skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks. By the way -- another possibility is to work for technology projects which aren't really in the startup game.

A lot of my friends work for the Wikimedia Foundation, Thunderbird, Mozilla, Tor, and so on. There's no possibility of walking away as a zillionaire, but neither do you have to work with (or for) dickwads who are only in it for the money and who are out to screw you out of your share. And if you're any good, there's a guarantee of doing something significant that you can point to later on your resume, should you want to go the entrepreneurial route. These organizations are global, so you get to do a fair bit of travelling too.

Non-profits have their own special brand of problems, but if you tally up the pros and cons they are definitely an option.
Post a wish on boodhi may win I pad 2
Hello

We are currently inviting students to WISH on http://boodhii.org/blog/mywish .

Your WISH enrolls you to a lucky draw for a I PAD 2 , that would be given away to one of the lucky winners who " WISH" their learning wish on boodhii by December 31 2011. All you need to post a wish is an e mail adress.

Through Boodhii we hope to meet the some of the changing learning needs of our rapidly-evolving digital present-day society.

We would like to promote the interests of students worldwide, through directing them to the information they need for learning. At Boodhii, we develop the tools for that learning.

I am writing to you today to introduce you to Boodhii, and to invite you to try the feature "WISH", your learning wish. We at Boodhii will work to fulfill your wish.

All you need to make a wish is an email ID. Sign up on Boodhii.org and WISH. It's that simple.

ONE USER WILL WIN AN I PAD
To enroll for the I PAD 2 draw :
( iPad 2 16GB with Wi-Fi )

Sign up on boodhii.org. Post a learning WISH .

Students have to be enrolled in a program at a University.

Users can post multiple wishes but it only entitles them to one entry for the IPAD draw.

Winning student will have to Provide a Proof of the enrollment in a University program.

Name of the winning student will be announced, January 2012 via an e mail to all the users on boodhii.org
My point in quoting that wasn't that success is necessarily bad for you (Alex Ohanian seems to be doing okay, and jwz is himself a counterexample) it's that success in that sort of business has a large random component.

The point of the OP's post is that huge sacrifices are necessary for great rewards. I think the truth is more like, your huge sacrifices are necessary so that our investment strategy works.

Meanwhile, guys like patio11 and the 37 Signals team have shown there's plenty of different paths to success. And if you think about what people like Jimmy Wales or Tim Berners-Lee have done, there's lots of ways to "make a dent in the universe" without even forming a traditional company. I know this is crazy talk, but not all roads to greatness involve making a VC rich.

But you know, now that I think about it, I think people are going to read what I just posted and only zero in on the "dozens of instant millionaires" sentence and ask how can I get in on that?
Hm, self-help books don't work, except if they are good? Seriously?

I am currently reading the 59 seconds book because I found it in a lesswrong article. It is OK, but it doesn't solve all problems (it only covers some techniques). The human psyche is a complex thing, "just get to work" is simply not going to be enough for everyone.
Fair enough. I took this post in bad faith as well after you went ahead and deleted your thread in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3283447 instead of replying to my comment.

Yes, this post does have attribution but I still doubt whether you have the permission from the original author to copy entire content word for word in your blog. You usually need a license from the original author to do that kind of a thing.

A better way to do this could be to quote only some interesting parts or only those parts from the original post against which you want to present a counterpoint. That might be reasonable as per "fair use".
I think the issue is that a lot of startups delude themselves into believing that they're putting "a dent in the universe" - trying to create a Steve Jobs-like world in their minds.

But at the same time, if they don't, it's really hard to motivate themselves and their employees to put in all the effort needed to make a startup work.
The interpreter in 1.8 and earlier is definitely pretty sluggish; I believe the 1.9 implementation was intended to be quite a lot faster, and JRuby is pretty fast. No idea about Rubinius or IronRuby or other alternative implementations.

