skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What keeps you from beginning your Start Up?
Let's set the stage here, as I'm sure most will be expecting a nice motivating pitch about why you should quit your job. My purpose here is to find a way to keep one of our bright young stars from doing just that.

He wants to execute on his planned startup, and I want to provide all the same opportunities a startup offers, within my organization, so that there is no need to look elsewhere for it. So what motivates the decision to fire your boss? And I do believe that people don't quit their jobs, they quit their boss. But we should not get side tracked by the "quit your boss" thread: his decision to do a startup was made before he was hired, and he very openly shared his plans with us and we made our offer anyway. He signed, and now the deadline he set on day one is approaching.

Is it the opportunity to make more money? Possibly over a long distant event horizon, but his startup is unlikely to match the salary potential of the next two to three years.

Is it ownership / equity? Stock options are available, thus it is possible to use this incentive to keep him within our engineering team.

Is it responsibility? His career path can include that too, and I'd be happy to start transferring more on to his shoulders.

Is it influence, decision making, and direction setting? Well, we kinda fall down there. Many cooks in this kitchen, and most have greater influence than is available to him. His voice is heard of course, and great ideas are easy to spot no matter who they come from, but if he expects his voice to win out every time I can't provide any assurances that it will be so.

Have I missed anything?

Let's not forget the other things that corporate life provides that Start Ups simply can't compete against: we've got cash which means all your standard developer care and feeding: snacks, beverages, free lunches. With cash comes profit sharing, job security, benefits, paid vacations, etc. We've got lots of people in the office too and that adds to your daily life experiences: co-workers become friends become family. And he's got me, and many others, as advocates within the company trying to show that we are invested in his career and will support him no matter which path he chooses.
What, no horse-head-in-the-bedroom?
Yes, it's from his Beating the Averages essay: http://paulgraham.com/avg.html
It's not the language, it's the people.
If you love what you do, keep doing it. Improve upon what they have, whether that be the customer support, the interface, an extra feature or two, integration with other services... competition is good for you.
That's not the way supply and demand work.

Adding wind increases the supply and lowers the cost of energy, which increases the demand. It could easily cause a net increase in energy used.

The fundamental problem is that you don't offset anything. Offsetting would be replacing conventional energy generation with alternative, and paying for the difference in cost, not just adding more energy.

Your local energy provider probably has a program to do this. Call them up, and ask to spend more on energy. As they expand their generation capabilities, they do more alternatives according to your direction. That's a "real" offset.
How you should run your startup: Lessons Learned From A Failed Entrepreneur
http://almaer.com/blog/rotating-java-and-javascript-on-the-s...
Actually, the Haskell community is a lot like the Perl community. And nobody uses Haskell to be fashionable, it's too hard to figure out for that demographic. The people that actually use Haskell use it because it's a good language and it's what they actually want to use.

I've known many awkward, unfriendly and arrogant people who use Perl

I wouldn't go this far -- but if you read the Perl mailing lists, you'll see that we are not lacking in the snide comment department. Basically, it's like everything else -- the people who are smartest have very little tolerance for everyone else, and they are happy to insult you as much as possible. (I used to be really good at this -- I could come up with a hilarious-and-hurtful remark for any situation. But I felt bad about it and cut it out. Being nice is good for book / class sales anyway.)
Comcast Meet Verizon FIOS | TechJaws
Seth's Blog: Listening to the loud people
The TMTOWTDI philosophy seems to have hardwired a certain degree of open mindedness in them.

