skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I still disagree that your case is the average and that your situation can be used to model any young startup. Don't get me wrong, I admire what you're doing and the strong statement you're making about productivity and balancing priorities. I just agree with the above comment that it sounds a bit smug, especially by the title. There's an implied message of "I rode this methodology to ~$5M in funding, so you can too", and I think that makes a huge oversight that this is the same company that hosts some of the largest international developer/new technology conferences six times every year. Aren't you also the owner of the company that hosts FOWA, FOWD and FOM twice a year each? Doesn't that at least deserve a mention? "This works for us, but we also have the kind of industry connections and positioning that practically predisposes us to this kind of funding the second we're in the black anyway"

What I think happened here is that you did a number of things right which affords you this flexibility in hours. I would say the real story is that you made something of value vs the free-but-pointless model we read about much more often these days. You built a business around something valuable with a relatively high price point that makes it less of a victim of the kind of scalability issues that "general public" web based services are dealing with.

I think the bigger take away would be:
If you make something awesome for the general public that millions of people will be using all day long, plan to work seven days a week 'round the clock and there's no guarantee you'll ever see a penny. If you come up with something valuable that people would be willing to pay $25-$50 a month for, your life will be much, much more enjoyable and you might actually get to watch your kids grow up and/or have some time left for your hobbies.
Building a great work culture: in praise of Hack Day
On MetaFilter, you'll have to be a member for a week (http://faq.metafilter.com/38/Can-I-post-to-the-front-page-im...) before posting to AskMeFi.

MetaFilter also has a few rules about linking to your own stuff in posts, so rather than including your URL in your question, you'll want to put it in your profile.
Nanosponges Can Soak Up Oil Spills
Isn't the 'real world' relative? To a kid in high school, that is the real world. To a grown man among his peers at work, that is the real world. I never understood telling kids that high school wasn't the real world. I can understand telling them it gets better (and it does, I know) but to try to mask certain stages of their lives as not real doesn't seem genuine.
He made a joke. Laugh at it. Not one part of that had anything to do with bigotry. Relax.
I think one important cultural thing is that, in the US, schools really are the center of your social life, including after-school sports, clubs, etc.

There are other countries where school is just school (more like a job), where there are no sports/clubs/etc., and your social life revolves more around your family and long-term friends. Sports might come from totally separate organizations. In this case, school is much less of a social thing. So maybe that has something to do with it.
I like the article, a lot. But I have some reserve with the advice given.

In my experience, many people would actually be glad to hangout with someone weird if he gives them some time to get used to it, and take it easy on the weirdness at first. I consider myself weird (my weirdness is that I mostly don't give a shit about conventional thinking and politically correct things. I just love a good argument, to the point where I would provoke people I barely know into arguments about politics, religion, whatever), and I have to be extra-careful with what I say and do, otherwise people freak out. Sometimes I slip and people think I'm crazy. But I'm getting better know, and I have a group of friend with which I can be myself. I provoke them playfully and they understand that it's just the way I am. And I'm grateful that they do.

Someone quoted Alain de Boutton in the thread: "Intimacy is the capacity to be rather weird with someone - and finding that that's ok with them". That's exactly right, but intimacy is not something you get immediately, for free. It's something you have to build, it takes time, and sometimes it doesn't work. Most of all, it takes compromises: people will accept you as you are when they realize that you're interesting and that you care about them.

Now why should weird people go out of their way to befriend other people? Well you have to be pragmatic here, and think about what you really want. Friendship is an amazing thing, and is available to anyone, weird or not, and doesn't require you to change who you are. It just requires you to be patient and take it step by step. Is it being hypocritical? Pretending you're normal when you really aren't? Not if it's temporary. Think of it as a way to create a first contact, before working your way to a real connection, where both parties can act natural. That's what social interactions are about, that's what all this highschool BS is about, and that's why I think it's a bad idea to home school your kids.

EDIT: An example of my weirdness in action: I often mess up with girls I really like just because I can't help saying outrageous things just to spark a good old argument. Damn.
Megaupload Trial May Never Happen Because of Possible FBI Error
I am not sure what a magnet school is but it was funded by the public school board and still accepted regular students. If you wanted to go and were outside its normal jurisdiction, you had to have an IQ above a certain percentile.
Thanks for this. I was the "weird" kid in junior high and someone just like you gave me that speech. It helped tremendously, and you changed that kid's life.
I know, but on a (probably unfairly) uncharitable reading his advice is 'don't worry, that girl who didn't want to kiss you is a loser, and so are the people who don't want to hang out with you'. It might be comforting, but I don't think it's healthy or true attitude to take.
I chalk it up to the fact that what’s perfectly normal within a group of friends can seem harsh from the outside. He’s probably just accustomed to making jokes like that with Jay, so sees no issue putting it on his blog.
>gain social skills and learn how to deal with people

Learning to get on with people is important but school isn't such a good place to do that.

