skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Some problems are also beyond most of our scope. Most people here think they're extremely smart. smarter than the average person. But all we really possess are superior technical skills. In reality, we just own a tool others don't. But solving those hairy problems requires special insight/research outside of technology. Having those technical skills(coding, design, user experience, etc) is just a pre-requisite and let's you into the arena.
The dumb move by the government to censor the internet earlier was catapulted by opposition from every corner and then came headless high court rule and the signal from the court to continue with the censorship. I see this as a dumb and the dumber show.
If it were a serious enough threat to the public health we could always exterminate the armadillo species. Make an animal legal to hunt, add a bounty, and the population will be decimated in under a decade.
but wouldn't it turn on automatically with an alarm? There should be a concert mode or movie theater mode that really shuts off all alerts.
I agree with you. Especially if you don't have FU money. Your first priority in your mind is to avoid working your entire life. That's first and foremost. After you achieve that, you can start worrying about problems with more risk.
Anywhere to see Y Combinator Founder Bios?
I'd love to see what other stuff the Ycombinator founders created before they started their YC companies. I know the backgrounds of a few of them, like Drew Houston and Jessica Mah, but are there any sites that have more information?
In practice, it's a "Mute- all sounds, but don't frustrait me when I try to watch a movie, or need to get to work on time -switch".

Theaters, weddings, etc. are absolutely not the only time you want to mute things. A very large number of people work in shared offices and operate their phones in silent mode all-day, every-day. I for one really appreciate that I don't have to think about what state my mute switch is in when I get home hours later and try to watch a YouTube video.

The common case is that your alarm is only ever set to wake you up in the morning and your timer is only ever set when you're sitting around, waiting for your dinner to be ready. It's very rare for you to set an alarm or a timer which will affect a quiet group environment.

I don't think that a hard mute-always rule is worth compromising the common case ;-)
Certainly. None of these require 6 figure payments. There are some setup fees, (very reasonable) and then they usually charge per action (items packed, computers checked, etc).

Ones I worked with and would recommend:
http://parcelport.net, http://amplifier.com/

Ones that I talked with but didn't have personal experience (yet)http://www.im-logistics.com, http://archway.com, http://www.capacityllc.com/

Each has their own pros and cons and it depends on what you're trying to accomplish.
Wait for Google to destroy their dream by releasing a competing product that integrates with Google+ and Google Apps.

evil laugh
I actually don't find them difficult but mostly because I've read a lot of stuff from the era. It's kind of like Shakespeare, it's hard initially but then you get in the swing of things. There's also plenty of civics style booklets with explanations.
This site came to mind - http://wappr.com
Perl and ruby are pretty similar (much of ruby was inspired by perl according to Matz), but perl is much older than ruby, and thus many people are used to language idioms that aren't particularly modern.

There's also a tradition of writing one liners ala sed/awk in perl, and someone going from that to more complete programs isn't generally the best for program structure.

Python's whitespace requirements tend to make it clearer to read, as there are fewer ways to format identical code, and it's a much less of a TMTOWTDI language than perl.

tl/dr: Perl code is often written by old timers who expect everyone to be a perl genius like they are.
While I agree with your sense of how valuable your time is, (really in any endeavor, not just startup life), I disagree with the implication that just doing more, quickly, will help you slay or avoid the startup dragon.

It is often the case in my own life that one or two days of solid, no-stress thought time can save many weeks, sometimes months of effort.

I think it can be particularly hard to take this time when you're cashflow negative, in the press, and the clock is ticking.. That is precisely when you most need to take that time, of course. :)
3rd world=developing

I don't see anything derogatory about it.
Assume for a moment, that he had stolen money from American Paypal accounts through phishing. Does the argument still make sense? I think is does not. The argument is visceral, nothing more. She makes a straw man argument about '.com' and '.net' that is completely irrelevant, but attracts the pitchforks and fools.

