skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd highly recommend working at a well-regarded, industry-leading company before assuming that startups are the only option.

I thought basically the same thing you did as a teenager, and when I was formulating my career plans after college, it was "startups or bust". It turns out that employees at Google, Facebook, Mckinsey, Goldman Sachs, numerous hedge funds, and probably even some old-economy companies actually have quite a bit of freedom to do their jobs with creativity and excellence. Good managers don't try to control employees - they manage them, so that the employee's natural talents and inclinations are matched up to the needs of the organization. And a manager at a fast-growing company probably got put in that position because somebody else thought he would do well at it, while a manager at a startup got that way because he hated his old job enough to quit.

There're certainly things wrong with big companies - I could probably name half a dozen areas where Google is dysfunctional and probably not fixable because the dysfunction is an emergent property of having 30,000 people work on a suite of products used by billions. But unless you've worked in both big and small companies, you don't have enough information to understand what dysfunction is inherent to being big and what dysfunction is just the result of getting a bad boss.
Just as is the case with many things, ability comes with experience. Design, while dealing with many concrete and quantifiable considerations, still relies heavily on a distinguishing and trained eye. It's what separates the Jakob Nielsens ( almost entirely intellectual in approach ) and marketable attractive design.
Hello! It's common to be out of ideas so I've tried to collect everything about ideas here: http://www.ideaoverload.com/

Happy idea hunting!
I wouldn't hire someone if I didn't believe they possessed the same mentality. Is it really a big deal given that the chances of having to pull all nighters in college to meet an assignment deadline is so common? How is work (especially in a startup) any different or less important?
Intel releases 6 core Sandy Bridge for $990
Arbitrator Awards Seagate $525 Million in Western Digital Trade Secrets Case
"Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible."

If you're doing this, or thinking about it, consider that it's a prescription drug and if it's not prescribed for you then you're getting a) illegally, and b) reducing the supply for people who need it.

There is a shortage of Adderall and similar drugs. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=npr%20adderall

By using these drugs casually you're not only improving your all nighters, you're possibly ruining someone's quality of life.
>I have no idea what people expect for $199. I find it very valuable for the money.

Thing is, there are other vendors who are creating REAL Google/Android tablets in the $199 range, as he mentions. From those tablets you can get the entire Android experience, unlike the Fire (unless you root it and put another OS build on it, of course -- though that won't fix the lack of GPS or cameras).
I'd love to read a review comparing it to the Nook Color. I have a Nook Color and it's not an iPad substitute. Nevertheless, loaded with CM7, it has a useful place for light web browsing and reading recipes in the kitchen.
Living in the southern hemisphere (the one with the bigger ozone hole) and being an import from dark cold places I turn into a lobster with moderate sun exposure. It doesn't always get better heading away from the equator here due to ozone depletion.

Adding computers, air conditioned comfort and a complete disinterest in outdoor activities to the mix and I doubt if I get enough vitamin D to last me through the winter. Skin cancer avoidance is well understood here and drilled into kids from pre-school age but lifestyle changes may be putting some people into other risk areas.

Curiously, I have a skin condition that is treatable by UV exposure, topical vitamin D analogues and generally improves in summer yet as far as I know there is no clinical evidence that vitamin D supplements have any benefit.
I don't ask what changed in China but what changed in my oppinion. Sorry for the confusion.
Fitparel.com - A new way to buy clothing online 
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fitparel.com takes the guessing-game out of size selection when purchasing clothes online. You enter the size of an item that you know fits well and we recommend similar items based on its dimensions. We indicate the size of the apparel you need to purchase and also the quality of fit between the fits-me-well item and the similar item.

Try fitparel.com and provides us your comments.
I just recently predicted consumer backlash with the Fire:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3269095

...so I guess I'm not surprised.
Excellent video of the Proof of Lagrange's Four Square Theorem
Implementing Distributed Systems Using Linear Naming
Hmm. The author's recommendation to use Redis' 'KEYS' command to pattern match keys for invalidation is a dangerous one. 'KEYS' runs in O(n) time. If you're using Redis in a serious production environment, you do not want want to be using an O(n) command each time you need to invalidate a group of keys. It's better to group related items in a Redis hash table, and that way they are all stored under one common key.

Honestly, I think this article is a more impoverished version of antirez's post on the same topic [1]. antirez, being one of the principal authors of Redis, is a much more authoritative source, and he actually describes all the patterns that this author described in greater detail.

[1] http://antirez.com/post/take-advantage-of-redis-adding-it-to...
I agree that the next government very likely can't change the inherent problems of the Chinese society. But I think the Chinese youth can. If you look at the Chinese news you see young people rebelling against the system every day and they become more. Also the government is not as strict and well organised as it was many years ago, when their tanks where fighting the student protesters. The Chinese government itself is fat, lazy and far away from the real life situation of most Chinese citizen.

