skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN:  The Four Hour Work Week model of Startup Financing?
Problem:
I'm bootstrapping, but I'm frustrated by having to work so many hours to keep money coming in. I don't want to pursue or take funding.

Possible Solution:
I just read the * Four Hour Work Week. I'm thinking about doing the Four Hour Work Week thing to solve the cash flow problem, and use that money to finance my startup.

Question:
I'm sure that a number of people here have read the book and have tried the method. What are your thoughts, problems, caveats?

---------

* The Four Hour Work Week: http://www.amazon.com/4-Hour-Workweek-Escape-Live-Anywhere/dp/0307353133/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226614224&sr=8-1
You're right that most possible programs are useless and uninteresting. So I agree with you that if a learning program was given problems to solve that are generated by generating random programs, that wouldn't be interesting.

I am not suggesting doing that. What I am suggesting is that the problems-to-solve be generated by humans.

Incidently what I am suggesting isn't quite inductive programming but something slightly more general, in that the job of the problem-solver isn't to generate a program that solves the input/output pairs, but to guess what the next output will be depending on its input. (The problem-solver may or may not do this by internally creating a program that solves the problem).

Anyway I've done a quick write-up of what I propose: http://www.includipedia.com/wiki/User:Cabalamat/Function_pre...
I've imposed my own ban on TechCrunch, with the BlockSite extension for Firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3145). I actually installed it specifically to prevent getting lured to TechCrunch articles from sites like HN where I'm just looking at headlines. It's the only site I have listed, and the links show up as visited and unclickable, saving me wasting precious minutes everyday.
awadsayeed at gmail dot com, i'd be very interested in hearing from you
gm, in its present form should not be bailed out.

institute new federal efficiency standards on all cars sold in america. this will level the playing field while the american auto industry retools itself.

pump tens of billions of dollars into research and development to create the next wave of vehicles that meet these new standards.
I've never worked at a place where a person like this is acceptable. I've been told too many times that I was too negative when in fact I was just being realistic.
Disclaimer: I'm an evangelist.

So I think the problem is that some horrible sales shills are using my job title. I wish they would stop, or die. Either way.

The concept of evangelism (in terms of the word) is someone who believes in something telling others about it. For the stuff developer tools that I evangelize at Yahoo! I only do it if I believe it's worthwhile. I say that as a developer.

The problem comes when people aren't really evangelists. They have no problem screwing over what they are supposed to be passionate about by lying to people who can spot them a mile away. Developers aren't your average chump.

While I don't expect this to be true for lots of companies I hope our evangelists are honest and knowledgeable. If we are ever any other way I'd love to hear about it so I can fix it. The last thing an evangelist should be is someone who drinks their own company's cool aid and doesn't know about the outside world.
It almost seems like a publicity stunt to get people interested... sex, betrayal, prostitutes...
Really. What's next? "Barak Obama wears shoes."?! This is getting out of hand.
I recently finished reading the 4 Hour Work and I have been thinking about how it would work for a web startup. The problem with a web based product is that it's hard to outsource.

You talk about working many hours to keep money coming in. It depends on what you do. If you are a consultant, you are selling your time and that is hard to outsource too.

Doing the 4 Hour Work Week thing and using the money for your startup is a great idea. I hope it works out for you.
You continue to imply a lot of things that aren't justified by evidence. Asking about potential embarassments isn't the same thing as rejecting candidates for them.
I was expecting a more thought out post from such a strong title.

I don't think it makes sense to support this argument by correlating the value of advertising with the health of the economy or whatever he was trying to do. He should have left the economy out of the equation if he wanted a stronger case.

I would argue that online advertising will become more and more accurate with its targeting methods, which in turn will raise its value as opposed to destroying it.
I've used both and I greatly prefer python+scipy+matplotlib. Because it's a real programming language, unlike Matlab's clunky Basic-like thing. So if matplotlib doesn't do what you need, you can extend it or just write something custom in GTK+Cairo. The depth and stability of scipy & matplotlib is very impressive.
Google’s Next Big Move: Taking On Apple, Syncing Your Digital Life
Discussion of Google competing with Apple's iPhone via it's new G1 mobile phone, perhaps looking to create or buy sync technology for online storage and backup
You probably should listen to this advice. (Searching through every bid is going to be painful).
The highest unique bid complicates things slightly..

