skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Business plan is the biggest piece of bull crap. You should know your business or do whatever it takes to learn it and persist - that is the only thing that is required and a smart investor will get that and ask the right questions.

Still, write it if you think that it will get you the money and then promptly discard it, or better still ask them to write it - obviously if they understand enough they should rely on their numbers more than anyone elses.

If they say that your business plan is not good enough, ask them to shove it up their sorry ass.
The Google Apps Revenue Myth
I taught myself Dvorak many years ago during lunch breaks using this tutor (I think the webpage was much simpler back then, though the content looks the same)..
http://www.gigliwood.com/abcd/lessons/

Although I could type quite well from an early age (despite the ZX Spectrum's rubber keys) I never learnt to touch type Qwerty. Learning Dvorak forced me to touch type and rest on the home keys properly. Using a "normal" keyboard also meant I couldn't cheat and look at the keys when using Dvorak.

Probably due to now touch typing, Dvorak is faster for me (and more comfy). I'm forced to use Qwerty often enough however that I can switch between the two fairly easily.

I'm in the UK but use the US-Dvorak layout as that is standard with Windows. I'm therefore missing the pound sign but ALT-156 gets me through the odd occasions I need it. I have tried the UK version on Linux but couldn't find the exact same layout for Windows and am too lazy to re-create it myself. The US version is good enough for me.

I tend to use the old DOS style keys for cut/copy/paste (Shift-Delete, Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert) due to the odd xcv layout others have mentioned. I learnt emacs after the switch so the layout seems fine to me. I haven't taken the time to learn VI.

Windows is a little awkward as switching layout with the taskbar icon only changes the active window and changing the default input language seems to miss things like the start menu.

I think an ergo keyboard is the next step (I can feel my wrists are pushed into a slightly unnatural position) but am yet to try one. This makes a lot of sense to me also but again I'm yet to try it..
http://www.tlb.org/keyboardchop.html
> exclusively for rich people

No, it is not. The California Public Employees’ Retirement System (Calpers) alone had more than $10 billion invested in hedge funds in 2007.

So your average Joe should not wish evil to hedge fund managers, his retirement money is at stake.
QA from Anybots - the coolest thing you'll see at CES all day.
Everyone has different experiences and needs, but I'll tell you my experience:

1) Most investors of internet startups don't ask to see a business plan. Maybe half want a short (1-2 page) narrative about the business-- an executive summary.

2) I've written formal business plans for two businesses in the past and they sat on the shelf collecting dust thereafter. In 6 months they were sorta obsolete. In 12 months they were freakin' hilariously wrong. New companies change to fast to do that much formal planning.

A good investor will recognize that. They won't ask for a business plan-- but they will ask a bunch of hard questions to make sure you've thought about the important issues.
Thank you, Zed, for debunking internet-forum libertarianism. To the non-naive libertarians among us, however, you have provided no new information.

If you have the time, you should pick up some Friedman or Hayek. Friedman's "Free to Choose" is a mass market book on libertarian economic policy. Hayek's "The Use of Information in Society" is a beautiful exposition on the function of a decentralized market. But there are plenty others.

You might also benefit from a well-reasoned, economic critique of regulation. "Regulatory capture" is a real phenomenon, as is self-serving bureaucracy. If hundreds of thousands of pages of rules and a multi-trillion dollar budget weren't enough to fix the market, there is probably something wrong with the process. "More rules and money" probably isn't going to fix things.

I can find such writing for you if you don't have the time. Drop me an email.

However, you will find that writings by competent libertarian economists are not so easy to "debunk" when compared to forum posts written by 16-year-olds. Or Misesians. Those guys are crazy.
Google's Unkindest Cut: Tech Support
1000 charges on a long-life battery is pretty good, maybe you just need to use a laptop for an extended period of time to understand how batteries work. Assuming this battery does get the advertised 8-hour lifespan and it is used five days a week (for 1.5 charges per day) then this battery will last through two and a half years of constant use. That is actually quite exceptional.
"Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.” -G H Hardy, the opening lines of A Mathematician’s apology
Then again, some people will compain if you speak in uncertain terms.

It seems to me that there could perchance be another problem in our communication, namely that of people of a certain persuasion expressing themselves in quite a convoluted manner perhaps better fitting a person in the process of producing a work of literature, in an attempt at asserting their intellectual prowess.

We have something to say, but we encode it in a carrier signal of verbal acrobatics.

It's logical because intelligent people want to appear intelligent too, but communication shouldn't be a competition of who can bend the English language in the most ways while still saying something.. and that was close too!

Then there's Programming Reddit, where (often very intelligent) people gather to argue about things and out-smug each other while still being more right than their opponents. I read it because there's still a lot of useful information floating around, but it's getting tiresome to read conversations that have a "winner".

"C-C-C-COMBO-BREAKER!!"

