skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
For me, It's the API and customer (developer) service. Second to none in the payment industry.
I think a big difference though is geographic segmentation. Pepsi could dominate the Southwest and Coke could dominate the Northeast; there's no reason why that would be true of amazon vs. buy.com.

We do see that with internet companies only for national or language boundaries, e.g. baidu in China, gumtree dominates in the UK vs. craigslist in North Am, Yahoo beats google in some asian markets, Orkut is popular in Brazil, etc, etc.
"And schleps should be dealt with the same way you'd deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in." (love the metaphor pg)

I did this once outside of my startup on a motorcycle trip to Panama, crossing the boarder into Mexico was a huge block for me and my riding buddy. We stayed in the US and drank beer for 2 days straight not realizing what we were doing. Then one night we had a moment of clarity, jumped on our bikes and headed for the boarder.

We just jumped right in!

In that moment of clarity I removed the fear and felt total freedom and the world became my oyster if only for a moment or two.

I think schleps are the reasons why many startups either fail or succeed, the ones that win hit the wall and learn to break through them.
20 Examples of Subtle Texture Use in Web Design
"Intelligence" isn't some stat you train to make your spells do more damage. It's a complex mix of what you've learned, how you learn, and who's teaching you. "Intelligence" is just as hard to define as "consciousness".
The author changed it, as you can see the url still has the old title

edit: changed
pg, would you be willing to share some of the great startup ideas you think people are overlooking? (In addition to the ones on the Request for Startups list.)
How would you say it's tedious? There are many sites with product reviews, blogs, forums, etc. Need a new camera? There's dpreviews. Need a new TV? Cnet. Need a new video game? IGN.
... and compiled languages. Testing won't ensure 100% code coverage.
set -u

Another great thing I could have read in the effin manual.

He could have added a little reminder about the ${VAR:-default} syntax. [[ http://www.ooblick.com/text/sh/ search for Quasi-variable constructs ]]

Great read, thanks.
But then shouldn't the highlighted bit include the char in front? It's also case insensitive. I think it's trying to be clever.
> You don't have to be an expert, but it's crucial to have regular form checks on the lifts. Nothing is more depressing than being sidelined for several weeks because of bad squat form leading to an injury!

I just mean to say that I used to think you couldn't do these sorts of lifts without some sort of trainer that could teach me how to do them, and that since I didn't know one, I couldn't.

Rather, these days, you can read starting strength, watch videos online, film your own lifts and get people to help you pretty easily.
Ah, stealth edit
If he committed no crime under British laws, I guarantee he would not have been eligible for extradition. The article is so thin on substance that it is hard to formulate an intelligent opinion on the matter.

Edit:

I just skimmed the PDF, and the kid argued that he shouldn't be extradited for three reasons: 1) Not illegal in both countries 2) US copyright punishment is "unjust or oppressive" 3) An extradition would be "disproportionate" relative to the crime.

I agree with points #2 and #3, but not #1. I think #3 is the strongest argument. Copyright infringement is not a severe enough impediment to other's natural freedoms to merit sending a citizen to a foreign country to face charges.
A question to ask may be, is there a more efficient way to discover what these problems are? I know Y combinator and co. have somewhat of a pre-defined list of problems they would like to see solved that are not being addressed. For a lot startups it seems to be random. Their idea occurred to them when 'they', or someone they knew were having this problem.

I think there are many industries that many talented engineers know nothing about, and therefore don't know where the problems lie. How can we facilitate this awareness to the people who want to create startups without it being happenstance?
I just tried "heigth", it's almost as bad.
105395 results for heigth, now beat that ;)
A lot of gyms have classes you can take. Yoga, pilates, martial arts, spinning, kickboxing, various sports, the list goes on and on.

I can never bring myself to just "go to the gym" for the reasons you suggest. But give me something organized, and I'm hooked.
It's a classic network effect. Wikipedia is popular because it is popular. Because its popular it gets more users, with more users it gets more and better articles written, with more articles written it gets more popular. Once that critical mass is achieved its very difficult for anything else to provide a better service.
Or

if [[ $filename == foo ]];
Exactly. Deciding what to buy is a research project. I think it's one of those pains we've got so accustomed to, that we take it for granted.
Same here, I contacted support two times in two years and they said "we're working on it". Obviously, that isn't true and they just don't care about the outdated search index.
Not my experience at all. It's easy and straightforward (really takes less than 10 mins). I have a bunch of startSSL certs in use. Before I started using startSSL certs I used Thawte certs.

Dealing with Thawte was HORRIBLE, these guys are extremely pushy (their sales reps repeatedly called me at home to 'convince' me I really should renew my certificates with them and wouldn't take no for an answer). Contrast that with startSSL where I had some questions and Eddy Nigg personally replied within minutes.