All of your bids have 3 possibilities compared to the current highest bid. (lower, same, higher).

LOWER:
lower is easy - it's not a winner. Except for this scenario:
1. $10 --> Becomes highest unique
2. $9 --> lower, not a winner
3. $10 --> Duplicate with no.1 no.2 ($9) is now highest unique

SAME:
Same is easy - your old highest unique no longer is a win.

HIGHER
Higher becomes a win - UNLESS there's already 2 (or more) bids at that value.

Some thoughts - perhaps store three lists and a value?
sorted list of duplicates lower than the Highest Unique Value (HUV)
sorted list of duplicates higher than the HUV
sorted list of uniques
Current HUV

Take a new bid. Compare to the HUV:
Lower: not a winner.
SAME: not a winner - HUV updated to next highest unique. value appended to duplicates list.
HIGHER: compare to Higher duplicates list. If not in there - update as HUV - winner.

Behind the scenes - I assume you're logging each bid, details, etc.. You wouldn't have to wait to do this in order to return a result.

Is that understanding your issue?
The article has been updated with this correction:

Note: This is a corrected version of the story that originally ran on Nov. 12, clarifying that Google Chrome runs JavaScript, not Java.
Concurrency in javascript: http://www.mozilla.org/rhino/scopes.html
Will 4G Networks Get Sidetracked by Patent Problems?
Taglocity Puts the Best of Google Gmail into Microsoft Outlook for Free
Multicore Is Bad News For Supercomputers
Exactly. Moreover, most programmers will simply use high level primitives from some library where concurrency is deep buried, so they won't need to worry about it at all.

And who writes the libraries? I'd suggest that if you're only gluing together libraries, much of a rigorous CS training is wasted anyaways. You could do just fine with very little formal training on algorithm design and analysis, and a rather shaky understanding of the fundamentals of algorithms, if that's all the programming you do is. You're probably better off with a trade school.

If you're going to be doing anything challenging in the programming domain, you'll want a good grounding in concurrency.
As a confirmed liberal Democrat I am all for helping the workers. But as the owner of a 1999 Ford Windstar I have a very low opinion of the US automobile industry. It's not the workers' fault--they're not the ones who (mis)designed the cars--but I don't want to give the management any more rope. So I'd rather see the government spend $250 billion on job-training programs for laid-off auto workers, etc., than $25 billion to prop up GM as a corporation.
The other day, Dave Winer broke his Cuisinart coffee machine and was, within 5 minutes, able to replace it on Amazon. Therefore, online advertising is now dead.
The other big problem with Matlab is that because it's licensed, you can't just do what you like with it. I've got several servers that I like to be able to crunch numbers on, and that would be not only expensive but incredibly inconvenient to maintain all those licenses of Matlab.
?????? so mongrel comes with its own OS kernel that has better support for multicore than linux and freebsd? wow!! coolzzz!

Hi. You may not have noticed it, but this site is not Reddit. Please try to keep commentary like this to a minimum, where 0 is the minimum.

Anyway, please also read the posts you are replying to. They are saying that many applications get concurrency "for free", since the database library handles the concurrency for them. Yes, this can be a bottleneck, but it is a fundamental problem with the notion of locking. If you want maximum performance, don't lock. If you want absolute data integrity, you have to lock. That's a problem.