I think you are spot-on here.
a good idea keeps me from starting my next startup right now.

i've said this many times before here, but one of the biggest things that prevent people from starting a startup is the instability of the startup. the family man or person with larger financial responsibilities will usually need the steady paycheck.

some of the pro-big-company arguments that you make are off the mark.

make more money? yes, in the short term. with the risk of a startup, there's potential for great reward, especially if the company gets acquired.

ownership/equity? those are nice, but you typically get more with a startup.

responsibility? career path? sure, you get some control, but not nearly as much as you will in a startup with a small team. you get to do so much more when working on a startup.

influence? again, so few people, your voice counts way more, especially if you're an expert at something.

company benefits/culture? they don't even compare. a company can pay for lunch, great, but that doesn't mean that they understand what the people want (my company is a good example of that). "paid vaccations"? typical startups don't track hours and you take off the time that you need when you need it. just get your work done.
From Avoiding Silicon Valley to SkyData and Modular Innovation
Microsoft Connects with Ordinary People | TechJaws
> Actually, the Haskell community is a lot like the Perl community. And nobody uses Haskell to be fashionable

Point taken, but bear in mind that :^) indicates ironic or mischievous intent. I might as easily have said Erlang...

I don't participate in mailing lists but the Perl Monks have always been very helpful and patient when I've had a question, from the most basic to the more complex. The only time I got into trouble there was when I asked a question about optimizing a mailing list, and a large chunk of the audience thought I was trying to spam people. The fact that people do go there and ask "hey, how can I use perl to spam people" didn't help much... Anyway, I was eventually forgiven, with the help of a Monty Python quotation and some closely-worded arguments :)
RescueTime is automatic, and cross platform.
> If it gets block scope (which Ruby also doesn't really have, I think?)

Yeah, it does, but it's a little different. Here I iterate through an array in a block, assigning the current value to a local variable. Afterwards you can see that local_var remains undefind in the higher scope.

[norman@elis] +> irb

>> [1, 2, 3].each {|i| local_var = i; puts local_var}

1

2

3

=> [1, 2, 3]

>> puts local_var

NameError: undefined local variable or method `local_var'

for main:Object

from (irb):2

from :0

>>

However unlike C-like languages, Ruby doesn't treat if/else type statements as a block. So for example this works in Ruby:

>> if true

>> local_var = "hello"

>> end

=> "hello"

>> puts local_var

hello
After seeing this second ad in this new microsoft ad campaign i'm definitely looking forward to the next installment. These are pretty funny and entertaining.

All things considered I think a lot of us are overanalyzing these ads. This is a $300 million ad account with crispin + porter + bogusky arguably one of the best ad agencies around. The size of this account ensures that this campaign will stretch over a year or more. I think the overall messege they are going for is fun. Microsoft isn't going to try to win this in the "cool and hip" area, so they are going for the "fun and useful". After this campaign runs for awhile you may have people looking at their pcs as fun ("I can play all my games on a pc but not a mac") and useful ("wow! pcs are everywhere, I know how to use a computer thats everywhere"). While I myself tend to overanylyze the underlying messages with these ads, I have to remember in doing so that just yesterday my mom was talking about how funny the shoe ad was and couldn't wait to check out the new one, so for the average consumer these ads will hit their target over time.
It's an incorrect assumption that you can't work on a startup while working at a company. If you have a boring 8 hour day job, you still have sixteen hours left in the day. The first 8 hours may be mind-numbing and leave you exhausted and incapable of independant thought, but focus hard enough and you can get a decent 6-8 hours for a quality coding spree at minimum. You just have to get used to the work.
Anybody know of any Python API's?

I'd also love it if Justin.TV open sourced some of their Python media server stuff. :D
Because as consumers we have more time/money to spend on the web than the vast majority of the population of countries like China and India.
If you have a boring 8 hour day job, you still have sixteen hours left in the day.

Of course, you're going to spend 6-8 hours out of those 16 sleeping. And 1-4 hours travelling to and from work. And 0.5-1 hours preparing and eating breakfast and dinner (I'm assuming you have lunch during your 8 hours at work). And at least 0.5 hours showering/shaving/brushing teeth/getting dressed/etc.

focus hard enough and you can get a decent 6-8 hours for a quality coding spree at minimum

If you only need 6 hours/day of sleep and live five minutes from where you work, sure. But for most people there simply aren't enough hours in the day to stay alive while working two full-time jobs.
How does this compare to using 007 as my luggage combo locks and PIN code (0007)? :)

Interesting app you created though.
Offer him a pathway. Making a startup will be hard on him, so if you offer a soft job and allow him time to work on his ideas, he will stay.

