skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
After high school and before college, I spent half of a year in Beijing learning Chinese and the other half in Palo Alto working at a Web startup. (It sounds like a cliché now.) This was three years ago. I'm really glad I did what I did, but there were many things I learned during and afterward that would have helped me a lot. A lot of my friends who deferred college for a year don't consider it a good choice, so it's not a given that you will enjoy it.

My recommendations:

- Leave home.

- Spend only your own money. Don't ask or let your parents pay for a single cent. If possible. (But stay on their health insurance.)

- Make your own plans. If you're traveling, don't sign up for "packages" offered by American (or whatever your home country is) tour companies. Get an airline ticket on your own and correspond with local tour agencies, local universities, etc., on your own.

- If you have to spend your parents' money or get your plans approved by them, then do your best to persuade them to give you as much freedom as possible, and take as little money as you need.

- Embrace your freedom. If you're traveling, don't overplan. Leave room to take a trip to another city with people you meet or to abruptly decide you want to go somewhere else or do something else.

- If you're looking for a job, people will try to take advantage of you. Don't underestimate the value you provide. Don't sell yourself short.

- Asia is cheap, safe, and fun. South America, Africa, and the Middle East aren't safe. Europe and Australia aren't cheap. And the US isn't quite as fun (for people who grew up there like me). Those generalizations are what led me to go to China, and I think they still hold (relatively) true.

I see from your post history that you don't program. If you're interested in the tech (and tech business) world, which I think you are, then you will be missing out on 99% of it unless you learn to program. I would recommend you figure out what environment would be most conducive to you learning to program, and then put yourself in that environment for the next 10 months. It's that important. Then travel or something for the next two months.

My email is in my profile.
Financial panics still require that practical men violate their own principles.
Hi there

I think it depends what you're doing. I had a quick look at your bio and if what you are planning is the air-compressed scooter then I think this could be a very interesting project and you'd probably regret not doing it. I'm sure you've already done your market research! :) From your bio I don't think you'd have any problems in getting another job if it came down to it.
Don't forget that "in the long run, we're all dead." I don't know why I find that quote so ironic. :)
And being a venture capitalist is like being a producer ?!? :-0 !

I kid because I love exclamation QuEsTiOn mArK
I believe in what Peter Thiel said:

He's even more bullish on the Valley. "We have this leverage finance bubble like we had in the '20s, and there's an argument that we're headed to something comparable to the '30s," he says. "Where was the best place to be in the '30s? Probably Los Angeles. It was the hub of new media and technology, with the radio and the airplane. Silicon Valley is the L.A. of the 1930s.
What's coolest is that the analytics tools were available to discover it. No other storage solution I've seen has that level of instrumentation.
I disagree with 3). If anything, entertainment websites will increase in usage because entertainment tends to be counter cyclical.
Newsweek feature asked: "Their magazines are full of user-generated content, but will people pay for it?"

http://www.newsweek.com/id/120355

I guess not?

I'm also kind of bummed out by this news. These guys were paying ZERO for their content and they still couldn't make it work.

Also, I agree that there's something odd about them not just going web-only + a pay fee for super users. How many people do you need to run that site? 3?
Someone killed the redirect because it was in article space.

The original article is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Why_Wikipedia_is_not_...
Some very good advice in the bullet points, there. I can confirm most of them from personal experience (unfortunately).
Not if Jobs dies.
How much overhead does it take to record disk latency data in realtime? Does it slow down the disks? I read on the guy's blog that ZFS's write caching meant that end users didn't experience increased latency when the guy yelled at the disks, but surely there must be some performance cost to all this instrumentation.
I wonder if the kind of "anti-noise" tech used in high end Japanese cars around the wheel arches would be useful in a data center.
Steve Jobs steps down as CEO of Apple.
JPG Magazine Goes Bye-Bye
Is it possible to keep the 6+ figure job and fund your business with your salary? Then, if it doesn't work you haven't really lost anything. If it does, then you can quit. You'll also be able to start now instead of saving up cash and going through it as slow as possible.
Well, all of those are perfectly obvious in function. Back, forward, history, up the menu hierarchy, down the hierarchy, history again, and refresh.
Seems like there could even be a business behind having large houses and turning them into hacker houses...
There is no difference

If you think your startup isn't a (big or small) business - you are missing the point.
http://code.google.com/p/latex-composer/

firefox extension based on mimetex
Expert's Opinion on Cloud Computing
Listen to industry experts speak about Cloud Computing. Several Gurus express their opinion on cloud computing. Included are industry leaders such as Tim O’Rielly of O’Rielly media.
PCNTDA asks farmers to approach state to get back land
Of course it is crazy. So what? I did it 7 months ago. Leaved what had become a 350 people company to start a new project. Back to square one. Not a single regret.