How does the original comment have anything to do with jurisdiction?
Perhaps there should be "Mute" and "Mute Everything." Not sure how the UX would work for that - a slider for all three values could be tricky - but it would make it clear exactly what kind of muting you want.
I was also surprised at their massive funding rounds too. Perhaps there's more room for growth than it seems...

Or maybe they are perfectly positioned to provide the "fully cloud-hosted architecture" itself: technology experience and market leadership. Under this hypothesis, they are hard at work on a general cloud platform behind the scenes, and that's their pitch to investors.
While I agree with your point, I think the deeper detail is that, in order to solve the difficult problem, you've just got to find the person that can deal with the banks. So in this case, the schlepp is not necessarily working out a deal with the bank yourself, but going through the work to understand the deal, and then going through the work to find the right person to make the deal happen.

It rolls up into the overall point which is not that everyone should try and do a payments processing system, but that most of the ideas that are probably worth doing are those that have a significant amount of difficulties involved. And that, to execute the worthwhile idea, you'll have to figure out the problem somehow, and not just switch off because you don't have x - whatever that is, whether a person, a skill, a contact or a social network.

If you want to find the fresh powder you've got to hike up the hill that nobody else can be bothered with because it looks too hard.
If Google wanted to show support against SOPA, have they considered telling their bots to grant everyone amnesty on Jan 18 for taking down their content? Merely blacking out the color scheme of your site is great for awareness, but it doesn't do much to put you in the experience of what it means when a website is taken down.
Get 3. Negotiate.
Note the difference between YOUtube and this website. YouTube wasn't explicitly designed from the ground up to be based off of copyright infringing works. This site on the other hand was. That is the big difference.
Awful conclusion.

If the user gives conflicting commands, tell them so.

That's responsible design.

Or, avoid it, by making the switch 3 state. 1St mute: user is telling to silence all, except alarms. 2nd, user is disabling all sounds, whatsoever, even if he turn on noise fart app.

That's good design.
I've previously had exactly the same problem with the iPhone. I was singing in a professional rehearsal and had switched the phone to silent, but somehow in my pocket the iPod app was triggered to start playing some music. It disrupted the whole rehearsal and it wasn't clear where it was coming from at first. I was extremely embarrassed (and livid with my phone) when I realized it was coming from my own pocket. I disrupted a rehearsal that was probably costing $2000/hour.

I think Apple made absolutely the wrong choice here. The "silence" switch is next to useless if you can't actually count on the phone being silent when it's switched on.

You might ask why I didn't just turn the phone off. I put the phone in "silent" mode when I still want to receive notifications via vibrate, so I can look and evaluate whether I need to slip away and attend to something urgently.
Not really. We've had the issues on Froyo devices, too...
I think part of the grandparent posters's complaint is that nirvana's claim seems more like wishful thinking on what nirvana wants the law to be, rather than how it works in practice. The comments below discuss the issues surrounding this extradition, while the top comment is relatively content-free. I'm guessing about this, of course, but if that's what motivated his post I'm inclined to agree.
I suspect there's a significant number of iPhone users who have never once shut down their phones, and don't even know how to do so.
"Median" and "average" are being used inconsistently in this article, making it more difficult to meaningfully interpret the dataset.
I sometimes wonder how many violent crazies are out randomly walking the streets. I'm impressed (and glad) that there isn't more random violence as you described. It would be very easy to stab someone, run off, and never be caught. But it just doesn't happen (well....extremely rarely anyway).
> A very large number of people work in shared offices and operate their phones in silent mode all-day, every-day.

If that's the case, can't you just turn the ringer to off in your phone's settings? Why do you need the silence switch for this? The silence switch is useful when you want to switch back and forth a lot.
> When implementing the Mute switch, Apple had to decide which of a user’s conflicting commands to obey, and they chose the behavior that they believed would make sense to the most people in the most situations.

> That’s good design.

