skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Come on techies- why so few responses? Is it because he's right? Is it because you all think you're so smart, precious, and valuable that no 'suit' could ever add any value? Well, looks at Jobs and Gates. Those techies-turned shrewd businessmen show that smart developers learn the business side of things as well. Conversely, business guys should be learning as much about the technical side as possible without having to directly own it. I have attempted to do just that, and it has helped me immensely in my own startup. I would also add that understanding the design and copywriting end of things is quite valuable. In the end, the sales copy is what replaces you and brings in cold, hard cash. That's why the top copywriters in the world charge up to $500/hr- they create words that generate cold hard cash in your bank account. And they are worth every penny of that investment.

The best way to increase the odds of startup success is multidisciplinary teams that cross-pollinate and respect other disciplines. The developers should understand customers, marketing, and visual design and the business guys should always be learning anything they can about workflow and technical vision. In addition, design adds a lot of value, and both the techies and suits should enjoy learning lots about design.

Thanks again for a fascinating read and great graphs. Drop some comments people!
You seem to miss the point which is rather clear. Genius is not Inate, It is man made. Basically he is saying that it is nurture which makes genius and not nature.

So just to explain it more clearly, it is the environmental circumstances which make a genius and not his genes.
Firefox with:

* NoScript (really makes browsing more secure)

* Twitterfox (a pretty nice FF twitter client)

* All-in-One Gestures (Mouse gestures a la opera)

* Web Developer (EXTREMELY useful for web developing. Allows you to easily disable js, css, cookies, images; resize your browser to 800x600 or 1024x768; Outline various types of elements; view generated source (so including anything JS changed; and many other great features, which are sometimes useful in browsing as well as developing)

* Webmail Notifier (I have 3 gmail accounts I have to check, and this alerts me when any of them have new email, checking every n minutes. Also allows me to easily switch which I'm logged into)

* Yubnub as my default search engine for the search box (go to http://yubnub.org/ it easily allows you to use many different sources with simple commands [like "yt rick roll" to search youtube for a rick roll video])

* Adblock with the Filterset.G Updater (blocks a huge % of ads! When I use other computers, I realize that sites that I never knew had any ads on them do.)
"This messages are because of vulnerability in Heysan.com."
Unhappy people also turn to drink. That doesn't mean we should all stop drinking.

Everything in moderation. Also I think we should quantify this... "US TV" is in no way related to say "UK TV". Just look at something like question time/newsnight/top gear/etc etc
Actually I'm pretty sure that if you take away the strawman (i'm not saying people don't change channels, I'm saying their remote usage isn't governed by critical thinking, it's governed by easily manipulated emotions) it is the norm, and advertising rates are determined scientifically by those data points.

Interestingly, people who feel they aren't manipulated by the meta-reality and it's subconscious suggestions are just as suspectible to being manipulated by the metareality.

You can make big generalizations about people's usage of TV because they have the same neurological responses to it, which is the reason advertising works, and the meaning of 'the medium is the message' and the subject of a bunch of scientific research done by corporations to manipulate you into thinking you need axe body spray. Did you know Procter Gamble uses the same propaganda techniques early communist china did, over the air? Politicians calculate exactly what effects an ad will have on a specific demographic based on the profile of the audience of the show they watch.

You give people to much credit. It large numbers, like in tv viewers, their behavior is very hivelike.
Vulnerabilities don't advertise the infected app. They advertise penis enlargement pills. Why would some user who discovered a Heysan vulnerability use it to trick people into using Heysan?

I'm hoping this article is just inaccurate, or outright fallacious. Or Heysan really does let people upload photos of their friends or something.
This is why you should live in the UK! Just stand outside in the rain ;)
On a related note, if you find this line of thought interesting, you'd probably enjoy Steve Martin's Born Standing Up.

