skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Short answer, never, particularly when you are still calling yourself a start-up. Once you've 'made-it', you aren't a start-up anymore, you're a big business, and big businesses still need lots of work to keep them successful.

Long answer - when your piece of art is complete.
A great book, 'Finite and Infinite Games' lays out my feelings on this.
Your first STEP in success is when you are really in the game. I've launched a few companies that nobody cared about. Got no traction. There was very little reason to keep revising the product/project because I wasn't in the game.
Other times you hit on something that people care about, and that is making a difference. You work like mad to churn out new products and satisfy the demand. You are in the game. That is success level 1, and it goes from there.

I think the big problem with saying "how do you know when you've made it?", is that this isn't a sprint or a marathon. It's a life. You've never 'made it' in life, if you're done, then you're dead. When do you know when you have breathed enough? When you have eaten enough?
If you stop working on your product/business, it will go stale and die.

You can 'get out', sell, hire others to take over the day to day tasks, but what do you do with yourself then?
I think some of PG's comments regarding the 'artist' in programmers/innovators is just that. An artist doesn't stop painting once they have sold one painting. So your current project leads to the next, etc.

I would say to answer your question, that only you can decide when your current piece of art is done.
If you're making great money, fantastic. If not, maybe you love this project so much that you'll continue with it anyway.

Basically, have an exit strategy, targets, goals, etc. But none of these are 'finishing lines', they are markers on the coarse. Like aid stations on a cicuitus marathon coarse. They let you know that you have reached a significant marker, but don't stop running, 'cause you are still in the race.

There are still things to do, problems to solve, art to build.
The journey is the destination.
That's what you say now, but if you ever get to that point, you'd miss the excitement of the whole process and you'd want to do it again. So free time is not something an entrepreneur would really want.
Straight from the src:
www.netsol.com
Everyone else is 2ndary, they try to force some hosting option on you.
I see your point, but I disagree.

Keeping the big three alive would make sense if it was the first time it had happened, and it was a matter of time and liquidity before they would be back on track. Unfortunately it seems that they are unable to compete in the global arena, and that this is a structural issue, not a liquidity issue. The only thing that will come from a bailout is a few more years. The money would be better spent reeducating all those people that are soon going to be out of a job anyway.

Regarding your last comment: I just read a comment thread on Reddit about credit cards that I frankly found disturbing. It seems like it is the norm in America to use credit cards for major purchases, in between job money, end of the month money etc. etc. and it doesn' seem that anyone finds this problematic. I think you will be forced to structurally realign your economy in the next few years - spending money you don't have isn't a viable long term strategy, and that's basically what the average American has done for the past many years. All the bailouts in the world won't change the fact that the basic problem is that America is consuming more than it produces. It'll only add to the debt.
I think that #0 should be: "Actually start. Don't just talk; do."
cool.

first thing i wanted to do was to add some companies and find out what the highest salaries were.

unfortunately i had to hit next a bunch of times to get there. would be kind of cool if there were sort features or the option to control how many results per page.

can you refer me to the previously posted link to the source data you are using?
I've used IIPImage to good effect (IIPImageServer to serve, IIPMooViewer as client):

http://iipimage.sourceforge.net/images.shtml
Heh, yeah, I know, I was just light-heartedly picking a hole in the statement many people make about time being more important than money.

As an aspiration, it's noble, but when pressured people nearly always find a reason to make more money instead of taking the time ;-)
A Windows Mobile phone, such as Samsung BlackJack 2.
Crap headline. This has been going on since the app store first came out. Everytime I see an app using UIProgressHud or something similar, I laugh.

Google isn't setting a trend here. They're just following.
My experience selling a draft novel on the Amazon Kindle
FriendFeed and level playing fields
Yep -- I confused you. Sorry about that. I should have stuck to the initial argument instead of providing commentary.

The argument I was examining was "who are we to decide?" I think it was answered nicely.

To respond:

Science is not about "a good feeling" about something. It is about mastery. Constructing a model that can be tested. I mean, just think about it -- when I drop a hammer, I can tell you each second how far away it is going to be, its velocity, and its momentum. It's complete mastery to our degree to measure. That's science.

I object to scientists becoming social activists, no matter what the cause. Social activism involves fear mongering, public opinion manipulation, politics, and "messages" instead of information. Science involves none of this, and if scientists continue to confuse their jobs and their art with others, then science will become cheap and politicized even more than it is today. We'll have "conservative" scientists and "liberal" scientists and each group will have the usual internet echo chambers to talk into. It's already heading that way.

