skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It kind of depends on the complexity and size of the site. You want to make sure you can have it done in a reasonable timeframe.

I'm doing all of the development on my site http://collegeacb.com but its a really simple concept (basically just a forum). One thing I have found really helpful though is having a cheerleader. Nominate someone to keep you focused (even if they don't do anything else) so that you don't give up half way through.
Does a failed startup count against you on your resume?
Having a prototype makes everything easier, including finding partners. Build your prototype, and then while you're out socializing with other startup founders, and/or beating the bushes for customers, investors, business development opportunities, and press, you can also mention "I'm also looking for another developer to join the company in a partnership role". Somebody will know somebody, and if you're selling the dream effectively they'll be inclined to make that introduction.

The problem with people looking for business partners is often that they imagine that an idea is enough to persuade someone to get involved. It rarely is. An existing friendship might be enough, but a stranger with a new idea (and nothing else) is just annoying. So, building a prototype proves you're dedicated enough to put some of your own skin in the game before asking anyone else to do so. That's a big win.

And, of course, there have been single-founder success stories. More than a few, in fact. So, if you never find a co-founder, if you can deliver a valuable product, you might still build a successful business. But it's obviously a harder row to hoe.
Push-ups give me a headache. I don't know if its the blood rushing to the head or the neck tension, but they are uncomfortable for me for reasons that have nothing to do with the actual excercise. Same thing for pull-ups, sit-ups or whatchamacallit.

Machines are comfortable while still maxing out my muscle capacity. They are the sole reason that I am now, after many years of repeatedly failing to start a weight regimen, enjoying gym excercise.

You are probably right in everything you said, since I know fuck all about fitness, but I know what I like.
Hopefully someone will correct me if wrong on these, but just a couple thinking off the top of my head are Craigslist and Delicious.
The background to F#'s Unit of Measure support
You can already pick up eee's and copies for $200 or so...

I'm not sure where the market is for a tablet like this personally. It's less useful than an iphone (not portable), and less useful than a laptop (No keyboard).
Is COBOL really understandable after 14 years?
Post was pretty good, but this link within the post was even better: http://venturehacks.com/articles/speed
And that is exactly my point. It's one thing to build a prototype, and another thing entirely to be able to mass produce a web tablet for $200. And no matter how good the EE, you can't do that stuff at a messy kitchen table - you need serious resources.
Yeah, but who actually goes to the patent office to look for ideas he can license to build products?
That paragraph is followed immediately by an example, which I included.
Is there demand for a discussion site that has nothing to do with blog or news posts? Comments and threads could still be monitored and ranked by users. Discussions could be split into topics and subtopics (philosophy might be interesting, because some of the arguments would concern where to make the splits).

The hard thing would be to make sure people voted up and down for the right reasons.
They are an unpleasant morass, though
That's a fair synopsis of my response, yes! The very fact that they have built a prototype already means they're doin' it wrong.

The correct approach when you fly in with a set of specs (which seemed to be $200, touch screen, browser) is to find suppliers and negotiate your build cost down to sub $75 so that you can afford to bring it to market at $200

This kind of budget, with the volumes (small) and capital (small, mike arrington isn't dell) that TC would have for this project means that well before you're at the stage of ordering samples building a prototype, you would have needed to have done a whole lot of work at the negotiation table to even get into the ballpark.

I'm all for optimism, but honestly - this isn't a rails web app - it's hardware.
Less useful for what? If it had the right form factor, it might be more useful for browsing Hacker News over my lox & bagel, which is what I'm doing right now. (Commenting would require voice recognition, which is not up to snuff, yet, or a software keyboard, which would be worse. But a little Apple Wireless keyboard could be a good adjunct for that.)
Hence "patent".
The screen?

It's Arrington's old macbook air screen.

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/19/apple-is-flailing-badly...
Quote:
"That $1,800 piece of hardware has now been dismantled for parts for a project we’re working on here."
That is worth reading for the comics alone.
Really gorgeous, though the captivating patterns felt so recursive that I was reminded of the article a few months ago about the painter who was obsessed with patterns, amongst them Ravel's Bolero. And of course, they were linked by the same terminal brain illness.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13599-bol%E9ro-beautif...
I think the hard lesson I am learning is that you really can't afford to spend time arguing with co-founders about what should be included and what should not.

I think that every 2 person team has to designate one person as leader, and the other as adviser. Otherwise there are too many bruised egos and too much compromise.
I <3 python and its mandatory white space, but requiring self to be listed as a parameter does bug me.
Story about an Android contest winner
This guy built an app that takes in a picture of a bar code and then looks up information online about the product. Very neat.
I also don't understand that critic. I have never ever had a problem with it and it is a big part of what makes Python so readable. I don't think there is any other language that comes close to Python in terms of readability.