It's a beautifully written memoir in which he tells the story of how he became one of the most successful stand-up comedians ever. I'm not much of a reader, but for what it's worth, it's probably the best thing I've read this year. And, yes, it reinforces the idea that "genius" is often the result of years of hard work and trial and error.
> it has a big table of pay ranges for people with X years of experience and/or education.

Those ranges are so large that in most cases they're pretty much irrelevant. If you're a good enough candidate, they'll make it work. Why you would want to knowingly under pay yourself just for this particular job?
I think you need brain scans to validate your claim about us and uk tv. I think those scans will show that the brain responds the same to uk and us tv.
Way too much information! ;-)
Myth #5: Rails is hard because of Ruby
Most of those cameras are privately owned, and on private property. I'm ok with that.
You're probably right. Just so you know though, one of the Big Lessons I've had selling to big companies is to figure out:

(1) The times you are asking your counterpart to spend "her own money" (from her budget, outside her range, etc)

(2) The times you're asking your counterpart to spend play money.

It's always helpful to remember when you're hesitant to ask someone at a big company to pay you for your product or service that they aren't paying you out of their own pocket.
> You can convince HR that it's not worth negotiating with you because your salary demands will end up too high.

Why would you want to work somewhere for less than you've earned in the past?
You still shouldn't cough up your salary history to a startup hiring manager.
Packages You Won’t Need a Saw to Open
Because you might be desperate.
Yeah, I've never understood all of this salary secrecy crap. Just tell them what you want to be paid! If it's way more than they can truly afford, at least you won't waste any more time.

If you know what the market is paying and are comfortable with a particular wage, what the hell does it matter if you're under everyone else?
I'm reading the book, and although everyone online latches on to the 10,000 hours hook, Gladwell's hypothesis is much more ecological, in the sense that it's not (primarily) some innate drive that gives "geniuses" (i.e. accomplished people) their edge, but the subtle stimuli/reinforcements people get from advantageous environments.
Thank goodness for the BBC - no adverts, quality drama,factual,news,entertainment etc :)
If the opposing party in a negotiation knows you're desperate, you'll never win.
It's because most of us are still focused on building something people want. Without that, none of these other things matter. Most people who contribute to this community get that.

Another important point: There are a bunch of brilliant, motivated people on HN who have shown great ability and insight in both development and business. By not paying someone to focus solely on the business side early on, they buy themselves more time to make something people want, build their user base, and improve their chances of being successful.

When you've got the chops to do both, you should. Especially early on.
First Look At WordPress 2.7 | Weblog Tools Collection
For a start, I'd say it makes a big difference if the channel is funded by advertising, or by the viewers.
kaspersky internet security blocking heysan.com:
http://www.pix89.com/images/44pxiihgu16vahufvqop.jpg

Mozilla blocking heysan gtalk log in:
http://i36.tinypic.com/2iuccgg.png
>manager even reminds the execs who I am saying, "that's just the way tom is".

That sounds like a defensive statement to a negative impression, to be honest.
Incurred technical debt is the result of many "best compromises" made over a period of time.
It's still extremely helpful if the "business guy" or non technical knows basic coding & design principles. It makes the conversations between founders much more intelligent and the frequency of words like: "how", "you", "what", "think" is probably a lot higher. I'm not going to pretend like I always know what Tom is talking about, but at least I can ask thoughtful questions (and dumb ones too). He'd probably say the same thing about the tasks I handle. And you can do all of these things without being a buzzword spewing suit. For example, I wear sweat pants every day :).

I think it's also helpful if a founder/employee can wear multiple hats. For example, I handle all marketing/SEO/PR/accounting/analytics/writer stuff/affiliates/business deals/VC crap. While Tom handles all bug fixes/main site coding/development/sys admin/design/features/etc. Our biggest weakness is design, but we've managed to get by fine.

/non-technical at TicketStumbler
You just described my current day job. lol.
Which usually means that they find someone that isn't as "difficult to work with". :-)
That's because most of the TV shows suck nowadays. It's not that unhappy people watch TV, TV makes people unhappy because of the crappy programming!
Online Visualization Tool
heres another one saying that a friend wants to battle you on heysan. lol battle you???

