. In that case you don't care about information that was transiently present in the server for a fraction of a second once, you care about information that has been persistently stored.

But if you want such a ridiculous requirement, you can have JavaScript on the signup form that computes the hash on the client and sends it to the server. That form still needs to go over a secure channel (eg https) because the information sent, while not including the plain text password, is sufficient information for a sufficiently motivated attacker to get access.
Emulsion ( http://emulsion.me ), which will allow photographers to create beautiful, simple portfolios in about 15 minutes.

We felt someone needed to kill the slow, Flash slideshows everyone was using.
How do you get the apps list on other people's phone
* { font-family: Comic Sans MS !important; }
Not to mention that there are magnet high schools that do very much like the perceived prestige of having PhD level instructors. Your typical public high school wouldn't care, of course.

That's not true everywhere. Where I live, there's nearly unlimited public school choice and school districts must reimburse each other at a state-mandated rate for transferred students. Especially in poorer districts, this rate is generally higher than the per-student funding the schools receive for in-district students. (I've heard it's up to $1500/year more.) Individual schools that can recruit students by offering specialized programs (languages, music, science, etc.) can increase their funding quite a bit.
Thanks for sharing. Screw the English - the ideas were spot on especially about market reach. In general I find people who have no real value to add with usually criticize not the ideas but the person. It shows low self-esteem in my eyes.

My biggest beef working with start ups - they only focus on technology.

When I am doing sales and marketing for them the times I have succeed is when I figured out a well defined market that not only feels the pain but it actively looking for a solution and that also easy to reach. An example:
software security inspection software

Before I came, the company focused on VPs of engineering for SMB market. Now this is well defined. But no VP of engineering is going to say - oh we need to pay someone to find all the security breaches in our software. However I went after CEOs and VP of Sales - and angled it as 3rd verification if they are in the middle of strategic relationships: OEMs, exits for buyouts, selling to financial or insurance industry, or even working with Fortune 1000 companies. What a difference - we suddenly had their attention and were able to close some business quickly.

I am very good at B2B. But I refuse to sell anymore. I hate doing business with people are want the easy money and screw customers meaning they fail miserably in operations. They also think very badly of sales. Typically coders who have never sold, being a techie I have looked at some times at their code - for shame!

So I am on my own. I am trying the B2C market but have yet to succeed: 30 itunes apps, 3 websites, etc.

I am tempted to go back into B2B since that where my strengths are but I just want to a small shop so I am kinda stuck until I succeed :-)

Your point about not doing business in a domain that is not of your interest or expertise - valid point. I would suggest getting a partner that does have the domain expertise and enthusiasm. I know plenty of successful who are not enthusiastic about the industry they are in. And tons of CEOs who can not tell you a single benefit statement of why to use their product/service. It would be odd but to me it is normally. In front of customers, I always have to check my CEO to make sure they don't hang themselves.
Be sure to check out the animation. Also its Bionic Handling Assistant & Bionic Tripod is amazing as well, reminds me of Dr. Octopus ;)
You can also view it as a protest of a company's practice. People protest in front of brick-and-mortar establishments all the time to make consumers aware of things which may affect their decisions. I wouldn't call that "holding stores hostage."

If a review has zero information, then I agree with you that it is absolutely worthless and should be removed. However, if a review clearly states why it is scored the way it is, then it doesn't matter if it is purely about the content of a book or not. I have seen plenty of reviews which indicated shoddy binding... would you say these are worthless as well?
Rate my startup snackandmunch.com  On Mashable too 
Mashable wrote a story about it just after 1 week!
http://mashable.com/2011/04/05/snackandmunch/
Twitter Search is now 3x faster
Seedcamp Berlin - the Teams
They promised not to sue them, thats something I guess.
The hacker/hustler conversion also depends on what type of business you're building.

If you're making a web app with a well-defined market (a 'better mousetrap'), the Hackers rule. Many B2C plays are like this.

If your business requires big deals and more B2B-type stuff, it gets trickier.. you ideally need a Hustler/Prophet. And at least one of them should have grey hair.
We solved this in part by using "cocktail titles". So anyone who works here can call themselves senior. So we have "senior designer", "senior programmer". At least that has some ring of fancy.
Thanks for this comment.