What is the issue people have with it? They write code that writes code? That is the only issue I can come up with.

And self, yes it might seem a bit unaesthetic at first but it is not such a big deal.

For me,
Python = productivity
A drunken blog rant is a drunken blog rant.

Cheers to that.

I don't read a lot of stuff on the web top-to-bottom, especially opinion pieces, but I found this article exceptionally entertaining.
I'd never heard of 'English' units before, we call them Imperial.
There are two entire sentences there that could be thrown out without any change in meaning.
Every Sunday is the same
For a one night stand, that's fine, I guess. Or maybe you change your PIN every day? :) Even if you do that, your partner will get lucky once every coupla weeks or so.

Anyway, I'm not advocating keeping secrets from your partner, but for people who depend on keeping secrets on their phone, (at least) most phones today do not have anything other than playtime security.
When networks become as reliable a partof the infrastructure as the water supply. Of course, the water supply generally comes first.
He says at the bottom of the article that that's not his argument, it's one he hears from others.
Erlang at Work - Hunting Bugs
if you are referring to http://www.revolutionhealth.com/, they seem to have a traffic nearing 3M uniques a month. That sounds good to me.
> Perl OO never really caught on because it isn't part of the core language.

What?

Perl OO did catch on, and it is part of the core language.
I concurr with the previous comments that most of these "guidelines" are common sense and this is definetly not groundbreaking.

What is nice though is that you have a statistical "verified" list which is >most< and with is >least< important of the common sense we already know.

Another thing why this could be probably^W interesting is that it could influence e.g. goverment, or other institutional sites.
Yes. Why would a big corporation want to hire someone who can come up with ideas and implement them without "adult supervision"? That would make the 100 layers of management useless, and nobody wants to be useless.

The ideal candidate will be smart but have no ambition to do anything on his/her own. A failed startup means he has that ambition.
Looking at Chess Futures? Bet on This Norwegian Chess Prodigy
Usability Tip: Use Verbs as Labels on Buttons
I think most people who like to come up with ideas and implement them wouldn't want to work at a large company for the reason you mention. Small companies and other start ups would probably value their ideas and initiative.
I'm not sure if anyone's used nuclear-powered spacecraft closer to the sun

http://www.google.com/search?q=rtg+sun+nasa+Ulysses

Ulysses was in the news in 1996-1997 because NASA's Cassini-RTG decision was being criticized. The argument was that NASA's can't-use-solar-at-the-distance-of-Saturn argument didn't hold water in light of the fact that NASA even chose to put an RTG on a Sun explorer.

it doesn't seem likely, since solar power is plentiful there.

That was the crux of the NASA-can't-be-trusted argument.
One thing to keep in mind is that IT professionals are different from software engineers which seem to be the majority of the technical backgrounds that HNers have.

I'm surprised there aren't more sysadmin related posts actually. (Wiring Servers? How do YOU do it?)
metafilter.com is full of esoteric posts and people from all sorts of different backgrounds post on it with surprising amounts of wit and candor.
In the past 3 or 4 years, Microsoft has really changed its stances on a lot of things in terms of languages. Between the DLR and F#, it certainly makes me mind working on .Net a little less.

I do wish Rich would resume support of Clojure on .Net, but I understand why he chose to focus on the JVM alone.
Ha I like how it's correctly done in the Mac popup, but not in the PC.
http://www.electricsheep.org/
Can really relate to #9 "Highs and Lows — Never give up".

One day I think "haha this is going to be BIG". Then the next day I think to myself it's an idiotic idea that will never make any money and is using too much traffic and I ought to just close it now before it uses more. Trying to average those feelings out over the days is quite hard - especially if you're a single founder.

I guess if you have co-founders, each founders highs and lows rarely coincide, so you're able to pick each other up.
The things you find out about your friends...
hahaha. this is great- I tried to post my own experience with this start-up (and in my opinion, citing the REAL problems) and was told to take the post down (later, with legal text) and now I see this post, trying to parody the one I wrote with things like 5. and 8. - shame. I might want to add though, that the author does not have the technical expertise to figure out who wrote how much code along with other (many) misrepresentations- otherwise, 8, while very sound and correct advice, might differ in terminology and he might have a better idea fitting his take into existing context written by PG and others.

Nonetheless, most of the advice is realistic and useful in the sense that the points raised are practical and might help structure your startup.
I have a year of "failed startup" on my resume, and it's always either been positive or neutral in the eyes of employers.
I, fortunately, did absolutely nothing idiotic at the age of 14.
Well, sure, but those serious manufacturing resources belong to OEMs in China. As a US-based designer, building a factory is not your problem -- there's no hope of doing that profitably at this rock-bottom $200 price point. Your problem is design -- figuring out which combinations of commodity parts will do what you want. After which you'll take various iterations of your prototype to meetings with OEMs like Foxconn, asking them to bid for the honor of manufacturing the product in bulk and sticking your company's label on it.

