skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ask HN: What tasks stop you from working on your product?
In my own experience, and from reading Hacker News, I've noticed that there is still a lot of friction when starting a startup. Things like incorporating (choosing which type, what state, actually filing, etc), payroll, taxes, and so on. These are all tasks that just seem to take founders away from working on their real goal.

I was wondering what tasks take you away from working on your goals -- what things do you wish you could just quickly take care of and get back to work?
Hi smoody,

No I've never investigated memcachedb. Lots of the tools people have been suggesting are new to me. I'm reading and trying to learn as much as I can so I can communicate better with folks that have been doing this level of programming for years, but it takes a while since there's a lot to grasp here, and I have to keep it all "in perspective" relative to the business requirements.

Thanks for your suggestion, I'll keep it in mind and mention it to the engineers I discuss this project with when I'm ready to hire them. When an engineer can explain something to me in simple terms that I can understand -- even when I don't really have the background to understand it -- I know I've found an engineer who has the kind of communication skills that make him exceptionally valuable to me.

:)
Agree - several of my friends are millionaires, but I don't consider them ultrarich. Neither do they sonsider themselves ultrarich.
So the point of this article is "Don't listen to late night infomercials promising overnight wealth?" Is that anything other than obvious? In fact isn't there an obvious corollary involving not reading Seth Godin's blog posts?
And what part of this post isn't common sense?
You didn't find it informative? That's unfortunate.

What is the audience of this forum. Looking through your list of submitted articles reveals no indication. For instance, your last submission was "Japanese Convenience Stores Thrive Despite Economic Downturn."

Foreign languages are very hard to learn. I know, I speak three. I didn't say anything about managing a foreign dev team, just that you should learn a new language. The world is flattening and I don't always want to speak English.

I don't know how 10 years of OOP correlates to a "juicy" blog post. All I can say is that in 13 hour, with close to 3500 unique visits, some people found it interesting.
Ingres will announce a new open source database platform on Nov.18th.
Green data rules at Web2 Summit launch pad
The planets are called a, b and c. I think we can remember that.
Dan Dennet - Power of meme's
I found the stuff about photos interesting. I'm a fairly heavy photographer and use a mac. I don't throw away anything other than pure white or pure black photos. I keep 3 copies of all my pictures, organized like he suggests - in directories by YY/MM. I rsync from the main disk to the second disk as soon as I put new photos on the first disk. I rsync from the second disk to the third disk when I think of it. I have 3 1 TB drives (the last one I bought cost C$ 120) and about 600 megs of photos. I only save the raw images, not processed images.

I like my system better than his, at least for photography. I should make more of an effort to backup other stuff (for which I do ad-hoc backups, usually with tar files).
Would I be using Ubuntu if it was as popular as Mac OS X? I don't think so. Part of the allure is the geekiness.
"Also, advertising has the capability to go "viral" now. In a matter of days, they can spread a meme across the internets. :-)"

True, but a lot easier said than done, haha.
Great article although I think it makes the most sense to force caching for a base set of CSS and JS and then have your code that changes more often in a separate file.
Funding for Open Source Artificial Intelligence
I cook every day (it's pretty much a hobby) and almost always spend less than that per month for food. That includes cooking for other people at least once a week and odd recipe experiments. No shortage of meat either... I just finished off a package of chicken tonight that cost $4 and lasted five meals, including one with another person.

I'm having people over for tacos this weekend, pork butt was on sale for $1.50/lb today. One pound of meat makes quite a few tacos, they'll be cheaper than Taco Bell's. And carnitas rules, it will taste like a million bucks. I usually buy what's on sale as it's a good way to stay out of rut, I just make whatever works well with what I bought.

Now I could go buy a piece of kobe beef and spend the $150 in one trip, but for me it's more fun to come up with tasty meals from more basic (but yet good quality) ingredients. If I actually tried to spend as little as possible it could get really low and ramen wouldn't be involved.
It's actually quite possible to just ignore those tasks, work on your goal, and then retroactively take care of them once your goal's on it way.

There's a big task that has to be done beforehand, though, and is a huge pain: figuring out what people want (and will pay for). It's much harder than it seems.
Whole Brain Emulation – A Roadmap (2008) [pdf]
If it sounds like propaganda, it is propaganda.
Carolyn Porco: Cassini Pinpoints Source of Jets on Saturn's Moon Enceladus
Glad to hear that you liked the book. I am looking forward to getting the beta book myself, but have three books on my table right now. Hopefully soon.
I agree about his photography comment.

