skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've had the misfortune of working for someone in New York City who was running a similar operation. But I think he stays just inside the law. He announces that he has a seed fund for startups. He spends all of his days pitching investors. He then pitches his ideas, usually working in concert with one or more partners. He then hires 2 or 3 programmers to work on the idea. He pays himself very generously for his leadership skills. For one of his projects, he might raise $100,000 in 3 months and then pocket $20,000 as his fee for providing leadership. The rest goes to the programmers. And he might have 3 or 4 such projects going at the same time.

Technically, this is not a scam. He raises money and spends most of it trying to build startups. But I did have the sense that his focus was very different than what I expect of most of the Hacker News crowd. I had the sense that he didn't really give a damn whether any of his projects succeeded. He was making a very good living just raking in dollars from investors. And of course, if the investors are dumb enough to give money to him, then in some sense they deserve what they get.

I recall that for all of the many meetings we had, he never mentioned customers a single time. He only talked about investors. He talked a lot about "the deck" (the PowerPoint presentation he would use to dazzle potential investors), which he constantly tweaked and polished. His only interest in the programming was to show some progress so that he could ask for more money. And then after a few months he would claim that the idea had failed to show traction, and he would move on to the next idea.

Any boom will attract a certain number of parasites. I had the impression that he was manipulating the rhetoric about a tech boom in New York City to sell the idea that investors needed to get in on the action, via him.

It was intriguing to realize that this was even a possibility. For me, when I'm part of a startup, I'm generally willing to sacrifice some of my current income for the sake of seeing the startup maybe succeed. But this guy was playing the opposite game.

He was very smart. And he invested enough of the money raised that no one could accuse him of running a scam. And yet, I had the impression he was just barely legal -- just barely doing the minimum so that no one could accuse him of running a scam.

He did have one success in his past, which I think made his whole operation possible. He was sort of like the aging actor who had a popular show 20 years ago and nowadays does infomercials. That one hit gave him the credibility to run his almost-scam.

Anyone involved in the startup world should be aware of operators like this.
A proud moment for me was when my then-six-year-old daughter wrote a letter to Santa that said, "Dear Santa, I know that you can't exist because you would have to go faster than light to deliver all those presents." I don't know where she got it from, but I was impressed by her skeptical attitude!
If you love your work, what is wrong with living to work?

(When I say living to work, take it as implied that I mean taking good enough care of yourself to prevent physical or mental health problems from tanking your work quality)
hobbies that do not involve sitting in front of a computer screen... Working to live, vs. living to work.

It's more complex than that for me. I really like Calcanis's point that work is life for him. "Work to live" makes it sound like you would be happier if you could just have a trust fund, which is true for almost nobody.

I don't know if I want to take it to Calcanis's level where his work is his Alpha and his Omega, but my work is a big, big part of my life right now, and the other things (friends, dating, a home life, hobbies, etc) are less important to me. In the future surely that will change/flip. Certainly I've had different priorities in the past.

But the other thing is I kind of treat my "hobbies" as work. I just moved to a new city, and a lot of the "non-work" fun people are doing is partying, drinking, eating, playing outside, etc. Those are things I love, but lately what I really want to do is gardening, beer brewing, building structures, and yes... even coding for fun.

And one of those activities--gardening--became the foundation of my business. So now, even that is considered "working" in a very real sense.

So for me, this work/play line is very blurry. And the question of whether it's ok to want to spend most of your time in the "work" world is open for me. As is the question of whether it's reasonable for people like me (and Calcanis) to want to work only with other people who feel the same way.

Personally, I'd never want to work in a company full of "me's". I'm totally screwed up in a bunch of important ways, and I want people who do the opposite to balance me out.

I guess that's where I disagree with both DHH and Calcanis. I'll throw my own absurd overgeneralization in to the ring: fire the people who are just like you.
I think it's up to Dr. Clark to decide how "trivial" a matter it is to see his words unilaterally scrubbed, as if they never existed.

And as far as the meta sites go, I've found meta.SO to be an echo chamber; ideas aren't voted up or down so much on how they contribute to the discussion (as it goes on HN), but on whether or not how much the cool clique agrees.
I really sympathise with the point made about allowing yourself (at least) a year to "mature" and/or figure out, even to a small degree, what direction you want to take your life in before going to University. I think if I'd done that I would have been a lot less susceptible to upvoting all the recent "HE is a waste of time" articles.

Philosophically (and practically), not so sure about trying to fix higher education through purely economic/business terms, but then I'm no expert on it.
Telehack - stylized ARPANET/USENET simulation
You too can own a Dalek for $5000
Do you typically browse with JavaScript disabled? I would think that these days it would seriously change the browsing experience and many sites would be unusable. Just curious. :)
FUNcube Dongle: a software defined radio that runs from a USB port
I think you're missing something. Without wholesale deletion, we can't construct The Grand Truth about our past, like the textbooks in Junior Hi and High School "social studies" present to us.

