skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"How do you reconcile this with most startups failing?"

Very simple. Don't choose the type of startup that has a 3 in 10 chance of succeeding on the off chance that you are the lucky one that hit's the lottery. Stop thinking that if you want to be an entrepreneur the only thing you can do is get into YC, Techstars, 500 Startups or have some idea that a VC will invest in.

The other thing you can do is work as hard as I've indicated but put eggs into other baskets. The first business that I did (which I sold after 9 years and did pretty well with) I had spent time learning UNIX while I was running the business in order to manage the business (quite unusual back then but I found it fun and interesting. So it was my fun but the fun had a purpose). With those skills I was able to do something later that also made money. I worked all the time but I dedicated some of my time also to learning new things that could be "the next thing" or a fall back if the first thing failed (it didn't).

The point is, just like in investing you are supposed to diversify you can do that as well with business. Now I didn't diversify my efforts until maybe year 4 (because I started with nothing and had to make up for not having enough capital to do everything that I needed) but once I got to that point I took some time and money and invested even then in the future.

I started my business with maybe $7000 (in today's dollars) that I earned by doing various things in high school and college by working.

Yes, for me it worked out. But my suggestions are also based on many years of observing what others did that didn't work and how much effort they put in.
I think its a cool idea, and I think it almost makes sense. In showbiz, you sign lots of short contracts and lots of gigs, so you need someone to deal with the hassle and be in the know, cause you have to find new stuff often. Software is kind of like that, but not as frequent. I think it comes down to frequency maybe- If you need to find new jobs often, an agent would be very helpful.
Actually, 30 m/hour is 8 mm/sec. But that's a bad choice of units, because seconds is not a good mission time scale.

The point is that, within a couple of hours, you can drive beyond the contamination radius. And, over the span of the mission, you most certainly will.
I'm not a woman, but I agree this is a great strategy to consider. I think one of the reasons that both Pinterest and Instagram caught so many of the startup & wantrepreneur crowd off-guard was that their success, to a large extent, came from a predominantly female user base, and typically feminine interests. Google, for all it's strengths, is mostly run by intelligent but geeky male nerds. Same for Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, etc. I don't think a "pink strategy" alone will save Yahoo -- I do think they need to import more of the cultural strengths of Google, Apple and Facebook -- but it can be a competitive advantage.

There's one potential negative to the "pink" strategy, however. Regardless of how some might like it to be, the overwhelming majority of hackers do seem to be male. If you evolve your company to be female oriented in their product suite, you may make the company less attractive when recruiting and retaining male hackers. And ultimately having talent on staff is the bottleneck. But there may be a way to pursue a balanced path which gives the advantages of a pink strategy while not being too bitten by the negative, so you come out ahead.

I also wish they'd drop the "!". Just "Yahoo". Much cleaner.
I think I misunderstand what you mean by "preference".

Take as example a company where 90% of the programmer applicants are male. As I understand the word "preference", a resulting workforce of 90% males would indicate no preference one way or the other (assuming the men and women were equally skilled).

Further, a 91% male workforce would be evidence of a male preference, while an 89% male workforce evidence of a female preference.

Is that what you mean by "preference"?
On the Deadness of OAuth 2
An agent traditionally represents someone that has a unique talent -- say an actor, director or a high profile fashion model. These are situations where the name of the person (i.e. their brand) brings actual financial value to a project. So for example if Tom Hanks stars in a film you produce the value of the film just increased.

In stark contrast developers are engineers, i.e. they make something that's a result of a specification. Now yes some developers are better than others, but that work is "under the hood".

Now an exception to the above might be a "rock star CTO" or founder who is really more of an architect or a product person. But at that point their actual code is besides the point if you know what I mean. In fact the actual code from this sort of rock star might even be below average, but that's not why they're getting funding.