And what's with the Franklin quote? Was it normal to write "I walk'd to the store and purchas'd a banana" in those days?

Quick - someone hit me with a "Never start a sentence with 'and'"!
Has a 30 page business plan ever directly helped a company you worked on? I'm not challenging you, I'm genuinely interested.
Repulsive quantum effect finally measured
The entire 21 years of magazine content (and more) are available on this "Dr. Dobb's Developer Library DVD 5" release:
https://store.ddj.com/product.php?pid=4
No, I understand exactly how it works. If you take a short position by borrowing a stock there is always a small but non-zero risk of completely blowing up due to something like this. It's playing financial Russian roulette. Making the market more transparent reduces the risk a little more, but it's still non-zero.

Any trader with common sense would have hedged the downside risk using other derivatives. For example, he could have purchased enough deep out-of-the-money call options to cover all the shares he borrowed.

No one is suggesting that shorting or speculation ought to be banned. However I remain unconvinced that requiring Porsche to immediately disclose their VW ownership stake in this case would have had any benefit for the German economy as a whole.
Do you have any stories about how any of those business plans helped companies you were working on? I'd love to hear some.
Well, I have a reputation to protect as an interaction designer. I'm kinda a microcelebrity. People who know me have a high expectation of my work. (Surely not as high as I think, though, I'll give you that.)

But for programmers with little user experience experience (urk), your point is a good one.
i thought windows' command.com was posix (some version) compliant? posix != unix compatible, per se, i don't think
I think it only matters for developers who work with mainstream open source.

That's me most of the time and my switch from a dual-boot windows/linux configuration to an OSX laptop several years ago has saved me many hours (although I still have to work around odd OSX weirdness here or there but that is pretty easy to work out). I'm not likely to do Windows-only stuff anytime soon so I don't expect I'll be paying Microsoft anything until their POSIX support is superior to what OSX offers.

However if you're not a developer or if you and your customers mainly work with Microsoft-only proprietary stuff then POSIX won't really matter.
If you want to learn from a book (as opposed to memorising a shopping list or something) then the advice is always the same: get an overview first, then notice the details. Facts seem to need an overall framework in which they can "live". Without it, they get lost.

A standard technique goes like this: read just the first and last paragraphs of each chapter. Then read the first sentence of each paragraph of the first chapter. Then read the actual chapter as fast as you can (don't focus on details or bits you don't understand). Finally, go through it one last time and make notes. Now go on to the next chapter.

However, if you truly want to memorise an astounding number of facts (e.g. a list of a thousand pieces of information, or all the common words in a foreign language), then you need to use sophisticated mnemonic techniques. It takes a little practice, but you get surprising results very quickly. For example, after about 15 minutes practising the techniques in this book, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Use-Your-Memory-Understand-Improve/d..., I was able to memorise the order of a shuffled deck of cards with about 95% accuracy. It wouldn't have taken more than a few days to learn to memorise several decks at once with 100% accuracy.
Tips:

* Automate Server Configuration with Puppet

* Store your database on an EBS

* Backup often to S3

* Use cloudfront to host your most common static files (CSS, JPG, JS)

* If you don't have too much email volume, use google apps for your domain.

* Use DNSMadeEasy.com for your DNS and also failover to your backup.

* Anything that you didn't automated, document it so that its easier to automate later.

* Have a backup plan if EC2 goes down.

If you want some help with this, you could always email me dan {at} abtain {dot} com.
I have a lot of friends that are in or have been through A-round-funded startups, and I've been through several myself. All of them took market-rate salaries. I worked a year without salary to start a company in '99, but all three of us took market salaries (over my objection, which I'm now happy wasn't honored) when we closed the first round.
True points, I was more commenting on how the connection between an admission that 'the site was compromised, we're going to take some time to fix things' resulting in a definite conclusion that the attack was malicious worked.
I don't understand the "override lockout" part? If a user overrides a lockout and gets a new password, what is to stop the lockout process from starting over again as the attackers continue trying.

I don't think that "security question + get in immediately" is the answer either. Security questions are just other, usually significantly weaker passwords.

So do you mean password reset with an email that contains a special link that does allow them in? (not that email is great but it's at least another channel)

I think an exponential backoff with a maximum of somewhere in the 2-5 minutes range per IP would be ok.
To quote a fellow developer on this topic:

<pengvado> that brings back the memory:

<pengvado> windows is posix compliant

<pengvado> every single posix function returns ENOTIMPLEMENTED, which is one complying implementation :)
Potion - a little fast OO language by _why
It's available on MSDN now if you have a subscription. Otherwise I think you have to wait till Friday, and it will be available here: http://www.microsoft.com/windows7
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX#POSIX_for_Windows

Short answer is no, it isn't.
What are the top 3 things you'd want to have handy in Excel when you sat down to a second meeting with a strong-sounding investor, webwright?
>"Libertarianism is NOT Anarcho-Capitalism."