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_c0e2zFuzsT0/SRmwOubakEI/AAAAAAAAAF...
Old phones. iPhone, Android -- these are the phones of the future. In three years, most people will probably have WebKit or Gecko running on their phone.

The iPhone is already the best selling phone in the US.
The mention of the Russell-Whitehead proof brought back memories. It's from Principia Mathematica (same title as Newton's book, but it's a different work.) Here's a representative page:

http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cache/a/a/t/aat3201.0001.001/00000...

Look at the last line of 54:43. Then look at the page number. This isn't a joke. It's really how bad axiomatic mathematics is.

During my last year of high school and first year of college, I was fascinated by this stuff to the point that I couldn't think about anything else. After digesting Peano arithmetic, I moved on to Zermelo-Frenkel set theory (the "set theory" that we normally use is self-contradictory and therefore meaningless to a mathematician.) I worked through Godel's incompleteness theorem. I tried my best to understand non-Euclidean geometries. And a bunch of other stuff that I don't even care to remember now.

Soon, predictably, it started affecting my health. At that point, I broke down and gave up that shit for good. The stuff I do today is positively quotidian by comparison. But it makes me happy. Even now, I'm occasionally uneasy about living in a universe where we don't know (actually, can't know) if the continuum hypothesis is true or false. But I shove the thought quickly from my head.

The point of all this is to tell you guys that unless you really know what you're getting into, don't think too deeply about the meaning of proof :-)
Jerry helped end the Cold War. http://www.nss.org/adastra/volume13/butrica.html
Does the state have the right to demand and view the tapes?
Yeah, most shows suck. But there are many, many shows on lots of channels. There are shows worth watching, though. There are some TV shows, IMO, that are works of art, rivialing some of the great movies out there.
There's a lot of fabless IC design startups around here in Silicon Valley and some of them are run like white-collar sweatshops. Second-rate engineers are imported from China or India with low pay but the lure of H1-B sponsorship to work on designs in hopes of flipping it to a bigger semiconductor company or back to OEMs in Asia.

This might be what happened but I think his project, or maybe the whole startup since they ride or die on a single product, got fubared and he was let go. He might be in the middle of relocating to the US or trying to get his family over, or maybe the company screwed him over on pay.

Either way, it's not an excuse to kill but that might be the motive. He probably already landed back in China by now.
Video Avatars
Firefox with:

* Adblock Plus
* BugMeNot
* Download Statusbar
* Firebug
* Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
* Full Screen Homestar Runner
* Gmail Notifier
* NoScript
* TabMixPlus
* Web Developer
* Compact Menu 2 (on non-Mac computers)

Also, several keyword search type bookmarks, so I can get rid of the search bar and use the location bar for everything.

* g <foo> - google search
* w <foo> - wikipedia search
* y - quick shortcut to news.yc
* cpp <foo> - google search that begins with "C++"
* etc.
I'm not sure your post deserves to be downmodded -- it seems honest and on topic. I can see how one bit in particular could come off as slightly offensive:

'Speaking only for myself, any candidate who starts going down the road of "I won't fill out employment application until we are interested in each other", "I won't discuss previous salary", "I won't provide references until there is an offer letter", etc... - just screams "Prima Donna"'

This is a matter of trust. Salary history, a detailed employment history, and references are private. In the case of references it would be down right rude, to repay the people who are willing to vouch for you by spamming their contact info to anyone who asks. There is nothing unreasonable about withholding that info until both sides clearly serious about moving forward. If anything, I wonder what your cavalier attitude screams about you?
"Police arrest alleged gunman in office park slayings that left 3 dead"
http://www.mercurynews.com/ci_10993931
Ask HN: Review our startup (bitloot)
High quality circuses for you to enjoy while the british government continues it's quest to make 1984 come a few years late and your world slides into chaos. I didn't realize "the circuses are really good" was a defense for an accusation that a culture centered around circuses is destructive to your ability to act more like a person and less like a monkey.

