skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: quit job and dive into the deep end?
hi hn,

i'm at a situation where i am about to quit my job, and just dive head on into starting a startup.

We have about $50k saved between the two of us. Is that enough?

I realize this isn't an exact science.. but how do full timers make the transition to a real startup?

I dont have any long-term expenses (no mortgage, no car payment, etc).
A lot of contemporary artists and designers have come out of London in the last ten to twenty years. And a lot of the stellar agencies that have international locations usually choose London for at the very least, a satellite office.
Colinux has the ability to mount your windows fs nowadays. I think the Linux module is called "cofs".
Cheers for your thoughts.
True, but, optimization is tricky, and you can say the say thing about ruby's messagepack and JSON libraries, where the speed difference is reversed. I, unfortunately don't have the time to go digging as to why, but there's a discrepancy somewhere.
This is one of those things where it would be much, much easier to explain with images, but bear with me.

Draw a circle. Within that circle, with the same center as the first circle, draw a smaller circle. Choose a point on that circle, and draw a tangent line from that point. Now, consider the fact that the portion of the exterior circle between the two intersections the tangent line has to it is not half of the circle.

The same principle applies when expanding to three dimensions: a plain can only divide a sphere in half if it passes through the center of the sphere. When that plain must be tangent to a smaller sphere with the same center, it is only possible to divide the larger sphere in half when the radius of the smaller sphere is zero.

As such, the portion of sky visible from any point on a sphere is less than 50%.
The Awful German Language - Mark Twain [1]

I love that essay - and he agrees with you on the gender issue:

---

To continue with the German genders: a tree is male, its buds are female, its leaves are neuter; horses are sexless, dogs are male, cats are female -- tomcats included, of course; a person's mouth, neck, bosom, elbows, fingers, nails, feet, and body are of the male sex, and his head is male or neuter according to the word selected to signify it, and not according to the sex of the individual who wears it -- for in Germany all the women either male heads or sexless ones; a person's nose, lips, shoulders, breast, hands, and toes are of the female sex; and his hair, ears, eyes, chin, legs, knees, heart, and conscience haven't any sex at all. The inventor of the language probably got what he knew about a conscience from hearsay.

Now, by the above dissection, the reader will see that in Germany a man may think he is a man, but when he comes to look into the matter closely, he is bound to have his doubts; he finds that in sober truth he is a most ridiculous mixture; and if he ends by trying to comfort himself with the thought that he can at least depend on a third of this mess as being manly and masculine, the humiliating second thought will quickly remind him that in this respect he is no better off than any woman or cow in the land.

---

1: http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html (First hit I found on Google. You might find "better" versions)
Ask HN: Demo videos music or no music?
Imagine if companies like facebook, youtube or twitter made a one minute demo video that has no narration but has 4 text screens (basic instructions).

Question is do should they add background music or not? If so what kind?

Audience is the general public. My vote for a sweeping rock melody probbaly is not the best choice. Some say generic, kid games style, upbeat music others say inspirational corporate music etc.

Your thoughts? examples would be great!
Warner Bros. Forced To Fight For Fair Use
If you do project-based work professionally, each project can come with its own set of technologies and related experiences. Combine that with a few personal side using another set of technologies, and the array of technologies you are experienced with can grow pretty rapidly.
That is discouraging to hear. I've given up on the idea of being able to make any sort of living writing nice, general desktop apps for most any platform. Seems like you have to target a niche with a quality product so they'll have a need and a lack of mediocre competitors. No offense, but FOSS has done considerable collateral damage via the second point. Usually people would rather put up with a crappy UI from 1990 if it's open source than pay $2.

The gamer demographic on Windows is also a bit notorious for piracy.
This is one of Clojure's finer design choices, emphasis on values. Thus, = alway means deep equality, identical? for testing whether two values are actually the same object.
Where's gcc? ;-)
I never got around to implementing the hierarchy. My idea was to have a few basic entries, say, "users", "dates", "MIME-types", etc. which could be prepopulated.
Ooshmma Garg's startup: gobble.com - SF Bay Area
No, Forth is not sourceless. Though I was startled to read about how some implementations give you a souped-up disk editor for coding, to avoid the overhead of a self-hosted filesystem. I guess it beats toggling bits into the front panel....
On the other hand I would suspect much more media attention is given to kids that excel in throwing or catching a ball.

While TC isn't exactly mainstream media it's nice to get some coverage.