In summary, I highly recommend giving startSSL a shot.
An interesting piece, but I think a flawed one too.

I am in complete agreement with the section about "you can't start a startup by just writing code", and I think that concept could have expanded to become an entire and valid article.

But then it morphed from that into the idea that people (often subconciously) avoid "schleps" and pick easier tasks instead, which I think is both obvious and normal. I also think it is often a lot less subconcious than pg thinks.

To expand on the example of olympic athletes: I don't know about that specific example, but to expand to "professional athletes", an awful lot of people do think about being a football star, a top baseball player, whatever. But ultimately, even children with dreams have a basic understanding of risk vs. reward.

Saying that starting stripe involves a lot of schleps is one way of putting it, another way is to say that you're less likely to succeed.

Probably no one who applied to Y Combinator to work on a recipe site began by asking "should we fix payments, or build a recipe site?" and chose the recipe site. Though the idea of fixing payments was right there in plain sight, they never saw it, because their unconscious mind shrank from the complications involved.

Other than gut instinct is there any reason to believe this is the case? Those people also chose to start a recipe site over becoming journalists, or chefs, or working in fashion - nobody has ever, before starting either a career or a startup, gone through every possibility and ticked them all off, so why is it that in this case we should assign subconcious fear of hard work s the reason?

Personally I find it can often be the reason conciously, to the extent that I don't believe it has any need to be in my subconcious. Much like when I'm in a casino and think "let's bet fairly small" rather than "risk my entire savings to have a chance at getting crazily rich", when it comes to work I conciously think about how hard something will be, and what rewards it could bring.

Personally I work in content/publishing, and no it never occured to me to work on Stripe, but thinking about it now, if I could go back in time, I wouldn't try to build Stripe first, nor would I at this point in time consider a job in that kind of company. Maybe part of that can be assigned to the schelps involved, but I'm conciously deciding that.

Regardless, an interesting piece as food for thought.

edit: As a completely unrelated question that doesn't really merit creating an entire topic to ask, does anyone with showdead enabled have any idea what comments like http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3465559 are all about? I see them now and again, and can't work out any logic behind them.
Digital 'Eye Ball'
For their next trick, the IRS will be sending tax bills the to British citizens...

I hear dumping a ship-load of tea into a local harbor is a good way to make your point about this sort of thing.
This trend will go on, other 3rd world countries will do the same. The problem is that "the internet" doesn't have the political clout that mainstream media has.

The good news is that most of these countries are too corrupt and disorganized to make this censorship work. It might even actually help improve anti-censorship technologies.
Their certs are issued by Comodo, which is a well established CA. And they are hardly free, their price is simply rolled into the domain registration fee.
However, if you relay on the IRS' advice and they turn out to be wrong, you still get hit with a tax bill. "Trust us, but don't trust us." Gotta love government.
Instead of asking "what problem should I solve?" ask "what problem do I wish someone else would solve for me?"

PG had another gem some time ago along the lines of:

The best startup is the one you needed at your last job.
Sure they do. I'm using a bunch of them right now. The only restriction startSSL has is that they don't accept popular names like 'amazon' or 'google' for subdomain names (I found out after I tried to get a cert for 'amazon.xxx.com' which we'd run in an AWS EC2 instance for testing). So we switched to 'sandbox.xxx.com' and got the cert within minutes.
Fascinating. So your system acts as an email client too effectively? That is mission-critical. I built a system similar to this for my last business and have wondered why no one (even Salesforce!) have not offered it. I would love to talk further. How can I get in touch with you guys?
I'm using it. It is very great to get wildcard certificates, and multi-domain certificates. Yes, their web interface is not great, but it does work.
i remember when i was at university, studying for my phd, working with the smartest people i have ever known. what surprised and depressed me most was that they were so inconsistent. i wanted all these brilliant people to share my politics, which i felt obviously right. they didn't. i wanted them all to be nice people. they weren't. they weren't even consistently beautiful. the only thing they had in common was that they were all very smart.

it would be so nice if simple, visible, easy to measure, but ultimately facile appearances were strongly correlated with deep, complex, hard to measure, but important traits. life would be so much simpler.
Schleps is an indicator our work goes towards success. It has to be hard. Notice this can equally lead the entrepreneur to nowhere. It is the role of the entrepreneur to understand if this the right schleps.
We encountered this problem, "Oh, so you are like OPower, how are you ever going to beat them at their own game?"

I love consumer energy and see a huge shift in the way people relate to their energy. I am solving my own problem because no one in the energy space has solved it for me.