Anarcho-capitalists would consider themselves libertarian, and many famous ones are also leading lights of the libertarian movement. Murray Rothbard is clearly a libertarian, and Lysander Spooner belongs to the classical liberal tradition that the libertarians adopt as their forefathers.

The problem is that "libertarianism" is a medium-sized tent. So when you criticize "libertarians" for position X, well some hold that position and some don't.
I'd actually like to define it as extreme moderatism.
Alternatively, perhaps CalPERS shouldn't be risking average Joe's retirement money by putting money into unregulated speculative investment pools. There's no reason to expect that hedge funds will deliver superior risk-adjusted returns compared to any other asset class. And there are some really horrible structural problems with most hedge funds which make them poor choices for pensions.
You can just use the unix seconds count.
There are a lot of legacy date functions built around 1980.
Vietnam: 100 percent open source by 2010?
C++ Users Journal was always my favorite, even though I've never seriously used C++. I hope it's still around, I never kept up with it after I moved.
Have you seen their clothing? They are bland and tasteless. They are wal-mart clothes for 3x the price.

Having "American" in this brand will make countries laugh at how unsophisticated we are.

You are going to make something in America at least make something good like New Balance. We don't care to known for making neon green tights.
Looks cool but how small is too small for "netbooks". At some point they are too small for the lap, and I think this might be getting close. Not sure though.
Exactly. Vista was more of a "lay the groundwork" release that focused on security improvements (UAC), etc. Win 7 won't change Vista much, it'll just make it look prettier -- and people will love it. But the groundwork was laid in Vista.
Also pertinent here is the Alexander Pope quotation included in Franklin's autobiography:

"Men must be taught as if you taught them not, And things unknown proposed as things forgot."

You may know the answer to the problem someone else is going through. You may know that their approach is utter garbage and that they are clueless as to what they are doing. But rather than saying so outright, which will likely come across as offensive, it seems better to phrase things in such a way as that they will come to see the better solution for themselves. They might not even realize the role you played in that, nor credit you for the insight. But they will have learned something, improved their work, and didn't feel insulted.

In my experience, it's a route worth trying, anyway.
I have been using dvorak since 2005 and wouldn't go back. I had trouble with my hands with qwerty but don't now.
Choosing VIM Color Scheme
Cue the hoary joke from the 70s:

Q: What will the High Performance Computing language of the 1980's be?

A: I don't know, but it will be called Fortran

That was one of my dad's favorites :)
What does it do? It looks to me like a segway with an LCD screen in the middle.
I think this has less to do with lack of POSIX compliance and more to do with how unfriendly windows is to hacking in general. The command line is completely crippled. If the command line had a similar feature set to Linux I don't think POSIX complaince would matter much.

So between a crappy command line and the registry, hacking windows never seems worth the trouble.
Your argument is that various people look black in pictures? To me that sounds like an admission of not having done proper research into the matter.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_26/b3939108_...

'But BusinessWeek spoke with seven former workers who say they were offended by what they called a highly sexual atmosphere at American Apparel. They told stories of senior managers who pursued sexual relationships with less senior colleagues and rewarded their favorites with promotions, company cars, and apartments. "It was a company built on lechery," says a former stock person. "I thought it was a male contemporary perspective on feminism, but it turns out to be just a gimmick," says another ex-employee. And another: "I made sure to stay away from the store when I knew [Charney] was coming into town. It's not one person -- he's aiming for all women.'

I generally have little patience with these kinds of feel-good PR-ish stories.
Do we believe Kawasaki on this one? He says, paraphrasing, "a pitch is a great communication tool, but no substitute for a plan", which he says you should write in 12 point type for people over 50. I feel like webwright at least would contradict this advice.
Yeah, that's brilliant, but really - you can only decode what it means if you know the other person is too polite to say things outright.
What a dumb question
I use a DataHand keyboard where the layout you use would not make a big difference because every key is easy to hit. Unfortunately they just stopped producing these things...
Criticism from people I respect tends to have a large impact on me. Criticism that is clearly technically right can make me say "Oops" and correct it. Criticism that is vague and ad hominem gets flushed out the window.

Just think of what kind of criticism you want to get and actually impacts you; make that the kind of criticism you deliver. That's if you want to help other people.

To the extent you want to help yourself, flattery has always been a favored method.
GlimmerBlocker: http proxy ad blocker for mac os x
What do you consider a livable wage? $25,000/yr is actually pretty good considering median household income is about $50k: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income.
The revolution of Public Choice economics was to examine the incentives faced by actors in the public sector, instead of viewing public policy as exogenous to the economy as previous models have done.

In the past, if economists discovered an inefficiency in the market, they would say "and the government should correct this inefficiency with policy X". Public choice economists don't ask if governments should do X, but rather will they do X.

