skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
tomasien, the thing is you are not two MBA's working primarily on pushing the business forward, while they only have someone technical 'lined up at the start of our raise...but he was not full-time when we were going around and making our pitches.' (my emphasis)

Because in that kind of situation, it's a lot easier to see how they would get 120 introductions.

Incidentally, on the amount raised: I think 500,000 would be more reasonable, but remember that they ended up with about 10 investors. Perhaps one or several of these investors had a standard of how much they wanted to invest, which pushed the total this high.

In fact, given the fact that they're two MBA's needing to purchase ALL their technical work, I would say that a million dollars (or close to it) is, well, something they'll need. Not to say it can't be done with less, but it is pretty easy to imagine how they can spend the money, and in their situation it's probably healthy to invest in enough hard, practical, shipping CTO-type people to dilute the 'idea pool'. Look at what happened with the guy who was hired with two business guys: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3966301

The poster said: "Out of 3 founders, none is technical" and "During meetings, I always feel like a killjoy by attempting to be realistic and focused and reserved about the brand new idea they come up with every other week and that I need to get started on right when the meeting ends."

And someone else responded:
"Three founders and one engineer that creates products?

Move on as fast as you can. Is not that you can't partner with some idea guy but three of them is too unbalanced. Doing anything takes an enormous amount of work, you can't change the idea every week(well, yes you can if you can reuse what you had already done, or if changing means less work or satisfying your customers much better, but usually you should not)."

I thought that was a particularly great point in that thread! So, in order to avoid this "unbalance", these two MBA's really need a sizeable tech team to dilute the 'idea pool'.

To me, the amount raised is MAYBE 2x-2.5x what they need given that they're two MBA's. Honestly, this is not a crazy cushion if there are unexpected setbacks or if they just want to make a sizeable investment up-front in content, etc, so they can prove their business model for a Series-A, make good, big sales, etc all off of this seed-round.

They downplay their previous startup experience, but perhaps it was enough to convince investors that they know how to spend this seed money effectively.
These two businesses are in entirely different industries. Not only that, they have very different market characteristics.

Ford is a capital intensive industry that reminds me of Berkhire Hathaway - the textile company that Warren Buffett could never figure out how to make money from. It has competitors everywhere making relatively undifferentiated products.

Facebook on the other hand, is more like a media company. It has 1 billion eye balls who spend an average 30 minutes a day on its site on user-generated content. If you were a TV station, how much would you be valued at with that kind of metrics? FB has a beachhead in the sense that it is a marketplace of users who create content, and users who view them. This makes it incredibly sticky and also difficult for a competitor to come about. The downside with FB is that audiences can be fickle. If they think FB is a fad, they will start leaving. Therefore, FB had to establish itself as a habit-forming medium, like e-mail, so that people constantly reengage with it.
ROM-DOS to be exact, but it's still an MS-DOS knock-off.
Furthermore, parsing the output of `ls` is a terrible practice[1] that makes for an even poorer sample.

A little further in the article, the author even suggests running

`ls | grep junk`

(instead of the much simpler `ls junk*`. Do I need to point that out?).

I also know some people are going to retort that wasting a process or a pipe is not that bad. This discussion has been had over and over again, probably ever since Unix was invented.

In any case, the poor example chosen, as well as the flaky commands used, seriously hinder the credibility of the article.

[1]: http://mywiki.wooledge.org/ParsingLs
The bubble pattern applies to venture capital
College isn't just for web programmers.
Depending on how far north (or south) you live, daylight saving is arguably worth the hassle.

Where I live, in winter, without daylight saving it would be dark until 9.30am or after in the mornings, meaning all the kids need to go to school in the dark, which is more dangerous.

Then at the peak of summer, it would probably still be daylight until close to midnight.

The closer you are to the equator, the less swing there is between the number of hours of daylight between summer and winter. Even between the very north of the UK and the very south there is an appreciable difference.
Now this should be a Kickstarter project. With such detailed plans as "Research" for 9 years I'm not seeing any risks here. Jokes aside, I'm not really sure what the point would be. As much as I love the idea of spaceships and exploring space, the budget this would require vs. the payoff - at this point in time, given the other problems we have on Earth - do not seem worthwhile.
This option is not portable at all. For instance, it won't work on Solaris' find. I strongly advise against the use of non portable options.
"I don't understand where all the devil-with-pitchfork stuff comes from"

I assumed that it was all cultural (note the lowercase c there) - societies would construct, using technology, the Heavens and Hells that their religions had told people already existed.

