skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Personal financial stability and past experience can go a long way for people to take big bets."

Really liked that quote. One of the benefits silicon valley gets when it mints a few hundred or so millionaires is that those people now go out a bit more fearless.

Tom Lyon who is a serial entrepreneur once told me that you really needed three wins, the first was you joined a company that taught you about what being a tech company entailed, the second was a startup where you made enough out of it that you could do a third where you could better control the economics and the vision. There may be a number of attempts in that thread but its really true.

A number of people I know seem to have various milestones for fearlessness, but they roughly correlate to;

1) they own their house free and clear,

2) they have enough money set aside for their kids educations,

3) they have enough money set aside to keep them in Ramen indefinitely[1].

Each level brings its own level of fearlessness.

[1] generally the 'retirement' calculators ask you to predict when you're going to die. So you take that number, the cost of paying taxes/insurance on your house and your own health + ramen and that is your 'ramen retirement' number. Note that you leave behind a giant asset (the house) so many folks assume selling the house and moving to a smaller/cheaper place in that number.
Excellent post. 1 point to make. I'd love to write more but I'm pressed for time right now.

"It is entirely possible that the idea of depression is itself a cause of depression" - This has been proven, again I'm sorry but I don't have the time to find the research at the moment.
You're right, a riot where 4 people are killed is indicative of the country being stuck in the Middle Ages. Likewise, Brevik and the Aurora shooter killed 20x this, each; must mean that Norway and the US are stuck in the Mesolithic era.

/s
So is this just a link exchange scheme? I fail to see the value they add. Their platform doesn't provide a a like-for-like hit rate, so wouldn't this just attract a bunch of low-traffic sites?
Sorry... I can't seem to get Posterous to update any of my posts. I can edit them, and both the Rich Text editor and the HTML source views persist my changes, but the published post does not.

I'm guessing that they have some sort of publish to static HTML worker that is ignoring my blog, but in the spirit of my post, I'll try not to speak out of ignorance :-)
9-11 – A look back at it’s influence on the entertainment/Gaming industry
That's pretty common when an "Ask PG" post gets an answer from pg. A lot of HN members are highly interested in pg's thoughts.
A very substantial portion of Facebook's revenue is derived from Zynga customers buying virtual currency -- FB takes a 30% commission of every dollar redeemed into Facebook Credits.

While it obviously needs to be remedied for the benefit of user-experience FB also has shareholders who want to continue to see positive revenue gains.
What happened was they never had staffing appropriate to the mission, so they switched to using contractors for PSD (far more than DoD ever did; for DoD, contractors were support and logistics and low-level on base security).

The triple worldwide security contract (Blackwater, DynCorp, Triple Canopy) seemed ok, but then there were political/PR issues with Blackwater.
Apple announces iPhone 5
Whatever you're doing, you should stop it and start writing speeches instead.
Very well said.

I've been planning a blog post for some time on "hidden principles of Silicon Valley"; basically the unsaid assumptions that the top investors seem to follow but the startup peanut gallery don't grasp. Just little tidbits I've gained from the writings of Peter Thiel, Paul Graham, Marc Andreesen, Mark Suster, Ben Horowitz, etc.

One example: lots of people decry the trend for valley startups to burn cash to grow market share. Silly startups, why can't they bootstrap? Why is LinkedIn trading at a 300+ P/E ratio? But the hidden assumption (which may be wrong) is that the winners of today's tech game will be around for a long time, generating billion-dollar cashflows for decades.

Peter Thiel explained it better than I can:

"PayPal is illustrative. 27 months in, its growth rate was 100%.
Everybody knew that rate would decelerate, but figured that it would
still be higher than the discount rate. The plan was that most of the
value would come around 2011. Even that long-term thinking
turned out to undershoot; the discount rate has been lower than ex-
pected, and the growth rate is still at a healthy 15%. Now, it looks like
most of PayPal’s value won’t come until in 2020.

LinkedIn is another good example of the importance of the long-
term. Its market cap is currently around around $10B and it’s trading
at a (very high) P/E of about 850. But discounted cash flow analysis
makes LinkedIn’s valuation make sense; it’s expected to create around
$2B in value between 2012 and 2019, while the other $8B reflects ex-
pectations about 2020 and beyond. LinkedIn’s valuation, in other
words, only makes sense if there’s durability, i.e. if it’s around to cre-
ate all that value in the decades to come."

It never fails to amuse me that the mean HN poster is actually quite cynical about startups -- I think this is partly due to cynical people posting more.
That must be the next time they're planning to offer it.

Installing the example code and running it indicates that there was a previous course that started July 10.
In my experience most teams do planning completely wrong. The goals of the planning meeting are simply:

1. Do a relative-size estimate the top n stories in the backlog. (Where n is
some number slightly larger than the number of stories that usually fit
in an iteration.)
2. Pick the stories to complete in the iteration.

That's it.

I often see teams:

* doing one-by-one story estimation, and debating over how many points to assign.
(The statistical method completely fails when it's done this way.)
* getting into long discussions over the spec. (That's between the dev
and product owner, to be figured out during the iteration.)
* worrying too much about accurate estimates
* worrying too much about how much work to take on
US Poverty Rate - 15 Percent
If you close the tab because that's annoying you, it lets you stay on the page and it shows the entirety of what it was going to type out. Just figured that one out.
It's really not, though most of the research seems to be on refugee populations: http://voices.yahoo.com/researchers-examine-ptsd-depression-...
A problem with these sort of sites is that you're associating your business with another business that could easily be competing with your own, or worse be something that affects the image of your business (for example race hate, pornography).

