skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think that the 80% extends past this guy's sample group of 3000. In fact if you do some "fermi calculations" it doesn't appear to be the case that 80% of pentamillionaires in America come from startups.

The article claims there are 930,000 pentamillionaires in the united states. 80% of that is 744,000.

There are about 1.1 million lawyers in the USA. Let's say the top 10% have a net worth of 5 million. Thus 110,000 of those pentamillionaires are lawyers. So we've got 634,000 left.

There are about 700,000 doctors in the USA. 15% of those doctors are surgeons and anesthetists, specialties where you can make $500K/yr. So, 105,000 pentamillionaire doctors...

529,000 pentamillionaires left.

750 MLB players + 460 NBA Players + 1700 NFL players = 2910.
Let's multiply that by the past 10 years = 29,000 current or former pro sports players who are pentamillionaires

500,000 pentamillionaires left

I'm getting a bit tired to do this math, but it seems like there must be 100,000 guys in the financial sector who have a net worth of 5 million dollars. So - 400,000 left.

Add in movie and TV stars, rock and pop music stars, guys who manage movie/TV/rock/pop stars, executives in the entertainment industry, the handful of other sport stars and entertainers who make a lot of money... that's probably another 100K. Down to 300,000.

Now think about all the guys who rose up the ranks of fortune 500 companies. There's probably 100 guys at each fortune 500 company who make a mil a year? Now we're down to 250,000.

Someone please correct me if I'm padding the numbers too much. I could be dead wrong on the number of rich finance sector guys, or totally wrong about how much money the top lawyers and doctors save. But, I also totally left out other rich people, like presidents of universities, university coaches, directors of rich nonprofit organizations, and so forth. Even if my math is off it really doesn't seem likely that 80% of the pentamillionaires in the USA came from startups. It seems closer to 10-20%, if that. Not trying to be a debbie downer but 80% seems way off the mark.
I have yet to meet an entrepreneur who struggles to come up with a great idea; in fact, most people have lots of good ideas.

I'm not sure about that. Most people have lots of ideas... but in my experience the overwhelming majority of these are very bad ideas.

I think it's worth considering the possibility that living in the bay area benefits startups by letting founders see lots of what does and doesn't work, and thereby helping them avoid spending time on some of their very bad ideas.

(Of course, this cuts both ways: I doubt you'd see an Amazon.com come out of someone who had spent years in the bay area -- more likely you'd get a response along the lines of "You want to sell books online? Like... dead trees? Which you have to store in warehouses and ship across the country? You should write a facebook app instead, that would be so much cooler.")
But completely unrelated ideas don't spawn the kind of creativity that is really useful.

Pretty much every idea out there can be tied back into computers. The more outlandish the idea, the more likely that the resulting union is radically new and interesting.

Not to nitpick, but how could there be "unusually large numbers" of anything "all over the world"? What's so unusual about that large number, if it's everywhere?

My point exactly.
Code Nightmares
So, I think it's time I took a break from programming. I...actually don't even really know what to say. It's 4 am, I've had 3 hours of sleep tops.

I just had 6-7 waking nightmares about code in a row. I'm dead serious. Nightmares. About. Code. I don't even code for a living anymore (blargh job market, working on it though).

Have I been on Microsoft APIs too long or what? Is this what it's like to lose your sanity? To be more specific, the nightmares were about beautiful APIs. (or lack thereof when I woke up)

Yes, APIs. Application/GUI APIs I believe.

Had a random nightmare about Mail.app too.
This is absurd.

I'm going to get a drink of water then make a bootstrapper in asm.

What do you guys do when you can't sleep?
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Larrabee: Intel's biggest leap since the Pentium Pro
Shawn Fanning's Incredible Shrinking Pay Day: EA Bought Game Company for $15M, Not $30M
In that case, though, the "savings" are likely to be decent investments. In any case, it's hard to get away from the post's breakdown of methods to get to $5M.
A Trillion Hours
The feedback here is valuable, but leaves out one point which you might not be aware of: an "intelligent chat system" will enjoy about as much widespread success as a poetry board. (Which is not to say that you should stop, or that this isn't valuable.)
Social engineering on Twitter
Trying to figure out if this part (on what $15 mill bought EA) is a joke:

Current Assets: $1 million
Long-term assets: $1 million
Acquired in-process technology: $1 million
Goodwill: $9 million
Finite-lived intangibles: $6 million
Liabilities: ($3 million)

Goodwill? Finite-lived intangibles? And what were the liabilities that somehow led to cashflow into EA from Rupture/ThreeSF?
The Apple Mac Cost Misconception: Macs and Their Prices
As the comments to the article point out, it's not so easy. Carriers are complete arses to interoperate with.