Of course, there are lots of potential pitfalls in that process -- there are several middlemen who can mark the price up, there are lots of suppliers to coordinate and play against each other, and there's the constant risk that your design is lousy, or unmanufacturable (when the factory is half a world away, it's hard to establish a good design feedback loop), or that you'll cut so many corners trying to meet your budget that your brilliant design turns out lousy. This is presumably why there are so few decent $200 web tablets.

Incidentally, though I used to be a product engineer in the cellular components industry, I'm no expert on the overall design/manufacturing process -- I was a tiny cog in the giant cellphone machine. For actual knowledge I recommend something like Bunnie Huang's blog posts about hiring folks to build the Chumby:

http://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?cat=6

UPDATE: I just surfed through my own link, and I have to say that Bunnie is a great blogger. His hints for getting quality designs out of Chinese factories (my capsule summary: "live in China, watching the assembly line, for as much time as you and your budget can stand") are in line with my own experience.
That auction system won't work well because in your example, somehow foobar.com is available after 10 years of $10 domains. If nobody picked it up yet, it's unlikely any sort of bidding war is going to occur. Also, the problem is already so well-entrenched, with so many domains currently being squatted on that it does nothing to solve it.

$1k domains would stifle innovation because there are a lot of people who can program (or learn to program) a cool website but might not have $1k to spare. Craigslist, plentyoffish, whatever that MySpace site made by a trailer-dwelling teen in Detroit that was a media sensasation, every blog known to man, etc. might not exist if the founders had to plunk down a grand.
In an Indian State there is an interesting Govt sponsored healthcare http://aarogyasri.org/
That was exactly my point. We could, but we won't and we probably won't in another 50 years. Technology is held back by all sorts of stuff.
Are they? I mean, they're giving you more choice for sure, but I don't see any PCs sold without them. People still make their decisions largely based on OS.
What Startups Can Learn From Michael Dell
Isn't this sarcastic?
It supports normal first party cookie use, but easily blocks third-party cookies. This prevents people like Google from using their own cookies on third party sites.

So right now when you go to, say, autoblog (supposing it uses Google) Google reads some cookie they gave you to figure out who you are, and stores in a db that you went there. Then when you go to Myspace, they read the cookie again, look it up in the db, and know to serve you an ad for cars.

If MSFTs feature were enabled by default, this would be blocked. They could, of course, workaround it somehow, but could they do so while still making installation of Adsense for autoblog as easy as tossing in some js code? That's the threat.

If you want a more detailed technical explanation than I'm capable of giving you, I'm sure you can Google it :)
So was it like a big fight with drama and crying and all? Did someone get voted out? Please do tell your side of the story! I love drama!
You can send me an email at maximusklein@gmail.com and article poster, please if you have the time, do send me one too!
read it many years ago. but reading it again it is just as good (even my non-programming girlfriend enjoys it!)
Sorry, but I can't take seriously people, who are writing stuff like "C++ is the dumbest language on earth...". It's not even insulting.
The caste system will die only slowly. It's present here in the good ole USA too.

I have a work cohort who is Indian. He claims the caste system is no longer in use in India but dismisses the Dalits: "Ah, those people! Those people are no good!"
In concentrated high tech areas it might not count against you, but for me in San Diego it is something employers find to be a negative. To them it shows that I might not be "dedicated" to the job I am applying for. I get a lot of "How do we know if you are going to stay" and in general a lot of questions that just start with "How do we know (whatever)", it really starts going downhill once that starts in.
I wish I could but unfortunately- the author is very agile with his various BS NDA, Non-compete and what-the-hell-not forms. I'd rather move on to things in my life that don't waste 5 months of my time. Anyway, I just couldn't hold myself back from saying something when seeing the "leader" go on and publish his thoughts while suppressing mine and then misrepresenting a few things.

I'd rather end it here by saying I don't want to be a part of this new blame game and that the advice given is very sound and realistic. Tragically, the author has tried to apply his zero-technical background to very technical practices when trying to blow out his thoughts into relevant context provided by others. In the process, he has decided to dish out 50% of the problems, misrepresenting a few and then suppressing the other REAL 50% through NDA forms.

Lastly, so that it is clear- the author and his company paid 0 dollars for the patent- It all came out of my pocket and was the result of years of work.

In my opinion it is wise to file a provisional patent for an idea you think is worth it in all its uniqueness and by all measures, I (think I) did not commit a crime by trying to secure my invention/s.

Choose the people who you work for very, very carefully. Things like this (and probably worse) happen later.