It's definitely the case that stock Ruby 1.8 is slow for a great many applications, though. Having said that, there's alternatives, and a lot of the time efficiency of execution is not at the forefront of the objectives for systems written in Ruby.
I don't understand why people do this. I mean, overcommit to activities which would unlikely produce money or fame.

Why not throw it all out, watch porn and write patches for amaroK all day like I did today?

I can understand when you're pulling a lot of weight for a short time doing incredible things, but continuous pointless activity is a thing I strongly resent.

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
Munich Ludwigsbruecke
An easy to see demo would be great.
Not to dismiss his criticisms. The Fire has problems. But this device was clearly designed for a different market. He acknowledges it "I had read that the Fire is designed as a consumption device for Amazon products" But he decided to buy it anyway.

It seems odd to write a lengthy criticism of a product he anticipated wouldn't suit him.

EDIT: grammar
We building a web app, now we want to make story telling demo video. So what are the low cost options we have ?
>and the money is backed only by the faith and credit of the nation who issues it.

another view was that the demand for and value of the money is supported by the government collecting back the taxes in supposedly the money printed by the government. But such a view is pretty much out of the window in the modern world of unbalanced budgets, "discount windows" and multiples-of-GDP sovereign debts
ok, i get the point. Will always keep in mind. Thanks Susam sir
In the past year I've dropped 40lbs of fat and have put on a good amount of muscle. For my goals, which are fat loss and lift as much weight as possible, Id say I've hacked my nutrition pretty well. Instead of limiting how much I eat, I limit the ingredients I eat. For 6 day out of the week I'll only eat red meat, chicken, fish, sweet potatoes, broccoli, natural peanut butter and ezekiel bread. I keep it high protein, typically around 50-60% protein, then fats and carbs make up the rest. I don't count calories, if I get hungry I eat and just make sure I'm eating more protein than fats or carbs. 1 day out of the week I have a massive cheat day, eat anything and everything. If you do this right, you'll feel sick by the end of the day. The cheat day is great because it gives you something to reward yourself with every week, this greatly helps me eat clean during the week, knowing that I can reward myself in a few days if I stick with it.
A variation is used in many financial services sales teams, where the bottom 10-20% each year are fired, or if sales don't increase. Similarly was/is used at IBM to remove the bottom 5-10% of under-performing staff each year.
It looks like their Support section an example. http://support.ribbot.com/
I fail to see what the issue is. Companies need to specify how many groupons they are allowing to be sold when in negotiations.
I've tried Adderall a few times and never got the productivity burst that users claim to receive. It tends to have the opposite effect on me. My attention darts everywhere and my skin feels like it's being pricked by thousands of needles.

The reason why I was productive in college and pulled 4.0s most semesters is because I actually found my coursework interesting. It wasn't something I was plowing through because the degree would get me fame and fortune. I didn't need exogenous motivation in the form of a pill.

I know three people who swear by Adderall/Ritalin/Vyvanse/etc and I've heard the same summary from each of them: "It helps you get through boring work, but it kills your creativity." One guy will switch between pot and Adderall to do his work. He smokes when he needs to be creative and takes Adderall when he wants to bang out lines of boilerplate code.

The substance lifestyle really isn't something I can buy into.
"If it does, all the really necessary people will just leave and do their thing somewhere else."

Uh yeah, the developers, who are reading this and thinking "what a dick."

Maybe he should go somewhere else.
we use

ISSUE-1234: persist client-side display configuration to settings

and our issue tracking and code review software recognize issue numbers and hyperlink to the actual issue, with comments, reported-by, description, environment, replication steps, related changesets, code reviews, etc. pretty great especially considering multiple commits on the same issue which can't be rewritten into one commit because they've already been pushed. it also makes `git log --oneline` useful.
Labor minister calls for 40% tax rebate for games industry
Nailing social media in six steps
Yes, that was my point, though sadly I seem to have omitted it.