Side note: In the case of an entertainment artist who has an agent it's the artist with the best track record that will do do well. An unknown artist with an agent is still at the bottom.
My guess would be that the 12 is already near the limit. The two "free" stars feel like a little personal gift, especially if they actually punch them out when they give them to you, with a sly wink or something. If it was 900/1000, it would feel confusing and dishonest.

You might also gain some actual loyalty if you give them the last one for free, since that would be an unexpected treat reserved for people who bought 9 cups of coffee.
Re: Eternal September, I had forgotten about that term. Every one of your comments on this thread is interesting and insightful. Thank you.

What was the term similar to "Eternal September" that described the day AOL users were able to access the web? I was one of those AOL users... I remember setting up AOL winsock so I could use Netscape and bypass all of the AOL-browser garbage (http://www.netlingo.com/word/aol-winsock.php) The day I got that all working was a great day in my teenage life :)
All hands meetings are morale boosting when they feature Oprah style handouts of fancy schwag. Business status reports, meh.
Actually no, we've got our own multi-billion page index, however we do farm out the long tail stuff (like hiybbpraqag :-). At some point I should get a blog post up about modern web indexes, its really fascinating to look at the relevance curves of the first few billion pages out to the first trillion page mark.
http://mixture.fm
Yeah, I think this is right. And NBC actually did this for the soccer World Cup, IIRC -- you could buy a package subscription from NBC letting you watch all the games online.

I have to imagine there's a market for pay-as-you-go subscription to things like Olympic events, same model as buying movies on Amazon or Google Play. I know I would pay.

As it is, try getfoxyproxy.org.
Not quite. They were almost certainly approved by JPL in its role as a FFRDC. The copyright in such cases belongs with the government. What you write would be correct if they went through copyright release at another NASA center like JSC in which the workers are federal employees (I work at JPL.)
Jordan 5
I agree that women are under-served by technology companies, but I'd argue that it's vital to break the demographic down to actually provide anything useful.

Tech firms don't build sites with the stated aim of being "for men", they make sites that provide finance news, sports scores, gadget reviews etc. To redress the gender bias, we should be looking to find what the smart/wealthy/interesting women are doing and build sites that they love.
its possible he is using a specialized kernel or something, or some other edge use case that would make optimizations more feasible
Possible, although there is also NFC now added to the RF mix, not sure if it can share an antenna or not.
What ring do you wear/which have you tried?
This is awesome! If you're in San Francisco (or next time you're here) I owe you a beer.
I also love this idea, but I'm not sure it would translate to anything outside the sports/entertainment arena.

In both sports and entertainment the "agent" model works because the person being pursued is considered highly irreplaceable (like Kobe Bryant or Angelina Jolie). For the team, players having agents is a huge negative. But what choice do they have? People are only willing to put up with a bad process when they feel that they are getting something invaluable. That's why people line up out the door and around the corner at special food spots like Georgetown Cupcakes, or for a cheesesteak in Philadelphia.

In other words, even though I agree that some developers are so highly skilled that they are essentially invaluable, if you walked into a company with an agent they'd simply put your resume aside and find someone else. Programming (especially in the eyes of the non-technical) is a highly replaceable skill.
If it chose well based on existing SC favorites it could be great.
The article's mention of beautifully designed mobile apps sparked a few thoughts for me. One property of mobile devices and especially smaller devices like phones is people use them frequently throughout the day in short bursts. Small wait times associated with bouncing, translating animations etc are magnified and the UIs start to feel laggy. Yesterday I purchased my first Android device and the snappy UI has been quite a nice change. This is a relatively low-end Android device. And I've been using an iPhone 4S for the past few months.

So I think the design of mobile apps will be simplified going forward. I could see moving towards simpler UIs like Craigslist. This is a major win in a variety of ways: faster UIs implies better user-experience, less computationally intensive UIs implies less drain on limited resources, and simpler UIs implies less design and development time. I love the idea of never stressing out about rounded corners, little shadow and shine marks etc. They're nice to have initially but just get old as one uses the same device/OS/apps for months on end.
Isn't this pretty much what a consulting firm does?
Gabriel seems to enjoy encouraging the misconception that DDG is a search engine.
"either that you enjoy it or there is a problem in product or delegation abilities."