Choosing one of two conflicting commands without warning the user is terrible design.
awesome! thanks
Guess the folks at WePay didn't read this.

Still struggling to see the difference between WePay and Stripe personally.
I tried some time ago and didn't get the certificate or any email back, not worth the hassle to save $20 imho.
Here's my current thinking: I use Heroku to start out. If the app takes off and needs to scale, I can use Heroku until I get in place a cheaper/more custom config to support my specific needs - including pulling in the external services I'm using to dedicated servers.

If my app never takes off, then I don't need to do this work.

I find that it's always a good idea to know what you'd do a few steps down the scalability line (100 users, 10,000 users, 100,000 users) but not necessarily build for the biggest case. When bootstrapping, you can't afford the server costs for the big cases anyway.
Suplemen kesehatan
Personally, when ever my back is against a pile of rocks is when I decide to try out the forklift. When ever I have a pile of schlep that I've been doing manually (or when I see that I will have to do it manually) I usually opt for the forklift if I can see it will reduce that schlep and net me some time.

The payoff can't be a thin margin either. If doing it manually vs learning a tool will save me a few hours total, It's not worth it. However if writing a script will save me days on end in the long run I'll think about it.
As I understand, they seem to say TM failed because it was considered as an alternative to threads and events, so they propose to do events+TM.

That is, one big problem with TM is I/O, like doing network read and write. But if you are already writing event-driven programs, you return to event loop whenever you do network read and write, and at that point TM implementation can do smart things. If TM is sold as "write threads without locks" this can't work, but if TM is "write events but with more parallelism" this seems possible.

Actually I am quite surprised that this model was not heavily investigated already.
I reached out by e-mail once, out of similar curiosity to the parent, and got a string of replies that made about as much sense as his comments here. The mails kept coming, several minutes apart... I was actually worried I'd stepped into a situation I didn't want to be in. I'm convinced there are some real psychological problems there that startup advice won't help with...

> I'm some kind of terrorist lab animal, in jail--shrinks abuse me and shit.

> All I can do is post to HN News and yell at my shrinks.

> I get fake downloads and no emails. Total terrorist lab rat abused by shrinks.

It is sad. I hope he does see those shrinks.
This whole thing is nuts. A case where there are proportionally as many UK victims as US victims, but the UK declines to prosecute should not be eligible for extradition. It does't pass a stink test, nor a "disproportionate" test.
Here's the big thing that you missed in PG's analysis:

>The most dangerous thing about our dislike of schleps is that much of it is unconscious. Your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps. That's schlep blindness.

Thus defined, schlep blindness isn't the unwillingness to do hard work. Instead, it's the unconscious aversion to ideas that have unpleasant tasks associated with it. This idea is actually pretty profound and it's good to have an awareness of it.
Dropbox I see as a feature, not as a long term defensible business.

Google is well positioned to take them out.. if they can get their act together.
You probably know about these but just in case you could also use the books "Founders at Work" and "Startups Open Sourced".
LANGUAGE #LENGHT #LENGTH = #LENGHT/#LENGTH
C# 1352 937647 = 0.0014 <- best
JavaScript 4252 2907459 = 0.0015
PHP 3116 1167924 = 0.0027
Objective-C 679 238051 = 0.0029
Ruby 1232 380484 = 0.0032
Java 7706 2348900 = 0.0033
Perl 1239 258892 = 0.0048
Python 3662 737292 = 0.0050
Ruby 10789 1690604 = 0.0064
C 18981 2902857 = 0.0065
C++ 9458 1315552 = 0.0072 <- worst
Design - Protecting users that expect things do what they say, from themselves, since 1976.
I've lived with (though not mastered) both an iPhone and an Android device, and I don't think either gets it right. With the iPhone, I was confused how to set the volume of the alarm. The last I remember I would turn "on" sounds, set the volume I wanted the alarm at, and then silence the phone before I went to bed. I never actually learned how to do it and I never trusted it. With android, I had to find how to set the specific "alarm" volume control, which you can access if you try to select a ringtone for the alarm. I've found it once and set it and I don't have to worry about it anymore, but it took too long to figure it out and I didn't realize the alarm had its own volume slider.