Also, the UK authorities are making it much harder for Australians to stay on after completing a 2 year working holiday visa.
Agreed. These things are covered in depth when setting up a Groupon, and Groupon has a pile of resources to help a business prepare to deliver what they're offering.

These stories pop up all the time, though, and the press keeps gobbling them up. I'm no fan of the company, but it's easier to paint Groupon as the villain than the individual business owner who didn't do the math of running their own business properly.
The Great Redis Misapprehension
The Five Megabyte Web Developer
I also returned mine. I was expecting a more polished experience from Amazon. Even for $200 the software feels unfinished and nowhere near as responsive or intelligently designed as iOS. The lack of hardware volume controls and placement of the on/off switch are the killing blows.

This isn't buying a Honda and expecting a BMW-class experience. It's buying a Honda and getting a car that only starts after three tries, only reads square CDs, only streams music from EMI, and refuses to brake until the pedal is pressed in the exact special way at the exact time. The iPad just drives.
If you're going to try it, consider following a similar procedure here before you commit to it since it's rather expensive compared to other enhancers: http://www.gwern.net/Nootropics#adderall
It's also used in the military.
> If I need to write several paragraphs about
> the changes I'm making, it's definitely too
> large a commit.

careful, this is subjective, and a lot of people consider it best practice to commit in small chunks but rewrite local history right before we push to squash everything into one changeset for the issue. the idea being it keeps the master history high level which is more useful when looking at other-peoples-commits.
That's why I preach VMs. They can go wild on those - just teach them how to create and revert to snapshots. They'll love you forever :)
Lots of people are using it professionally (we have a team of 9 doing Clojure). More: http://dev.clojure.org/display/community/Clojure+Success+Sto...
Wasn't too much vitamin D recently linked to heart problems as well?

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45325473/ns/health-diet_and_nutr...
Yep that is both the support forum for the site, and a demo of the product itself. This should be more clear on the homepage. Thanks!
Are jQuery Users Fools?
I don't have the reference for this, but I recall the seals between shuttle booster segments were originally engineered to use asbestos, not rubber as the gasket. The engineery qualities of asbestos for this purpose were perfectly understood, lower tempature lift-offs would not have been an issue, and most importantly, all the expensive live testing had already been performed when higher-ups recognized how politically incorrect asbestos was, even though a program as high-tech as the shuttle program was perfectly capable of handling asbestos perfectly safely. There probably was no $1M engineering fee that would have ever fixed this, because the multi-$M live fire tests were complete. No one considered this relatively minor engineering change (after all, the seal was redesigned to work with rubber) worthy of another round of very expensive tests (which primarily focused on the motor).

In a similar fashion (sorry, also doing this from memory, no reference) sometime in the late 80s or early 90s the main fuel tank insulation was switched-out because foam manufactured with CFC became verboten, so another material, with apparently unknown (or not completely desireable) engineering characteristics, was swapped in. I never recall hearing about ice ripping off big chuncks of fuel tank foam during the boost phase in the 80s. I only remember hearing about this starting in the 90s (or at least after the Challenger accident).

This is certainly tangential to the OP, except that there probably was copious high-priced consulting which provided political cover for both of these mistakes.
Steam Floor Cleaners
It looks like they did 75% off of $40 leaving them with just $5 after Groupon's cut. I don't know how that would ever work with all the labor needed to make a good cupcake. They should have stuck with 50% off and a cap on groupons. Poor planning by the business owner.
This is the first I heard of ZeroCater as a bubble company, which I'm assuming is because they're dependent on tech companies whose bubble may burst. (Being in the UK, I don't know that much about them, so this is just an assumption.)

I think it would be shame if the model failed just because of fluctuations among tech startups. It should really apply to any business where people want to attract and retain talent.

Having benefited from this deal at Google, I feel like it has a lot of benefits for both the company and its employees.
Adding to that:

From what I have read tanning beds emit mostly UVA rays not UVB in fact something like 95% of what is emitted is UVA.