Adios.
I worked for years for a internet-healthcare startup building a webapp for physician practices, with lots of attention to billing. After a successful IPO, a couple of us have branched out to a new company (http://www.mariahealth.com) trying to improve the user experience of healthcare.

Regulations need to be considered, but a bigger challenge is that many powerful players (e.g. hospitals, health insurance cos.) who you often need to work with and can be risk-averse or capricious with respect to technology and startups. But that situation has improved hugely over the course of the last year or two.

As a result it seems like a good time for startups. Especially in the U.S., but not only there (differences between different countries health systems are often exaggerated). I doubt there's an industry where it's easier to find problems.
Green Fitness Presents Patagonia Tenzing Shoe | Green Fitness World
I don't think it's a matter of reliability: most aspects of the Internet infrastructure are perfectly reliable. I think it is mostly a question of social convention: most of the people posting these ads don't think of the Internet first, and most of the people who might be interested in the ads aren't scouting the Internet. Part of the reason for both of those factors is age: the Internet is not nearly as pervasive among older folks (or in communities outside the Bay Area, for that mater).

Another reason is that the Internet is global by default, not local (with a few notable exceptions, like Craigslist). At least right now, there just isn't that much to be gained by putting local notices on the Internet: there's an incremental advantage, but it's not the sort of obvious, game-changing advantage that drove the adoption desktop publishing, for instance. That might change as technology improves (for example, being able to show highly locale-specific ads to someone based on the location of their mobile device).
Green Fitness Gear on display at Beijing Olympics | Green Fitness World
Stanford's "autonomous" helicopters teach themselves to fly
I recruit for investment banks and hedge funds; it's a positive, even if it's not a tech startup.
Ugh. Every time I read something from the MSDN jobs blog, I come away with the same, greasy feeling that I get when I've spent more than 30 seconds talking to a recruiter who cold-calls people for jobs requiring fifteen years of Ruby experience.

If you want to know what a pirate thinks of your sailing skills, you don't ask his parrot.
Yeah I don't think google will need to work too hard to fix that one :/

Unless MS removes even more standards support from the browser like disabling dom methods from js, you'll always be able to toss in some js.

Also it would mean that statcounters, certain iframe login mechanisms etc would be broken in IE.

It'd be pretty cool if IE does become crippled in this way though, less IE users == less headaches.
I love people who take risks and follow their passions, but if your resume lists a series of short stints at failed startups, I think it’s natural to question a person’s career management skills.

What are "career management skills"? Two interpretations come to my mind.

The author could mean a tendency to constantly worry about how one's resume will look to big companies. If this is the case, why does Microsoft care? A person who, whenever considering a new project, worries about how it will affect his resume is more likely to get stolen by a competing big company, since big companies generally prefer conservative resumes. However, a person who isn't scared to have a resume with many jobs at failed startups is more likely to get stolen by a startup, since they generally don't care if a person has such a resume (they may even prefer it), and also because the person probably has lots of contacts in the startup world. In the American technology industry today, headhunting is a danger regardless of how conservative the employee's resume is.

Another interpretation is that by "career management skills" the author means a willingness to take a steady, well-paying job when one has a family to support. This makes sense: what would you think of someone who insists on working for startups, even at the cost of having trouble feeding his three children and being forced to live in a dangerous neighborhood? But perhaps he doesn't have a family. Or perhaps the spouse has a steady job to support the kids. Or perhaps he has a trust fund or a bunch of money from a previous startup. There are so many exceptions that a resume full of failed startups is not a reliable signal of this kind of irresponsibility.

Neither of these interpretations makes much sense. But there's a less charitable interpretation: "I love people who take risks and follow their passions, but not too much, because then they'd balk at the crap we'd make them do."
If your girlfriend is motivated enough that she's willing to bruteforce a 4 digit pin in any length of time, you better be pretty careful.
Perl OO = library. Scheme OO = library. Library != language. The last time I tried to use Perl OO, CPAN had to download a bunch of stuff for Moose. That doesn't sound like it's part of the core language to me.

Has the situation changed? Are there OO things included with the default dist of Perl?
No, it's squatting combined with the known fact that short domains that can easily be sounded out are best.

When we were looking for a domain name, we built a script to merge a bunch of keywords into short domains and check for availability. There were almost none left with the word "sports" in it. sportshit.com was available and that was about it.
You can write readable code in any decent language, and you can just as easily write unreadable code in Python. The important variable is the programmer's skill, not some language-imposed restriction. Besides, bad use of white space is rarely what makes code unreadable. It's usually poor organization, functions/modules that are too long, non-descriptive names, overly complex class hierarchies, etc. I think Python is a nice language but I disagree that its whitespace rules make it so much more readable than other languages.