I agree that some people have a problem "in product or delegation abilities".

Unfortunately business is about risk and constant change. If you don't have enough squirreled away when the rainy day comes you will be dead in the water. The world is littered with business people who didn't think things in their business would ever change. Maybe you own a restaurant and a competitor opens up down the street? Maybe you work in video post production, with network clients, but then their business drops so your business goes out the window. Are you prepared for that (Andy Grove of course said "only the paranoid survive". And that is true from my many years.)

Related, have you ever heard of someone winning a medal or being atop in sports or entertainment and at least in the early years not working 24x7 to achieve their dream?

"shows either that you enjoy it "

It is well know that in order to succeed at something you have to enjoy it to the point of wanting to do it all the time and being a work workaholic. You will always be able to find cases where there are exceptions of course but point is whether you want to be at the top or merely make sure you aren't one day in a van down by the river you better be working pretty hard.
Easily edit MP4 file with MP4 cropper.
Need to convert files on dvd and no way to import them into FCP? DVD to Final Cut Pro Converter lets you rip DVD movies to the format like DV, H.264, MOV, MPEG-4 compatible with FCP.
Was in SF for a month library, besides lots of places to plug in and work uninterrupted, the main branch has a huge selection of computer books.
For what it's worth, I was not at the time aware of the mayors of Boston and Chicago saying they would oppose the expansion of Chik-fil-A in their cities. I wholeheartedly disagree with those actions, and I support Chik-fil-A in their business goal of selling tasty chicken to whomever will buy it. I still disagree with their political goals, but their freedoms as an enterprise should not be taken away because of them.
Developer Productivity with Top 5 BootStrapToday Features
Tchaikovsky on Work Ethic vs. Inspiration
The thing that stood out for me, and made me think "nice", was Brandon's idea of creating a vector field type. One can then apply operators directly to the field, without having to think in terms of lower level constructs. In that sense, I think the '9-lines' claim is fair.

Any comments from anyone (Brandon?), as to whether configuration and boundary conditions can be simply applied to the vector field type?
Re: Trending Now and target audience

Do you seriously think if Google published Trending Now searches, it would be any different from Yahoo!? Or are you suggesting Yahoo! should editorialize?
Curiously enough, the http://nz.yahoo.com page I got redirected to looks quite different and avoids many of the issues you point out.
The ability to lead a much more relaxed lifestyle that has people saying I look 12 years younger than people my age for one thing. I still work very hard (because I enjoy what I do) but I set my own hours and can basically do whatever I want to do.

By the way I was in a non-tech grind it out type business. I didn't "hit the lottery". I built a traditional business and sold it. It is still operating today and the person who purchased it has operated it for longer than I did.
Wikipedia fails to link to a lot great in-depth sources of content that don't provide useful encyclopedia citations. For example, great forums on a particular topic that is not a provider of any coated fact.
Tim Doody’s detailed profile of long-time LSD researcher Dr. James Fadiman
Thanks for the info. I will try that. I am subscribed to Comcast internet, but not TV. I have my fingers crossed. Hopefully I'll get some ClearQAM coming through the coax.
Note the date for the KCC's move to scrap it (the date is today for those who didn't read the source). The real names policy has been used by the government and corporations to stifle serious discussions and criticisms in South Korea. Korea has a really strong and trivially abusable libel law, the [Cyber defamation law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyber_defamation_law). Basically, right now in Korea, I cannot criticise the accuracy or validity of a news article online without giving the journalist a strong case for suing me for damaging their career of ineptitude. The law is completely ambiguous and even allows political figures to sue opponents for criticising their policies.

