skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Part of the problem is that we're in a transitional phase where each generation can look forward or back and see privilege or entitlement in the other. As more of a Gen X'er myself, I think I was part of an early transition that has picked up a lot of steam over the past two decades.

When I graduated from college (early 90s), there was still a lot of talk about how the old contract (you work for a company your whole life and they show you loyalty in return) was in decline. Truth is, it was probably in its last gasps. Now, I have a hard time thinking any 20 year old graduate would even think this arrangement exists in the first place. Young people still seem to have a few expectations ("I did everything I was supposed to do...", but I'd say the notion that going to college sets up for a good job is going extinct among recent grads).

This is an incredibly important distinction that is often lost between the boomers and millennials. Sure, Millennials may not want to work from 8-5, and that may make them look lazy to the older folks - but keep in mind, the stability of an 8-5 job isn't there for them.

If someone wanted a career in software back when I was in college, I'd have recommended that they study computer science or a related degree, work hard, get good grades, try to get an internship, maybe go to a good grad school, and show a lot of diligence on the job. That's still a reasonable way to go about it.

But now? My advice to someone looking for a software career is: write something! Got an idea? Implement it, get it on the web, try to get some users for it. If you don't have a good idea, talk with people, learn about other fields, see what people need and try to create it for them. It's cheap to fail, so fail fast and keep at it. I'm not saying you shouldn't major in CS or go to grad school - a lot of great hackers (by the standards I listed above) seem to take that path. But what I'd really recommend is recognizing that the instability you have inherited can be liberating, even if it means you'll have to deal with a lot more uncertainty in your life.

Funny thing is, it was there for me, too. I wrote all kinds of web apps in grad school, but I somehow couldn't wrap my head around the idea that they could be "real". I think PG mentioned this in an essay - when you open the door to a cage for an animal that has lived in captivity for a long time, it often takes a while before the animal realizes that it can leave. Maybe people are waking up to that now. Nobody's going to be delivering carrots and filling up your water bowl every morning anyway...
If an entrepreneur takes equity funding from a VC, then likely the VC will be a Member of the Board of the entrepreneur with enough power to fire the entrepreneur. So, the entrepreneur, in his trip in a small canoe across rough waters on the way to distant, solid land, needs to be very sure anyone else in that canoe is really good to have along and won't be a nervous Nellie who will break ranks, stand, and scream at the first big waves that rock the canoe.

In particular, in information technology (IT), what fraction of the VCs would an entrepreneur eagerly hire as, say, a co-founder, a CTO, CIO, lead developer, DBA, network administrator? How about listen to in a discussion about a 'pivot'? How about as Chief Scientist to stir up new, powerful, valuable 'secret sauce'? Did I omit Power Point expert? Gee, why would I omit Power Point expert?

Another point: The day before taking the check, the entrepreneur may own 100% of the business. The day after taking the check the VC owns maybe 30% of the business, an additional fraction is set aside for employees, and the rest 'belongs' to the entrepreneur except is in a four year 'vesting' schedule which means the entrepreneur now owns NONE of his business and, if fired by the Board, leaves with NOTHING, zip, zilch, zero, not even the source code he typed in to begin with. Bummer.

Next, now IT VCs don't invest in pigs, chickens, dedicated, driven, devoted founders or any other barnyard or other nonsense. Instead, VCs invest in numerical metrics that correlate well with future financial value. Generally the VCs invest in 'traction', just traction, already significant and growing rapidly.

Then there's now a rub, a big issue: If the traction is significant, say, 10 Web pages served a second with 3 ads per page and $1 CPM, then just why should the entrepreneur take the check?

Or, think of a US Main Street business in anything from a carry out pizza shop to a landscaping service: They don't get venture capital. But a PC server able to deliver 10 Web pages a second costs much less than even an oven for a pizza shop and much less than a truck for a landscaping service. The difference for the IT entrepreneur is that if the project is at all successful, then (1) the entrepreneur can lean back and let the server PC do the work and (2) has a chance of growing rapidly into a significant business to own, sell, or do an IPO. So, an IT entrepreneur can proceed as for a Main Street business until money is coming in and then see if a really good business can result. Nowhere in there is much of a role for a VC Power Point expert.
Thanks for mentioning this. We're just now starting on a massive reorganization and rewrite of the docs. Look for some solid initial progress by mid-October.
Maths, which ultimately leads into functional programming (all IMHO).
I'd also recommend asking people for their FIRST name only, and emailing people with a personal email right after they sign up for the beta. Start a conversation, ask them what their problems are, what features they want, etc. Make them feel special, and tell them "Nice idea, why didn't I think of that! I'll try to include that."