As far as the chicken little, "why risk it?" argument, I'd refer you to Occam. We can either believe that the climate will continue along some course and the associated ecosystems will adapt as they always have or we can start adding all of these variable like sea level or ice cover and then draw some alarming conclusions. I like to KISS.
Orlowski is the sole reason I unsubscribed from the Register. I hope he will not be frequent here.
(spoken like Jon Lovitz' Master Thespian): but he was only mmmmarketing!
Bernanke and the risk of deflation
Why Can't Microsoft Make Money Online?
Lori Drew bullying case was not about technology
Yes. To clarify for everyone else, he means this:

http://www.dash.net/

and it works exactly the way that Seth describes, even down to Dash users participating to provide real-time traffic updates.

It's an in-car device like a Garmin but internet-oriented. Personally, I'm not sure if it's a viable niche -- it's somewhere in between the Garmin and the iPhone. And the idea of Dash users providing real-time data is obviously a chicken and egg problem.

In any case, maybe Seth's idea was an improvement over radio reports in 2000 but is already behind what Dash, Google Maps or Yahoo maps does today.
Wait, what? As a citizen I pay double taxes. I get a credit up to ~ $83k, and after that I get double taxed.
I disagree, but I think it's because of our separate interpretations of "free time". I don't mean free time in a sense of doing nothing, I mean it in a sense of hobbies, travel, family and pursuing projects that may or may not be monetizable. I'll always have a business of some sort I'm taking part in, the variable will hopefully be the amount of time dedicated to it.
Idea: Custom On-Demand Clothing. How, or Why Not?
$15 milllion net worth after tax, or $1 million yearly income, whichever comes first. Today's dollars, adjusted for inflation.
No, I learned that the SEC's Office of the Inspector General released a report detailed what they did for the last 6 months. Since the Inspector General of the SEC's job is to investigate the SEC, this is expected.

If you read the actual report, it is barely scathing. Cuban tries to make it seem as if 6 out of 3500 employees doing something criminally wrong is a large number. Since that is less than 1%, I would like to seem competing numbers for other federal agencies.

Also, the SEC cooperated fully with all investigations. See page 67 of the report:

During this reporting period, there were no instances where information was refused.
"Many of these people go unheralded. This makes those I mentioned successful 'idea spreaders' in my book."

I agree with this, but I guess I would differentiate between someone who comes up with an insight on their own (even if someone else has come up with something similar before), and someone like Gladwell who just reads books and then rewrites the good parts to make the ideas spread.
Haha true but what a way to go down.

Death aside, what's the startup equivalent? There may not be one but I envision the cofounders getting ripped from their desks by the foreclosure people as they're trying to finish one last line of code...
Absolutely. Newton only became Newton when it was shown the ideas worked, and better than Leibniz, for instance. Same deal with Einstein. Their contemporaries knew they were onto something, but a healthy dose of skepticism was reserved until the ideas gained empirical weight. Still not all of their "good" ideas were validated.

Testing ideas, to me, is the best way to change how we think, especially when we're proven wrong. If we know how the experiment will turn out, there's little point in actually running it. And there, I think the process you describe for startups isn't so different than the process for science. In each, the hunch points the direction but the apparatus must be built to verify or reject it. But it's hard for me to see one hunch, rather than a tested series, leading to a true discovery.
No matter where you are, "made it" is always one step above you.
You're right there. All of the retired people I've seen look really old and worn down.
That's the point. You play pong with the moving windows that it creates. Nothing malicious here.
> Microsoft is huge - it has the resources to tackle google on search.

What exactly do you mean by "tackle"? Microsoft has enough software engineers, but they don't have enough time and search data to catch up. Google has enormous log files from user's search behaviour and experience battling search spammers. And this is what Microsoft is lacking and cannot buy.
or an s60 phone such as the nokia e71
Just a reminder that it still won't solve your power problem. I don't actually know that many people who have a car charger for their phone.
Kamaelia - Distributed Programming in Python
They were Greeks not Romans ;-) That's the problem heh.
The source data is linked to in the About section in the website. I don't have the original HN thread, but the blog post itself was this: http://realtimecollisiondetection.net/blog/?p=70
A fine reminder to clear your history after any "personal" browsing. On the other hand, I seem to be able to disable this by disabling the browser history entirely.
This is interesting. Last time I downloaded it, I couldn't get it working on OS X in a couple of hours, so I abandoned it. Maybe I should look again? Or ... even better ... maybe someone else will make it work, and I'll reap the rewards of massive human parallelism?
Hi Paul

I'm surprised you didn't tie this in to due diligence checks done by VCs, and its impact on startups, etc. The parallels are strong, and you've commented on that impact before (at FOWA in 2007, I think).

Regards,
Terry Jones
Great article - because the MVC has a place, but not as the only way to make robust, easy to code and recode, web applications. MVC is not the same thing as a framework either - and because Rails,Cake, or Django chooses an implementation strategy, the "design pattern" origins of MVC get lost. Agile gets thrown in there, and it's messy definitions time.
At least MVC being tossed around doesn't offend me as much as the "Enterprise" and "OOP" Java bureaucrat's rabidness.