I'm of the opinion the official alarm and timers should be the only apps that can violate the silence setting, and it should be painfully obvious how to set the volume when you set the alarm.
My understanding is free ones are not trusted/accepted by the browsers

You might mean self-signed certificates?
Even cold water was bad enough.

The fun fact is not to say "monkeys are dumb"

It's to compare our ways to mere monkeys, who can't even communicate
This is where having lots of experience comes in play. It's possible to hire lots of people, someone to operate the forklift, a geologist to evaluate the stones, a physicist to plot flight paths for the stones, etc.... but each hire will slow your startup down. Work with someone who has done a startup before, or get mentoring from that person. This will teach you to use the right tools at the right time before you end up in such a pinch.
Forgot to mention, there is a lot of pros/cons to 3rd party fulfillment and it has to be done right. If you seriously decide to look into 3PL warehouses, I'll be happy to give you more info about what you need to look at.
He could use a dozen managers from the same company.

Also managers who doesn't get lame math jokes makes people steal more bagels. Beware.
Vote: VPS/dedicated with third party email hosting

Reasoning: SaaS is extremely tempting. If programming is only a hobby for you I recommend it wholeheartedly. But if you're serious about your app or business, learning or hiring someone for sysops/devops is really the way to go. It's cheaper, you aren't dependent on anyone, reducing your points of failure, and you learn extremely valuable skills related to server setup and maintenance.

In my (soon to be open-sourced) deployment solution that's built on Fabric and Chef, all I need is a configuration yaml file to describe my servers. I provide IP addresses, what role(s) each one serves (app, db, static, queue, etc), what kind of software for its service I want to use (db servers should all use postgres, for example), what OS to expect on each one, and what stage of deployment that server happens to be for this project (development, staging, production). Everything is completely shared-none and non-destructive, so if I happened to have 3 VPSs, each hosting some combination of several sites' app, db, and static resources, across a different OS on each, I don't do any additional work. All I type is "make deploy" after quickly writing some lines in that config file and I can sit back and relax. Servers get setup from scratch if they're new, secured, and have services like logging all ready to go.

In essence, I get the dead simple deploy of a SaaS, with the flexibility of using whatever hosting provider I feel like, using the exact stack and details I want, for the cheapest price I can find. If my Ubuntu-running Amazon data centers flooded tomorrow, I could be deploying on brand-new RHEL Linode servers with 30 seconds of yaml changes. That kind of peace of mind can't really be bought from a SaaS provider.
There can be a lot of money in being that guy.

I know an entrepreneur who never bothers to check his business plans with even back-of-napkin calculations. He just makes Powerpoints. He is an "idea guy", you see.

So far he hasn't crashed and burned because he happened to start his first business during the 90s bubble, at the exact same time that other people were making business plans without doing back-of-napkin calculations. And he sold them a lot of stuff. His other terrible business ideas since then haven't yet returned his net worth to where it should be (zero, or negative) because he'd have to live several lifetimes for that.

I think this explains a lot about how mind-bogglingly stupid the world can be. Nassim Taleb wrote a whole book on this theme, "Fooled by Randomness".
I use a Linode for VPS/web hosting, Google Apps for email and AWS for S3 storage where I need it.

The combination is great. But if it wasn't for the Linode community and great support I would consider switching to an EC2 instance - I imagine an EC2 would be quicker to communicate with S3 than my Linode, though I haven't looked at Amazon's datacenter location options.
I agree that it sounds like a bad idea, but you're just having a knee-jerk reaction. You don't have enough information to make that judgement. How do you know this wasn't a well crafted exercise designed to teach certain elements of social interaction? I guarantee you a good teacher could use a situation like this as a tool to teach the class something valuable.