I use an 80gb harddrive with 2 partitions (one for linux and a small 15gb windows partition), so I'm more than just ruthless. I have to be resourceful. I have to be no-food-to-eat resourceful. Dumpster diving resourceful, lol.
Poverty builds character.
I always thought back then that I would get one once the price came down, now the prices are quite low but I have no desire to get one because they're so prevalent that I no longer need one.
Your daily calorie needs, yes. I think what you'd really be forsaking is not meat (hamburger is relatively cheap) but fresh fruit and vegetables, milk, and most of all, variety. So I'd dispute "healthy." Sure it'll work when you're young, but 10 years of it, and say hi to cancer. And your point about your "coffee budget" just emphasizes it.

In the interest of fair disclosure, I should admit that the reason I had such a low food budget was so I could have more money for beer ;-)
Your second point seems very good to me. I admit, I do not take the care to write in english prime (english without 'to be') all the time. I should have while posting on it. LPTS Irony Check Fail. (Also, there are other uses of to be rather then identity, such as the figure of speech 'it's ok'. It's OK to use those.)

Using is or to be causes sloppy thinking, because you are cashing out your description of the universe without relativizing it to a frame. A seems B to instrument C, or A seems B relative to nervous system C. If you are talking about quantum physics, you can't discharge that. If you use the is of identity, your language discharges the observer as a feature. Quantum physics Fail.

This guy I was talking too seemed pretty interested in this stuff. If you want to take our science and apply what we learn to the world at large, then taking the language we use to talk about things in science (no is of identity in quantum physics equations or papers) and applying that grammar seems to me a very smart way to see the world more like science revels it.

It turns out this makes you sound exactly like a sufi or a zen monk a lot of the time, but that should surprise no one, since mysticism is a branch of neurology.
Reminds me of a level from Lemmings.
I just bought 2 chicken breasts. Price on the package was Canadian $7.50. So say US $6 (guaranteed to be more in SF). That for me, was 2 meals for one, though obviously nice meals (the vegetables, spices, rice probably increased the price of each dinner to about $7-$8 US). So basically I just spent 1.5 days of my budget on 1 meal.
Heh, I totally agree.

Unfortunately, these tasks do have to be done at some point, and they aren't the goal of your startup, so they do take you off-course. Minimizing the time they take would be a good thing, I think.
Clearly your news index lags the market price of the stock.. I wonder what use can that be?
This is more true than most people believe. Particularly people that haven't tried hard.
SEO is dead. Advertising is dead. Linkbait is living.
All of these numbers are ridiculously high. I could afford not to die even when I was earning half of what they say the minimum is for my area. I suspect that this is politically motivated (e.g. they highlight all the jobs they don't think pay enough -- but they don't highlight all the expenses they could argue are too high).
SwellJoe above identified me as a man and I said I wasn't. What am I missing?

This is what you get when sex education doesn't get taught at an early age. Boys have a..
No.

The point is that the behavior changes based on whether you are running from the command line or from inside a script, that this is completely arbitrary, and that there was no override possible for this behavior. When run from the command line, simulations for combinations of gains that caused the system to career away did indeed career away, they just continued to do so for the full length of time specified in the function call. That kind of abject flakiness renders the program unsuitable for professional use in that you can't plan for those kind of quirks. I had invested hours by the time I worked out what the bug was, and invested hours more trying to fix it. I finally had to give up, after investing my time and effort, because the platform was fundamentally and fatally incapable of doing what it was asked.

It is completely unacceptable for a package to have such wildly different (and undocumented) behavior for the same exact function call. Matlab was indeed stupid. It was a buggy minefield of stupidity when I was using it.

Finally, it looks like your defense of this awful weakness on the part of Matlab is, ironically, a result of your commitment to the platform rather than a reasoned response to the case outlined.
Product Reviews:SEVEN FOR ALL MANKIND HIGH WAIST BOOTCUT HOLLAND
uh, this gets posted once a month. we get it
no, haskell. clojure in the end runs on the jvm. the ghc compiler has parallelism baked into it in a fundamental way.

don't get me wrong, i like clojure, but it won't be better for multicore until the jvm is better for multicore
Why not? It seems like if we can see them they could see us - unless you just mean our planets are smaller so they'd need a better telescope than we can make?
I don't expect that I can work hard. I do my best to avoid the laziness. Yes, I am only 21 and have much to learn. But my experience told me, it is not that one work so hard to get success, instead, it is that the rest of us just too lazy to pursuit what we really want.
indeed, look at the great depression, look at japan in the 90s. in each of these secular bear markets, markets rebounded for gains as high as 100% from the previous low...yet still the ultimate direction of the market was downward. DJIA will rebound at some point to around 12k, then back down to 5k. it will be most amusing watching the last hopeful traders plow back into the market only to fall into an obvious bear trap.

ultimately we will get hyperinflation as the govt prints literally trillions to monetize the various debts of the govt. the strong dollar now is just a head fake as the yen carry trade and other various forex arbitrages unwind.