Without mass deletion, anyone, absolutely anyone, can go look at the unchanged unedited primary sources. No interpretation by High Priests of History, the ones who write the simplistic pablum in school textbooks necessary. That's the kind of thing that causes reformations, and we don't want one of those, any more than we want another Watergate Scandal.
The purpose of design is to make people want things
Do you want to make a ton of money writing banking applications?
Considering he has somewhat of a history, is this a lesson in vetting for angel investors and accelerator programs?
I agree, but where would you fit it in? I'm trying to figure that out as well.
Bad for history maybe, but I liken this sort of thing to personal email archives.

I find that if I don't cull aggressively as email comes into my inbox, I wind up with an archive that is not only huge and unwieldy, but full of stuff I will almost CERTAINLY never need to read again. Unless you are a god with regular expressions, the best time to clean up archives is as you are making them, rather than a hundred years from now when the archive has eclipsed available storage capacity.

Archiving stuff is great, but I try to stick to discarding the useless, the mediocre, and the pretty good, and only saving the remarkable, notable, and fantastic.
Here's the problem:

Your friend was smart, but most people who come into the doctor with self-diagnoses are whack jobs. Doctors don't know who to take seriously so they take no one seriously, unless you approach them the right way.
Yeah... I learned that the hard way, too.

I can't describe how stupid I felt at that moment...
Is it really necessary to refer to Microsoft as 'M$' at this point?
Thank you! I was wondering exactly the same thing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2620297
In my experience, whenever someone has proven to have sufficiently searched out for an answer themselves, this doesn't come up.

That said, my primary experience in help rooms is in ##java on freenode.
How Tuition Works At Oxford University (2007)
Another more traditional name for hellban is shadow ban. Just saying, for those who remember the modems and BBSes :)
There is no vs.
Why Rails 3.1 Streaming means you still have to think about your HEAD
I believe it was an article called "Shareware Amateurs vs Shareware Professionals". His old Dexterity is no longer available, but he released the copyright on all his material so I mirrored it (and all his old Dexterity articles) on my site:

http://www.sodaware.net/dev/articles/shareware-amateurs-vs-s...
Ask HN: How to balance Equity when the Investor is also a Client? 
Dear All,

I've seen several examples of startups where investors exchange funds for equity, but what about when the investor is also a client for the new business? You could just keep things separated, I know, but any other ideas to streamline the relationship?

Would it be reasonable exchanging funds for services (instead of equity) in a SaaS scenario where the new service will reduce investor/client's existing operational cost?

Many thanks for any insight.
I'm not sure it's relevant. Queueing in the transfer protocol is a useful feature to address the limitations of physical hard disks (i.e., to delegate the ordering of temporally-proximate I/O operations to the device, which usually can do it better than the host OS can). With flash disks, optimization of seeks is unnecessary (since there are no seeks), and they are usually so fast that the command queues rarely grow.
I'd love to get more into Scala and Clojure, but I don't know the first thing about Java, especially the Java ecosystem (war's, ant, jvm's, etc).

Unfortunately, most books/articles on Clojure and Scala assume you know Java.
But ... but Mirc is such an amazing tool!!

(please don't hate me, I use xchat and irssi much of the time)
> The question to ask is: What are the economic and social forces keeping the COBOL code base alive?

Do you want to be the person who volunteers to rewrite those codebases into $HOT_NEW_LANGUAGE (or even $BORING_STABLE_LANGUAGE) and be on the hook for ensuring that your rewrite exactly replicates the behavior of the old system? Introducing bugs--or even inadvertently fixing bugs--during the rewrite is absolutely not allowed.

Let's say, for concreteness, that each one of those tasks above is a multi-million line codebase. Think about what that would cost, both in person-years and in monetary terms. (Sure, you can write 10x less code...but half a million to a million lines of Python is still a lot of Python.) Remember, you probably have to have a fairly exhaustive specification of how the original system worked before you embark on the rewrite; just getting that specification together is likely to be tilting toward person-years of work.

Do you want to be the manager who goes around to talk to all the involved stakeholders and explains to them why this is a worthwhile use of their systems, time, and money? ("We'll have an easier time recruiting people to work on the system," probably doesn't fly; neither does, "$LANGUAGE is cleaner/faster/more readable.") What do you tell them when they ask about possible issues during the transition? And so on and so forth.
I used to work for a large defence company. They paid for "certified" ADA compilers for PPC architecture. They had as many (if not more) bugs. Not only that, they built their stuff on FPGAs which had even buggier compilers than the compilers for the software.