They're sure to remember you if you do this. You can even do automated email segmentation. If their reply has "Sent from my iPhone", you know you can send launch emails for the iPhone version to these guys. If their reply has "Sent from Droid", send the Android launch emails to them.

Starting a conversation also lessens the probability your launch email gets put in spam as well... I'm sure Gmail, Yahoo, etc all have algorithms where if you respond to an email address, any future emails from that email doesn't get marked as spam.
First Class Mail is a Zombie - Kill It Off.
Looks good overall. Couple small things:
1) Show a couple more screenshots so we know what exactly it does
2) I see this a lot and it drives me nuts: DailyChomp, but the logo shows dailychomp. The logo also looks a little out of place.
3) I would give the option to collect email addresses too.

Lastly, and the most important... start A/B testing right now. Try testing the wording in that button first and go from there.
Jesse Schell on Gamification Future of Education - Charles Johnson(Scvngr)
I know this is getting downmodded, but hes somewhat right.

"Chindia" is draining our economy, by "draining our economy", I mean its destroying the people who actually do the work.

For every job that is sent overseas, not only does it result in someone, an actual real person, losing their job, but a form of slave labor in a foreign country "hires" the replacement.

If I was President, honestly, I would push for a 0.5% tariff on all goods and services from countries that are not considered first world countries.

I may be unable to improve the conditions of slave laborers in foreign countries (especially China and India due to massively corrupt governments that are doing everything possible to widen the gap between the poor and the rich instead of closing it), but I don't have to support doing business with those who make this possible.

0.5% would result in hundreds of millions of dollars in recaptured revenue, which could be instead spent on trying to preserve jobs in the US instead of exporting them, but it would also be low enough that the consumer would not bear the brunt of this.
Jobs' 1984 Mac vision lured English filmmaker to American advertising
You have to pay for unemployment insurance. The more people who make claims against you, the higher your insurance gets. You probably aren't going to get charged 100% of the employee's unemployment, but you get charged a goodly chunk.
affiliate revenue, advertising revenue, data licensing revenue
Like Christopher McCandless (upon whom the book and movie "Into the Wild" is based) rightly said: "Careers are a 20th century invention".

Not saying everybody should do what he did, but I have come to increasingly believe that everything should be questioned when it comes to choosing a livelihood - even the assumption that one needs to work for a living - since its going to be a big part of your life.
"I think the former has value to people with no aspirations in CS (a lot of value, really, everyone needs basic IT skills in the modern world)."

Well yes, but let me tell you a little story.

One of the things that I get to notice, as a woman, which my male colleagues don't, is just how repetitive womens' work often is in the office. I have a lot of female friends that are secretaries, receptionists, assistants etc, which I don't think is true of most men working in IT. And I see how much of the daily grind of what those women do could be automated, if only they knew how to put together macros, or even just how to make use of tools like Automator on the Mac. I have tried teaching macro programming to a couple of them, but they get stuck on the simplest of programming concepts. What's a variable? How can I expresss a complex algorithm given a small set of primitives? Flow control, what's that?!?!

I can't help thinking that if they had learned these very simple basic concepts when they were back learning about how to set tabs in Word, that they would be many times more effective in their office jobs today. So even if someone has no interest in CS as a career, the reality is that these days many, if not a majority, of jobs could be helped by it - running a small business, office work, etc. But if you leave it until the person is an adult out in the workforce, they often won't want to learn.
Another example of how criminal it is: A major studio will pay Technicolor $25 million annually for an exclusivity fee. Then Technicolor will charge inflated rates to the studios, so the films will appear to lose money.
This is really inspirational for people who are working at it, hard, but don't get traction immediately, and all the while are reading about others whose businesses just skyrocketed right away.

It's not always a launch to the moon, sometimes you have to orbit for a while.
I think that there should be good classes that kids can opt into, but personally I don't think that it should be compulsory. There is a tendency for adults to want their children to be like them (but better of course). Probably every fire fighter wants their kids to follow in their footsteps.

On a personal note, whilst I sit as both 'coder' and 'business' person I enjoy my children learning about what I do without pushing them. What I love to do with my kids is to take them out into the world so that they experience different cultures, discover nature, learn to kayak, ride bikes and.... well, be kids. If they develop an interest in something then I will support them, but I'll not be a pushy parent. I would be delighted if my children followed in my footsteps, but as long as they do their very best in whatever path they choose to follow that will make me the proudest
shrug

In my experience PHP or Ruby is generally a better/easier web programming experience (I tried Python but it never really clicked with the kids).

Python is a good general purpose language though.
So you would be OK with requiring everyone to use Windows as their operating system, in perpetuity?