That is just another schlep that you have to break through, all the people who laugh and say no, because there will be many who just don't understand.
Finally, html5 graph/chart library that works in Biology
Just found this. Saves my life.
De dure, not de facto. Show me a report of someone getting arrested for it. Hence my accurate description of his ridiculous scenario appealing to a slippery-slope style train of thought. Case closed.
Not even a few words to describe each one and their merits? I guess this is yet another top 10 that will get dilluted with the rest of the spam.
Or look at the manpage

${parameter:-word}
Use Default Values. If parameter is unset or null, the expan-
sion of word is substituted. Otherwise, the value of parameter
is substituted.
That is where focus, vision, listening and filtering come in...
I don't mean to be rude, but how is this the top voted comment? Extradition exists for a reason, and this comment lacks a serious depth of thinking and belongs on reddit.

Start here:

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

Form arguments based on the restrictions outlined.
Essential we want to ruin his life over nothing. The net impact of TVshack was certainly not enough to warrant extradition of a foreign citizen and sending him to federal prison. Unfortunately, its impact may have even been positive; encouraging people to be more engaged with new media releases. We're behaving like true bullies on this case and I think it does a lot to tarnish the idea that the US is a resilient country of civilized humans.

It's honestly quite shameful.
I find their service excellent. The website doesn't have the latest hip look, but the service is solid, and they are very responsive and helpful in case you run into an issue. For a free service, that's impressive.
Agreed. There is plenty of room for competitors.
That explanation is not how someone who understands the syntax would read the statement. In general, when an expression contains one pre- (or post-) operator, the reader will take that action before (or after) the rest: "decrement then index" in both cases.

It sounds confusing that the pieces of such a statement are not executed in the order that they are written, but in reality it's not any more strange than the fact that "a = b;" reads "evaluate b and store in a".

The real problem happens when there are multiple operators like that in the same statement, or multiple appearances of a post/pre-inc/dec-remented variable and you need to parse operator precedence in order to figure out the order of execution. As usual, abusing the syntax leads to confusing code, but simple and straightforward cases like "a = b[--i];" are cleaner and easier to read for anyone competent enough to matter.
There seems to be an elephant in the room: gym is boring, pointless and offers too few bang for the trouble.

It's inherently boring. Walking is fun. Hiking is fun. Chopping lumber is fun. Swimming in rivers and lakes is fun (pools - less so). You see new things and move yourself around.

In gym, nothing really changes, you just do some repetitive things in a big room without windows. Sitting in cubicle is probably more fun because you've got web access at least.

I don't know if the problem is inherently solvable or not.
So, you think that folks who commit fraud shouldn't go to jail, presumably because "Oh god no, definitely not. Monetary damages, yes. Prison sentences for a non-violent crime, definitely not." (from the parent), but disobeying a judge deserves jail.

What's violent about disobeying a judge?
I just rode my bike back from the gym, and have been going regularly for about twenty years. It's the only time I have to catch up on podcasts.
"I actually dread human interaction of any kind"

> Well ok, necessity is the mother of invention.

"People say it's very inhospitable. But it's the epitome of hospitality. It empowers the guest to get in and to get out."

> Wow, the irony (and sadness) are overflowing.

The only time I can really see this being more useful to me, is when I can't get a hold of my wait(er/ress) to bring the check or run my card. And here's a better idea that I'm a give you all for free. Near field communication with cellphones and a chip in the table. Open up my payment app, close and pay for the check with my cellphone. Put a few bucks tip on the table and leave like it's the old days before credit cards.
An Argument for the iPhone's Contextual Mute Behaviour
What’s Going on with Twin Rates? (includes a visualization)
Piracy is just copying information. The only "harm" it might do is make the person selling the information lose a sale that might never have taken place (I, for one, would not have bought the things I have pirated if I couldn't have pirated them). Basically, I don't think that I should be less free just because someone wants to make more money.

If I was in charge, laws would only restrict the freedom of the people for the safety of others (and even then it would only do so by making harmful acts illegal, not by spying on them or other crazy things). Intellectual property would only outlaw copying for commercial use, which would allow artists to make money from movie theaters, concerts, etc.

I'm sure many problems would arise from such a world, but I doubt that they'll be worse than the problems from the current system, and I'm sure that given time and actually implementing it, the kinks could be worked out.
Has anyone out there done refactoring experiments? Perhaps as an academic exercise? I don't know the kernel well enough to say for sure but I do recall a fair bit of duplicated code in e.g. the drivers. It would be interesting to see what could be done there.
Look, I'm not counting on web developers providing me with a site that's fully functional without JavaScript. That would be stupid. I have no trouble enabling JavaScript for specific sites that need it.

Opera is a great browser and has good support for HTML5 and CSS3. In fact, since I refuse to live without snappy Mouse Gestures, I don't even really have a choice in my primary browser.

Also, redirecting a browser somewhere without using JavaScript (since it was disabled) should be a reasonably simple operation.