Other writers have covered the idea that higher powers might use some of their resources tormenting virtual copies of lesser beings - I'm sure this is mentioned as something that some Transcendent Powers do in A Fire Upon the Deep. Not to mention Charlie Stross's excellent A Colder War:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Colder_War
Well obviously they should work less then. Most people I know who spend less time working tend to enjoy life more, look better, have more money and live longer.

Oh and they are more austere.
Considering you're talking about pulling the config off flash, which is where the OS and not the config is stored, I'm not too worried about what you plan to do.
At research universities most of the budget comes from research, and most of the work in research gets done by grad students. Undergrad programs are an afterthought.
This is a little silly.

Simulated life will obey very different economics than normal life.

People should check out Robin Hanson's blog for more info: http://www.overcomingbias.com/2012/04/em-econ-101-talk.html
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This was already discussed at length on HN on previous posts such as http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3949899 (77 points at the time of writing, posted 4 days ago).
The real problem with college education in the US is that the majority of the students don't start to plan their career until after college is over. Far too many believe the value is in the piece of paper, so that's all they care about, which turns out to be a terrible allocation of your resources.

Obtaining a job is a signalling game. Having a degree is one signal you can provide to employers, but there are also many other equilibria. In other words, there are many ways to signal a good match to an employer.

A person's "college years" need to not only be treated as a time to figure out what you want to do with your life, but perhaps more importantly, what you DON'T want to do with your life. The notion of leaving high school then going to college and finishing in 4 years as being the "right way to do it" lacks some key pieces of relevancy. Figuring out what you don't want to do doesn't just teach you what you don't want to do, but it also teaches you wisdom; wisdom that can only be gained by real world experience.
"Its almost like a third world country"

If it looks like a third world country, then where did all the money go? Presumably the majority of people aren't driving around in Porsches?
Well, it did eliminate some kinds of coding (the part where human produces machine code from block diagrams) and debugging (the part where you look for errors in the above translation.)
Depending on your product and your talent, I think 2-3 engineers is plenty. I've worked with larger teams, but at that point it becomes a more committee-like and less self-directed.

At that point, you're probably better of splitting into even smaller, more self-directed teams.
I do not recall ActiveX running in MacOsX or Linux. I do not understand when People are completely ok when a game is Windows only but when it is in Chrome suddenly preaches multi-browser compatibility. To me, NACL is not a mistake, it is future. Oh also it is damn open source.
> that means the result of a function is dependent on it's inputs ONLY

Not quite, it means that a function call can be replaced by its value (A function can depend only on its inputs, yet write to a global variable, for example).
The learning curve of Haskell can indeed be daunting.

It took me about 4-5 months to get comfortable with Haskell, and a couple of years to make it the language I'm most comfortable in.

GHC type errors can also be very frustrating.

But I agree with dons that unless you're doing very advanced "type hackery" at the edges of what it can do, you really aren't "fighting the type system", just fighting the difficult error messages.

I do find that months of investment into a crucial tool such as a programming language is worth it for anyone who careers in programming.

I can testify that with time, the amount of type errors becomes much smaller, and that you start to smell GHC error messages a mile away :) That is, when seeing an error message, the cause is usually immediately clear simply by having been trained to see that same error message many times.

When I do rarely happen to struggle with a type error, it is a real bug, whose debugging in many cases would have been more frustrating in run-time.
He was pointing out a usability flaw. You can assume he already knows about the workarounds.
I wonder how different the product would look depending on who was making this. I.e. Apple vs Google...
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Hey, you're the atomontage guy! I'd give you a couple million if I could :)

Totally agree. There are many examples of developers who seriously underestimated the costs for a full game. With the influx of projects, I believe some kind of vetoing will have to be implemented for projects >50k.
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Are you referring to this documentary?