I always thought it was slightly odd but nice that The Late Show with David Letterman occasionally featured "kid scientists" in the line-up.
Two guys in Egypt have built something pretty amazing that tens of millions in venture capital have failed to do. Goes to show you it's the team, it's always the team.
I agree, I don't think it's exactly 50%, should be less.
Here's a simple drawing: http://zombal-zomb.s3.amazonaws.com/70/earth.png
another thought is: if it's possible (I do notice the copyright for this), could we put it on wiki, so everyone can update it after approved by Dr. Saed Sayad to generate a comprehensive one.
I hear it doesn't work on 68K-based Macs, either. :-)

Seriously, Apple hasn't even made a PPC machine in what, nearly 5 years? It's great when manufacturers support legacy hardware, but at some point you're going to have to bite the bullet and upgrade. It's not like there hasn't been plenty of warning.
Both, but the increased quality of the stories is what led me to ask. Will the changes to the voting ring detector show up in the Arc source, or is that kept secret in order to preserve the effectiveness of the detector?
This is one of pg's theses about startups -- one that he bet heavily on when he became an investor. And the first essay that had a significant audience.

http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html

I'm surprised that conventional wisdom has flipped at HN. Is C++ now considered just as good a language for web startups as Python or Ruby? Really?

This feels quite eerie. I've felt the "decline of HN" posts were a bit overblown but this really shows, at a minimum, how the community has little to do with its origins any more.
Home cooked food: order over the net for pickup or delivery. I sampled some of their food at the California Street Farmers Market today (5/22) and it was very good. They launched today and have an awesome special for the first 100 people to order.
well, i thought this was excellent. sorry it didn't get more votes - thanks for posting it.

[edit: ha! i changed a setting while reading that, then forgot. i just rebooted to fix a hardware issue and - wow - this looks way better! all i did was reduce the amount of hinting used by kde. until i read that article i had assumed more was better. also, my comment now makes no sense, sorry - i made that when it appeared to be slipping off the "new" page with just 2 votes (but i see somehow it arrived on the front page...).]
Ockham's Razor has two interpretations.

One says that if you have several theories that might explain what you're observing, the simpler one is probably right. It doesn't matter whether this is true; it saves time by letting you fail faster if you're wrong. This is the more popular understanding of the razor, but it's less useful because it can be wrong, and jackasses often use examples of its wrongness to claim that it never provides any information, in order to advance crackpot metaphysics or religion.

The other says that if you have two theories which both explain everything you're observing, then it doesn't matter which one you adopt, so you might as well adopt the simpler one. For example, if I hypothesize that E=mc^2 + u, where u is the number of invisible, otherwise-undetectable pink unicorn particles within three meters of Mars, this theory makes all the same predictions as E=mc^2, and is nondisprovable. It's Occam's Razor that says that we shouldn't bother with this pink unicorn version.
I'm not so sure it would be the case, as it depends on what is being filtered for, but as I said, groupthink... At this point, one of HN's problems is simply scale; cities are qualitatively different to villages. Reddit has sub-reddits, but that just stages things explicitly. I wondered if something more subtle could work.
"Must have ten+ years of Tesla driving experience."
I've had trouble with Mongo Mapper and Devise.

I've upgraded Mongo Mapper to 0.9.1 to take advantage of it's Rails 3 integration, and it works with Devise 1.3.4 which removes the deprecation warnings.

To do this, I had to pull down the devise-mongo_mapper plugin to avoid version conflicts - it works with the newer code with no changes.

Mongo Mapper 0.9.x has a new configuration hookup that I had already written myself, so that code had to get a small change.

Joint, a Mongo Mapper plugin, doesn't work. I was going to replace Joint anyway for my own needs, now I need to do it today instead of next week.

Now I'm 2 hours in, and still not working on the Asset pipeline work I want to do, but my app is running except for the Joint bits
Stackoverflow's answer:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/341993/is-django-developm...
A technical manager's comparison:
http://kurtgrandis.com/blog/2010/02/24/python-django-vs-c-as...

Python/Django wins! I've also heard anecdotal evidence of a .Net killing a person's startups because of the difficulty of development.

I was trained in Python/Django and am now working in ASP.NET/C#. I've opened my mind to it, and can get stuff done, but I always feel like it would be faster & more elegant to do it in django.
I would argue this has more to do with the developers familiarity of the language which would dictate speed of the initial build and speed of iterations.
I'd consider doing something like dropping the AND by default.

i.e. /photos/london/2011

while still having the OR and NOT and any other operations you need. the idea being that at least due to training from hierarchical filesystems the AND would seem rather implied. As far as considering the duplicate filenames i'd add a prefix to them based on the order they were added to the DB (e.g. first one gets no prefix, second one gets a 2_ or whatever you figure out) that way you won't has as many cases where a file's name changes the moment you add in a new one.
Innovation Investment Journal
Madison Ruby Conference Early Bird Special Ends at Midnight Tonight
Person doesn't read back of box that details prerequisites for compatibility, then complains when their software is too old to work with new hardware.

