skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I see kickstarter projects as an investment, and thus I want to see a (potential) return.

They are pretty explicitly not an investment, though, and the site is quite clear about that. I don't think an equity model would serve them well in most of the markets they're working in, either; it would attract a different audience that they aren't targeting. Kickstarter is modeled off some successful crowdfunding efforts in the arts from the early 2000s, like Trent Reznor's and Radiohead's, and aims to connect fans, not investors, with people undertaking projects.

Would it really be an improvement if, instead of getting a limited-edition box set and maybe access to preview chats/etc., fans got an equity stake in Reznor's label in return for crowdfunding his next album? Do the thousands of fans who kicked in for his last crowdfunding drive even know what equity is and what to do with it? That seems like adding a huge amount of complication for something few fans actually want.
I guess I'm just an outlier. My work is just one part of my life. I work anywhere from 7 - 3, 8 - 4, 9 - 5; 10 4's if I want, or some crazy mix. When I'm not at work I take BJJ lessons, work on my freelance consulting and graphic design, read / write / spend time with my daughter. Catch movies; go out with friends occasionally on the weekends to see a UFC fight, that type of 'stuff'.

And I am still talking about productivity here in the way that because my life is organized into such organized blocks of time it's easy for me to go 120% during each time. I know I can't pay my mortgage, take Jiu Jitsu, have the quality of life I do if I don't work hard. So my job gets me 100% 8 hours a day, for 5 days a week. It's a compromise and one I'm willing to make.

Working at home or on flexible schedules (and again I have a pretty flexible schedule) sounds great until you realize that teams can't collaborate together as effectively; deadlines still need to be achieved, and so on. Really if you're having problems with productivity or with work not being finished in-time; then check what you're expecting of your team.

My .02.
Let's just hope that none of the capacitors break in the near future.

While it may look cool, it's a complete disaster for maintenance.
Equity just doesn't make sense at the level that most people are backing KS projects. What kind of equity are you expecting if you back a $100K project for $15? Maybe, if the project is wildly successful post Kickstarter, you'll see a couple hundred dollars?

There are also projects on Kickstarter that will never be profitable, not because of failure but by design. People use Kickstarter for art experiments and to fund parties and special events that don't generate a product that will be sold after the initial funding. You'd be better off going on AngelList if your goal is to fund projects for high amounts of money and get a return on your investment.

That said, I don't think there anything explicitly stopping someone on Kickstarter from giving small amounts of equity to backers, and it might be something that people do for very high tier ($5K-$10K) reward levels.
California is a big place. Go outside of the major metropolitan areas, and housing is affordable.

I wonder why companies don't take advantage of this?

For instance, put your startup in the San Joaquin valley. That doesn't have the cultural attractions of, say, the San Francisco area--but that's easy to deal with. During the week everyone should be busy with work. For the weekends, it's a couple hours drive to the Bay Area and you are saving so much in cost of living that you can easily afford hotel and restaurant costs for frequent weekends away.
Ok, but WHY ?
40% more chance of dying in the next 3 years, but WHY ? because the chair broke ?

They just did statistics and conclude that sitting is harmfull. Ok. But i'm sure we can also find that, for example, more men died than women. Does that mean being a man can kill you ?

I don't mean being sat most of the time isn't harmfull, but i mean this study doesn't PROVE anything.
Did I say this? I sure didn't mean to.
Show HN: Weekend project - just relaunched the Open Exchange Rates website
So they did actually reject you for one of those reasons or did you just not send them your CV?
"When using Java, I often change my program while it is running. recompiling classes on the fly. It works in most cases, and when it doesn't work, I believe other languages would fail as well."

I use Java fulltime at work and also have some problems where recompiling classes on the fly doesn't work. I never had the problem with Smalltalk. To assume the problems in one environment will be problems in another is exactly the problem with the original article. It assumes that because something similar exists in X, it would be the same in Y and have the same sorts of issues and rewards.

"Finally, lighttable is a proof-of-concept... It's not there yet; there are no reviews; leagues of smart engineers have tried to reproduce something similar and could not escape the POC phase at all."

A large chunk of what is in light table has existed in over a quarter century in Smalltalk environments and been used to build large and complex applications.
Solarized theme for Octopress
> Do that for a while and you'll see them start sweating
> and advertising their new open product.

No, you won't see that. They won't even notice. One of the mobile providers in my country currently runs an ad with a text like "Turns out 60% of smartphones are not so smart after all"—by that they mean, that those who bought smartphones don't even know how to configure them. Provider thus offers to help with setting up email, facebook, etc.
My point is: majority of the users are not even going to use everyting that manufacturer intended to be used on the device.
I tried writing some software for fun and while it worked for a little while, I'm still burned out. Now what?
This is going to be handy for our coming SaaS product. Thanks a ton really! (and slick site design, too).
All of those things happened to me, but my life hasn't been ruined. Not even a little. It was after my greatest failure that I finally learned to be happy. It wasn't easy, but it was important. The lone exception from your list is family. Failing in a startup cannot wreck your relationships. Only you can wreck relationships.