UVB is what prompts your body to make vitamin D not UVA and UVA is what makes you tan UVB creates more a burn than a tan.

Tanning beds offer the worst you could possibly get you're getting very bad burn e.g. a "tan" and very little vitamin D compared to sunlight.
I remain skeptical of Groupon, but this story seems to be more about an idiot small biz owner than about Groupon being bad for business.
Seems more like a comments thread than a forum.
Well, a big share of the work I was involved in as a management consultant resulted in clear measurable $$$ to the client. Typically in the range of 5-10x the fee. One of the teams delivered something like 20x the fee in a project for the government.

And yes, that means that the client who payed 2 million USD to run a team actually got 40 million USD in payoff from this. This is of course an outlier, but it is still true. I have seen the details of this project myself (as it was a public engagement).

Why hasn't anyone heard of this? Because the glory of the successful projects are always given to the client executives/team.
Makes me wish I were young again.
In a related vein, http://hnnotify.com provides comment reply email notifications if you want to know when someone replies to you on HN (Disclaimer: I am the author)
Just because you're starting a company doesn't mean you need to raise millions of dollars, work 80 hours a week, and try to become the next Facebook.

Alternatively, you can raise (or save) a moderate amount of cash, work comfortably at whatever pace you choose, and build something scalable and sellable. If you're making quality software, it's not difficult to generate enough passive income to support the lifestyle you want to live.
OccupyYourself (heart)
The package uses integer to represents errors instead of os.Error.

This fragment of code is not idiomatic because st.CannotReadDatabaseDirectory is not an os.Error.
Making It In Silicon Valley When You Have Zero Connections
At the risk of stating the obvious, someone with a business that has 4k monthly turnover in cupcakes probably enjoys making cupcakes but is not necessarily an expert in industrial scale capacity planning. Groupon inverts the laws of physics for her business. Customer acquisition is no longer hard, gross margins are no longer $2 a cupcake. A part of me sympathizes.
Sorry mate, but that's not how the English language works. They're comparable as in "you can compare them" but not comparable as in "said comparison shows a clear winner and loser".
Logistical excuses to doing a startup
This post is trying to say be a part of history in a significant way. But in reality your Lolcats/Facebook/Whatever wannabe site isnt important in the least. The only part of history that the people in SV startup land will become is the part of history where investors were throwing money at companies that had ideas with no products or execution or strategy for making money at all. We'll end up as the part of history that's remembered for I justified valuations, hype, and a huge busted bubble that ruins everything for the few companies that actually are worth funding. Most of the new trendy startups I've seen can be run on $50,000 a year max and I'm being generous. All you need is a server and some code, not a billion dollar valuation for a CRUD web app.

Very few startups are destined to be great or even decent. Very, very few. It's a shame that so many are getting so much hype without justification these days.
No, they can guarantee their computers supply minimum level of computing power to make the network trustworthy, they can also cover transaction costs perhaps, and the block chain is still open for all. They can also offer an exchange and make money that way. Ideally, they can protect the network from corporate and government attack or interference -- keep it somewhat unregulated, promoted, trustworthy and developing.
Would you be interested in paying per search, paying for access or just general donations based on your experience?

I ask as I am doing this but have not considered a business model for it as yet.
I also wonder how Americans talk about ADHD as if it is something bad. Prescribe meds against it, even.

After reading a list of symptoms, I clearly have it. But it's a part of my I! How would anybody take meds aimed agains a vital part of their self?
Project Ideas for Beginner Web Developers
No it doesn't. It demonstrates that Minecraft's solution is heavy. Minecraft is a cellular automaton. That's why its slow. It would be a mistake to believe that minecraft demonstrates the effectiveness of voxel technology.
Disadvantages of Using Linux
No, most of these do. To build a search engine for example, you need to collect a massive amount of data (say, every web page on the internet), and perform a relatively trivial amount of computation on it (building a TF/IDF term index of each term, computing PageRank, etc.) to build your indexes.