At least with electrical engineering there are blueprints and "parts". UML does't let me work the way I think (although, when I have enough time, I don't mind it). Can anyone recommend something better than wireframing, IA, and psuedo code for code design? I think that's what's required when you need to pacify those afraid of venturing beyond MVC.
Replication is trivial once someone else has already shown you how to test the idea. But only if they're right will you be too.
Anybody who does work just so that he can one day not work, will find his contentment threshold pretty quickly. He will find a satisfactory job with enough free time and will stop dreaming.
Thanks! Something running s60 is interesting to me since it seems like it would be easier to program. My current phone is a treo 650 (palm), and I am disappointed at how high the barrier to programming it is.

I want to be writing blog entries like this one: http://blog.danielwinter.de/archives/13
In my experience, the problem's often the opposite. With most startups, the accountant's job is to tell you when you're being woefully irresponsible with your cash and are about to fail because of it. That's harsh news to give to a friend.

The first company I worked at had an accountant that was a friend of all 3 founders. She was quite well qualified - Ph.D in accounting, taught at Bentley, had previously worked at several big companies. But she was not comfortable saying "No, we don't have the money for this" when the founders did something stupid, like hiring an expensive engineer sight-unseen from China or delaying the product launch by 6 months while the engineering team pursued a different direction.

We ended up going out of business rather abruptly when a $6M bridge loan from the VCs came due and there was no cash to pay it off. My boss (who was the only member of the management team who wasn't previously friends with the accountant) was incredulous that she could have forgotten that we needed $6M ASAP. Of course, she hadn't forgotten at all. She just wasn't comfortable telling management "Your dreams are about to go up in smoke unless we get more cash quickly and drastically cut expenses." Which is completely understandable in a friend, and completely unforgivable in an accountant.
I thought the startup equivalent was to kick your creditors down a bottomless pit...
Reality Check - Guy Kawasaki
There's very little to it. As I said, sometimes a function is only a function. I'm wary of providing an example, because the discourse on programming languages is distorted by being conducted at the level of code snippets when what really matters is whole systems, which are harder to talk about. But since you asked, I went through my code and picked at random the first reasonable example of what I'm talking about:

(defun ranges-intersect? (range1 range2)
(destructuring-bind (c1 c2 r1 r2)
range1
(destructuring-bind (xc1 xc2 xr1 xr2)
range2
(return%
(and (or (= c1 0) (= xc2 0) (> xc2 c1))
(or (= c2 0) (= xc1 0) (> c2 xc1))
(or (= r1 0) (= xr2 0) (> xr2 r1))
(or (= r2 0) (= xr1 0) (> r2 xr1)))))))

(The ugly return% is because this code also compiles to Javascript, but that is another story.)

See? It's just a function. In the past, I would have made a Range class with an Intersects method. Now, I don't, and my life is better.

What's valuable is that this function isn't tied to other functions and it isn't tied to any state. That's what I mean by orthogonal. If I want to use this somewhere, I just use it. I'm not forced to pick up a whole glob of other stuff that's stuck to it. I'm not forced to create anything in order to call it - except a couple of lists of four numbers, if I don't have them handy, but this kind of thing is an order of magnitude more lightweight than defining specialized types and creating instances of them; especially since, if your object model is a rich one, your types inevitably reference other types, which makes creating things hard and forces you to jump through hoops just to get at one lousy function. Eventually people create entire technical disciplines called things like "dependency injection" and frameworks to jump through the hoops for them. No one seems to notice that they're taking a complicated thing and making it more complicated.

You may object that writing "new Range(c1,c2,r1,r2)" isn't much different than "(list c1 c2 r1 r2)". All I can say is, yes it is, utterly different in a way that has profound implications for how I build programs - but this isn't the sort of thing that a code snippet can make clear.

What's really going on here, I think, is that "functional programming" is just a tautology. No one has programmed without functions since the 1950s (assembly language excepted). But the facilities for defining functions were low-level for a long time, which made complex programs hard to write. One way of looking at OO is that it was an attempt to fix this problem by adding the abstractions of class and method over top of low-level functions. This turned out to be a mistake, I think. A much better fix is to just have higher-level functions.
Nokia and Berkeley are piloting software which monitors traffic via mobile devices that have GPS - they say they are working on an iphone version. http://www.traffic.berkeley.edu/

Some stand-alone GPS, if given traffic data, will take that into account when trip planning. http://www.gpsreview.net/traffic/

All he's saying to do is combine the two into a single application. Not that interesting IMO.
The Top Sites From New Zealand on Alltop.com
Thanks to Guy and the team for putting New Zealand on the international stage...
Summary: Amazon has a pretty good setup for publishing to the Kindle. He's sold roughly a copy a day since August for a couple of bucks a pop. He seems rather upbeat about this.
Web funding norms are a context, not guidance
I'm surprised the FBI did this investigation in the first place.