Turning it around, when I think of all the people I know who have gone through the problems you mention, few did so as a result of starting a company. In fact your list seems well within the bounds of normal life.

I'd love to hear an example of a person whose life was really ruined by a failed attempt to start a company.
Sure it would. If they want to become an Engineer help them. Obviously most of them won't. When you take a job, you're taking that lifestyle to boot. I remember the exact MOMENT I didn't want to do sales for the rest of my life. I was at an award conference for being in the top 5% of performers (yay me) and the discussion was on reality tv shows (oh so boring). One of the managers sitting across from me remarks how he's never seen most tv shows because he's worked 2nd shift for 15 years straight. It wasn't anger in his voice, or jealousy, it was simply a statement of fact.

Fact is, I did not want to be him working 4 - 1 for the rest of my life. Most sales jobs require odd hours, pushes on weekends, and a different skill-set than other types of jobs. No thanks, I'll take my 9-5 in exchange of other crappier hours, working on weekends, etc. You take a job, you know what effect it will have your lifestyle, that's really all I'm saying.
This was a statistical work from data on 220,000 people in a large Australian longitudinal study, and it claims to show that sitting time correlates with increased mortality independently of level of physical activity. Some thoughts:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2012/04/sitting-time-corr...

This is not the first study to propose this correlation, of course. There are a range of others from past years. One has to wonder what the mechanism is here, however - my suspicion is that it actually does all come back down to the level of physical activity in the end. In these massive studies the level of exercise and activity is reported by the participants. A person who stands and works is going to be somewhat more active than a person who sits and works, even though that time may not be categorized as physical activity, or reported differently.

Exercise is much like calorie restriction - the effects are so large in comparison to other factors we have easy access to that they are likely to creep into any study.

You might look at a recent study on activity and Alzheimer's disease that was one of the few to use measuring devices rather than reports of activity. One point that emerges is that a fair degree of ongoing low level activity and exercise won't be classified as such by the participants of study without machine measurement. Housework, taking out the trash, the small increase in energy expenditure from standing while waiting versus sitting while waiting, that sort of thing repeated day in and day out. How much you are sitting really does sound a lot like a proxy for how much activity you are undertaking when you are doing things that most people don't really count as activity.
I'd say that instant eval in the 'inventing on principle' fashion does make it novel and groundbreaking. Everything in it don't have to be. The core premise, a general purpose IDE based around those ideas is.
I did. I cleared out a few filters even though I am 95% sure they wouldn't match the emails. Wouldn't be the first time I was wrong though.

The main thing I find irritating is that it contains the Inbox label as well.

Any filter to send something to the trash says "Skip Inbox, Delete It".
Flattered to hear that--thanks, Kevin.
There's been a steady stream of "burnout" trip-reports, and without trying to sound condescending, most of them sound like luxury. Almost all "how to avoid burnout" advice is based on the assumption that YOU are fundamentally in control. I have yet to read the burnout story involving 3 competing jobs, 2 urgent deadlines, 1 screaming infant, a bout of flu and a sick relative. Well, sometimes you just have to knuckle down and get on with it. "Burnout" doesn't exist -- it's just a bunch of Stuff That Happens In Life. It's normal, it doesn't make you special, get over it, its boring.
LXDE + Compiz is quite nice if you don't want to go full tiling.
It's a false bifurcation to present only "local laws should reflect what the local culture finds acceptable in public", and "everyone should be really liberal in what they accept in public" as valid choices.

My position is simple: people are happier in countries where kissing in public is allowed. People have become happier in countries where things like kissing in public have become allowed.

Things like enlightenment, separation of church and state, democracy and checks and balances result in countries where people are generally happier and more free. That has been experimentally verified in a number of countries over the past few hundred years. Some sets of ethical beliefs produce results that are deemed better, even by those that object to part or all of those beliefs.

Cultural relativism cannot and must not be used to excuse repressive behavior.
I use eclipse every day and don't have much good to say about it except that it starts up regularly and i can't about intellij on my machine.
"So - really the only reason to have a pilot actually in the cockpit is if the side sending up the plane is worried they'll lose the ability to control it remotely."

Well the only thing worse than losing your fighter to enemy force, is the enemy force controlling your fighter against you.

With current technology I'd say the best possibility is single manned fighter controlling few unmanned fighters with two-way highly encrypted optical link. So that when engaging enemy the pilot would just send one of the unmanned against a identified target, bit like a more maneuverable missile. Then the AI would kick in.