I think the chances are not too low that there will be revolution kind of change. Maybe cultural, maybe not with weapons and that stuff. But the Chinese people know too much about the wealth of their rich comrades, of their big cities and of the western countries.
The Streak 7 has the 4G built in, and so it would be cheaper to go with a stereo Bluetooth headset ($60 - $70) than the Samsung phone (just under $200). I don't want a contract given how things are going in this space, and so that's actually one of the cheaper phones with 4G.

As for what the Prime might do better, I know that reading Manga scans is a little easier on a 10" screen (whole page at a time rather than a half page), and I presume that the 4 cores will make any editing or web browsing faster. But whether it will do it several hundred dollars faster is a big if in my mind. Ideally I'd get both, try them out for a week, and return the "loser". But that's a bit more than I can afford.
Micropayments suck, currently. If that ever changes, I'd be in favor of both per-search and access; until then, maybe a freemium setup? It'd be hard to hook programmers without letting them try it, and you can experiment with more computationally-expensive searches (regex, AST, etc) without letting random users tank your system.

I wonder if you could even build a market off open-sourcing the engine, thus allowing people to improve it for you, and run a paid service that searches GitHub, Google, etc for results. Free accounts for contributors that fix bugs or provide speed / feature improvements?

I dunno, just throwing ideas out while they're percolating, I haven't given them a whole lot of thought.
It's quite possible that too much vitamin D could be bad for you, so going overboard might not be a great idea either.

Pretty much all formats are preferable over tablets, yeah. Drops, kids' “candy” versions &c.
LibVLC and libVLCcore are now relicensed under the LGPL 2
Caterina Fake, working hard is overrated
http://caterina.net/archive/001196.html

> Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that's what you like to do.
I bought it primarily for reading books and figured any other use I got out of it was a plus. I've since found out that it's great for video less so for other stuff. I think overall it's an outstanding value for the price.
NSA guide to Writing Efficient Fortran (1972)
> Some startups are virtually certain to succeed.

If your execution is good and your definition of success is sufficiently modest, that's probably true. But for big successes? It's hard to think of many examples, even in retrospect.
Automated Detection of Software Bugs and Vulnerabilities in Linux
One24 MLM Marketing
Would you call it "slave labor" if you're working for yourself?

I don't think that the said drugs would greatly help in any of those areas

Perhaps you should try them before you start expressing an opinion. There is a great deal of diversity in mental function and perhaps these drugs have exactly the effect you describe for people who function differently than you (or maybe even for you).
> reducing the supply for people who need it

That holds for many other things in life, even basic necessities such as food, money, shelter. What's interesting though is that the drug doesn't seem to have too many bad side effects based on the article - reduced appetite & sleeplessness are what many people can live with. What would be interesting to know is if there is any other more dangerous side effects of prolonged intake of this chemical, eg. addiction(?), or inability to concentrate without it?
Arachnophobia and video games
I'm guessing PG's definition of success is "likely to generate a return on investment if YC invests". For that, there're a bunch that are no-brainers, even if they end up as just a talent acquisition. Parakey, for example: even if it failed, some company was bound to buy it just to get Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt (and Facebook did). Ditto Friendfeed; yes, it was ultimately a talent acquisition, but the founders and investors didn't do all that badly on it.

I don't think you could predict the overwhelming success of a Facebook or Google in any reasonable timeframe. However, you could probably be fairly certain that Mark Zuckerburg was sitting on something useful once he got a few thousand people to sign up.
This is similar to mythbusters 'Can using a cell phone at a gas station start a fire?' http://dsc.discovery.com/videos/mythbusters-cell-phone-gas-s... .

I've accidentally left my phone on flying from the US to Asia and picked up cell service in half a dozen countries. When roaming you usually get a greeting SMS message from the new network informing you of charges and it was fun to look at all the places my phone got signal.

The need to turn off electronic devices is proven to be nonsense. But why keep it there? Maybe because it teaches us to be compliant while flying. Listen to instructions and do as you're told.

I'm not a fan of that. So I read my kindle after I've been told not to if I can get away with it. Or listen to music even when we're coming in to land.

If my e-reader ever causes us to crash, humans really should have built better planes.
Good layman's explanation of bitcoin and Byzantine Generals' Problem: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2667486
>Are bitcoin users allowed to use arbitrary clients?

Yes. The protocol is pretty open-ended, but the whole system is designed to be verifiable - if you don't produce something that fits the rules of the existing clients, they simply won't accept your results, and you won't get anywhere. How you produce that information doesn't matter, the proof-of-work ensures you're playing by the current rules.