But if he has the bug, he will leave at some point. You can't hold down a ramblin man...
Paper Transistor
I might as easily have said Erlang...

I think Erlang does have a bit of fashion going for it. It works like other languages that people know, so they can pick it up and do stuff with it. Haskell is not quite like that.

Anyway, remember how the github people rewrote git-daemon in Erlang instead of fixing their issue with 10 lines of C, just so they could blog about it? Now that's fashion.
The two aren't related at all. Google is using a Microsoft open-source library for Windows GUI programming, not HTML rendering.
Keyword being "easy."
Well, one obvious reason is sample bias. I've always assumed that the reason the English-speaking web seems so much larger, to me, than the Chinese or French or Hungarian web is that I don't speak Chinese, French, or Hungarian so I don't spend much time browsing their websites. If there were 10 times more Chinese web pages than U.S. ones, I would never even know.

This article doesn't address that, of course. It talks about sites like Hulu and Pandora, but answers its own question (international law and licensing make it difficult and expensive to legally deliver media in many different countries). And the rest of the article is about a single organization -- the "Online News Association", whatever that is -- and its deplorable tendency to be US-centric. Whatever. Perhaps the members of the ONA like to think that it is a vital organ of "the web", but in fact the internal politics of a handful of organizations doesn't constitute a problem with "the web". (Unless those organizations are, say, ICANN.)
This smells like a perfect application of FUSE to me. Userspace filesystems rock.
"very long rant about the mere premise of this article. Please, for the love of god, let. it. go."

I think you and many others are missing the premise of the article, if you bothered to read it at all. 9.11 is merely a setting for the image. The article is about the image, the inherent "lie" of photography in general, and about people's reaction to images such as this one.

True, this is a famous image from a particularly notable event in recent history, but the same basic article could have been written about many other images, even some of those specifically mentioned in the article itself.

For more in the same vein, check Errol Morris' excellent series of blog entries (http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/which-came-first-...); then re-read the Esquire piece. I think you'll have a different feeling about it coming from that perspective.
What $foo web frameworks were people using before Rails?

Until Rails, people mostly wrote CGI-style applications.

(Yes, there was mod_perl, which people mostly used to make their framework-less web apps run a little faster; and there were Java MVC frameworks. Those were the exception, though, not the rule. Most people just wrote CGI scripts.)
Not a very well supported article (Hulu and Pandora that's it), and as the first commenter wisely points out; there are HUGE non English web networks that his author is simply not recognizing (probably because she only speaks English)
Why do you need LLVM for this? Just use any server-side Javascript implementation, port your foreign functions over, and ignore DOM.
I used to do this all the time, but I solved it by switching my search bar to cuil. Now when I get hammered and search for electronics or movies to impulse buy, pictures of naked people pop up instead and I get distracted.
It's that you call it snuff porn and dismiss its value as art. While I understand where you're coming from, I most wholeheartedly disagree - capturing an event as it happens requires quite a lot of courage and it results in really opening an audience's eyes as it happens.
Internet Bots: Anatomy of a Stock Selling Frenzy
I wish that was a movie commercial - it looks so good!
Las Vegas Hummer Dealership Switches to SMART Cars and Vespa Scooters
I agree with what robg said to you: this isn't a photograph of fear. Far from it. It's about an act of defiance at the last moment.
the Ruby tricks?

Why couldn't you? You have anonymous functions in JavaScript, that's as much metaprogramming capability as you get in Ruby. (Notably absent from both are macros.)
To his Ruby 1.8 vs. 1.9 question: the difference isn't huge, and I don't think we'll see a split. You get fibers (coroutines); new hash syntax, like User.create(name: "David", address: "123 Fake St."), Enumerators, and lots of little changes. Ruby 1.9 programs should look pretty much like Ruby 1.8 programs for the most part.