all real estate will lose 50%. everything. that is what happened in japan in the 90s...even desirable tokyo condos lost 50%. 50% will be the minimum downside for real estate.

actually its worth noting that when japan went down the toilet in the 90s, they were the world's biggest saver and lender. we are the world's biggest borrower. so don't expect anything as gentle as japan's ten-year recession.

expect an end to all of this around 2020, and this will only end when people see taking on debt, any debt, as about as attractive as sharing needles with a junkie. when this is over its impossible to say what the economy will look like, but you can be sure people will be dealing in tangibles...cash or barter.

the best thing you can do now is -preserve capital-. you are going to need it to survive. forget the charlatans telling you to "double down" because they have some anecdotes of companies exploding out of temporary down times....none of your luminaries have lived through anything like this, and indeed many of the superstars of the roaring twenties were literally gutted by the market turmoil of the 30s...they just refused to believe the downside would last very long, they thought it was all just a buying opportunity...little did they know how far things would fall.
Brain implants show promise for paralysis
$6 is a lot for a whole chicken, which comes with two breasts, two thighs, two legs, and two wings.

Yes, you can spend that much for a chicken in SF, but you don't have to.
Alright, well, I just expressed an opinion inelegantly, but may it remain just one. I'll stop trolling already.
We don't get the credit because we're nerds; The suits will.

Suits believe they are progressing things. And the rest will always credit the nearest authoritative looking type.

Worse still, many scientist and engineers credit the suits themselves.
Maybe try not calling it 'market index'. This is a familiar (sounding) term to most people, so they will assume they know what it means, and wont look for an alternative definition.

Since it is an original metric that you have created, why not give it an original name? Even better if you can link that name to your company name, think 'Zestimate' from Zillow - easy to say, obviously a 'new term' so something that I need to learn, and feels like it belongs to the company, due to the 'Z'

All that said, I'm still not quite sure what real world problem this site solves..
Because MV has resources that those other places don't have. If you can succeed without those resources, MV isn't the place for you. However, if you need them and acquiring them costs more than $9k/year somewhere else, MV is cheaper.
Netflix CEO Thinks the Time is Ripe for Web TV
History promises inflation, not deflation.

BINGO

all that money being printed now with reckless abandon, and the tens of trillions more we will print as the boomers retire...its gotta chase something...it will chase commodities through the roof. oil will go to $500. your weekly grocery bill will be over $1000. now's a great time to stockpile the black stuff before it goes crazy. it will be amusing watching futures traders get gutted as they open up shorts on oil futures presuming it will keep falling...
Instead of 5 years how about you move to China and study / communicate (as opposed to having fun) everyday for half a year to the fullest of your potential, you'll be up and talking and blowing Moser's article to smithereens.

I say this because when I moved to Australia (I'm Chinese) I was speaking English in 3 month, given I was 9 yrs old - but it just shows how much more important your environment is compared to how much time you study a language (unless its a very close language).
What about photons?
We should've realized there was a problem when low income workers making below the poverty line became the hot new commodity in finance. Whereas in the 80s, young men in finance spent hours calling rich people insisting they give them money, in the last 5 years, they have instead been calling up poor people insisting to give them money.
So the process is something like this:

The government encourages banks to engage in risky lending.

Banks, with government support, make unusually risky loans and get into a bunch of trouble when the loans start going bad. This causes the banks to begin failing.

The government takes 700 billion dollars to fix the problem that they contributed to creating.

It is quickly discovered that the government is not spending the money effectively and banks aren't doing what the government intended them to do with it

Now... these Harvard grads suggest that rather than giving the money back to the American people to start over where the government went wrong in the first place, we instead entrust the government to create federal banks and hope they don't screw it up again. Sounds like a great plan. Really.

Sources on the govt's role in it all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_policies_and_the_sub...
fair enough ..
yes. i wish most sites would go on a markup diet.
Notpron: online game uses a variety of Internet techniques to make puzzles
That made me chuckle. Of course the fact that I've made it to another Friday with a (nice) paycheck helped.
Was a bit disappointed, I expected some actual application of the algebraic theory here.
Watching recorded programs at a time determined by a schedule set by a corporation is very old school...

...but continually declaring different times as the point where the transition happens from the old to the new school is just naive.

It is the same as the whole Web x.0 thing. Its more useful as a marketing tactic but you should not try to assign discrete periods of time to technologies that are continually evolving.
If it does not sound like propaganda, it is definitely propaganda.
The only tasks which I find stop me from working on my product are various administration and customer support chores. The one-time items like incorporation are trivial in terms of time-cost.

Being forced to step away from development has actually saved me more trouble that it's taken away. Being forced to take a breather to tally up expenses or polish up some documentation takes my mind away from the development task at hand and helps give me a better perspective on things when I return. On far more occasions than I'd care to admit, I'll find myself thinking about the 'absolutely essential' work I was intently doing to improve my product and realize it was either completely unnecessary or else could be done in a better manner.