This is not to say that this can't be a fantastic business - great barriers might mean that there's a mint to be made if you figure out a way around them - just don't underestimate the lack of cooperation from the carriers. That'll be your biggest showstopper.
Ummmm....... "During an arrest, you think since you aren’t guilty, how can they arrest you? Why should you run away? And how can you resist right then? After all, you’ll only make your situation worse; you’ll make it more difficult for them to sort out the mistake. And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say goodbye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! We didn’t love freedom enough. Every man always has handy a dozen glib little reasons why he is right not to sacrifice himself."

Doesn't this quote answer your question?, firearms are much more effective than axes hammers pokers and whatever, we have the God given right, weather or not whatever tyrannical government may happen to be in place recognizes the 2nd or not. Disarmament leads to:,
"during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase"
Or worse, sometimes --much much worse.
Makes sense. I guess they pay an evil premium.

But wouldn't they have something written into the deal that they can't sell the company at a valuation lower then the preferred stock price? Isn't that what preferred stock means.

I suppose that there would be no restrictions on buying at a lower valuation.
There are all kinds of crappy things that affect hackers, and everyone else. If we start posting them all, it would be easy to fill the site with them.

That's not to say you shouldn't be concerned, just that political discussion belongs elsewhere, IMO.
Ask PG: How many lines of Arc for a search on Hacker News?
Perhaps I'm just to blind to see it, but there seems to be no search around here..
I mean "I search might prove usefull.."
It's not a joke. From the latest 10-Q linked in the article:

Finite-lived intangibles include developed and core technology, carrier contracts, trade name, and subscribers.
Meanwhile use http://searchyc.com/
Don't give up on languages because of cosmetics... find a better reason!

Think this is probably easiest to understand....

my $entire_file = slurp 'file';
Squeezed Books isn't getting much traction, unfortunately. I've moved on to other things for the time being, and revisit it every now and then to make tweaks or otherwise improve it. Even the contest I'm running hasn't had any takers... ok, a free book isn't the millions of dollars Google can offer, but a free book for typing a sentence or two is still a good deal.
The article is pretty sloppy with numbers and definitions. There's no indication their survey of 3000 is representative of all pentamillionaires, for example.

But, there were about 106 million 'households' in the US in the 2000 census. Perhaps there are 110-115 million households today. If 930,000 of those households have a net worth over $5 million, that's very roughly in the 1% range.

Wikipedia's article on {Millionaire} suggests about 9 million households have a million-dollar net worth, so 930,000 at the 5-million level seems plausible.

So it's not that 1-in-100 Americans are pentamillionaires as individuals, but almost 1-in-100 live in a pentamillionaire household.
I've heard that Apple has canceled the push service, or limited it to one push per 15 minutes?
Listen to breaks.
Top Source for College-Related stories
tl;dr - "Because people are stupid and wouldn't understand them."

How patronising.
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Comparisons with an arbitrary notebook are just silly. For starters, if one is a 15'' screen model and the other one is 17'', they are in completely different categories.
Friendster Lives: New Cash, New C.E.O. and a New Strategy?
The inhospitality business
Seriously unstructured. Initially when I was reading the article, it seemed to be making sense but later it goes completely haywire.

Overall this is what feeling I get after reading the article: maybe Evan has got bored of all the things he did and wants to do something exiciting now. What exciting? He doesn't know.
- Maybe amateurs (some future form of blogger).

- Maybe free lancers building a name & readership for monetisation via books, lectures etc. (This should at least salvage the top tier journalists)

- Maybe none. Who said a change has to be 100% for the better. When the printing press was born, illustrated books (hand illustrated) died.
I posted bzplnr as a Rate My Startup, more as a beta program than an acrual launch, and I must say the feedback was terrific - detailed, honest and even a bit brutal, but without exception encouraging. I've made some changes (it's now http://www.fourthirds.com) accordingly and it's slowly starting to gather a few users who are tentatively having a go with it.

Aiming for a re-design and enhanced featureset soon, so I'll be back for more HN honesty!
I don't know about your numbers, except that income does not necessarily imply assets...

IIRC, from the survey done for "The Millionaire Mind" (<5, but anyway), many people had a family/lifestyle business. Technically, a start-up, but the corner fish n chip shop is probably not the first image evoked by the term. Another significant factor was frugality.

A theory: the enforced savings of a startup is a significant factor in the retention of the created wealth.
The idea is that in perl is very usual and common place to call externals programs, the thing is that you don't need to setup the filedescriptors manually as jrockway says he does in the article.
He used reusability as an argument.