And finally.. Tinfoil? All in all, there was absolutely no reason for that personal attack of yours. So yeah, try to behave.
The World of Holy Warcraft
Yep, I spent the last two days hanging out in the Stripe campfire chat while I was implementing my own billing system. Some of the questions were borderline bizarre and I was truly shocked at how the Stripe team went above and beyond to answer every single request. My only other experience is with SagePay who I spent weeks asking questions on their developer forum to get a handful of vague responses.
http://www.stickk.com/ is a great site. I think learned about it a while ago here on HN. I use it to motivate myself to go out running in the mornings. If I don't go running at least four days a week, $10 goes to a climate change denial charity (this was chosen by me, not a reflection of the sites politics).

It certainly works - there has been many a cold, rainy morning this winter that it's been the deciding factor in getting me out the door...
Megan Fox :DDDD
drooling :D
Just a side note: like many Yiddish words, 'schlep' originates from the german verb 'schleppen', which translates to 'haul','tow','drag','carry' or 'tug'.
That's bullshit. That would mean every domain name out there could be taken by somebody with a trademark application, a pen, and the application fee. Sorry, but just owning a trademark shouldn't be enough to grab a domain, particularly if the domain existed prior to the issuing of the trademark.
Any SaaS startups out there who have had success doing what David suggests, i.e., staying in touch with customers over a period of time to build a trusted relationship and then turning those folks into paying customers?

If yes, what were the specific actions you took that worked to drive engagement and moved them from consideration to purchase? Emails, newsletters, phone calls, etc? The more specific the better, i.e., frequency, language, etc :)

On an unrelated note, for SaaS startups, I highly recommend the blog from which this article is taken. He has lots of relevant and actionable advice.
$ cat foo.sh
#!/bin/bash
echo $BASH_VERSION
unset filename
if [[ $filename == "foo" ]];
$ ./foo.sh
4.1.2(1)-release
./foo.sh: line 5: syntax error: unexpected end of file

If $filename evaluates to an empty string, then the last line of code becomes

if [[ == "foo" ]];

Similarly, if $filename evaluates to a b c, then the last line of code becomes

if [[ a b c == "foo" ]];

The bash interpreter has problems with both of these.
If you own american stock in the UK you have to register with the IRS (W-8BEN form) to make sure you don't get taxed twice on dividends.
Great, now all restaurants can have the ambiance/experience of a Sheetz or Wawa gas station!
I work at a direct competitor to that, and lets just say that I'm less than impressed by their so called seamless sign on.

It requires the user to download a special client - that is a big big threshold for the average user. Let me contrast this by having the phone automatically get the information needed as operator settings from the app-store and then automatically start to offload without bothering the user further.

Also, why use wimax? It is a tech that is slowly dying (despite the fact that it gains users - it is expected to peak userwise in a year or two).
The 2012 Queue ICPC Challenge has Begun
Nature appears to rely on the torus pattern to evolve life at every scale
Computer animations of molecular machines inside your body
I would like to point out that just because a website isn't being run doesn't mean the guy isn't doing anything with the domain.

I have to say that I think you come across as pretty arrogant.
It was one one of the pieces about CS education in the Guardian - ill dig it out if i can find it tomorow
Thanks. I will definitely do that. I actually thought about selling tea "equipment" through the site but for it to be economical I would have to buy a decent quantity. Using an affiliate program may indeed be the better option at this point.
Agreed, I was just sayin for the sake of the article, he brings up the subject of unitialized variables, without mentioning this other way.
I actually did pay them a bit, but only so that I could obtain "verified" status and generate unlimited wildcard certificates for all of my domains. It's a good deal :)
I took "RIP free speech" to imply that he thinks that this case marks some sort of change in how free speech is handled, which it does not.

If he was instead trying to make a general argument that convicts should not have their rights restricted while they have not completed their term, or if he was arguing that prosecuting someone for massive willful copyright infringement is a violation of their rights, then I misunderstood.
I think there's a flaw in the premise, namely that one persons schlepp is another mans passion.

From the Stripe example: "You'd have to make deals with banks." - I know quite a few people who would love nothing more than the challenge of getting big banks to sign on to a new payment service. Their passion is selling. The harder the sell the bigger the challenge. Just like good hackers want to work on hard technical problems great salespeople like to work on hard sales problems.

The real takeaway here is that you should find your personal schlepps and start a company with someone who is passionate about them. If a great hacker, a great salesman and a great fraud investigator started a company they would be able to start a company like stripe. And they'd all be doing stuff they were passionate about.
Yep. The GIL means that individual Python bytecode operations are atomic, and so by extension single Python statements that translate to individual bytecode instructions can be treated as atomic (if you don't care about portability to alternate Python implementations that lack a GIL). But complicated Python statements that translate into multiple bytecode instructions (like dict.setdefault) can't. And, of course, neither can sequences of multiple statements. So you still need locks for most cases where you mutate objects that are shared across threads.
click-able: http://chrisfenton.com/cos-recovery/