But I think it may not be news, but it is important to call it out.
I have spoken to a member of google maps mobile team (they program for all platforms) and asked him how blackberry compares in difficulty to android or windows. He said that blackaberry is pretty bad, but the most painful ever is Symbian. 2 cents here.
You should meet my Grandparents. My Grandma especially is a firecracker. She's done more this past year than some do in a decade.
"Even Smalltalk and Self use blocks (i.e. closures or lambdas) instead of providing some lightweight class/object literal notation."

Blocks are objects! You can use them with various methods and they have state too!

The syntax is the lightweight class/object literal notation! Check out the class `BlockContext`.
I can only remember Gladwell using two statistically relevant pieces of information...

I can remember at least eight statistically irrelevant anecdotes...

Which is precisely why authors use "statistically irrelevant" anecdotes. Because they help you emotionally connect to the material and remember it better.
No, if you put the 6K on the card, you're limit is still the same, but you are charged less interest. You can then take money off the card as you need it and you are then paying interest on the current balance. e.g.

Balance = 20,000
Payment of 6,000 Balance = 14,000 - interest is now calculated on this balance
next week take out 500 Balance is now 14,500

and so on.

'will be more useful than more debt juggling.'
it's not juggling debt it's minimising you're costs. Not minimising your costs is the difference between having enough cash to be a startup for another 6 monts or not

30,000 @ 20% interest = $6,000 p/a
30,000 @ 3% interest = $900 p/a

To maintain the 30,000 debt on a card you'd have to come up with 6,000 a year if it's a personal loan it costs you $900 a year - so fo a couple of phone calls you can change your costs by more than $5,000.

'I would be cautious about falsifying a credit application.'
I never suggested any falsification, this is debt management 101.
I don't think the title of the article is accurate - this looks more like a simple generic data-flow kernel. It's probably good for tasks that can take advantage of concurrent decompositions but I don't see any obvious support for distributed computation.
"And you still maintain encapsulation, too, because the returned function may access stuff that was only available inside the containing closure (where it was dispatched)."

That only works if your functions can maintain state and if they can, well they're basically objects aren't they...
Twenty Rules for Amazon Cloud Security
That code was proof of principle, just playing. No claim to have written any particularly efficient prime number generator.

I'm glad you found it instructive.
Scrivener: Outline, Edit, Storyboard, Write.
Man, this is what I want in a programming IDE.
If your ideas are only valuable when other people believe them, then if everyone else died of some plague that you happened to be immune to, it would suddenly be impossible to have good ideas. That doesn't seem right.
Interesting. My goals are to write home automation and GPS tracking apps, ideally in python. Stuff like that open-garage-door-when-phone-gets-home project. Any UI work would be web pages, so I guess I want a good web browser.

I'd suspect that problems with implementing gmaps wouldn't affect me. My issues are more like "can I code and deploy from linux?" and "do I get access to the camera, network, speaker, etc?"
Well, strictly speaking, they're closures.

There's a lot of overlap between objects and closures, though using one or the other will frame the problem in a slightly different way.

See also: http://people.csail.mit.edu/gregs/ll1-discuss-archive-html/m...
Ocean currents can power the world, say scientists
It's an amusing word, but a bad sign when one uses it.
Cool but I wished the post gave more details.
Agreed... It's a dull sunday - made me chuckle.
Having created something that's made life (offline, RL) better for a huge, broad swath of people.
MIT OpenCourseWare - Linguistics and Philosophy
Sounds like he wants a dressing gown, or maybe a slanket.

The Left Foot Company have been doing a similar thing with shoes for a number of years, you get your feet scanned in one of their shops, and then choose styles on the website and they are made to fit your feet, robotically. Except, they got to try them. ( https://shop.leftfootcompany.com/2007/Process.aspx )

I don't know why it's impractical for an etailer to be an etailor, but I guess the current system of basing clothes sizes on a couple of measurements which vary between brands and styles would have to become much more specific before it would work well.
Check out Mologogo: http://mologogo.wikispaces.com/
Sometimes the best way to get a working technology is as a spin-off from a practical implementation.

I'm thinking about how building a superconducting particle accelerator led to great advances in the production of superconducting titanium-niobium. It was because these components were going to be used, that the effective technology emerged.
Teams plug in to video game to evaluate talent in NBA
Figuring out how to test an idea is a "tame" problem, in that the problem has a definitive formulation and stopping rule.

Coming up with an entirely new paradigm is, if not exactly a "wicked" problem, some other type of complex problem so difficult and uncommon that we don't even have a vocabulary to describe it.

So when I say that coming up with ideas is more difficult than testing them, what I mean is that coming up with an idea belongs to a more difficult class of problem, even if it is occasionally easier to create a specific idea than to test that specific idea.