Michael Portillo's Great Euro Crisis

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01hllyd

Self-confessed Eurosceptic Michael Portillo visits debt-stricken Greece. He believes that the euro crisis must have shaken the Greeks' faith in Europe's single currency and wonders if there'll be a desire to revert to the free-floating drachma. In Athens he meets everyone from a destitute young family to the former finance minister and the outgoing Prime Minister, and is surprised by some of their answers.

Meanwhile in Germany, Europe's economic powerhouse, Michael encounters the taxpayers who are paying most towards Greece's mammoth financial bailout while having to watch angry Athenians burning the German flag.

With tensions rising in the Eurozone, is this the moment it becomes more united, or will it be pulled apart?
Do not underestimate your importance and the impact you can have for the category 3) students.

My first year Calculus professor 20 years ago had very similar feelings and frustrations, but through his passion he connected with some of us. Lots of great students don't apply to the best schools and for whatever reason end up stuck somewhere close to home. He eventually encouraged me to take his Modern Algebra class and that opened my mind to a whole world of Mathematical beauty.

Enjoy the opportunity to touch young minds as long as you can.
It sounds like being able to run a bunch of Varnish servers to cache stuff at edge locations around the world. I wonder if it really works that way or do you have to change your web app a lot to work with it?
+1. i think the only time you need to store timezones is when you don't have an absolute point in time. say you are storing a time without a date. ie: 5:00pm. you need a timezone associated with that time somehow.
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The article does not clearly specify the problem to be solved. But it general, it would seem the author is concerned about choosing a data representation for date and time and place of a future event that stable under changes to the local timezone. In other words, he wants a flaccid designator.

UTC is clearly not suitable for this.

On the other hand, no-one is looking to add 8 months to a localtime and have it make sense. This kinds of scheduling decisions will always be supervised by humans.

And the "Chile" example just goes to show you should be prepared to update a schedule. Airlines do this all the time.

Food for thought.
This is one of the better page turning effects I've seen, but I'm not sold on any of them.

On iOS one soon learns that many of the gestures can be performed as tiny taps and flicks, rather than as more exaggerated gestures, a good example being scrolling with a flick, or sliding the on/off toggles with a simple tap. However, the page turning effect here is at its slowest when a simple flick is used to turn the page, and at its fastest when the finger is dragged all the way across the screen to turn a page - this is backwards, and causes me to get annoyed with the gesture very, very quickly. I would expect fatigue to become a problem for serious readers too.
It does not matter how long you work.
What matters is what you get done in a week.
Please mind that the report was written in 1954. The real complexity of programming and computing in general was not fully understood at that time. (I'm confident that we still do not understand it in its entirety, however.)
I don't think that's why these stats are interesting. There seems to be a stereotype of lazy Greeks being bailed out by hard-working Germans. These OECD stats (which I originally checked out after an episode of Radio Open Source featuring economist Mark Blyth) show that this is just another example of an ugly, incorrect stereotype.
Greece could be the most productive country in the EU and their government would still be in dire straits. Tax evasion is endemic. It doesn't matter how much people are making if almost nobody is paying their taxes. The Greek government has started cracking down, but Greek disrespect for taxation has been building for generations and won't die easily.
Why is there no mention of taxes here? Isn't the single biggest factor that the Greek tax system is corrupt from the ground up?
Not sure why you were downvoted, widespread tax evasion in Greece is certainly a contributing factor for the trouble they're in. You can build an apartment building, have an 'uncompleted' top floor, and therefore pay no tax on the building.

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2010/10/greeks-b...
Dual sim
MIT doesn't teach its undergrads anything they couldn't learn at the local state school

I think it's more subtle than that. If you start with people who are very good at learning (which is all you can know about them at college entry time) then you can teach them more in 4 years than you can the "average" person. So the MIT guys probably really do learn more. The question is of course the extent to which that translates to on-the-job performance, as good learner doesn't imply good doer.
that was an absolutely fascinating (and very well written indeed) article. for those of you who tl;drd it, this bit towards the end was particularly insightful:

-----------------

Why pay this cost? Because I don’t do algorithms, other people do, so I have to trust them and respect their judgment to a large extent. Because you need superhuman abilities to work without layers. My minimal stack of layers is - problem, software, hardware. People working on the problem (algorithms, UI, whatever) can’t do software, not really. People doing software can’t do hardware, not really. And people doing hardware can’t do software, etc.