I for one like the timing:
First, most blue chips are now completely focused on their core business. Perfect times to try to quietly take the lead on wide open niche or emerging markets.
Moreover, lots of smart people are leaving their employers (voluntarily or otherwise) or are just tired of seeing their company going down the drain. Perfect times to hire bright people for cheap.

That's why I don't think your timing is wrong at all. That is, if your project does not require massive initial funding, because I do have some doubts about funding in the current environment. I usually don't bother to see VCs before breaking even and being able to show 7 figures in sales or revenue. Just arriving around there on the current project, so this month should be the start of the VC pitching circus. We shall see...

All in all, there is no absolutely good or bad timing: it may be the layoff business or the cost-cutting industry right now, but there is always some growth sector worth exploring. It is always the right time to start something whose time has come.

Go for it. Work hard. Have fun.
...and let us know how it turns out. :)
I actually use GWT, and my advice is to be very careful.

I've managed to have bugs that show up in the browser that I have had an amazingly difficult time tracking down. You get a pile of javascript from your pile of java, and it can be hard to tell where the bug is at all.

Complexity is dangerous, and GWT is fantastically complicated. I haven't run into a GWT compilation bug, but I'm sure there exists such a thing, and the day I run into it I will simply sit down and cry because I have no other recourse.

(But when it works, I guess its kind of a nice way to build UIs, if you like Java-style UI APIs... I've never met such a person, but I'm sure they exist ;))
I don't think that's what he's saying. I interpreted it as "If your startup turns out to be a success, then it was a brilliant move. If it doesn't, it was a crazy move"
Also check: http://www.pastemath.com and a plugin for msn messenger: http://gallery.live.com/liveitemdetail.aspx?li=fc6c54f3-fa61...
I want to say something about leaky abstractions and caution the reader that writing code that you then pass to something that generates some other code is a very very scary thing by and large. The Java compiler and gcc are really mature, and every so often bugs are still spotted. Imagine if you're super-awesome-Objective-C-to-Javascript compiler has a bug. How do you know if the bug is in your Objective-C code, in the compiler, or just a weird browser oddity? Basically you end up kind of needing to know everything between you and the browser, so it may be a good idea to minimize those things.

(Actually, I recommend sitting down and writing Javascript without a library, just so you have an idea of what works and what doesn't across browser. It was somewhat surprising for me to be sure.)
Kdice.com, a game much like Risk, was done with GWT by one guy, and he wrote a book on GWT.
For those of us unable to watch the video - what is the explanation?
nazgul, you are recognising a stereotype of teenagers, who 'think the world needs to justify itself to them'. You see these kinds of adolescents all the time, which is why you recognise that stereotype.

You have never met a TCS-raised child. Why do you think that TCS, which you have never encountered, will without doubt produce this stereotype of teenager, which you have encountered often?
Richard Feynman Videos (I just collected as many as I could find)
It's only crazy if your startup is a web based todo list.
How to write a custom form builder in rails?
Tutorial how to build nice, concise and dry forms in Rails view templates.
Sure, but I'm arguing a bit more then that.

I'm arguing that it's fine to have some companies that don't pay dividends. Fine in a world where the standard is dividend paying companies. Once they become the exception, once you stop even speculating about what they would be paying if they where paying, once you start talking about, game's up. Stock becomes trading cards.

BTW, it's not just not paying. Paying 1-3% is the same sort of issue just that then it's the investors rather then the companies fault.

But then, all that says. It still works. Sort of. Baffles me.
Stock market prediction
Do you have any pointers to what was wrong and how it was resolved?
A Non-Blocking HashTable
Did you read the article? In direct response to 1: "The researchers had already discovered that each session of intellectual work requires only three calories more than the rest period." So, yes, it does, but apparently the change in appetite more than offsets the increased consumption.

And as for 2, this complaint is a pet peeve of mine. Yes, bigger sample sizes are (often) better, but sometimes you can't get a bigger sample. Size of sample and representativeness are kind of orthogonal, if all humans were homogeneous, sample sizes of one would be totally sufficient. (Basically, sure, there could be uncorrected bias, but please point to a bias that you think is unaccounted for, and not just "should have paid for more subjects".)

Honestly, it kind of sounds like you want the study results to be something since you have preconceived expectations that thinking hard should use more energy. I'm not trying to be combative here, but I don't really know of anything wrong with their methodology. I haven't read the paper in question, but presumably neither have you, so we're two people on the internet arguing about something we haven't even read. Whoo, yay internet!
He screamed at the disks to recreate the graph. Disk vibrations led to latency.
Is "look and feel" copyrightable?
although i agree with the points raised here, am inclined to be critical of the uh, critic... when all is said and done, wikipedia provides a lot of info we can use and THAT is what matters...

ps: it would be to wikipedia's own good if it could reflect on the points raised by the "critic"... aren't we all for self improvement, eh?
No, that is not it. With G'g and Gg' you are repeating the same permutation in your set above!