I think we have some fundamental philosophical differences about how the world should work. ;)
Very good post, I especially liked that they built the winning minimum available product so fast: It would have been most likely impossible without all the learning and failed attempts. Unfortunately, some things you can only learn by doing.
"The regulatory burden and the prohibition on "non accredited investors" quells a lot of support the entreprenurial community could use."

So, "friends and family" start-up money is illegal? When did that happen?
I disagree. Most of the time that I sign up for a beta service (at least for a free beta), I am doing it out of curiosity more than anything. I'm not about to start a long conversation with every beta I sign up for.
From Paul Graham:

"The median visitor will arrive with their finger poised on the Back button. Think about your own experience: most links you follow lead to something lame. Anyone who has used the web for more than a couple weeks has been trained to click on Back after following a link. So your site has to say "Wait! Don't click on Back. This site isn't lame. Look at this, for example."

You can read the full article at: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
Just on 2) - I actually prefer to see all lower case in the logo, as opposed to CamelCasing the whole lot

Certainly agree on 1) though
I think I didn't explain properly. Your interpretation of Nietzsche's quote is correct and Absurdism says exactly that. It says instead of seeking a 'safe life' and striving for a life that is 'acceptable' by the society, we should make our own meanings and choices no matter how crazy they might appear because we're not answerable to anyone but ourselves. All novels of Camus contain this same theme. Some of the Nietzsche's famous quotes like "live dangerously" and "become what you are" also contain this sentiment.

Remember that both Nietzsche and Camus refused to belong to any particular philosophical school of thoughts but many of their thoughts overlap. So I'm just trying to link both.
I like the spin on this. Sounds like something that could be very useful.

I must note, however, some phrases that set off my bullshit detector.

>SEA participants were 19 times more likely than eligible non-participants to be self-employed

Either I'm missing something or this says that people who are in a self-employed assistance plan are likely to be self-employed. Perhaps this is an editing error?

>In Oregon, nearly half of the successful SEA entrepreneurs have each created an average of 2.63 new jobs

Ok, but what kind of filter does "successful SEA entrepreneurs" imply? 1 in 100? 20%? Once again, the language is loose and circular.

Money is not an answer to everything. In fact, funding at high levels can be the worst thing ever to happen to a good team in a startup. At small levels, like this, it perhaps can make a big difference. Perhaps.

There is a great big giant humongous gap between something that sounds good in an editorial and something that actually does something useful. I'd want a lot more data on this before passing judgment one way or another.
Can you go into some more detail why you would not choose it? I am curious.
No problem - just what came to mind when looking at it. For any things you do consider changing, be sure you are keeping good track of the relevant statistics to help you know what is working and what isn't.

I don't think $1 a month is too high; I think the main difficulty will be just getting the consumer to overcome the mental friction inherit in any online purchase, especially subscription purchases. You're going to have to convince people it's worth getting their wallet out for in the first place, and after that I would guess you could price it anywhere between $1 and $10 and it wouldn't drastically change how many people convert. That's at least given the current state of the product - if you can demonstrate more value, then you may have an easier time convincing people to spend their money on it.

I still think your best bet is to offer a free plan to small userbases, and then charge them once they grow beyond a given size. You could reassure them that they won't lose their images or have their account held hostage if they don't upgrade, it will just be frozen at the max limit of user icons. I would also offer 2 upgrade plans: a basic plan which includes 1 or 2 styles/sizes of icon, and a premium plan with all the customization options. The goal of this would be to make the basic plan more attractive while allowing those who need to customize to do so. Another idea is to pin the free userbase option as a "startup" option, and sell it as a gesture of goodwill towards entrepreneurs vs. a free/paid plan.

I really don't know much about GAE, but do they have some way to sell this as a GAE-compatible plug-in to other App Engine users? That might be a good route to take if they do.
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Thanks for the feedback.

It's using hashbang links simply because the mobile web application uses a similar approach in order to reduce the assets being transferred over 3g connections.

The desktop web application is bootstrapping the same JavaScript at the moment so it uses a similar approach in requesting the assets that change.

The idea is so the desktop can easily inherit most of the functionality of the mobile web application with minimal modifications.
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Yep, then you're not a valued user. Those who are willing to have a conversation are the users you want to keep because their interest level in your product is high. They're the ones most likely to buy, as well as spread the word.
Practical Guide to A/B Testing
I didn't mean to dismiss your question, it's a reasonable one to ask.

The reason for considering this theory interesting is because it is at least nominally a scientific theory, whereas a God theory is not a scientific theory and thus not interesting to science.

Why is a God theory not a scientific theory? Let me attempt to explain..

A scientific theory starts with experimental observation (in this case, the observation that all electrons have the same mass and charge) and attempts to explain that observation. This explanation should be 1) testable, and 2) predictive. That is, it should be possible to disprove the theory through further experiments, and the theory should lead to further conclusions about how the world works that would then be provable through experimentation as well.