Those insights would not likely be gained if I had been focused entirely on development. Mix it up.
It has other flaws as well.

The most obvious flaw: a "living wage" should be the same in areas within short commuting distance of one another. Just live in whichever place is cheaper. An example:

Living wage in New York City is $7.72, while that in Jersey City or Hoboken is $11.28; the main difference is rent ($484 in New York, $884 in Jersey). So a person making only $8/hour in Jersey City can simply live in New York City and commute (the exact opposite of what people do in real life).

Another flaw is that their costs for rent are a load of crap. Out of the 5 cities I feel qualified to comment on (NYC, Jersey City, Hoboken, New Brunswick and Union City), and only one (Jersey City) was remotely accurate.

[Edit: another serious flaw I just noticed is child care for 2 adults, 1-2 children. If we talk about the "living wage" for one adult, the other adult can provide child care for free. Or each adult need only make "living wage"/2.]
i would recommend clojure if you want to learn "a lisp"...along the positives you cite, it has a growing community, very active development, hype (in a good way), and deployability.
haskell is the only programming language that made me reconsider most of my assumptions. its not a tacked-on, hacked-on functional layer on something else, its mind-bending at a fundamental level. because haskell makes no comprimises, it also is showing some insane performance on multicore. its no mistake that the google mapreduce tutorials use haskell in some explanatory examples...

ten years from now, you will be dealing with a multicore world, and you will be using something that is conceptually tied to haskell. i see this as inevitable.

factor i have looked at again and again, worked through some trivial problems...not sure i will ever "get" it. i would brute-force understanding it were it to take off.
The only thing stopping me is that I'm not entirely confident with PHP yet. I'm working on small sample projects until I'm certain I can go out and build everything optimally.
Fulltime PhD :(
Fresh fruit and vegetables really aren't that expensive. An apple costs, what, fifty cents? A banana, about the same? And you can get a whole head of lettuce or half a bunch of celery for not much more than a dollar. Or potatoes... I forget how much they cost, but it ain't much. As for milk, buy a half-gallon every week for $2.50 and you've got all the calcium you need.

Variety remains the big problem, of course.
I do use iTerm. Terminal does not let me change the ASCII colors, which is a deal breaker for me. (Mostly because of Terminal's default for green - it's too light, and that's the color I use for comments in code.)
Deliberation....you can discuss and plan things all you want but at some point you have to just dive in
I wasn't sure someone would be able to summarize Winer's reasoning without imploding the Universe, but I guess we are still here, so kudos to you.

This whole 'the economic world is ending and you must learn to live in the new economy that is totally unlike the old economy because times are really bad' thing is getting really, really old.
This guy is the best economist i have ever seen, he has predicted 15 of the last 3 recessions.
Here's another weird bit: in my area the "medical" cost for one adult is $79 a month. But for two adults it's $226 a month. How the hell does that work?
Nouriel, is that you?
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Scaling Early
I have had less than stellar success with multiprocessing in non-trivial applications. There seems to be a lot of undesired "magic" going on, such as workers having access to global imports which causes all sorts of issues. If I want a worker to have access to a module, I should have to import it in that worker. The irony in trying to make a multi-processing module stop sharing state isn't lost on me.

I didn't actually read this article because it basically sounds like "this is a myth because of the GIL" which is just downright moronic. I completely disagree with the idea that concurrency is a "myth," I do however believe that it can be more trouble to successfully implement than in other languages designed for concurrency, even if (theoretically) all the tools are there.
Meet Australia's geekiest geek
I think mediocrity is sort of the complement to laziness, in that respect. For example, settling for a cubicle job that drains you because you don't think you can do anything better or don't want to--that's still "laziness" in the way you're describing.
Living on $800/mnth in Boston; Close to the floor. You could get closer, but you'd be compromising on an essential.

That's one room out of three (water incld.), food, T pass (no car), electric, gas (for heat/food), iPhone, net, wash/dry and general supplies.

Minimum wage here is 8.00/hr. But you'd get more and could work less than 40 hrs and make it; It can be done.

But living wage doesn't mean absolute minimum. I'd need double to enjoy myself without having thinking about money. It's meant to be temporary.
I think Mr Winer forgets the element of competition. Advertising is not just about highlighting good products it's also teaching consumers to pick your good products over your competitor's good product.

Is generic Ibuprofen different from Advil? I think not.
OpenSocial: State Of The Union Presentation
Prototyping fast, then start the second edition. Don't wait until you are confident enough to start. I find that whatever I do whatever language I use, I always do the best in the second version.
Iraq War Ends - Troops to return immediately