While building a search index is computationally intensive, the number of CPU cycles exercised per GB of data is relatively low. So if you wanted to 'distribute' this problem by farming out the data across a high latency connection to have it processed on another node, and then have it returned to you would actually be slower in many cases than just processing locally on a decent machine.
There are so many reasons why this is a dumb idea.
My favorite numbers for startups are that they have a 1-in-20 chance of succeeding.

I don't know where I got those numbers from -- seems like I've heard PG use a 1-in-10 chance, but you get the general feel for the situation. You should work in such a way as to acknowledge those numbers. I'm not saying don't work hard -- far from it. Just work as if this is stage 1 of a 20-stage process, each stage lasting a year or two. If you're not working in such a fashion that you can go a decade or two, logic says you have mis-configured your work habits.

I had this same attitude when I moved from the commercial world into startups, get your ass in gear and buck up! That was a few years ago, and I've moderated my views quite a bit due to brutal reality. I think part of the problem for me was that I was trying to compare the startup world to either the academic world or to the commercial software world. In both of those scenarios you worked as hard as hell for a limited period of time and then you delivered. You took the test, you released the product, you passed the class.

Startups aren't like that because the work is never done. There is no huge finish line you sprint through. It just keeps going and going. The cutesy way of saying this is "it's a marathon, not a sprint" but I'm not sure that even covers it adequately. It's not a race at all. It's just a long, hard slog. Yeah sure, if you've got traction it is a hell of a roller-coaster ride, but I'd worry about then if-and-only-if that day actually arrives. Work like Facebook did to get their first million users when you actually start attracting hundreds of thousands of users and you're looking that potential in the face, not before.
How do I get started?
Yes, that sounds like a dream come true. Got any pointers for me?
ADHD is at the base of my creativity.
Yeah, 'built-in' was an overstatement. Should have said 'anticipated and made possible', or something along those lines. Thanks for the correction.
Privacy monitor hacked from an old LCD Monitor
It just goes to show, if you don't plan and look out for yourself, others will just take advantage of you. This is especially true in the business world.
A quick thought on a future where all objects talk to the internet
Of late we are seeing a concentrated push towards a future where all objects talk to the internet. It’s a powerful movement with implications that go far beyond our current understanding of its value. I’m excited by it. However, I am concerned that it won’t be the utopia that it could be. I fear the system will be designed in such a way, that with all this new data will come a sort of noise that we once never cared about. The banal utterings of the machine.

We live in a world where nearly everyone (we know) talks to the internet; but if we’re honest with ourselves just for a moment, we can see that it’s massively disorganized. A profound cacophony of data. Yet here we are, extracting even more distraction. I hope that we can somehow avoid what we know not to work; and move towards a world devoid of trivial distractions.

I’m always amazed by the world we live in. It’s like nothing any other generation had the opportunity to experience. It takes my breath away. Daily. I can fly into space, live on a desert island, move my life to the south of France or tell somebody I love them from the other side of the world instantly. There is nothing I cannot do. The world has come so far. I feel we’re operating at a rate of unparalleled growth. However, with all of this comes uncertainty, with uncertainty comes concern, naturally.

In closing, the only thing I think I know, is that if we are going to do this we must aim for perfection, and there is no alternative this time.
Oh, I see where you're coming from.

Words in English can have more than one meaning.

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/comparable

adjective
1. capable of being compared; having features in common with something else to permit or suggest comparison: He considered the Roman and British empires to be comparable.
2. worthy of comparison: shops comparable to those on Fifth Avenue.
3. usable for comparison; similar: We have no comparable data on Russian farming.

It seems clear from context that he's using sense 1 in one sentence and sense 2 in the other. As the other poster said, that's just the way natural languages work. :-)
Yep, good presentation and the sticky notes are excellent.
Since I specifically excluded you, what's your point?