Concurrency should definitely be a part of CS programs, but Intel's thread library isn't the way to do it. CL-STM or Haskell's STM would be much better.
Here is a benchmark comparing R, Octave, Matlab, S-PLUS, and a few other common mathematical programming languages.

http://www.sciviews.org/benchmark/index.html

Suprisingly, R is one of the best in terms of speed, comparable to Matlab (Matlab is pretty fast if you vectorize your code). Plus, if you like functional programming, the R language is based on Scheme.
From what I've seen helping people I know handle pointers, they're really actually having trouble with the concepts of pointers. Getting them to draw the box diagrams with pointers correctly is challenging. The notation is an extra challenge, but it's not the main difficulty.

It's not the notation, it is the concept.
Well, I think it's sure to piss off a lot of companies building shaky business models off ads that no body clicks on (and that is happening), but I do think this is a bit over the top.
"Sorry, but I don't buy that. We're also moving to a thin client world where we don't actually need that much power on our thin clients."

Yeah, we've heard it before, several times, from the moment that networking was invented and onwards. Why will the push for this stick _this_ time around?
I think clusters are going to start getting much smaller ...
15 Useful Project Management Tools
No, but I consider a chip maker telling me what kind of chips they're going to be making legit. Especially when all the other chip makers are saying the same thing (All the other chip makers: AMD, Freescale, Intel, Sun, Marvell, and others)
A bionic hand
You are right of course. This is an incredibly misconceived scheme that will fail to meet it's policy objectives.

The main focus of action against the scheme appears to be this web site: http://www.nocleanfeed.com/
FHWW is a very fun and interesting read. I'm beginning to make better use of virtual assistants myself.

The problems I foresee are as follows:
1) Your time won't be immediately and drastically dropped. If you're spending 70 hours a week developing, you're going to go down to 50 supervising the outsourced developers, and for that you're going to probably spend more than the 20 hours of free time is available to you.

2) Outsourced code is not perfect. The outsourcing companies work largely on quantity not quality. So you're be spending a lot of time doing code review and fixing issues.

3) Unless you're already profitable, you're now spending money rather than sweat to earn the money. If you have the money then this is not a problem, but for many bootstrappers this is a problem.
Anything's better than spending it on war. Good thing we voted in a president that wants to keep fighting though.
"It's not that GM is too big to fail. It's that GM is too big to fail right now."

Maybe the problem is that GM is too big to succeed.
I like your optimism but I see it differently.

The classic interruptive model has a known ability to create revenue. That known is not enough to justify their current valuation. I think that they are shooting for higher then that. take advantage of how users interact on_____ is the same idea as Google Adwords, Yellow Pages or Hotel booking sites.

Only those have an easy to take advantage of way that people interact with them. Hotels pay to be the ones that get booked. Sites pay to be the ones that get found.

Facebook has no clear way to do this. It's a nice goal. But it may well fail. But the alternative to trying for it is saying "OK. Slap some bigger ads on. Get CTR up. Lets shoot for a %200 increase in revenue" They're aiming for 1000% or more. “The classic interruptive model" won't get them there & everyone knows it. So they aim for something else that noone knows the answer to.
Paul Bucheit: Sprint is cheap, it would be interesting if a large tech company bought them
I'm pretty sure that the singularity is not the fact that it's a point, but that the gravity is so high that it wraps in on itself. i.e. that spacetime has a hole in it.

Because once gravity is that high going any higher has no meaning by any physics currently known. So by that definition once you crossed the event horizon anything inside has no meaning - and that is the singularity (i.e. the calculations of relativity have an infinity there, which is the singularity, not the mass in a point).

Also I did sort of assume that if matter can not collapse to a point a black hole is impossible. It does not appear that a quark star could be a black hole. And nothing is known about the other candidates listed on wikipedia (Preon star and Q star), but there sort of is the assumption that they could not make a black hole.