The more likely split would be on the implementation level: MRI/YARV vs. Rubinius vs. JRuby vs. Gemstone. The camps are working together pretty well right now and aren't looking to divide the community, but I would hate to see it turn into a Lisp-like situation. No offense to Lisp - I love it from the outside, and would enjoy using it professionally - but the fragmentation is definitely a barrier to entry.
Yup, and every time a new language becomes popular, it will make your app written in the "old" language stop working.

Oh wait, no.
I once woke up after some late night computer operating (under the 'influence') and thought my webserver had been hacked. It turns out I half-installed several scripts the night before and gave up before completing leaving a mess of non-working scripts on my webserver. I spent 60 minutes changing all my passwords before I realized what I'd done (still don't remember why or what I was trying to do that night)

At least I didn't waste any money on crap from Ebay.
Actually, most JavaScript looks bad because of people cargo-culting bad DOM code.

I don't really like Javascript, but I do agree that the core language is minimal but complete. I will stick with Lisp when I want that, though, because Lisp is nicer looking and has macros.
How is this different from the JVM, though, aside in that Java pretty much never caught on for desktop apps?
Ask YC: Trying to use Google Apps to e-mail users but confused. Please help!?
Hi All - I'm tearing my hair out. I want to use Google Apps for sending e-mails to our user community. I know some people here use it so I have a few questions:

1) Do you use the "e-mail list" functionality. Or do you merely route your e-mail through Google within the daily limits? i.e. using the standard gmail functionality?

2) Is there any point in using the premium edition apart from the 2000 email limit? Its not enough for us anyway, so we'll have to break down into smaller chunks.

I was just on the phone with a Google "power user" and they said e-mail lists were not for mailing lists but for internal distribution. So I'm pretty confused. If anyone is willing to clarify, I'd be super appreciative.
I believe what the article referred to is unlinking of files.

The way most operating systems delete files is by removing just the inode entry for that file, and leave all data on the device to be overwritten at some later time. This way, forensics tools recover files that still reside in bits and pieces in blocks on file systems that aren't currently assigned to any file. Same technique applies to recovering these buffer images that the article talks about.

Same story is with deallocating memory. A process will no longer claim a certain block of memory once it's not needed, but not actually overwrite the area with zeroes. Operating systems generally take the approach to not doing anything they don't have to for the sake of efficiency.

There are tools however that will wipe the actual data multiple times before removing the inode (reference to that data) such that it makes it much more difficult to recover it. They do so multiple times due to magnetic traces on the actual drives that data leaves even when it's over written. RAM does not need to be overwritten multiple times, as far as I'm aware since it is a lot more transient.

Also, if same files remained on your hard drive for a long time (years), overwriting it many times might simply not be enough as the data literally seeps deeper and deeper into the platter and might be recoverable with a precision shaving of platter material. I heard this evidence anecdotally, so take it at face value.
Ask YC: Agile Documentation?
We're an agile shop. We've finalized what our initial architecture will look like and now we need to document the decisions leading up to the architecture and discuss RTO, RPO, etc.

Something like IEEE 1471-2000:

http://standards.ieee.org/reading/ieee/std_public/description/se/1471-2000_desc.html

or an EA framework like TOGAF:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOGAF

would be tough slogging.

I'm interested in hearing from others what they use. Sharing of templates even better!

My views on documentation are in close alignment to this post:

http://traceinthesand.com/blog/2006/08/25/architecture-documentation-courage-to-fly-in-the-face-of-convention/

Cheers
Looks pretty cool. I'm looking forward to using it. They're presentation at TC50 didn't go so hot though. I feel bad for the guy.
What's hilarious is how puzzled many of the VCs I meet with are over the fact that everyone leaves Boston. They constantly ask what they can do to get more startups to stay in Boston.

It's simple; invest in more companies. IMHO Boston is an ideal place for a startup: great city with lots to do, solid public transportation, very reasonable living costs (more like Chicago than DC, NYC or SF), tons of talent (oh hai MIT and Harvard) and very close to other metropolitan areas (NYC, DC). But all of this doesn't matter - people follow the money.