It turns out the incentives facing government actors aren't very good. They have much fewer incentives to act efficiently than market actors. It is possible to have competent officials at the head of a small bureaucracy produce good results. However, I doubt this is possible for the United States, which owns the largest bureaucracy in the world.

So, there are real reasons for limiting the scope of government.
Just to note, something important I am trying to preserve is trying not to inconvenience the end user at all if possible. They shouldn't need to be bothered by this (inevitable) crap.
OS Smackdown: Why Win Vista is better then Linux, Mac OS X, Windows XP...
Mitsubishi i MiEV Electric Car to be Sold as Citroën and Peugeot in Europe
Is it the end of the desktop PC?
You thus can't follow the recommended typing practice of pressing a modifier key with the opposite hand as the key being modified.

One of the reasons for that practice is that modifier keys are typically pressed with your pinkie. You also use that finger for typing characters, so for these characters you need to break your habits. Eventually you build new ones, but it'd be better not to need this. Even for characters that you don't type with your pinkie, you may need to stretch your fingers in awkward ways.

Thumbs are only used for the space bar, which is seldom used with modifier keys --and you can use either thumb for it, so you can alternate. Also, thumbs are less 'coupled' with the other fingers.

I'd still prefer my modifiers duplicated on either side, but I can see how this may matter less if they go under your thumbs.
Would you consider tweets to be creations of lasting value? I think I could argue quite convincingly that Facebook's network, the connections it inspires and facilitates, and the social interaction it makes possible is of far more lasting value to the world and its people than any tweeting or blogging, especially when they're as devoid of content as the posts I've seen.

Making snide clever comments is easy, building something that is actually making a difference isn't.
Sorry for the threadjack, but are there many HN people going to CES?

I'm flying up in a few hours, but only going to be there through tomorrow night.
I misread your comment at first as describing reading a book or magazine on your monitor. And to that I can relate: I have difficulty reading long-format content off of my screen.

When I sit down with an actual paper-based book or magazine, I find my focus and attentiveness are about the same as they've been for years. Not great, but neither are they greatly changed.
> "who died and appointed you the arbiter of stupid"

I think that's the key. We all are entitled to an opinion, but none of us is entitled to spit that opinion in the face of anyone else.

> "It's your attitude towards other people on the whole. You want to criticize because of the way it makes you feel"

> "Just biting your tongue's not going to solve this [negative] underlying view [of other people]."

Strongly agree. Most peoples' criticism (mine especially included) isn't harsh because they use a bad method, it's harsh because they're mean, selfish people.
I don't like your statement about a business plan not being a plan to run your company, that is exactly what it should be. Though maybe your 1 page strategy document is your real business plan.
The business plan is just a name though, you should have 2 sets of books/plans:
1) Internal accounting that is very pessimistic and realistic and assumes the worst case scenario and prepares for it.
2) External accounting that is incredibly optimistic and assumes every possible best break will happen 100% of the time.
Publishing 2.0: Tim Ferriss on Using a Viral Idea to Create a Best-seller
Not every trader could have just hedged out the risk of a blowup. that is becuase derivatives are a zero sum game. For every trader who purchased the out of the money call, someone sold it. Therefore that person is now responsible for unlimited downside.
i love his attitude. he's being friendly and having a good time, while also making progress towards real work.
This is from the same guy who contributed the amazing write-up of Le Web last month:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/dec/10/startups-in...

Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=393629
The EU (or more specifically the Schengen agreement) eases migration in Europe --- making voting by moving easier. Unfortunately they also tune down the competition between regimes by making the differences smaller.
Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected
I was a mediocre QWERTY typist when I switched to Dvorak. I lost what little ability I had in QWERTY. I heard of people who could switch between the two, but I haven't even tried. In some 5 years I haven't missed the ability to write efficiently in other computers.
Just burn the tracks to a CD-RW and then re-import them. This has always been the free way to upgrade your iTunes music.
Not very. Most Linux distros aren't POSIX (but oddballs like A/UX, Minix, and VxWorks are). The /etc tree isn't in POSIX, nor is less(1). POSIX doesn't even say that useful config data must be stored in text files.

It sounds like what you really mean is that you want Windows to be more like the other Unix-like systems you use. There's no standard for that.
maybe you don't ;)
He didn't write about whether he received a dildo. Like many American Apparel visitors apparently do.
While the explanation is clear, it should address the simple steps these hedge funds should have taken to protect themselves.

The hedge funds knew that VW was largely owned by big institutional investors. They knew Porsche was interested in owning VW. They may have had good reason to short VW, but if they were going to do that, why didn't they just buy some cheap, far out, short term call options that would have protected themselves from the divide-by-zero problem? The purchase would have been far smaller than their potential profits had they been right about VW declining like GM, Toyota, etc.
See how pointless BSchool is?