It makes no difference if they have distinguishing marks or not. It matters if you are told that a particular child is a girl (50%) or if you are only told that at least one child is a girl (66%).
OK, that's not how you see HN. I wasn't writing about HN originally. Every sentence fragment began with "TechCrunch." :)

On HN, you have a slew of TC-style masturbatory stories about funding and then you've got a handful of less exciting "hard luck" cases that touch people because they're like orphans who sing and dance.

Like that post about the plumber -- it's Puritan Work Ethic pr0n.

Most HN readers seem to think they're going to end up with the funding (the former), but at the same time they want to hear from those heartwarming orphans (the latter).
India's government, judiciary and bureaucracy are pretty good by comparison with other countries in the same income range or region.

The government also put money into education (more than was needed according to assorted "experts") which has enabled the boom in service exports.

I would also question how efficient China's government is given the high level of corruption, and its inability to enforce important regulations (like not putting melamine in milk...). Maybe the Chinese government is just good at convincing people it is efficient because it suppresses all reporting that suggests other wise.
Ummm, the original thread WAS about Sam_Odio. See the parent of the post that kirubakaran linked to: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=360891

I was one of the people that gave said assurance in that thread. I stand by my previous statement.

Heh heh, assurance.
This reminds me a lot of the power struggle behind GovWorks if anyone has ever seen the documentary Startup.com. One founder wanted to keep things true, transparent, and stick to the roots while the other wanted to go big, change the way things worked and in the end the more passive ended up walking away. It's kind of depressing how these stories all end the same: the company goes bottom up
First Steve Jobs Macworld Keynote in 1997
Windows has been built to be easily and centrally managed for sys-admins since the days of NT. Linux on the other side has been built modularly and to be absolutely hackable to anyone with a root/admin-account.

There is no question what I would prefer to manage. You underestimate the power of Active Directory and Group policies.
Sun went out of their way to make an amazing storage product. Interestingly, they started with perl, then rewrote everything in JavaScript/C instead[1].

You can even download a VMware image to test their UI and provisioning: http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/reso...

NetApp should go out of business already.

[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=390000 (yes, item 390,000)
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WWOOFing
It's possible thanks to the magic of dtrace.

In a storage appliance, you wouldn't expect the load to be overwhelmingly CPU bound[1], so performing real time instrumentation isn't a noticeable performance hit: http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/DTrace_Topics...

[1]: assuming you aren't using ZFS gzip compression: http://blogs.smugmug.com/don/2008/10/13/zfs-mysqlinnodb-comp...
I want to see the latency graphs during an earthquake.
While shouting like that is unlikely, I wonder if some data centres are effected from traffic rumble or other sources of vibration. (Having your server farm performance dip when you switch to diesel generation might be a problem).

I guess that might manifest as "slow racks" or "slow data centres". It also suggests that rubberised disk mounts (as are used for 'silent' desktop PCs) might sense on server systems too (or are they standard already?)
The $6 Million Social Worker
All My Books - Book Management Software
Totally Renovated 4 Bedroom Apartment with 2 Full Baths (housing rentals/new york/272843)
One should read this instead (from the same domain):

http://javascript.crockford.com/javascript.htm
How can you be told information about a particular child if you have no way to distinguish them?

I partially understand your point about G'g vs Gg' now: if having a prime is the only way to distinguish the children, then G and g must be indistinguishable, so G = g.
Seth's Blog: Change your pricing
I wonder why Windows 7 is creating so much buzz already, when it could still be years away.

Let's just wait and see what Microsoft actually delivers, and hope that the whole world will have moved on to Linux and OS X before that.

Don't forget that Microsoft has a proven track record of being rotten to the core.
See Competing iPhone Apps Coming with One Juicer
40 Inspirational Speeches/Clips in 2 Minutes
8 months old in a few days!
Worlds.com Patent Lawsuit Could Set Off Chain Reaction
Isn't that just something 37Signal's lawyer would have made them put in? It doesn't cost them anything to have those words there and might dissuade a few people from copying their design.
It's as lightly to be that people see food as a reward or stress reliever as pleasure is derived from it.

So after a stressful session of brain work in a lab they have just one more plate of pasta.

Interesting work but there is obviously a long way to go.
After a lot of brain twisting it sinks in.. and I do probability for living!