And you are subtly programed by the people who control the BBC rather then the american corporate interest. I fail to see a big difference.
It has nothing to do with scribd, it's just a link to a pdf.

Looks pretty good though, I saved it.
Looks like a neat idea. Reminds me of http://www.gimado.com/, just more targeted. I think these investment sites could be a very lucrative way to raise money for small startup operations.
For #2, you might want to check out Zuckerbucks, which is a virtual currency for Facebook that paid out real prizes. Careful if you go that route, I know the guy who built it and it can be difficult to constantly be mailing out physical items to people.
His easily missed link about the troll BIFF is a nifty read too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF

I miss Usenet.
My favorite NP-complete cheat: You want to solve an integer programming problem, something like

max sum_i x_i f_i

Where the x_i are restricted to be binary. The cheat: Just let the x_i be real numbers in the [0,1] interval, and solve the problem through a super-efficient linear programming solver. If you happen to end up with a solution where all the x_i are binary, you have successfully found a solution to the original problem. If you aren't so lucky, well...

This is simple, fast, and works amazingly well amazingly often.
> We have a skeleton team of folks, one to two people on the site answering emails, deleting spam, that sort of stuff.

That's pretty pathetic. Digg has a huge staff, what's everyone doing if they can't get more than one or two people to watch the content?
Great post, and a great reminder for builder entrepreneurs. I agree that the best biz people are the ones who come from a technical background and have successful transitioned into a biz dev mindset. I've seen it many times. The people who understand both how to build products and how to sell them are rare and extremely valuable.
That has been my main concern so far. It's a great incentive but it seems somewhat risky as well. Thanks for your input and the link.
OK, so it's destructive to my ability to act more like a person and less like a monkey. But I don't want to "act more like a person", I want to escape reality.
Hmmm, I would be hesitant to say the 'biz guy' isn't valuable at the start. If you're bootstrapping a company and there's 4 of you crammed into a room, it's probably not the time and place for him yet... But, I've seen teams dismantle themselves over disagreements about features, direction, or quite simply drown in incomplete and unfinished objectives. Your typical hacker is usually not the best manager or leader.

I think it's good practice to have a few friends/mentors/advisors to make sure you're not drinking too much of your own kool-aid, and provide advice from time to time.
Zombies want brains, zombies eat brains. Zombies are probably quite happy, if only you could ask them without being eaten.
Scribd for me is quite the opposite experience. I hate having my desktop littered with the pointless pdf's I've had to download to view. Instead, Scribd let's me take a quick look and then forget about it. If I actually want to download it, I have that option.

Also, I think a lot of folks forget that pdf is just one of the documents they convert. Many of their documents were originally Microsoft Office documents that they've converted to pdf and flash. Again - I'd much rather be able to take a peek at a MS Word doc than have to download it and open it with Microsoft Office on my mac.

For me Scribd makes browsing the web much more seamless. I don't get interrupted by having to download files and open them in another app, then close them, delete the file if I don't want it, then get back to browsing.

Given their user count and traffic, I'm guessing there are many others that feel the same way, but aren't as vocal about their experience because it's so seamless. It's a bit surprising to me to see such vitriol towards an app that provides free hosting to millions of documents converted from all different proprietary formats so they can be easily viewed.
And a good way to imply that you're desperate is to give them lots of details about where you were working, when you were working, and how much you were making.
Why is this going to work where every other open source bounty site has failed?
Descartes did a lot of his thinking in bed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Descartes
I'd agree this is TMI.

But... "honey"?