Now, it is doubtful that the one-electron theory is actually testable, which moves it from the realm of serious theories to merely interesting hypotheticals. This is similar to the idea of everything in the world being part of a computer simulation, for example.

Now, God theories in general have multiple issues that make them unscientific. For example, if you claim that God is an entity that is 'beyond time', you need to define in scientific terms what it means to be beyond time. Another issue is that you would need to come up with some experiment that would prove that God does not exist. Even if you were to formulate a definition of God that would satisfy these requirements, it is doubtful that many believers would agree with that definition. Thus, 'God theory' in general doesn't describe a scientific theory at all, and so it is fundamentally not related to science.

edit: I should also say that such a God theory is usually not interesting for another reason: Since it doesn't describe the god of any major religion, no one is really very interested in seeing it disproven. It's easy to invent a cosmic entity and come up with an experiment that proves that it doesn't exist, but what's the point?
The KE850? Interesting. Take a look at it in action. Notice the on-screen keyboard one needs for entering text.

http://reviews.cnet.com/cell-phones/lg-ke850-prada-unlocked/...
Yipit also sells that aggregated data to various institutions (http://yipit.com/data/). Their pricing plans [0] suggest they make a non-trivial amount of revenue from selling this data.

[0] http://yipit.com/data/pricing/

EDIT: See vacanti's reply down there.
The problem there, is that the talent that would truly help you succeed can already demand gross participation from any studio. And the rest, while they would undoubtedly prefer to work for an honest studio, would climb over one another to land almost any work regardless of accounting policy.
This sort of advise works great until they actually do sue. One of my biggest clients got recently sued by a long term client of his - a Fortune 100 company with all kinds of legal resources. My client had to shut down his business and then scramble to protect his personal assets like house, properties, etc.
1) For sure! I thought about sliding through screenshots on the mobile device's screen. Do you think there is a better approach? Bigger screenshots maybe?

2) I actually looked around a bit at places like Facebook and Twitter and noticed a similar approach with logos designed however but the formal name when referencing it in sentences is with the proper capitalizations. Not sure if this is the best way to do it but I just tried to follow 'conventions' I've seen around.

3) Probably a good idea, always good to give several options.

Will go about implementing some of your feedback, thanks a lot!
I didn't say they were illegal, I said there was a regulatory burden and prohibition:

"If, however, not all of the investors are accredited, founders will need to provide a lot more disclosure to the investors, including a full-blown private placement memorandum, risk factors and financial statements. Also, note that all non-accredited investors in a Rule 506 offering must be sophisticated, which means that the company must reasonably believe that non-accredited investors (either alone or together with their investment representatives) have sufficient financial and business knowledge to allow them to evaluate the risks and merits of an investment."

Its prohibited to take investments from non-accreddited investors in the straightforward manner you can from accredited investors, and if you do, you have a greater burden, and additional risk to bear.
That's exactly right. For unemployment insurance you pay a percentage of your payroll to the government. The percentage depends upon the number of claims your ex-employees have put on the pool of money in the unemployment insurance scheme. More claims means a higher percentage.

That makes the cost of a replacement employee higher because you're paying for the cost of prior employees' unemployment claims when you are making unemployment contributions for the new employee.
You're presuming that it's possible to determine that, but generally it isn't. Generally, I know what's fair for _my business_ and it's the responsibility of the other party to determine what's reasonable for them. Different parties will each have their own evaluation of a contract term - I may view something as a major risk and want protection, while the counterparty doesn't view it as likely and is happy to give that protection. This is why negotiating deals can be so interesting.

Providing a contract that is favorable to your own needs, while not deceptive, is in no way unfair or unscrupulous. The counterparty always has the right to negotiate or simply refuse to execute the contract. You can't expect to anticipate the needs of both parties and to do so would just make negotiating a deal more difficult, because you'll have less flexibility to give the other side what they need.
They did it while playing a game. And there's a certain thrill in scamming people, certainly.
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Absolutely from the U. S. and A. All of them.
After reading quite a bit about cohort analysis[1][2] (including Fred Wilson's[3]), this line made me understand why it is so important.

[1] http://blog.500startups.com/2011/07/13/cohort-metrics-for-st...

[2] http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/one-line-split-...

[3] http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/10/the-cohort-analysis.html
Why are you automatically assuming that the prospective employee had no idea that his employment was not completely assured beyond 2 months?
I was expecting a video: 'nooooo!'
Carol Bartz Resigns From Yahoo Board
Reject mediocrity in all aspects of life. Spend money on good tools, and shun anyone who makes less-than-good tools.