Certified compilers are protected only by maintenance agreements.
"...arbitrary values that apparently define the physics of our universe somewhat."

In other words, this constant is a piece of a model, fitted to observable behaviour, subject to refinement based on empirical data. And the model may at some point be able to offer insight as to why things are as they are; "just because" is not viewed by most physicists as a permanent explanation.

This is the exact opposite of religious thinking which offers conclusions in advance of, and regardless of, any empirical data.

My point is that the parallel you're trying to draw between religious prescription and the things that scientists call "axioms" is not valid.
Bank of America isn't really a corporation, it is an extension of the federal government. It is massively subsidized directly and indirectly by Federal Reserve interest rate policy, and was kept alive by several multi-billion dollar Treasury bailout programs starting in 2008.

If Bank of America were a real corporation the market would have killed it off a long time ago.
That's not entirely true.

You can transfer it to the company, but if the Feds find out that you own significant equity in that company - they take that as an indication that you are intending to be an 'immigrant' on a non-immigrant visa, which violates the intent and spirit of the visa.

So, sure, you may be able to do it and not get caught. But if you do, you just got a one-way ticket home.
This is understood, assuming your personal email is posted to the Web and consumed by others. I am a compulsive email saver, but periodically wipe out categories that are no longer relevant as well.
>a dr. who knows what and WHY

Same could be said of an auto mechanic--the prototypical technician.
why was my comment killed??

o the lulz-

pea gee today: "Sorry this took so long. For a while we hoped to implement our own search, but it became apparent that would take a lot of work to do right"

pea gee 392 days ago: "The explanation is a lot less involved than your question: what makes users happy is not features, but the quality of the submissions and comments. So I focus on the latter instead of the former. The result is a spartan site with good content. There's a YC funded startup that may solve the problem. If they do I'll use them. But frankly the issue is not at the top of my list. This is a classic example of how one should give users what they want, not what they say they want. Lots of people say they want search, but I would be suprised if there was a single user who'd left HN because it lacked search. Whereas if I let the frontpage get filled up with crap, or the comment threads filled up with mean or stupid comments, people would start leaving pretty quickly. So almost all the time I spend thinking about HN is spent thinking about how to avoid that." -source: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329334

To your credit you did come back with the YC investment product, but please don't disguise the fact that you didn't think search was necessary in the first place. Seems pumping up your investment was the impetuous that changed your mind. Nothing wrong with that at all, just let's keep the story factual. This is a classic example of how one should give users what increases value of a portfolio sister company and dressing it up as something else, not what they say they want.
It's interesting in general how Arc Forum lags behind Hacker News in features. Visiting there is a sort of time warp: in addition to there being no search bar or notifo, karma points are still visible on comments.

Edit: Added notifo point.
How is that relevant to the viability of Java?
I love Go, but it is a systems language (a C replacement), not a UI language. That's not even my opinion, that's how they market it.
I am missing the entire 90s in this story. And epic the 1984 commercial might have been, but I don't see how they successfully leveraged it to split the camps, if any at that time in personal computing history.
That's a lot of quotes, mostly by people I've never heard of (PG, Kay, Greenspun and Yegge excepted). I'm not saying there's no truth to them, but they're mostly fluff and little content.

Some notes: I don't know why PG can't, but I can certainly name a dozen great programmers who mostly work in Java. Greenspun recommends that instead of Java, you use (wait for it...) .NET.

The Dick Wall comment I have no issue with :-)
Why would you mind if the ROI was better?
There are multiple axiom systems in all of those fields and axioms are readily dropped if another set proves more useful.
The same argument applies to any company with large amounts of cash in the bank: Google, Apple, Oracle. If we're not asking why Apple doesn't do that, then we shouldn't be asking why Microsoft doesn't do that.

One obvious problem is management. Microsoft (and pretty much any other successful company) gets majority of its profits from a very small number of highly profitable products. It's hard to manage several businesses. Imagine how hard it would be to manage 8500 independent business. Or integrate them meaningfully into Microsoft (at that scale, they would have to integrate a whole startup as quickly as they integrate a single engineer today, i.e. several per day).

They would also need hundreds of people involved in picking the startups and making the deals.

For Microsoft, a company/product that does 10 million/year, even if it was acquired for 1 million, will not make a difference. They need billion dolar products.

So the question is: if they invested in 8500 startups, would Skype be one of them? If not, they still would have to buy Skype.
It probably holds small vectors directly inside the sizeof(InlinedVector<X>()) bytes, instead of indirecting. I think it's a pretty common technique.
Wow, lots of assumptions for a straightforward question. Was just curious to learn more about it.
It may be wise to change the title to use the full word "obituary," instead of something that might be read as "orbit."
I think you've been asleep for the last year or so. This is not even about Android vs iOS, I don't care about that stuff. There, clearly, is a large interest in developing for Android (again, whether it is on the same level of another platform is irrelevant to Java's future viability). Real, good developers are taking it seriously, and profiting.
What would have been even sweeter is if this caused a mini-run.