So having to retain the same values 100 different places in the stylesheet(s) makes them more reusable and maintainable than having the ability to define constants once?

What a joke.
Anybody here read The Black Swan or Fooled by Randomness by Nasim Taleb? He so eloquently describes all the fallacies which this article is full of.
The point that this can be done as a separate, server side processing phase has merit. Too bad it had to be wrapped in a ridiculously long, patronising article, containing such gems as the observation that style-sheets are rarely longer than a hundred lines. Right. And I'm not even going to comment on the choice of background.
how to achieve privacy settings or identify a person with multiple computers/browsers/devices/ips without register/login?
Business Management in BA - BMA India
The BA Business Management Degree is a course dealing with international business and management.
No, but mod_rewrite is not the only way of implementing it. In the mentioned case, index.php would implement a front-controller.
mod_rewrite is black magic, and will fail without suggesting why, just throwing a 500 Internal Server Error. Debugging a front controller in PHP (or whatever) it much easier.
Sometimes it can be done on the client side too.

It's called XSLT.
Darth Vader in Love
I agree that it helps to be surrounded by smart, creative people. I also think there are decreasing marginal returns to this benefit - are 1,000 smart people really that much more useful than 100 people for bouncing ideas off of? Is Seattle, Chicago or New York really so bad? More than the Bay area, it's how resourceful you are.

Now I'm not saying the Bay Area is a bad place to be, just that you don't need to be there to come up with and work on an awesome idea. Better reasons to be in the Bay Area: Investors, investors, investors.
I first put up Mibbit here...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=83660

It's growing pretty well now, handles around 10,000,000 messages a day.
As you can see from the original post, I started out having a telnet app, irc app, and game app (Multiplayer jigsaws!). The biggest decision I made was to focus on one. I chose IRC for obvious reasons. The feedback I got was that people didn't really know what it was etc - hence the decision to focus on one app.

To be honest I was pretty gutted about the feedback, and was about to give up on it. I then decided to post it to reddit anyway (nothing to loose) a little later, and got a few people using it there. I then found ircatwork.com which I bought pretty cheaply giving me some users to start with.
I naively thought I suppose, that posting to hacker news and reddit would lead to users. It didn't. Sure, a little spike in users that lasts a day or so, but it's not long term.

The biggest obstacle so far is probably getting to a state where you can make money. Premium accounts, targeted ads etc all take time.

Also in my case, dealing with IRC networks has been an eye opener. Quite a lot of the older networks are completely opposed to anything like Mibbit... "But then anyone could connect!" they say. Most are friendly now though, and at peak times we have 350 or so connections to freenode, and about 2,500 IRC connections open in all.

It's growing well, but that means it's costing a little more to run, and not yet making money. But I'm sure it'll sort itself out :/

I think the main thing is to grow and get user feedback, and that seems to be happening ok.
heh seems that anyone who uses "Me" in a product release ends us a failure
Swap your day around. It sounds crazy, but from the sound of it, you're crazy already, so that shouldn't be a change.

What I mean is:

* Wake up at 3am

* Work until 1 hour before it's time to go to the office

* Have a 1-hour nap

* Go to work, and work until you can't work anymore

* Go home, sleep

You'll have no social life for about 6 months, but you'll spend the best hours of each day working on your baby. After 6 months, you'll probably have something worth launching and/or quitting for.

This is not for the sane, but it's doable. I did it, and I don't regret it.
Ask YC: A Hacker's Dilemmaa?
I spent the last few hours working on a little script (http://fiemster.name/code/quikthot) that I hoped would solve the problem of writer's block.

There are plenty of sites out there are supposedly sites where people come and submit ideas of what to blog about, but all of the ones I have seen are entirely too convoluted.

After I finished this hairbrained attempt to simplify the whole process, I took a step back and immediately saw absolutely no redeeming value of what I had just done, and this made me feel incredibly sad.

Have any other hackers ever spent time on something they genuinely wanted to create, only to feel completely empty after they actually create it?
We launched the NewsCred private alpha via HackerNews a couple months ago, and the last 8 weeks have been a whirlwind of excitement.

The feedback here was very positive. We listened and made some changes immediately and then reached out to a few bloggers. TechCrunch, Mashable etc covered, and we received some decent reviews (nothing fantastic). It was still exciting to see your baby up on TechCrunch!

Traffic that comes with these reviews was good, but I hear it used to be a lot better before. We got a thousand new users from the TC post, nothing crazy. Mashable was a mere blip. Other less known blogs sent a LOT more traffic. We reached out to a lot of smaller bloggers and niche sites for feedback and that was quite fruitful.

We have daily users who love the site. That gives us hope and makes it all worthwhile. We've pushed out a lot of new features, and are gearing up for our public launch (although sneak preview available now).