You're right - we don't have the exact right answer. We're always trying to find the right answer for the right time. We may have a different opinion in 3 years or if we have 35 people. Who knows, but we're open to figuring it out once we get there.

In the end we want to build a company that allows people to do the best work of their lives.
Two suggestions:

Elements of Programming (by Alexander Stepanov and Paul McJones) takes a mathematical approach to programming. Since its only prerequisite is a basic understanding of high school algebra, the book is very accessible and easy to follow.

Digital Design and Computer Architecture (by David Harris and Sarah Harris) is a great book on computer architecture that starts with digital logic design (i.e. gates and transistors) and ends with a subset of the MIPS instruction set. Though, it probably won't help you much in 'daily work'.
7 Failed Social Media Predictions
Having fought LinkedIn's APIs and dealt with their crappy developer support, I'd like to give a very big warning to anyone who might be thinking about using their platform.

1) Their terms of use is unbelievably narrow. They own everything, and it's up to their discretion whether they think you are a competitor and can shut of your data access

2) Took them forever to get SSL support for their widgets. Despite tons of dev requests for it, they seemed to actively fight against it. Really friggin bizarre.
Honestly, I don't think there's much to improve with online social networks. If there is, then Facebook will build it.

Instead, I think people should think about how to improve people's offline social lives, perhaps via online means.

You could say online social networks are doing that by enabling people to communicate more, but I think online social networks would love it if you spent more time on them, not less.

Which is interesting, because I think most would agree that your offline social interactions, however frequent, are much more fulfilling.
I'm in the preliminary research stages of building a series of stock tools that allow users to do arbitrary searches on the intarwebs and then correlate the data with historical price data on equities. I registered tinystocktools.com but nothing is up there yet as I'm just tinkering with what sort of free API's I have available to me at the moment before I start seriously building it.

There will be social aspects to it but I'm so tired of "social" being the main focus so it's definitely going to be more of a research/monitoring tool that begrudgingly lets you tap into your FB and twitter networks as part of it.

There will be a consumer-facing interface but I'd also like to create a nice streamlined API so people can leverage my platform as well.
Is there any develop on mono for android?
Please share couple of example if any?

It will give me confidence about developing apps through this.
Does this mean I get to have yet another Share button next to 7 others on my website?
Fukushima Nuclear Accident – Exceptional Summary by Murray E. Miles
WP7 requires Windows 7 and a lot of us are still developing on XP
Huge for B2B business that need to run things like a channel program with logins. Not to mention, the amount of data that just got exposed is insanely valuable. Mashups here we come.
Red Bull is a really cool company, even though I don't like energy drinks. Did you know they have a record label? It seems like one of those things where someone said "Yeah and we should have a record label..." and then poof! It exists.

http://www.redbullrecords.com/
Employment: The Hard Parts
Two New Packs and Free Illustration at VectorPack.net
The Cartoon Vector Pack 2, a mix of 12 stock vector elements illustrating a zebra, a pig, a snake, a monkey, a cow, a bee, an elephant, a lion, a whale, a cat, an octopus and a millipede, the Tribal Vector Pack, a collection of 13 vector elements of organic and geometrical inspiration, and a Free Illustration using vector elements from the Cartoon Vector Pack 2 have been uploaded on VectorPack.net.
"Founders At Work" and
"So You Want To Be An Entrepreneur"
Just connect with your friends (using Facebook, Twitter, or your contact list) and you can then browse your friends apps. Zwapp detects apps automatically on your device with a few clever tricks.

Also the real-time feed shows you the apps your friends are downloading now, reviews, likes etc.
I recently emailed Amazon customer service and complained about this very thing. A couple of days ago I bought dead tree versions of books that were 20% more for the kindle. I will not buy a kindle version of a book that is more than the dead tree version. Period.
Perhaps people could put a list of submissions (links) they thought were good, but went largely unnoticed by HN, in their profiles.

For example, it could look like this:

My overlooked submissions list, from newest to oldest (last updated: xx.xx.xxxx):

1. Article Name (http://domain.com)

2.

3.

4.

5.
I think the article is more in the guise of: just buy the portfolio, and shut up.

It's a fact that, in this messed up system, they need them in order to succeed.