The article referenced for Q stars says 1.5 Schwarzschild radius, so it looks like to make a black hole you need a point mass.
So you're saying that no one will ever sell lower cost single core laptops any more? hrmmm I'm skeptical.
Despite Intel’s warning, AMD doesn’t change guidance, expects PC sales will grow
Even if the logic here made sense, there are about 50 billion data points a year ($$$) that beg to disagree. Data trumps arguments always.
sounds to me like success of a four hour work week relies on writing a book called "four hour work week" and getting people to buy it...

but seriously, anything truly profitable that can be handled in 4 hours a week is already being done by people.

unless you find something truly paradigm shifting innovative that only you could do, it's pretty much a guarantee that you won't be able to sustain this.

you simply can't compete in 4 hours against people putting in 40 if you're selling the same product. you have to have huge amounts of leverage to do so, in the form of irreproducible technologies, processes, personnel, design...
This isn't so much a problem as an opportunity. If newspaper content posted elsewhere gets more readers, then that suggests to me that the newspaper websites are doing something wrong that doesn't lead to readers going there. So if the newspapers fix what they're doing wrong, they'll get more hits.

I wouldn't necessarily characterise the unauthorised copies as "stolen" since it is probably the case that the people who view then wouldn't have viewed the original.
Personally? I'd keep what I have. There is nothing better or more rewarding than squeezing more performance out of fixed limited hardware. Where is the fun if you can just buy twice as many servers? The day hardware is free, is a very very sad day for programmers.

Of course there will be massive demands in the world of servers, research, gaming etc, but that's not everything.
Apple’s search engine? It’s probably not what you’re thinking
Display advertising had been dying a slow and painful death for quite a while now. CTRs for banners are lower and lower.
Yet when I see ads on weblogs, on Myspace and Facebook it still strikes me how much of this advertising is still just display ads.

At the end of the last boom Overture (purchased by Yahoo in 2003, right as the economy began to emerge from the bust) and later Google brought us a new form of advertising which didn't even look like advertising to begin with: search advertising. Overture's original goal was "sponsored search": the more you bid for a term, the more relevant should the term be in search results.

Perhaps with this bubble dying a new form of advertising will emerge or has already emerged - which we won't initially (or can't yet) identify as advertising.

Brand advertising too has less of a future on the web: search advertising (especially with Google and their consideration of relevance of the ad and not just the bid value - something which didn't exist in Overture's model until Yahoo's Project Panama) enabled the "little guy", the local small businesses, the webmasters to sell their products to an audience that was looking to them.

It's folly too say "all that can invented [in advertising] is already invented". Traditional PPI/PPC banner/display advertising is drying up and rightly so (it encouraged a reductionist thinking, treating users as captive "eye balls" as opposed to customers of a product; it encouraged mee-too copycat websites which called themselves "start-ups"). Yet I wouldn't be quick to discount the possibility of something entirely different taking its place.
Sure. Can my company apply for a bailout too? 50k sounds nice.
That way of thinking isn't new. It's how people like Heraclitus and Protagoras thought about reality. Everything new is actually pretty old.

One of Protagoras' sayings is "man is the measure of all things."
Maybe we're getting closer to a time when advertising is not an instant revenue source for any site generating lots of traffic, but companies aren't going to stop wanting to get their name in front of people. Therefore: sites wanting to monetize through ads = maybe dead in the future. Online advertising = far from dead.
I completely agree with your second point, and, FWIW, I suspect Nassim Taleb would as well. This site seems to promote the "narrative fallacy" that Taleb rails against in "The Black Swan."

I worry that it could end up with some very embarrassing results-- e.g., two separate news feeds report on the same event at different times, a positive effect is ascribed to one of the stories, and a negative effect is ascribed to the other.
Your right. That's true.

I was assuming that since the 'product' is relatively mature, their costs should be more or less known. Their revenue is the part missing from the equation.
Seriously. Advertising is more often than not selling you something you didn't know you wanted to buy, making the Cuisinart example pretty weak.
I would like Google to buy sprint (of course the understood meaning of this statement) ; but I bet MSFT or YHOO wouldn't let that happen without a anti trust case :(
The Death Of Packaged Software: Microsoft Store Opens On The Web For U.S. Shoppers
Wasn't it enough to completely miss my point, you also had to put that annoying "you" all over the place. Sigh.
In theory I'd say die die and die some more. I'd like to think that if we let GM just die then out of work car people will move on to creating the cars we actually want/need. Rather than arguing with unions over health care and labor standards, and begging for hand outs.