Careful, I hear there are people who get really anal about words having more than one meaning.
What Has Driven Women Out of Computer Science?
Not a full rebuttal, but just a point to make: How many "founders" does Balsamiq have? 1. How many single founder startups does YCombinator fund?
Anyone else notice how this kind of overlaps with the recent Malcolm Gladwell book's thesis?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell...
I know a lot of Europeans who went back to the EU when they had health problems. This would even work for an American, because many EU hospitals will treat anyone who comes in needing care.

It infuriates me when anti-universal-healthcare people (they still exist) argue that US healthcare is superior because foreigners come over here for medical care. What year are they living in, 1979? Now, people leave the US for critical treatment.
No, nor does it mean that everyone should stop watching TV.

Just too much TV or too much drinking is usually a symptom of some larger personal issue.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDI15t8xa7U&NR=1
You're going to need more than 29 words.

What is your idea? Why will people like it? Why would a hacker want to work on it? Is it viable? Is it viable with the economy in the toilet? Where are you? Do you want your tech founders to move to you? How do people contact you? Etc.
Open source bounty sites are, in my experience, geared toward solving developer problems. It's rare to see non-coders visit an OSS bounty site and create a bounty.

We're geared toward normal people funding the software projects. Normal people don't want to compile sourcecode; we provide developers incentives for distributing binaries. Normal people don't use wiki markup to describe what they want; we let them use a WSIWYG editor.

Normal people also use different platforms (mostly Windows and Mac). Making binaries work across platforms (12 people want Windows, 5 people want Mac, 3 only care about the source...) and giving the developer the tools to field those platforms (Is there demand for a Mac port? Is it worth my time?) is something that hasn't been solved yet by any bounty system I've seen.
Malcolm Gladwell: Wise guy
Color me cynical, but I suspect that the characteristics of Agile that made it attractive to management are the ones that lead to failure. Management looks at Agile and thinks, hey, we can stuff a bunch of interchangeable programmers in a tiny war room and get them pounding out code immediately - none of that 'measure twice, cut once' nonsense - just fingers on the keyboard and reams of code pounded out from day one.
Barak Obamas Deal Obama Biography
The US healthcare system is terrible. Although some argue that universal healthcare leads to long waits and difficulty getting appointments in some specialties, it's just as bad over here as it is in, say, Canada or the UK. We have all those problems to an equal degree... and medical bills, on top of that.

In Manhattan, some of the top doctors have stopped participating with insurance companies, because the companies (which are manned by the sorts of people who would be in guard towers of prison camps in other kinds of societies) often refuse to pay for bullshit reasons, leaving the doctor unpaid, or "negotiate" pay that is below subsistence level for the doctor. We've had a two-tier health system (insured vs. not) for decades, but now we're approaching a three-tier system (self-insured vs. crappily insured vs. not) because of the sliminess of insurance companies and the crappiness of their policies.

In addition, doctors have to carry malpractice insurance, the premiums of which are set, in large part, on a statewide basis. Base rates can vary by almost two orders of magnitude within a specialty, from a few thousand dollars per year to a few hundred thousand. The high-premium states lose doctors and it becomes almost impossible to get a specialist if you live in one of those states, with 3-month waits for appointments not being uncommon.

The US healthcare system is terrible; it's not just "left-wing propaganda" on the continent that says so. It actually is horrendous. Even many center-right Republicans are coming around to the need for an overhaul of the system.
The "library of foundational proofs" sounds a little like this graph of hyperlinked theorems online: http://us.metamath.org/mpegif/mmset.html#overview
Hang on, if you're unhappy, you're obviously not going to go out socializing cos nobody wants to talk to a miserable face and alcohol will only amplify the unhappiness.

When I'm unhappy I like to be on my own and ride it out, watch tv shows online to cheer me up. So TV shows make me happy not TV makes me unhappy.

Open Question: How many hours of TV do you watch per week? I'm on around 3hrs (Heroes, Prison Break, Entourage) but all my shows are watched online without the silly commercials.
I recommend adding as many ideas as you can and even fund stuff out of your pocket. I click browse and all I see is "test" and "wordobe test"...