Now, if they can just stop pretending that they are in this business for us, and not to make a profit, would be nice.
I develop on a Mac using Mono and MonoDevelop. I just want to say I greatly appreciate all of the work that has gone into Mono and MonoDevelop. Thank you. :-)
Is "unrealistic" a version of "that wouldn't work in the real world"? Of course it's realistic. Jason is describing how things actually work at 37signals, not how he'd wish them to be. So we have an entire staff of programmers, many who has been with us for years and years, who started out as "senior programmer" and has stayed with that title. The progression has been measured in salary.
All right. The Google URL's are different, so I'll assume this isn't just another copy/pasta karma endeavor.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2400790

I don't particularly care about my own karma (or lack thereof; and after all I was reformatting someone else's URL, albeit to avoid the PowerPoint dependency (and risk)), but I do care about the contribution of repetition to the increasing volume of noise on HN.

That aside, it is an interesting slide deck.
Ask HN: How should you practice a startup pitch?
I've grabbed a few responses here, but would like to hear from more folks about how they practice their actual pitch, and how you know when your verbal presentation is right?

http://www.quora.com/How-should-you-practice-a-startup-pitch
What if the group is that person and their dad, and they don't care if their dad knows the password to their gmail?
Redirecting on user agent to a mobile site is kinda annoying

Indeed annoying, a few weeks ago with the release of FF4 there were sites that mis-classified the browser as mobile, and redirected you to the mobile site. Usually the mobile site is limited and offers no way to switch to the real thing.
Nice idea. Apps are one niche it can be extended to other things utilizing social networks to get real time recommendations from friends.
Trying to figure out if a metagame is more important or transparency to increase competition and sharing.

Also trying to find vendors to sign up and create triviatisements (have 5 in the works).

Also adding stats for admins so we can see what people are actually doing
By Clever, do you mean a private API? I'd be interested in how if not!
OmniGraffle version: http://cl.ly/5nAo
Win the Floral Bundle Pack 1 from Vectorpack.net
Our contest is posted on the follwing blogs:crazyleafdesign.com/blog/ , thinkdesignblog.com/ , designmodo.com/ , mocii.com/,josweb.co.uk/blog/ , designbastard.com/ .
Thanks to our collaborators for sustaining our contest and good luck.
Can someone elaborate on what it means to share a website over LinkedIn?
Only works on iPhones and Androids, I suppose. Didn't work on my Nokia C7 (a very competent smartphone..)

Is the term "smartphone" only limited to those platforms now..? :-(
Our contest is posted on the follwing blogs:crazyleafdesign.com/blog/ , thinkdesignblog.com/ , designmodo.com/ , mocii.com/,josweb.co.uk/blog/ , designbastard.com/ .
Thanks to our collaborators for sustaining our contest and good luck.
The RSA Hack: How They Did It
We're optimizing for having the best work environment today. Prioritizing what some employer somewhere else might think a decade from now over improving working conditions today seems like a bad trade.
What really? Why?

Edit: Why am I getting downvoted for this? Someone give me a legit reason as to why you'd choose a 10-year-old, nearly obsolete OS over an industry-leading one.
I am not able to appreciate the contradictory statements here in the blog:

# Do not hire a PR firm to do your free marketing for you. This is a core capability you must own. You can and may want to hire a PR firm to supplement your efforts, but that’s a different story.

# Marketing is for companies who have sucky products. If you build something that is amazing (think Flipboard or Instagram or Instapaper) people will adopt it because it is amazing."

I think it is absolutely necessary to market what you build and that is the general advice from most gurus. Anybody has different thoughts to correct my perception?
Love it, will be parking my unused domains there now.
SaleLocator (http://salelocator.com) - A local retail sales aggregator and search engine.
we do two things:
1) We check on custom schemes (btw: watch that space as we will open source our work on that shortly!)
2) We check processes on iOS4 devices and match those as well.

The algorithm learns and will detect better and more with increased usage.
Or, you do the registration process over SSL.
"REWORK" by 37Signals is a good, quick read.

It is also useful to refer back to some of the bite-size chunks of advice in the book as reminders.
1) It is funny you say this, because that is how most platforms are. Look at Apple, Twitter or Microsoft. Not to say your warning isn't justified, but it is part of the game that is played when dealing with 3rd party platforms. They introduce them to bolster their own networks, and if they don't like what you are doing, or feel that you are competition, they will force you out one way or another.