The social atmosphere in schools is abysmal. A combination of obedience to authority and placating bullies. It's more like being in the army, or in prison, than a modern workplace or a group of friends. At least in a group of friends you can talk freely, without needing permission or being teased.

I think one learns more subtle and useful social skills from interacting with friends (i.e. voluntary relationships, where either party is free to leave) and from interacting with colleagues.

In my case, this occurred in the years just after school.

I won't say that school doesn't teach a certain amount of valuable knowledge, but that knowledge can be obtained elsewhere, without the huge overhead of learning to share space with bullies, thugs, and people in authority who think they know what is best for you.

And I haven't mentioned the enormous cost of schooling: 12 years of your young life (instead of doing more enjoyable things that you stand to learn far more from). And for most people, stunting of individuality and destruction of creativity (which cripples the ability to learn new things later in life).

I think most people just assume that schools are good places to learn social skills because they were forced to go through it themselves, so they had to embrace it at the time. After a while, they look back with nostalgia, forgetting how much boredom and fear they had to endure.
Visualizing entropy using space-filling curves
Yeah, that's an interpretation I can accept. I'm not sure it was meant that way, but it might (the part about "he was my friend" makes me unsure).
Postponing one week SpaceX
clickable http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starlite
Agreed. The title should say profitable at 3 mill a year and working 4 days a week... Funding was a side note.
I think the fact that Django's url mapper doesn't make it easy to dispatch based on the method means that Django wouldn't score to highly against this particular issue. It's easy to put

if request.method not in ('POST', 'PUT', 'DELETE', 'PATCH'):
...

at the top of every method (or use a decorator), but it'd definitely be nice if this were part of the url dispatcher.
Deepak Chopra is Microsoft's WPC keynote speaker
A startup that gets to the same place without funding isn't noteworthy?
Fantastic checklist!

tech, jobs, mission, culture
Pwning a Spammer's Keylogger
Typecase - Google WebFonts for WordPress
JQuery UI components for your ASP.NET Web Forms based startup
Just as most people borrow to buy their first home tech debt can be good to take on knowingly in a lot of circumstances. As long as the debt is being used to finance higher returns it's a very good idea.

For a new venture it can reduce risk and bring advantages such as time to market. PHP is a major tech debt for most organizations, but it was probably worth it for Facebook.
I'll address #3. Craig Newmark of Craigslist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist
One thing that I use often: when execution hits breakpoint, you can switch to the Console tab and modify local variables, and run any code in the context of the current function.

Also, files in the Scripts can be edited by double clicking.
The author goes on to explain how he messed up their friendship. So even if they aren't friends, I can't see that being anything else but a joke.
Deadly Bows and Nano Domes
Best Video Editor for Mac
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Huh? They would have to pull out of treaties to own asteroids, but there's nothing preventing them from mining them.
Awesome, when I started ClojureScript, getting even the basics down was a little tricky, but this certainly helps! Thanks.
I agree with (A). In situation (B), the company being acquired was not profitable and may not have been on a path toward profitability, and yet was of value to another company, which seems to go against your thesis. And situation (C) is literally the prime motivation of every investment ever made for reasons other than charity.
I'm about as asocial and celebratory of diversity as they come, and I love this essay, especially the conversational style. But I'd be careful not to take this argument too far into sophistry.

In school people clan and desperately look for some identity to copy. This leads to all the terrible social behavior you see in most secondary and high school in the U.S. Somebody calling you "weird" can really be a badge of honor.

But there's nothing to be gained in being different in itself. While you should be who you are, if you only define yourself in how weird you are compared to others you're doing the same thing, only in reverse. Instead of saying "I will look at my peers and copy them" you're saying "I will look at my peers and do the opposite" Both of these are just the same kind of herd thinking. Being weird? Awesome. Being deliberately different? Not so much. You need to do a gut check on this one. Schools are full of a bunch of people who all are very proud of being different, just like everybody else.

I also note that the gym conversation consisted of people comparing social preferences: sports teams, hollywood stars, and so on. These kinds of conversations form a type of social bonding -- a joining of group opinion (even if outliers are allowed). It's this very banter that creates the group identity that then shuns other people for being "weird".