In the future something like electronic tunneling radio might do the job. I really don't believe in AI doing the whole thing, scenarios are too complex. And there has to be someone taking the responsibility.
and the same discussion on being able to get a patent on APIs also happened - the most famous contestant at that time was Microsoft's .Net API patent application (now US7581231) - by now MS hold a series of patents on other APIs plus has a whole lot of additional API patent applications pending.

Now one could say that there are many patents that should have never been granted to MS or others (one of the better examples for MS would certainly be getting a patent on a Windows sudo implementation - US6775781) - but it might be indicative why MS went along the path to get patents on APIs vs trying to just copyright it.

Given that copyright protects the form of expression rather than the subject matter itself this pretty much explains why the copyright office would only require the first and last 50 lines of code.

While the answer with e.g. REST APIs that are pretty much exchangeable might be rather easy with more complex ones like system level or also the Java API this becomes pretty complex.

Maybe an analogy might help: If you take a car you might be able to patent and copyright most parts and functions but you certainly will not be able to copyright that you can drive the car per-se.

With an API like the Java API where the majority has been open sourced the actual use of the API (IMHO up to the wording of it or making this wording available in your application) is merely the general ability to use the solution overall - like diving a car or making it possible to drive along with other cars in traffic.

Then comes the question if Sun / Oracle have actually previously provided the permission to use the API directly or as part of other licenses (e.g. ClassPath)
I experimented with making a live updating HTML editor before, and one of the biggest problems with it is that sometimes your code will go through an intermediate stage, while you're typing it, where it contains infinite loops.

Now, if you could use JS.js¹ to sandbox the javascript in a webworker so that it never blocks the editor, and kill+reload every time you enter a key, well that would be cool.

1: http://tatiyants.com/introducing-js-js/
Cinnamon, while still an young project, is great. I've been using it on my desktop for a while now.

Two steps forward, one step back.
FTA:

"That was the conclusion of Matthew Aslett's analysis of recent data from Black Duck Software"

I'll just leave this here:

http://techrights.org/wiki/index.php/Black_Duck
Ken Robinson on Passion
It's because grad school grades are meaningless. No one ever asks about your grad school GPA. So "A" means "pass" and "B" means "fail".
There will never be a version of Chrome for iPhone and WP7 (nor Firefox, nor full Opera, etc.).
You should check out a Smalltalk environment that isn't Gnu Smalltalk or Redline Smalltalk, neither of which currently has the full Smalltalk IDE experience.

"Pharo By Example" would be a good starting point. If you are interested, feel free to email me, I'm quite happy to introduce people to what a Smalltalk environment has to offer so they can take it back to their day to day and start to spread the ideas.
Is there room for compromise?

http://www.amazon.com/Ergonomic-Kneeling-Posture-Office-WL-S...
Just nitpicking: DC++ is one implementation. The network is usually referred to as "direct connect". DC++ wasn't even the first DC client, it just happened to be the most popular one at the time the network itself was still quite popular.
This story keeps popping up on HN and elsewhere. And the common solution I've read is "Please, just get a standup desk!" as if standing up and not moving is healthier than sitting and not moving. I've seen no study that supports that conclusion. I think the message should be: moving is healthier than not moving, which is hardly news.
Read This Before Naming Your Startup
Agreed, but I think the look rather outweighs maintenance. It’s such a simple device that you’d hardly care to maintain it. You fry a capacitor, it’s one of a couple dozen parts; the thing probably wasn’t terribly expensive to begin with, so you just frown and replace the whole shebang.
Doing something that will help a bit and then returning to what originally burnt you out will not work IMHO.

Fresh creative work is something that enables you to make a break with your history.

You have to move on.
As long as we're on a grammar correction theme, "... a 200 line program".
That sounds like an impossible question to answer, without a deeper understanding of who you are, your life experiences and what you've noticed has driven you.
It's about JSMin, not JSLint. Crockford has actually several products ;-) And JSMin is IMHO not really opinionated.
> What kind of equity are you expecting if you back a $100K project for $15?

A very little amount yes. But if I can invest $100 (or $1,000) into a Kickstarter project maybe I "lose" it all, maybe make my investment back + enough money to buy a pizza. Maybe I double my investment, which then I can pour into other kickstarter investments.

Where AngelList falls down is don't you have to be a qualified angel? So someone with only hundreds to invest, or a thousand dollars, is locked out because AngelList is looking for investors with tens of thousands of dollars? (Although, again, the JOBS act might change that dynamic...)
Find someone to teach. Instead of you writing the fun software guide them to develop the fun software.
Yeah, I got some heat from other GeekDads when I put that on the original GeekDad list. But truth be told we have now read LOtR to two 8 year olds. The hard part is to get them to Rivendell. Once there the story takes over and it works. I included it because it is what _I have_ read aloud to two of my kids. Erik Wecks (GeekDad)
In this case i was using the machine as network storage, with the RAID1 array being part of a backup. The main system was on a separate disk, so the RAID was in no way required for booting up. In fact, i never explicitly set it up during installation.