As far as making more radical changes to the system, the whole thing is purely mob-ruled. If you can convince others to change over, then you change the whole system. The idea is that security and value-safety issues would be important enough to migrate everyone over, and people would do it - if they didn't, their money wouldn't be accepted any more, and they'd pretty much just lose everything.
Yes I agree I find the fire to be suitable for most of my needs i.e. reading, surfing the web, and listening to music. Most of the problems I have are software related and those can be easily fixed with an update.
This is a lame argument, akin to complaining that people using computers for fun are reducing the supply for people using computers for work. We can just make computers for everyone. That is what the free market is designed to do.

You should direct your ire at the people who are actually reducing the supply directly, namely the DEA, who are the ones preventing the production of sufficient Adderall. If there were not arbitrary restrictions on manufacture, then both the people who need it and the people who want it would be able to obtain it, and more cheaply at that.
Seconded. I'm doing a radically different thing from Rob's focus on niche web apps, so a lot of his advice didn't directly apply. But as someone taking the independent/bootstrapper approach to starting a software company, I still got quite a lot out of the book.

I'd strongly recommend the podcast as well: http://www.startupsfortherestofus.com/
Pandora Now Has 40 Million Active Listeners
There are times when these "symptoms" have a positive effect on your life and times when they have a negative effect. These medications give you the equivalent of an "off" switch for use when they are undesirable, if you have the discipline to use them correctly. For me, that constitutes extra choice in life and in no way eliminates a vital part of the self.
So how do you work like that? I'm having real trouble working, since my brain just jumps from one idea to another and I have to always keep the task at hand in my mind, which is pretty damn hard...
"It has some persistence support, but does not appear to be super durable. If you're thinking of using like that though, you're misunderstanding the tool."

This warrants a much more detailed explanation. The author should have spoken about possible durability options, like the append-only file, which, given the right configuration, makes Redis "fully-durable" at the inevitable sacrifice of some speed.

A more informative read would be: http://redis.io/topics/persistence
Edit: I originally wrote a paragraph with lots of F-words to make the point that the author was using so many expletives that they lost impact. Got downvoted, probably because the point was ironically lost amongst the expletives, so removed the offending paragraph.

Other than that, once I decoded it, I enjoyed the article.
Interesting additional fact that the author of the article seems to be unaware of: there is apparently a community of arachnophobic hackers who create patches or mods to remove spiders from most popular games: http://www.rahya.de/pages/posts/modding-fuer-arachnophobiker...
D-deficiency also nearly doubled a person's likelihood of dying, whereas correcting the deficiency with supplements lowered their risk of death by 60 percent.

Damn, and I thought that risk was at around 100%...
Templates / Thanks-Page / Powered by PopSurvey points to example.com

I wouldn't say killer, but good luck anyway.
And no fear of namespace collisions, or of introducing additional symbols.

Want to match Math in size when implementing algorithms? Use APL. Want to avoid adding additional symbols all the time? Use J/K/etc (APL descendants). Want to avoid namespace collisions? Welcome to Java.Sun.Com.Math.Oh.For.Effing.Sake.FactoryInterfaceBuilder
This kind of comes off as thinly veiled marketing for Ramit. I subscribe to his emails and I'm a fan but I didn't expect to see this here I'm the front page.

That didn't bother me as much as something else in the post. The article assumes you should want to make it in SV. I'd say ask yourself why you want to make it SV? Do you really need to go there to make it? I have a lot of respect for silicon valley and the things that come from there but there are too many people who want to make it in SV because it's trendy. They read HN and want to be just like the cool hip startup founders.

We should be doing what's right for us and our companies. Not all of us even belong in the entrepreneurship game. I briefly dreamed of coming to SV and trying to make it with a cool tech startup. Then I realized that I had no business there right now. It would be far better to get some momentum here in Chicago, build up some success, and grow my companies to the size they are meant to be while avoiding VCs on purpose.

There's too much hype around Silicon Valley and I'm afraid it's trendiness will be the death of its reputation for innovation. If things continue this way I fear that SV will be known for hollow, get rich quick types. Like Wall Street on the west coast. Do what's right for you. You might not want to make it in SV after all. Try to make it in Salt Lake or St. Louis, Hickville Alabama or Chicago or wherever it is you find yourself. I doubt anyone could succeed in a new location without the skills to make connections to succeed in their original location.
I think its because that if there were an accident involving the spill of aviation fuel (even in an aborted takeoff situation, I can see that happening) then the danger of ignition would be that much greater if everyone's phones, tablets, laptops, etc were all in a powered-on or RF transmit mode.

It makes good sense to minimise that risk.