Excuse given is that even older versions of Microsoft software is compatible. The problem with the argument that "Apple should just give them an upgrade to be compatible" is what do you do with all the people who have XP-era versions of OS X that are incompatible (this is 10.1-10.3 roughly)? Buy them new computer hardware?

Seriously, people not upgrading then having problems = not a problem for company selling commercial software.

Also, where's the outrage at Adobe releasing new versions of Creative Suite that are backwards compatible with old versions of OS X?
Anonymized personal data as a public resource
habrahabr.ru - Russian version of HN has a large following.
I've always found that coders have more in common with artists than traditional white-collar technical people. The basis of our industry is driven by passionate creators, many of whom would continue to create even if they didn't have a financial worry in the world.

Most people in the general population don't get this. I've found that artists and musicians largely do.
You're not the only person in that position. I'm a developer from the Java camp and moved over to the C# camp (by work necessity, Oracle, etc); and, of all the features of C# that I enjoy (Properties, Attributes, Lambda expressions, etc.) I absolutely abhor the idea that I, as a developer, have to know, perfectly, what future subclasses are going to want/need to run properly. It has never made sense and always felt like it was taking away one of the core tenants of object orientation (though I know that neither Java nor C# are true-OO languages). I know it probably technically doesn't, but that's how I've felt ever since I heard about doing it "another way"
What vulnerability depends on a specific version banner? Surely you're not insisting that the actual bug be predicated on the fact that one version prints instead of another.

A server intrusion work flow that involves a version banner? Saint on /24 -> choose exploit & target based on results. I understand you've said either this isn't worth the tradeoffs or 0days aren't getting mass exploited this way, but it is hard to believe you really disagree that intrusions happen in this fashion.
Any discussion of equality semantics would be incomplete without mentioning Baker's "Equal Rights for Functional Objects": http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/ObjectIdentity.html

tl;dr: meaningful equality predicates can only be defined on immutable values.
Ah, I've read this before, it's delightful, but I go one further. I don't actually mind the detached genders (Greek has them, the door is a she, the table is an it, the bench is a he), as long as you can guess it from the word itself somehow (in Greek, gender is determined by the word's suffix, the girl is still neuter but you can tell even if you've never seen the word before).

In German, you basically have to learn an extra bit of information for every word.
Lisp is probably the first language that supports writing DSLs.
Education is always expensive, even if not in direct monetary terms. Learning anything worthwhile takes time and effort. Time and effort that you can't apply to other things - aka opportunity costs. I mostly read and study in my "spare time", but even that means I can't do other things.
Even the app-indicator version doesn't support 2 monitors? What setup is your dual monitors? I'm trying it out, I don't use gnome-panel applets, those bastardly things.
IMO the first step towards happiness, fulfillment and eventual prosperity is dropping out of the rat race and being true to oneself. Everybody wants to but very few can.

Why does she think your friends are successful, because they're rich, or because they've found their passion and to them work feels like pleasure/recreation? Would she consider them successful if they hated their work but made twice as much? Or if they loved what they did but were making just enough to get by?
lftp is an old favorite of mine that i've used many a time. Its built-in shell with history, support for sftp as well as various flavours of ftp, bookmarks are features I've made use of.
A ideal language for startups requires three attributes:

Rapid application development

Open source distribution

Performance/scalability
It's more than a bit:

0 = der

1 = die

10 = das
Woman earns college degree two decades after complete memory loss
+1 on comparing yafc with lftp
As much as I love Berlin as a city, Germany's legal system is very much focused on protecting employees rather than helping small businesses. Starting a business and dealing with employment law is much easier in the UK than it is in Germany.

Beyond that Berlin does have the developer talent pool nor the access to finance that London does.
I agree with you, it was dumb to put it in Toronto after what happened in Quebec city. And that he's the only one left in jail is even more telling. They have to convict someone it seems for all the billions on a couple day event.
I would ask how much of a runway that gives you and do you think you can get to profit in the time estimated? The answer depends in part on how much you spend each month and in part on how well developed your concept is, plus a few other factors. For example: Is $50K something you can live on for 2 years or is that six months living expenses? (etc)
>If use of bitcoin is made illegal we cannot use it for personal or business use, and those who would use it for illegal reasons, trafficking in illegal goods and money laundering would still use it and would be the sum of the bitcoin economy.