Hell, it could be an exercise to teach students the dangers of group think. It would be intellectually dishonest of the author to frame the situation in the way that she did, but we have no idea of the context. Did the author watch the whole class and speak with the teach afterward, or did she just observe the class for a few minutes?

Without more context you just don't have enough information to make such a damning judgement.
1) No. You'll need a J-1 visa and that usually takes a bit of time.

2) You might want to look into Chile or Brazil, a lot of companies seem to be sprawling there. Be warned that you won't make the seem money you can make in the UK or most of western Europe.

4) I had friends interning in Hungary and Berlin. One of them got to write a F# -> JS compiler. The other one got more involved with SEO and marketing. You can find all sort of jobs.
Your pricing is insane. At $24/month I can buy a lot of good teas online, much more than "2.5 to 3.5 ounces" you offer.
That concept is made up by him. I, as well as many other people, am absolutely aware of great ideas that involve painful schleps. I've discussed startup ideas with different people since the 90s. A reason to discard an idea was "that's a cool problem, only we'd be in for a world of pain."

I don't see any evidence to support his assertion that "your unconscious won't even let you see ideas that involve painful schleps." It's just psychobabble to me.
A Love Letter to the Traveling Salesman Problem
That's not completely true: http://taxrelief.lifetips.com/faq/129997/0/what-if-i-rely-on...

You have to pay the tax, yes, but no penalty, so you have nothing to loose by asking.
I read it is pre-2.3 devices.
Google Calender lab for hiding morning and night hours
I don't see our government - or any current government being able to do that.

The Israeli's have a completely different approach to security - orientated around threat-intelligence and behavioral analysis.

It's like expecting Ford to suddenly decide they want to get into the software business

As it goes, they're about to open a software lab in Silicon Valley. I take the point you're really making here, but just saying :)
Costume National Men's Fall/Winter 2012-13, Milan
I missed it back in Nov and wasn't posted on HN, was helpful for me.
It'll still be interesting to see if there's any specific code/comments in there for the government-produced trojans/backdoors that are allowed through.
The actual interview transcript is interesting too: http://jonahweiner.com/Louis_CK_Q&A.html
http://www.startupsopensourced.com/e-book/

Lots of YC companies in there
The way the Dropbox execs have been talking themselves up in the press over the last few months just makes me think that they're angling to raise the price on an acquisition.

Dropbox is a great product, but feature development has stagnated, and the only two expansion options I see are:

* compete with Amazon in a much more user-centric way.
* compete with Apple iCloud in a much more open way.
> I've written programs where threads make the program easier to reason about rather than harder.

I want to hear about this.
Repeal DMCA!
Hi there. I think you're interpreting "average" as being equivalent to "mean", but this isn't my understanding of the term. Both the "median" and "mean" are measurements of "averageness". I use "median" when I'm talking directly about figures or a diagram. I use "average" when I'm making some general point, and only after I've already specified what my exact measure of central tendency was.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
I'm an iOS dev (approaching a million downloads), and fully half of our support requests are from people who don't understand how the mute functionality on their device works - particularly the side switch on the iPad. It's not a big deal for us since we've got a templated response at this point and it only takes a minute or two for us to send a response, but there are clearly a number of users out there that don't understand how the mute functionality is intended to work.
Craigslist Runs Anti SOPA/PIPA Ad Prominently On Homepage
If you guys are really, and i mean really looking forward to include other countries; i know that me and another bunch of people would be willing to give you money right now as an advance for the service and as incentive to actually make it happen.

Just be sure to include the big profitable countries: Switzerland, Germany, Australia, Japan, Canada, France, UK among others.
I've been running my services on my own hardware colocated out of Chicago for coming on 8 years or so.

I'm in the process of transitioning some of my stuff to S3 for durability, and will likely eventually transition to VPS-based hosting over the next year or two.
Australian Startup Accelerator Announces 2012 Startups