People are some funny animals.
Russian speaker here - moved to US when I was ten, haven't had much opportunity to practice. Your English is much better than my Russian, so don't worry about this too much :P
I would feel like walking the two blocks to my local cheese shop, although I have to say that my local supermarkets carry a surprisingly decent selection of specialty cheeses. Now, I'm in the bay Area which is one of the foodier parts of the country, so you might have a market in outside of major urban centers where the range of food choices is a lot narrower. However, there are quite a few vendors in this space already. Gilt Taste specializes in discount online shopping for foodies: http://www.gilttaste.com/
53% of 'light' AWS users are paying too much
Dropbox has little "market penetration" in the overall market of MS Office buyers.

Dropbox is familiar to us and the circles we are in, but that doesn't mean it has any traction at all among the middle-America soccer moms using MS Word to make flyers for little league or the pet shelter. (The recent photo sync update should help with this.)

Techies typically "misunderestimate" the traction of entrenched tools among normals and the value of building add-ons for those entrenched tools.
Boom. Love it!
I like how it get's around the problem of storing images people send before serving the <img> tag to the browser (for people who don't want to look: it doesn't store the images at all - it serves them in the same websocket stream using data: urls)
Sysadmin/Ops should have a part in what gets deployed. It is their job. My point is that if you have a choice between Python 2.6 that comes with your distro and Python 2.7 that doesn't, go with 2.6. The cost is minimal. Same for various libraries (PIL, NumPy, etc.) I currently have to deploy Django-Piston directly from a master branch on GitHub due to some terrible decisions made by developers who never gave deployment a second thought. Avoid this. If you would save more hours by using a newer library, minus time it takes to set it up and maintain it in production, go for it, but don't discount the cost on the Ops side.

I don't have a problem with virtualenv: it's a fine development tool, but it is not what I would use in production. If you want separate clean environments for each app, use KVM or Xen and give it a whole server.

supervisord is a fine solution. I just prefer that my processes look exactly like system processes. Upstart and rc.d are fantastic and do everything I need well.

As for separation of code and configuration, I simply mean that in my case I use Debian packages to deploy all of our software. This means that each package must be generic enough that it is deployable so long as its dependencies are satisfied. Thus your config files are mostly external to your packages. Then you can easily use Puppet or some such to deploy code. One other reason to use native distro packages: Puppet does not play well with pip/easy_install, etc.

>> Lastly, DO use apache + mod_wsgi. It is fast, stable, widely supported and well tested.

> And nginx + uwsgi/gunicorn aren’t?

I didn't say that. I am simply stating that saying "don't use apache" is wrong. Do use it. You can also use nginx + uwsgi/gunicorn if you want to, but apache is by no means a bad choice. It's got 25 years of use and nobody that uses it seriously is complaining.

> Absolutely. nginx is way past the “new and hacky” state though.

It is not, and I never said so. I use nginx + apache, where nginx is a reverse proxy. In fact nginx is my top choice for front-end server setups. I am saying, don't deploy things directly out of GitHub. Go with slightly older, more tested stuff. It'll be a bigger payoff in the end.

Overall, I think we are saying the same thing, with slightly different tools we normally reach for. I am just trying to throw a different perspective out there and a different way to do things. Thanks for the detailed reply.
I spent two 12 month periods working exactly 17 hours a week (German paternity leave is incredibly progressive).

Both times, it worked. When I tried tracking various arbitrary metrics of effectiveness (bugs fixed, commits made, files touched etc.) I found no real difference to working full-time.

I also spent one month working one day a week. During that month my effectiveness also stayed roughly constant, although I sacrificed almost everything that wasn't communication or coding for that month.

My focus during the working times was much higher. I never wasted time writing HN comments when I only had 4 hours to get my work done.

It was also more stressful than working full-time. Everyone else in the company still spent 35 hours a week generating email and commit traffic, which meant I felt I was always playing catch-up with that aspect.

I'd be interested to see what it's like when everyone in the company works a 4 day week.
iCracked is looking for designers and engineers to join the team
iCracked has massive plans to disrupt the multibillion dollar smartphone lifecycle industry with an “Uber”-type service in smartphone repair. iCracked, currently an international iOS repair company, has over 140 iTechs with plans to expand to over 500 in the next 6 months. What you see today in the smartphone industry is only the beginning and we’re looking to bring on talented engineers and designers to pave the vision with our core team. iCracked has been written in Forbes, INC, CNBC, NBC, TechCrunch, Lifehacker, and we can’t forget our about our rock star investors.

We’re currently looking for an iOS and HTML5 web developers, and some badass user interface designers. These key technical hires will work very close with the founders on every part of our business: Great user experience, excellent design, building out the back-end controls, data mining and more. We’re looking for the usual suspects – “whatever it takes” attitude, takes great pride in their product, and thrives in a fast paced start-up environment.

Designer

Looking for an awesome UI designer for both the website and HTML5 Webapp. Design is the way iCracked communicates with customers and iTechs on a daily basis and is very important to have clarity of our company offerings. The ideal candidates will be comfortable in a fluid start-up environment and will bring an energetic, fun and creative approach to their work.