Not very useful for money laundering if it is not very useful for non-criminal transactions.
I'm a regular user of HelloFax; it's a lot easier than going to OfficeMax to fire off a couple-page document every now and then for my day job.
That's how security consultants break into machines. If you're arguing that someone with a very recent SSH remote is going to use Saint to scope out a target, no; doubt it.
I don't know if you're being sarcastic, but a compiler is worth writing as a learning exercise, if not also for fun. Not necessarily a matter of need.
"...she discovered an upside to forgetting. She had forgotten old rancors...."

This bears repeating, because it's both interesting and unexpected. I have a relative with Alzheimer's—diagnosed a year ago—and while the signs are unmistakable, she's also still perfectly conversational, reasonably independent, and most surprisingly, much more amiable towards people to whom she was formerly rather cool. Our best explanation is exactly as stated in the article: that she had basically forgotten the rancor.

Anyway, I saw her so clearly in that line of the article I had to point it out, because it was (and still is) so surprising to us that this would be an effect of Alzheimer's.
My question is why on earth would you do a video? Seriously. Four text screens and no narration? Could you really imagine Facebook or Youtube doing a video like that?
Is it worth mentioning pushd/popd here?
The author makes some fair points. Java generics are a bit clunky. C#'s more liberal application of autoboxing can be nice. Some other options for string literals would be helpful, especially for writing regular expressoins without a ton of backslashes.

Checked exceptions are not something that I'd happily give up. We do have unchecked exceptions (RuntimeException), and the JRE generally uses them where appropriate. But what about methods like Inflater.inflate, ImageIO.read, or Class.getMethod? If these didn't throw checked exceptions, we would sometimes forget to catch exceptions which should almost always should be caught. It would be a step in the direction of a weaker type system, unhelpful errors, and less graceful recovery.

Regarding initializers, we can do the same thing in Java by giving an initializer block to an anonymous class:

List<Integer> L = new ArrayList<Integer>() {{
for (int i = 0; i < 10; ++i)
add(i);
}};
I see, it's a historical claim without a citation. What kind of machine was it back then, a PDP-11? I suppose it's possible they would want to save cycles here & there. Do you know something specific about the history here?
Ah, right. Yes, it's just arbitrary and completely disconnected from the words as far as I can tell.

In fact, we tend to argue about the gender of things here regularly. One well-known (and mocked) example is a very popular local hazelnut cream. People actually discuss if the brand name should be considered female or of no gender at all (not sure if anyone wants to claim that it should be male).

Since there's no real logic behind all these rules it's fair game to argue about it..
I lived in Berlin for three months and it's definitely possible to get by without speaking German, it helps, but English is widely enough spoken that you can survive without it (assuming you're working for an English speaking company)
I haven't had iTunes installed for years. It's a horrendous piece of software. I installed it and removed it a few days later.

I'd almost wager that that majority of people I know don't have it installed. I know none of my immediate relatives have it, and the only friends I know with it are people who own Macs (about 1 out of 12).

Anecdotal I know.
For just doing security reviews, I don't think open source should be a requirement; just available, published source.
Does kickstarter count?
WakeMate, despite its flaws (which are few and far between) it's a fantastic thing to have, I love it a lot.

Also Appsumo.
Not sure where you're living but I'm in a lovely 3br for a bit more than that and only 20-25 mins out from Bank on the tube.

Everyone in London knows that if you don't want to pay through the nose don't live in the centre!
The App Store Polices Make Total Sense Now: I've had- and still have- my issues with Apple's strict submission guidelines. But I now understand exactly why they succeed- and why they provide an objectively superior experience for many users than the App Market ever can.

Mitchell's first question to me involved apps. He wanted to know which ones were safe to download- was there anything he needed to watch out for. If Mitchell had purchased an Android tablet I'd have had a laundry list of warnings for him. But there isn't much to worry about on the App Store. I told him to scan the user comments if he didn't recognize a developer, but that apps for the iPad were pretty risk-free.

I almost stopped reading here because I found it so strange. Does the central point: "I told him to scan the user comments if he didn't recognize a developer, but that apps for the iPad were pretty risk-free." not hold for Android devices as well? Scan the comments, pick apps with high ratings?

It's like finding a restaurant in a new city. Walk around, find one that looks popular.