Also, as big as the discrepancy is between the amount of VCs in the SF area vs. the Boston area, the discrepancy between SF area Angels and Boston area Angels is even bigger.
Can the dropbox client be run off of a USB stick? Sort of like the PortableApps binaries.

Do these password managers integrate with firefox?
Advertising - Postmodern wriggle
I love it when funny people help not funny people be funny. Gates should have hired Seinfeild a long time ago...
I'm not mechanical_fish, but Harvest just felt right to me. It was easy to use; gave easy, flexible reports (important when I'm billing clients for my hours and my employees' hours); easy, private access for employees; reminder emails that I could trigger ("Get your hours in!"). It wasn't a clear thing, but the right mix of features and the right feel.

So maybe something intangible. Is that a cop-out answer?
Nothing, I'm on my second one.

Oh, and to answer your question, what made me go start my own business is I couldn't stand the way things were done in the big corp world.

I'm impatient. I want to get things done. I want to achieve things. I cannot stand the idea of being given orders. I have no respect for authority, only for competence. I want to realise my potential. The tedious and endless game of corporate politics bullshit is just a problem to be solved, as I see it. And one valid solution for it is to get out. This game just isn't worth the candle. What do you get for learning the ropes of the politics game? More politics. It's self-defeating. "The only way to win is not to play".

The corporate world also has a well earned reputation for being bland and boring. All the dishonesty and obsequiousness that comes out of needing to maintain a "normal" image makes it conforming like a mass of grey goo. Embrace weirdness and difference. Accept the idea that exceptional people are not normal. Then maybe it'll be less bland.

I haven't looked back since I quit. Life is so much more varied and interesting. I only ever do things that I think are worth doing. I work at my own pace (which is 10x faster than anything I ever observed in the corporate world). I work exclusively with brilliant people, doing something which I think is worthwhile.

Even if there wasn't more money in the long term, this is an infinitely preferable lifestyle.

What about you, yourself, who asked this question? Why do you stick around in this corporate world? If you're wondering why all these people are leaving, maybe you should go and find out for yourself. Believe me, it's worth it.
Scheme with C syntax and the associative array (nee object literal) as the basic datatype. It's a powerful setup.
Can You Build An Enterprise Only Web App?
Of course I agree with you. But we could also have a wide-ranging discussion about what that photograph represents. Indeed, that to me is what makes it so memorable and artistic. It's photography at its absolute, 1000-word best. Still amid that, fear never comes close to my interpretation.
iPhone 2.1 Software Update Now Available
Joel Reymont's frustration with Erlang
Are you in Boston too?
Buying Tomatoes at the Birthplace of Silicon Valley
What you are trying to do is very hard. Statistical NLP is the way to go for unbounded domains. You might be able to do better semantic analysis for smaller closed domains.

There is a relatively new great book on NLP out now that I suggest you take a look at. Particularly the chapters semantics are very useful, but they should give you an idea of how incredibly difficult what you're trying to do is.

Book: http://www.amazon.com/Language-Processing-Prentice-Artificia...
Debate: Behavioural economics - is it such a bigdeal?
Congratulations, Yammer, But Get Ready To Rumble
Wow i can finally browse my contacts without having to wait a minute for the damn thing to load.
Spore's user-generated creations library growing 10% per day
It's sort of a matter of taste. I use this pattern in Lua of having public attributes visible in my objects, with private values stored as enclosing outer local variables. (They're referred to as "upvalues" in Lua. It's a handy bit of vocab.)

Public object attributes are iterable and otherwise manipulable by clients of the object. Upvalues are opaque to clients - you need the debugger to inspect the local stack frames. They're perfectly accessible to the closures acting as methods on your object though.

It really just comes down to your mental model of the object in question.
for mass emails, you're probably better off using either a service or installing appropriate software. especially if you're breaking past the 2k limit on premium.