The Forth way of focusing on just the problem you need to solve seems to more or less require that the same person or a very tightly united group focus on all three of these things, and pick the right algorithms, the right computer architecture, the right language, the right word size, etc. I don’t know how to make this work.

My experience is, you try to compress the 3 absolutely necessary layers to 2, you get a disaster. Have your algorithms people talk directly to your hardware people, without going through software people, and you’ll get a disaster. Because neither understands software very well, and you’ll end up with an unusable machine. Something with elaborate computational capabilities that can’t be put together into anything meaningful. Because gluing it together, dispatching, that’s the software part.

So you need at least 3 teams, or people, or hats, that are to an extent ignorant about each other’s work. Even if you’re doing everything in-house, which, according to Jeff Fox, was essentially a precondition to “doing Forth”. So there’s another precondtion - having people being able to do what at least 3 people in their respective areas normally do, and concentrating on those 3 things at the same time. Doing the cross-layer global optimization.
Being currently involved in GPGPU research, these descriptions remind me of the state we are in for GPGPU computing. CUDA, OpenCL and now OpenACC have been steps towards a higher-level abstraction of stream computing and every time a new framework / language bubbles up, the inventors praise it as the end of coding close to the machine.
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This. The far more important column is the second one about Productivity. And Germany leads the way there with no mention for Greece.

Working more hours to produce the same thing is bad, not good.
I've certainly experienced larger teams that have gone committee-like and are less self-directed.

I've also worked with larger teams (4-12) that are not committee-like and are very self-organised and self-directed. So I don't think it's inevitable. I'm interested in teasing out the reasons some teams go one way and some another.

Bigger than 12 or so - then the committee-like stuff seems to become more unavoidable.

(Just read this rather interesting bit on how the process at TargetProcess http://www.targetprocess.com/articles/agile50months/ evolved. They have a mini-team per-epic - which sounds a bit like the best of both worlds to me)
In case you should ever choose to email him to convey your distaste over sharing Amazon Web Services news, his email address (published in his HN profile) is: jbarr@amazon.com

I, for one, find AWS technical announcements welcome and relevant. Perhaps you'd rather read about janitors getting degrees?
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Don't think of YC as the only option. Many seem to on HackerNews. Consider alternative accelerators before waiting 9 months hoping for YC. There's also seed funding, YC is one if many paths, it may be the best accelerator. I think once you have a product you're happy with wasting time hoping for YC isn't helpful to you or your company.
Yes that's the documentary, Its a nice one to watch.

What I realized about the entire chapter of Greece was that you can't blame the government and corporations for all the problems in the world.

Sometimes we as individuals need to step back and think of our own financial future. Reckless spending on our behalf without planning for the future are disastrous. Savings and investments are important for our future. And we need to think of it.

There is a point where the government's job ends and ours begins.
> where did all the money go

They spent the money.

It's no difference to running up a big credit card debt, but at some point you have to pay it back.

What went wrong for Greece was it maxed out it's government credit card and none of the banks would let them up their credit limit.

Now the goverment doesn't have a lot of money comming in but it still has a massive debt.

That debt has to be payed back or else they have to default (i.e. go bankrupt).
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Although I agree that its wrong to say All Greeks are lazy, Its also true that they didn't manage their money well.

Now I'm not too much of an economist. But I would be annoyed if my money is used to bail out somebody for mistakes they made.
> The reason I moved out of NYC (and out of the country) was because the NYPD put up cameras on my local (135th Street 1/2/3) subway entrance.

You moved out of a city because a CCTV camera got put up on a subway entrance? You're kidding, right?
I agree; let us not forget that due to EU, Greeks got looser borrowing from banks, and they bought German products. Last time I was in Romania for a business trip, I saw a similar picture. Goods flow from Western Europe to Romania together with easy credit. That spoils people quickly.
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Half a century later, people are still overly optimistic about software development. According to recent studies, this is true for everything (and society at large is actually in favor of it).

Yet it is particulary visible in computing. Why is that?

Side note: bullshit in marketing brochure is here to stay.