I guess the justice system DOES work, from time-to-time.
That's a farming program inside a large university, not a farming school. Are there actual farming schools or does "farming school" just refer to an agriculture department?
That is for all(?) of Y Combinator, whereas you might be interested in new posts with some criterion (keyword, points, etc.)
Download eclipse and just get started if you want to learn java. It's got plugins for practically everything and you can learn the low level details when it becomes necessary.
Ask HN: Is NYC a good place to get a job as a Web dev?
I landed a summer internship in New York but I want to go to NYC afterwards.

I have been looking at craigslist and indeed it seems like there are plenty Web developer positions open. But I have no clue how many are actually applying for these jobs.

So is it an employer or employee market out there? Will I have trouble landing a job?
The mars rover project is a source of inspiration for hackers everywhere. JPL should be applauded for the successful design and deployment of a "product" in some of the harshest imaginable conditions and then have it exceed expectations more than 10 times over. A testament to what can be accomplished with a billion dollars.
Yeah, that one.
In this case the punishment is potentially much more severe and there is no statute of limitations. The rules badly require changing, but ignoring them is unwise.
"...always missing something"

Such as?
A problem arises, however, when what appears “brazen” to people who have already interacted with a community for a long period is not so obvious to anyone else. Many community standards (such as “nice”) are nebulous and have vastly differing thresholds and signaling methods, and this is not something that can be easily resolved up-front. Applying subterfuge early in the process makes it possible for a well-meaning entrant to randomly lose by misinterpreting things early on, then being denied feedback that would allow them to make a more informed decision about their behavior. They are further punished by throwing their participatory resources into an invisible hole while thinking all is well. This is easily nontrivial collateral damage, depending on the set of visitors.
What I have found is every company seems to be looking for a "Senior Full-Stack Rockstar Developer" that is willing to work for $15/hr. And they wonder why they can't find qualified candidates.
I can't comment on Scala, but I think Clojure is starting to get to the point where you can learn just Clojure and not have to think about Java until much later. At some point you'll assuredly interact with Java some, but there are a ton of libs out there now that are simple Clojure wrappers around most common things.

Really, to get started with Clojure, all you need to do is install Leiningen (https://github.com/technomancy/leiningen) and type "lein repl" in a terminal window. No ant, wars, or jvm's to think about :)
I don't know what a trust fund is, but my goal in life is to maximise leisure and minimise work. The more time I have to spend on my own activities, things that make me happy, the better. (This even involves writing Scheme for fun.)

If you have a job doing something you love, I am not about to look down on you for working extra hours. After all, you'd probably be doing it whether you were being paid or not. It doesn't feel like work at all. That is where I draw the distinction.

If you are doing something that you normally would not be doing, something you don't enjoy, and taking pride in the fact that you are putting in these extra hours for free, working for someone else, increasing their wealth... the employer has you exactly where they want you. The perfect employee.

Working for yourself, now that's an entirely different matter. Work as hard and as long as you want. You're only answering to you.
Can you explain?

When a piece of software is verified with an Agda proof, that is generally a real proof. The proof may not cover all aspects, but in those aspects you really do not have bugs.

Perhaps you mean non-proven certification? Or a weak certification of too few aspects?
I had this same feeling about Avatar. It was a halfway decent little distraction, but nowhere near as good as 100 * 4 million dollar movies.

8500 startups could have an internal shared service ecosystem/infrastructure that could keep each one as lean as possible and concentrating specifically on the problem they intend to solve. Take chaotic advantage of economies of scale? A few runaway hits could make it all worth it.
Hadoop is a leaky abstraction because it crashes ? Does not compute!

I'm not very familiar with the others, but Lucene is really an example of great software. In a few lines, it makes you feel as if you can build a Google by yourself !
why am I being censored about pointing to this?:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1329334
When you apply for a visa, they take your fingerprints.
Anyone wanna team up on this? I'm thinking of a WordPress plugin that shows links to related articles or discussions based on a post's title or tags ...
giving a bouncing check to officer of the court is immediate jail time for bank manager..
You could say the same thing about auction buyers, and yet 99% of the world sticks with eBay rather than waste time checking a second site.
OMG/JK: iCloud, gWallet, and tPhotos
I've just never heard of a farming school. Agricultural programs and departments, yes. Farming school, no.

It's a great idea in my opinion. Food prices are rising. Post-peak oil, local agriculture is going to become more and more important.