That, and as a coder the way the law was worded made it very difficult to actually comply with securely. Politicians are the last people you want to have writing a data retention policy for you.
console.fm (500 Startups) is based on the same idea. Good stuff.
That's a little harsh of you, and totally unwarranted. The site's user-base has absolutely nothing to do with the article or current conversation.
North Paw: anklet that tells the wearer which way is North
There are many more such big and small meticulous features in BootStrapToday to make a team MORE productive; many more features are coming soon. http://blog.bootstraptoday.com/category/tips-tricks/
It's really true. I didn't realize the Author's Guild also decided to separately sue the university libraries as well, even though (as far as I know) the libraries' use was going to be far more limited (students and faculty only, and only to get you to books the libraries already provide) and fair use is even stronger for educational uses:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/09/no-authors-have-been-h...
Submission accurately reports Wired's headline, but the site is in fact Japanese. This helpfully lets me read it, but there isn't much "there" there.

They were able to purchase some parts of shadowy provenance which, on basis of their previous experience with iDevices, do not appear to be known parts. They therefore assume they're iPhone 5 parts. (Two competing hypothesis that jump to my mind are "Knockoff" and "Unauthorized overproduction of non-Apple parts with Apple logo attached to them to increase the resale value." because, hey, China.)

Anyhow, iLabFactory had their technicians take the parts they had bought and attach a current-generation screen and whatnot, for what they think is a sneak preview of what the new iPhone 5 will look like. Pictures attached at the original link and quite comprehensible without being able to read Japanese.
A language like APL has made work of this kind far simpler for quite some time. I was doing basic fluid simulation work and planetary/orbital calculation with APL at least 15 years ago.

Starting from something like raw C or C++ means that the ability to express problems at this level of complexity is impossible without first writing a library to create the "words" and "verbs" you'll need. Then it's a piece of cake.

A language like APL gets you to a much more expressive level right away. Exploring more complex problems from that vantage point is far simpler (and a lot more fun in my opinion).
My favorite success story of marketing towards the under-served gender is Dyson.

Before Dyson vacuums were marketed to women exclusively. If you suggested marketing a vacuum to men before Dyson, you'd be laughed out of the boardroom. Dyson threw that all out the window and entered the market with a vacuum that actually looks like a sci-fi weapon, and to great success.
Scheme is racket science.
I think they really need to listen to Jobs: cut the price point to $5/mo
I don't understand why Google wouldn't have to pay for at least one copy of each book they index.
just went there now and were visually raped by a huge background-ad by Disney and Verizon. Don't recall seeing those for a while now; thought horizontal background ads were a thing of a past. Learnt something new today, but definitely won't go back there in next couple years.
Whoa, did she really write off employees outside of HQ? Even Google feeds the plebes outside the Garden of Eden.
Interesting. In Japan, all around me are people who try to burn the wick at both ends hoping for a light at the end of the tunnel.. And they most definitely do not resemble the description you just gave of yourself..
Business Networking: How  To Avoid A Failure
The notion that business logic doesn't belong in the client is wrong because you need it when working offline. And sharing UI code is a pipe dream if you want native look and feel. (If you have a custom UI anyway like in a game, it's more feasible.) A more realistic goal is port the business logic, networking code, storage, and so on, and rewrite the UI code for each platform.
In addition to the disingenuous origins of the story told in this article (ably covered by other commenters), we also have here the usual implicit assumption that anthropogenic global warming == impending disaster. But the "evidence" for this is hopelessly tainted by politics. Indeed, suppose you were an up-and-coming young climate scientist angling for tenure at your university of choice. How best would you advance your career: by investigating the benefits of global warming, or by examining its costs? Alas, alarmism has long been adaptive in the race for status among climate researchers. The result is that, even though many of them are both smart and sincere, their conclusions are essentially useless.
I Don't Care if Marissa Mayer Has a Baby -- As Long As She Doesn't Change Yahoo
How many different ways of hosting a wiki page do we really need? What problem is being solved here that isn't solved by the multitude of similar options? (Not trying to be negative, i'm just trying to understand what problem/pain point is being solved by this tool that hasn't already been addressed)
Very cool, doing something like this has been on my list of Arduino projects for a long time.
I assume and hope she would divest from Google so that more of her net worth is contingent upon Yahoo's success more than Google's.
Ah sorry had to take it down, didn't know about the terms attached.