For doubters:
Before the door is opened by the host, you are less likely to have chosen the right one(with prob 1/3). Once he opens the door, he eliminates one "bad door". Now, given that you were less likely to have chosen the right one in the first place and one wrong one has been removed, it is highly likely that the residual door is the right one.
I think it is. No one said anything for or against scientific knowledge then all of a sudden WHOOSH.
Permalink: http://freescienceonline.blogspot.com/2008/12/richard-feynma...
I have to say, Android's sandboxed environment could be a big step up from the home-grown Linux sandboxes that Asus et al. currently ship with their netbooks.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=Trade+Dress+%22lo...
http://www.pchristensen.com/blog/articles/hacker-vs-engineer...
So says T-Mobile. ;)

(http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/09/know-your-rights-does-t-m... + http://www.colourlovers.com/blog/2007/11/04/beware-t-mobile-... for more info)
Among all of the possible things I can so easily say about patent law, the thing that needs the biggest reform is what is patentable. The optimism that no idea will be turned away died when someone first decided to patent something that inherent technological capabilities demand; for instance the company that is deciding to file suit regarding the graphical representation of computer functions (or "icon" as I like to call it), and now this. It's a tough call to make, but it demands close scrutiny, and even closer judgment.

Ostensibly, on the surface this suit will not hold water since "enabling users to interact in a virtual space through avatars. " has existed long before Feb. 2007 (according to this article is the date the patent was applied for) and that's just the point I'm making right now. If it is something that is just inherent to the technology or market your "invention" is targeted to, deny the patent; capitalizing on natural processes and expected functionality is about as inane as the mass marketing of bottled water.
Not sure if it's more expensive, even if you ignore the free quota. Amazon charges you $0.10 per instance-hour, not cpu-hour like Google (so you only pay while you consume CPU). Also, you should probably compare the storage price not to S3/EBS, but to Simple DB (you still pay for CPU time spent in the datastore, though).
Ooops... I thought I had linked to that post. Thanks for pasting it here!
Everything i needed to know about managing hackers, i learnt from my DVD collection..
highly wild idea:
If specific vibration causes specific disk latency, given a high precision intstrument, what are the chances of being able to eavesdrop sysadmins on a co-loc site? ;)
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I used to write the firmware that runs the tracking systems for disk drives (specifically, some of my stuff was in the Quantum Atlas III, IV, 10K, and 10K II). This does not surprise me at all. Cabinet vibrations were always a HUGE component of track mis-registration (i.e., the heads going off the tracks). It used to really annoy us when the cabinet and workstation manufacturers would stick our drives in flimsy, crappy components and wonder why the performance would suffer.
classic teaser. If you extend the problem to n doors and you're shown all but one, I think it helps the intuition.

Years ago I recall a lunch conversation with a group of mathematicians, some with PhDs in statistics, that was quite lively.
It isn't really ready for prime-time. AppEngine still has some limits that make it hard to develop.

Examples:

The 1MB file upload limit. It's not that I want to have users uploading 500MB tars or something, but I don't want to put a message in my app saying, "please resize you photo to be less than 1MB before uploading where we'll probably alter the photo again."

They've indicated that you'll be able to purchase more storage and bandwidth which is great, but noticeably absent was the ability to send more than the 2,000 email limit (http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2008/12/system-status-da...). The problem might not be that I want to send more than 2,000 emails in a single day. The problem is that these quotas are rolling windows. Plus, the whole point is that AppEngine scales without me having to do anything. If it doesn't accommodate a decent sized social app, I might as well just put something on Slicehost or EC2 since at that low a usage rate, scaling isn't that hard.

There's no map/reduce or cron-like jobs. The datastore in AppEngine acts as a bit of a straight-jacket to ensure you don't do operations that don't scale. However, without map/reduce and cron jobs, it can mean that you just can't do certain things. And yes, I know that you could fake it by running another server, making an HTTP request to AppEngine and cutting up a process that might take a minute into chunks that AppEngine would execute, but that's just silly. The whole point of AppEngine is not having to deal with your own server and having an integrated environment that just works.

If the purpose of AppEngine is for developers not to worry about deployment and scaling, then it just fails because of some of the limitations. AppEngine doesn't scale. Maybe that's just a matter of the quotas being removed/being able to pay for more, but as of right now it doesn't scale at all. And it doesn't seem to be an amazingly high priority at Google. Software development takes time, but it's been a while since they said developers would be able to buy more and it hasn't come - beyond the recent blog posting I linked to showing some screen shots.

AppEngine could be a wonderful platform to develop on, but not until some of these problems get fixed.
Detroit and Silicon Valley don’t hold the keys to the auto’s future; Henry Ford does.
You know, I have been suffering from unusual disk latency recently. I'm going to send someone into the DC to check for this. Not howling lunatics mind, other potential sources.