If they just died we could move onto the next stage of creative destruction, and those car people would build cars using alternative fuels, electric cars, fuel effecient, cool looking cars (not buicks, SUVs, and La Sabres).

However, I think we have to consider that if America stopped making cars then we'd just be sitting ducks for all the other manufacturers out there that are doing fine. Toyota, Germany, the Chinese, and Koreans. I think they'd just dump cheap imports on us, and we wouldn't get an environment where entrepreneurs could innovate new products without competition from larger manufacturers.

So I think the die argument, even without considering the pain of job loss, is naive to think we'd get better products made by American companies. I'm not convinced we would be better off letting them die.
As a founder of an auto(motive) startup, let me tell you that the things we'd do with x billion at this stage are not good. Some investment would be helpful (and we're looking for it), but a government administered venture fund of those proportions would probably be a disaster; a distraction for the ages. Our contention is that the market has not yet fund the successor technology to gasoline yet, and giving existing solutions massive wads of cash will only reduce the speed that it will.
yeah, a good tip, but still if you know one, you should at least go through the other ones tutorial just to know what you're missing :D
Time continues as you continue past the event horizon. The myth that you can't reach the event horizon is an artifact of poor coordinate choices. The length contraction argument is also invalid.

Relativity cannot calculate anything "inside" a black hole because that's the regime where that particular theory breaks down. This is a feature of physics.
I think Apple will produce a surprise. They won't be able to hide it from Sun's investors, but I expect the first proper, public confirmation, product announcement, and strategy brief to be when Scott walks on stage, shakes hands with Steve, and announces that Apple owns Sun.

Yes, Sun OSS'd a bunch of stuff, but they did it in a way that protects their kernel level IP from being integrated with Linux. That's still valuable to Apple (hell, it even ties in nicely with Darwin). But not as valuable as the relationships Sun has with large enterprise customers that still don't yet use Linux for everything.
So you think Apple does want a lice of Enterprise?

I think this article puts its finger on a point. People come out & say things like 'Apple will never replace windows because abc'. Or 'Iphones will never overtake nokia because 345'. Then the assumption is that they want to.

Thing is, I seriously doubt they want macs to be the no 1 pc. A world where such a huge market is dominated end to end by one company long term seems implausible. Keeping that kind of a grip would require price cutting concession & a whole lot of other stuff they don't like to do.

A cherry picked slice of a big pie is a nice thing to have. A cherry picked slice of several huge pies is great. With macs, they own the whole box. Of the people willing to pay a premium, they take a big chunk. They can leave those that aren't behind. And those that need something Apple doesn't want to give.

The stylish alternative works as a strategy.
Ubuntu's #1 Bug:  Microsoft has a majority market share
Status: In Progress
Importance: Critical
Social Network Apps To Finally Monetize Within The Next Year
Ten Ways To Thank The Planet On Thanksgiving
Nice 'green' post
Neither Ruby nor Python makes it impossible write threaded programs, with all the ensuing dangers -- their standard implementations just don't implement threading very well. I think it's a stretch to say that this constitutes an intentional judgement about the downsides of using threads. For all their disadvantages, threads can sometimes be the most effective way to structure a concurrent program.
He can hire the Ruthlessly Honest Dicks that getrealordie.com advertises by public pillory of their cover letters.
As long as attention is a limited resource people will be willing to pay for it. As long as people are willing to pay for attention (eye-balls) there will be advertising.

Perhaps not in its current form (banner ads, text links) but I don't see this going away anytime soon. I generally don't agree with Winer but his pieces are usually more thought out than this.

I agree with other commenters that bringing up the economy weakened his argument. I'm no economist but when times are touch elasticity and neccessity have a lot to do with what people spend money on.

Advertising is elastic and not a neccessity, its generally a means to grow your business. People are not worried about growing their business in a recession, they're worried about staying alive.