Not only could i not see what was going on, i couldn't even access the machine from the network. All for no good reason.
This almost exactly matches not only my complaints, but the feedback I gave when Google claimed to be interested in such things.

Another thing I've observed is that non-expert users are utterly confused by the various actions not being visible (though greyed out) when documents are not selected—they simply assume that they will never exist and don't see them after a selection is made. I can't see any way in which the new design is as good as, let alone better than, the old.
The solution: standing desks.

The misconception: that you need to stand all day. Alternate! Sit sometimes, stand sometimes.

How? Get an adjustable desk or table that moves up and down, allowing you to stand periodically while working. For example: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000QA0EHI/ref=as_li_ss_tl?... (get two: one for your front, one for your side).
> If they want to become an Engineer help them.

I'm trying to understand what you mean...

Yes, you're right. when you sign up for a job you acknowledge the change in lifestyle it may cause. My point is that from the perspective of the organiztion, it can a highly inefficient use of money, and aggravate some otherwise competent and capable engineers.
Until MegaCorp comes along and slaps him with a patent infringement lawsuit, of course. I'm pretty sure there are a large number of patents around amplifiers of various kinds.

Hopefully I'm just being overly cynical.
For those who waited for "the language" by Nikolaus Wirth those may have a look into Zonnon http://www.zonnon.ethz.ch/archive/The_Concepts_of_Zonnon_6_y...
[http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2847075]

I'm very thankful for that contribution! Yeah it is overlooked, that system was definitely superior to what we have today. I hope one day new machinery can be reverse-engineered by the computer itself (evolutionary algorithms), instead of reverse-engineering closed-source drivers by hand.
Do something completely different. Don't code for a year.

If you loved it once, it will come back to you.
There's a big reason I don't want to move to bay area to work. I love to live in Berlin just because I can get anywhere with a train anytime I want. And the funny thing is, in Berlin it is allowed to drink beer in the trains and subways and still I don't feel afraid at all, people behave. Trains work, are fast, safe and reliable most of the time.

When I visited in Berkeley I was horrified how bad the public transportation was in there. BART trains were most of the time fully packed, had only a few trains in an hour and traveling from the stations to home was slow and annoying. The bus transportation was horror. Most of the time they were late or not arriving at all.

I may have an European mindset, but living in the USA is just out of the question. Manhattan would be better, but then again paying above 1000 dollars per month from your apartment is kind of silly.
Ask HN - What Facebook app should I make? ;-)
Multiple desktops work as expected under Unity - you move between them and both heads follow. It's a very easy way to organize your stuff when you are a spatial thinker. This makes it natural to keep working contexts on separate spaces (editor + terminal, editor + browser, browser + terminal, email + IRC + IM) and easily switch between.

On the Mac, I like the Lion way to deal with it, despite it being unidimensional. The only thing is that you'll need to get rid of the mouse and buy a trackpad (assuming you are on a desktop or with the notebook docked).

I find it confusing when both heads move independently between their own spaces.
Pentagon releases results of 13,000-mph test flight over Pacific
Its about time I made a small, useful Facebook app!
I've come across "wysija.com" while looking at wordpress plugins recently. I immediately thought that was the worse name anyone could pick.

It literally looks like random letters. It's unpronounceable and hard to memorize.

They have a pseudo-explanation of the name at the bottom of their landing page. But I don't buy it. It reads more like an excuse.

But I ended up trying their product because I liked their video.

So I think the lesson is: If you put enough work into your product, you can overcome a poor name.
I agree but some people still see Internet Explorer as "the Internet" and I would say can't fathom how you use other browsers.

Those same people may also believe Windows is what a computer is.
I can say that all of the Clojure code I've personally seen for "real world" systems in Clojure tend to have a very small average method size, but I can't speculate on proprietary code I haven't seen. Certainly most open source Clojure code is very well written.

And if Light Table is only an IDE for "better programmers" then I don't think that's necessarily a bad goal to have. That said, since Light Table is supporting Javascript as well, it's not exactly only catering for minority languages.
Count me in!

(In spirit, I have too many projects already :-)
I think if you're burned out and try to force fun, it won't happen. The fun comes from following inspiration. Like recognizing a pattern in life and thinking 'I know how that works' and playing with some code as a reaction to that inspiration. Not because you think you should or associate yourself with being a programmer or whatever else, but because it just seems like the most natural way to carry on approaching the thing that sparked your interest.
In essence, you’re saying you have run out of things to do that are worthy of interest.

Isn't a key part of that phrase 'worthy of interest'? I bet it's the opinion of many that those things listed are not worthy of interest. The post assumes that everything there is to do in the world is supposed to be interesting to you.