Our main thing is to get the daily user count in the thousands every day. We now have some days where its less, some days where its a lot more. But we're aiming for consistency. Considering we are about to officially launch publicly, we're very happy with progress.

Its all about marketing and user acquisition now!
If chess playing is a matter of classification (ignoring the complexity of input vector encoding and computational feasibility), then Bayesian filter can surely achieve this goal.
Problem is, if the questions can be automatically generated from publicly available information (the contents of a blog), so can the answer. It will work as long as the system is not commonly available, because spammers won't care - but that's true for any new anti-spam system.

Manually creating three options and selection one as the "right answer" won't work either, a spammer will just try three times, until he gets it right.

I don't like the affinity test - it may work for certain types of sites, but consider the case where you criticize a company on a blog, and a rep wants to reply and participate in the discussion. If he has to do a "nontrivial amount of research" to post, he's probably not going to, which would be a shame.
"Have I been on Microsoft APIs too long"

Are you sure you were even asleep? Microsoft APIs are a nightmare even if you are awake.
Practice Fusion: 'Google Apps For Doctors' Ramps Up
I think I'm one of the most critical critics of most of the startups here, but I love mibbit. When I'm stuck in my C++ work, I click my mibbit button, it auto connects me to the channel and I ask the question. And intelligent informed answers come immediately. That's the real value of mibbit - not the IRC per se, but the ability to use it to instantly get a reply to a specific problem. Consider that in your plans for expansion.
Why not make script/install a shell script?
At least it was a fair headline (obviously spam).
I feel the server side thing is not a good argument, after all, there is not always a server side. HTML documents can be distributed standalone.

Also, it is much harder to do CGI scripting than to deal with possible constants in CSS.
Sure, it happens. But you almost always learn something from the experience, and get a bit or two of reusable code. This applies not just to code hacking... I have a lot of other hobbies (woodworking, electronics, cooking, etc.). There have been countless times some big effort didn't have the intended effect in the end, but rarely if ever has the experience been a "loss".

I would say though that I got over the whole "completely empty" thing afterwards a long time ago. Life is too short to get hung up on petty shit. Take what you can from the experience and move on!
True. And those top finance jobs still go to a small minority of people.
Better to create stuff and throw it out than to either not create it or to hang on to every little thing you do.
yeah that got nixed. will try to update with a reference. basically it is nly going to allow it through gtalk.
I really dig the the design of the site, the logo is pretty rad.

The one thing I noticed is how Y looks like a hand and is giving the "two finger salute" to the little guy flying in the parachute, it made me chuckle, but no one will really notice :) see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_sign

EDIT:(your site has something about a UK business, so you're probably familiar with it, I'll leave the link for others)
My problem with this is that everybody getting their ideas in the same place quickly turns to group-think. And that breeds derivative products and services with negligable added benefit.
You also have a cool button system at the stand which you can rate your experience with the border guard.

That is a brilliant idea. You'd only need one button for INS, tho', which would be labelled "obnoxious".
I can understand the need for security, but policies such as this make people like me less likely to visit the U.S. unless I had to (being ethnic type and Muslim already makes it hard enough).
Another question, how relevant is Kapor to our daily work TODAY? I don't happen to use Lotus Notes, but I have learned a thing or two from Joel's articles. That is why I remember his name and keep reading his blog.
It's definitely my favorite app, as well. I download the paper before I leave in the morning, so when my train into work dives into the tunnels, I can catch up on the news before I even show up at my desk! (Much more productive than spending the first 30 minutes of my day at the nytimes website.)
Ta!

Yeah, the logo (and most of the design, in fact) was done by an amazing Russian design company: http://www.turbomilk.com - I think they added the 'v sign' to make it more playful!
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For what it's worth, I have searched for topics to blog about before only to find a crapload of websites trying to sell me articles.

I would love to see a simple, nicely designed site that I can just click to and get a great idea for a blog post. Your little script seems half way there, so it has value to me.

Do you intend to continue with it?
Living cheap also has benefit in that it often forces you to assess what you need and want in life and ultimately what is really important to you.

There is a certain pleasure to be had to free oneself of the materialistic lifestyle we are often indoctrinated into following through nurture, especially in many western countries/cultures (e.g. process of society and education often teaches get a job, buy a house, get a car, get better job, bigger house, newer car etc. much of which is not really necessary).

When you earn enough not to worry about food and bills, you can really begin to do the things you want and learning to live cheap certainly helps.

The freedom is liberating and truly the best things in life are free (or often surprisingly cheap).
hey, mibbit rocks! I was just using it tonight, and earlier today.