Senior Engineer

Take the lead on building out the back-end and inventory controls, create dispatch algorithms, and generate automated quotes for devices through integrated APIs. Finding simple solutions to hard problems. Experience with facebook and twitter web/mobile SDK.

The Perks

We're a growing team that gets a lot done and has lots of fun along the way. All team members receive the same great benefits.

Competitive salaries and employee stock options
Daily catered lunches and fully stocked snacks, drinks, and beer
Generous paid time off and holidays
Plenty of Apple computers (or whatever you need for your job)
Awesome, casual office environment with plenty of toys (RC Helicopters, Blow Darts, Foosball, and more)

Enough about the company and perks – Lets take over this massive market! Contact Anthony@icracked.com with your requests so we can get to know you!
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It's definitely an inspirational story in a way...but lets not be quick to call the other kids "losers".

We must remember that they are all kids just trying to find their way. Some kids find their way by trying their best to fit in while others might be like the kid in this story.

You can build this kid up while not tearing the others down. Even the kids who are popular and mean, like the girl he mentions in the story, may at an older age find some of the things they did in school reprehensible. Lets not condemn them while they are still young and immature.
Dropbox vs Skydrive
Thanks, this is true. We do try to attend local meetups and scour the interwebs but can definitely do more.

Like you said, the job market is white hot for programmers... Have you had any experience trying to lure currently employed devs?
I took http://synonym.dartlang.org/ as an inspiration ;) This is a work in progress. Suggested additions, modifications, corrections welcome!
Rolls Royce Ghost Six Senses Revealed at Beijing Auto Show
Hausome.
I'd go for that, though I live in the UK so I would be wary of how they were to be transported. The hand-baked crackers would be a nice bonus too.

Maybe have a few different prices though? Not everyone would pay $30 for cheese.
Biz dev is a clever name for dirty work.
Well they tell some users to visit Facebook in response to support questions. Unacceptable if you ask me.
1) GET MORE VISITORS. You really need to get WAY more visitors to see some money from adsense. How to get visitors? I would find a suitable sub-reddit and ask the people there to link to you, share you on facebook etc. Write articles and submit them to ezinearticles.com

2) ADD A "DONATE" BUTTON. Easily implemented, you will explicitally ask people for a trivial amount (2$? 5$?) to help you keep the website alive. Say people that your blog helps people but you can't just keep paying for it.
Ruby newest release breaks Rails, no fix until RailsConf ends
Yep - our product is gear for companies up to about 10 users. In Ireland about 80% of the market is SME and that's under 5. Great thing with cloud is you can reach these people, but still deliver a cost effective solution and reduce stress.
Who's up for a challenge. Colorado GiveCamp, Spring 2012
Basically because they have to organize some form of hierarchy and if there is no shared goal they will organize it around popularity (PG made this observation back in one of his earlier essays)

I am betting that if they end up on a primitive island they would organize with special respect for those who where the best trackers/hunters.
I am a junior level developer and in both jobs that I have had since graduating, to the senior developers the term programmer refers to a professional software developer who takes pride in their work and does things correctly, while the term hacker can either mean someone who is attacking a system, or someone who comes up with kludge solutions to temporarily 'cover up' poor design decisions i.e. a 'hack'.
i liked the video !!
It was the same for me in Fiji. I was into comics, computers, video games and not rugby. In Fiji, not liking rugby instantly makes you an outcast. 7 years later and I'm no better. All that loneliness led to insecurities that I have yet to shake. Now I work in a studio with a bunch of designers, photographers and on occasion, models and I feel as lonely as ever.

Hopefully in 10 years I can belong to a studio of amazingly weird, relatable people.
I'm with you right up to that part about not homeschooling your kids (homeschool dad here). But I'll let it go since I think you may just be trying to provoke an argument. :)

(Unless you've homeschooled, I don't think you have any idea how much social interaction homeschool kids can get; we don't just sit at home all day.)

Edit: I see comments below on homeschooling and from homeschoolers. Our kids get a ton of social interaction outside the home: homeschool co-ops/events/park days with other homeschoolers, language lessons, sports (karate, soccer, equestrian), music lessons, girlscouts/boyscouts, university outreach programs, town provided activities (acting, choir, pottery, etc), temple, playing with all the neighborhood kids, and that's just off the top of my head.

My kids are 9 and 11 right now and are way more comfortable socially, and better at it, than I (public school) ever was.

Ultimately I think a lot of it has to do with the kids and the parents. We chose to homeschool our kids because we think we can do a better job with their education, but it certainly hasn't hindered them socially.