I made the PDF personally to turn into a printed/binded copy (I like physical books) with nice typography and after seeing the HN post thought I'd share.

If anyone still really wants this fancier version follow/msg me on twitter: @maxolson
There's been some fun research done on the topic of progress bars and user perceptible wait times. (To the surprise of absolutely no-one who is paying attention, a) people suck at math and b) if one has accurate knowledge that a process will take 100 units of time, coloring in 1% of the bar per unit of time is provably suboptimal with respect to user happiness.)
Huh? Don't you get all the carwash vouchers when you pay? Which one is the "free" one?
"On time" would be any externally imposed deadline, and I would say it's completely the fault of imperfect estimation practices.

If we could estimate perfectly, then deferring all work until it needed would be uniformly good. But many times the true size of the work is unknown and we procrastinate on estimating, and we only figure out how much work is involved until it's too late.
Disneyland does something like this with wait times for attractions.

According to a 1989 Newsweek article:
The waiting times posted by each attraction are generously overestimated, so that one comes away mysteriously grateful for having hung around 20 minutes for a 58-second twirl in the Alice in Wonderland teacups.

Source: http://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/37703/21793670...
You are so wrong about this. Twitter copies google model and does this and it is amazing to have such communication.
I definitely didn't communicate it well.

The deeper issue is that I wish I could borrow 20% of HN users for some other environment or somehow combine curation with timely conversation (hard to do).
However much like NHK here in Japan, it wouldn't be at all surprising if many people simply snubbed the collections guy because they don't own a TV, don't watch BBC, or just don't want to pay.
Was the title change really necessary? No one knows what "The Construct" is, but a lot of people know what "Fluid Simulation in 9 Lines of Code, and More on Fast Simulation Prototyping" is.
Convert Your Nokia Mobile Phone To A Wi-Fi Access Point
I admire Dave McClure for being willing to comment on this subject. No matter what you say on a gender-sensitive issue, someone is bound to accuse you of sexism. (It helps, of course, that he makes some good points along the way.)
I don't know about the US, but in Europe (and Morocco where I live), many freelance use "sales engineers" (technico-commercial in French, not sure if it's the correct translation), this person gets a commission for every gig he lands for the freelancer.
and that's one of amazon.com's official mottos.
WebGL Terrain experiment rendering the island Maui with fog and water
Facebook needs a new CEO?
We're all cyborgs already: http://abstrusegoose.com/171 :)

Cool project and a good read, thanks.
He means that when you buy the vouchers, you don't have to tear one off right away. This is bloody genius I'd say.
Reid Hoffman Launches: Startup Of You Fellowship
He's saying you can buy eleven carwashes for the cost of ten, and the immediate reward increases sales.
I was just thinking today my Starbucks card has buy however many cups of coffee to get to the gold level where you get a few free perks.

Then I realized how foolish I was to buy anything other than the smallest size since I would have made the same progress for far less money.
IREO Gurgaon Hills
Pop music too loud and all sounds the same, scientists conclude
I think this is a bit disingenious. Google indexes the entire web, not just a specific subset of it that it can hopefully in the future turn a profit by supplanting Craigslist (ie links and leads to Padlister). This is why you see CL allowing Google to index their website. If CL thought Google was going to spin up apartments.google.com relying off the back of CLs data you could probably expect a lawsuit there also. It's all about context and to suggest otherwise is just trying to find a way to profit off the back of another company who has already done the legwork.