I recall years ago you were not permitted to use a cellphone on the forecourt of a gas station. No one seems to remember or bother about that now.
Steve Jobs talks about Silicon Valley
Interview with the man behind the Occupy Wallstreet 'bat-signal'
Personally I avoid substances that affect cognition.
Do not smoke, do not drink, don't do any drugs and have no desire to. I don't know why.

This also gives me ability to enter the mild mental conditions corresponding to the use of said substances, but without side-effects, at will.

I would probably want to try mind-expanding psychoactive drugs which have lasting effect (LSD, psilocybin) in a controlled environment, tho.

As for slave labor for yourself: it still is.
Peer pressurized slave labor is still slave labor.
http://www.snopes.com/autos/hazards/gasvapor.asp
I assume it's a pirated copy of Windows at that price.
Want to Know Difference Between a CTO and a VP of Engineering?
I work for a company with 30+ engineers and description of a VP of Engineering, as described in this post, fits quite well. I would add some HR responsibilities.

Does this apply to your firm or in the company you work for?
Did you try turning off Silk (cloud acceleration)?
It makes good sense to minimise that risk.

Not really. To the extent a risk exists, the only response that would make any sense whatsoever would be to redesign the fueling and/or avionics systems to make them compatible with common consumer electronics. The fact that this isn't happening suggests that the warnings are all just so much hot air.

No one seems to remember or bother about that now.

Perhaps because there isn't a single documented case of a fire or explosion at a gas station being caused by RF energy at levels around one watt.
There is actually a very logical, sensible reason to have everyone power off and stow their devices during takeoff and landing, and this story disappointingly failed to cover it:

By far the most likely time for any accidents or incidents to occur is during takeoffs and landings. If everyone has 15 objects out and is busily typing away, it's going to be tht much more difficult for flight attendants to get everyone's attention to give instructions, and crucially, much much more difficult to evacuate the plane as quickly as possible.

This isn't controversial, complex or even hard to figure out. It's the same reason they aren't serving food and drinks at those times, and the same reason you have to stow your carry-ons and put your tray tables up at these times.

Disappointing that the Times did not bother to learn this or to write a more informative story.
Facebook, Fix Your iPhone App
The Effects of Line Length on Reading Online News
Now, this is where Redis comes in. You can find keys on wildcards! So you can just query it like so:

keys post/83/*

No no no. This is slow and there is a large warning section in the notes (http://redis.io/commands/keys) about using this in production environments.

[Edit: Why is this bad? Think about if you have millions of keys in your environment. KEYS will need to iterate over a million keys to find the ones that match your pattern.]

As an alternative to using KEYS, Redis provides the hash object. Store everything abou an object in a hash (e.g.: "posts:83") and then just delete the hash object. Everything under it will be removed as well. If you need to know what's in the hash that is going to be deleted, use the HKEYS command (which has no such warning about performance).
Did you turn off the cloud acceleration feature for the Silk browser? And are there any other browsers you can get from the Amazon app store?
While this explains why you must stow the devices, it doesn't explain why you have to power them off, why it's often OK to hold a device that's turned off, and why nobody ever tells you to put down a book or magazine during these times.
Pool and bowling will both improve after a couple of beers - your muscles will relax and you'll start to throw/shoot straighter. It's all technique with these two sports.

I don't need to point out too many beers will affect your technique in an equal and opposing fashion..
MythBusters covered this awhile back, and busted the myth: "The final explanation is that, even though the airplanes appear to be well-shielded against cellphone interference, there are so many different electronics in a cockpit, as well as so many different cellphones constantly coming out, the FAA doesn't want to do the necessary testing."[1]

[1] http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2006/04/episode_49_cellphones_on_...
I usually have a zillion of small tasks and I switch between them real fast, and at the end of day most of those are done.

Version control systems and command line histories help greatly.

When I need to write a sizable chunk of code: I might spend a hour or two surfing the web, but when I finally push myself in I get into the zone that Joel described without much problems.

Bonus points: Being ADHD, I'm able to switch tasks and spend a few minutes doing another task without leaving the zone! Resuming without productivity loss. And I absolutely neverming talking, I can talk and be in the zone at the same time.
I didn't mean for it to come off as marketing for Ramit. He has written some good stuff and I got something out of it, so I thought I would share to "pay it forward" so to speak to other people.

While I specifically was writing about Silicon Valley, I think many of the lessons could be applied to other cities and other industries. If you can build your startup in Chicago and can be successful, like Groupon or 37signals, I applaud that as well!
If this is the real reason for the policy then it should be stated officially.
I'll take those odds any day of the week.

I don't complain because I'm the boss, but I suppose if I were an employee banking on big returns, I might be a bit more skittish.

This is why so many entrepreneurs are creating their own startups, for better or worse.
This is great Dain. Love the article and all the feedback. Thanks!