The other problem is that why would a website use this service? Because they have low traffic; how many low traffic websites are there? Millions. So you're going to be competing with millions of other (potentially crappy) websites to get your advert on... a potentially crappy low traffic website, one that will probably not be related to yours in any way. The traffic will be of no real value, someone making a blog about fashion reviews isn't going to want traffic from a website that sells potatoes.

I assume the basic idea is they sell it for such a small price ($2.95/m) that most people will sign up and then not really care if it doesn't work all that great, if they have a million customers they're going to make a substantial amount of revenue even if their value to customers is non-existent.
INAE in internet behaviour, but I can clarify what I meant: I think of a troll as having malicious or mischievous intent, whereas I was speaking to people who are genuinely trying to add signal, but may not have the experience or depth of knowledge to do so effectively given the nature of an open Internet discussion.
Sounds interesting indeed. And sensible, and a reasonable future-proof distributed architecture...
Hey guys, thanks for the comments, this wasn't that thought out, more of a venting moment against this kind of behavior by these that are supposedly in leadership position.

Its compounded by the fact that I'm trying to launch a game called Flirtatious, that is attempting to make meeting someone online fun, as non-creepy and not too fake either (check it out here apps.facebook.com/flirtati - feedback will be read and thought through).

Launching a game as an indie dev is difficult to start with, and even more so when the ecosystem is being kicked in the face by the big boys on a regular basis.
Looking at the pricing on the amazon site here: http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/#lightUtilizationRILinux

does it mean Small (Default) linux server only cost $69 for a whole year? likewise $138 for a medium instance for whole year?
Ask HN: Overcoming Blah?
Lately I've found myself unable to conquer even the smallest challenges. I've been trained my whole life to look a dozen moves ahead and choose the optimum path towards solving a problem. But most of the challenges I face now are mundane (where the decision isn't that critical) or worse, come down to a choice between two or more mediocre solutions. The consistent lack of challenge is sapping my motivation.

So while overanalyzing a problem is good for engineering, it's often bad for short term contracting and personal relationships. I've become disinterested in work and seem to read the news or do anything else besides getting the job done. Sometimes I wish someone else could take the reins and just give me a stream of tiny tasks and simple yes/no or A/B choices so all I have to do is make a decision and not have to worry about maintaining the whole context of the problem in my mind. But I don't want to work for someone else, because it's resulted in negative reinforcement and burnout. I also don't see a way to be compensated fairly for taking on the burden of being solely in charge of a project, with its loose ends and followups.

So my question is, how do you "snap out of it" and get real work done consistently day by day? I've found trance music to be helpful, and working at certain hours. But I'm looking for deeper inspiration, more metaphysical, like if I do A B C, then X life goal will result and my life will move forward. I'm not feeling that now. As far as I can tell, my future entails a never-ending stream of minutia that causes a spiritual crippling of my resolve and psyche. I worry that since I work and correspond with regular folks, that their agenda will always be at odds with mine and govern my life.

Continued here due to 2000 character limit:

http://pastebin.com/3pmNXDM2
Thank you very much for taking this step. (Not disclosing long-term plans just because they're frighteningly ambitious). Hopefully this goes double for ideas you chose not to take 7% of for a couple of grand :)

(As that adds real injury to mere insult.)

I genuinely appreciate it.
If you're going to give medical advice that contravenes known best practices and lay blame ('stop making yourself depressed '), you'd better have something substantial to back it up with. You have nothing.
Likely --- I haven't gone through them. I have no dog in this fight. I was merely offering the citations you requested, thinking you were genuinely interested in the topic. I won't make that mistake again.
Now this is really perfect timing to steal attention from the upcoming Apple press event. One might wonder if the time of the announcement is just accidental.
If you've got a provably secure protocol, what's the problem with formally verifying the implementation of the protocol?

I work in an area where bugs are very scary, so we use formal verification, and that's on top of having many more testers than developers.

From the perspective of this naive outsider, I'd would have expected FV to be worth it for security sensitive protocols. Is it that the protocols are too complex to be verified, or is it just not considered to be worth the effort?
You can blame the user for not noticing that they're spamming their contacts and deleting the offending app once they notice it.
Apple Is Number 1 In U.S. Notebook Sales
I think you could have made the effort of introducing the gentlemen as _South_ Africans.

The title seems contemptuous, to me.
TCDisrupt Startup Alley: What We Learned
IPhone 5 liveblog
The Rise of the Mobile Web (and Web Audio on iOS 6)
This is a very good reason for a second facebook account for playing games.
I definitely agree. His piece is flawed but it's interesting.

I would say that the author is simply against huge corporations, and all the good and bad things that go with them. Would we be better off with only small businesses? I think not, but it's good discussion.
The chrome bug just changed from WontFix to Available.
Apple Officially Reveals The iPhone 5
any insight will be greatly appreciated.
No, it's really not nonsense at all. I honestly couldn't think of a worse place to start a company than Silicon Valley, other than potentially a third world country with no internet. Extremely high costs of living, constant talent warfare, and absolutely terrible traffic at peak hours. Unless you're venture backed, stay the hell away from the bay.
I'm not making an argument against formal methods. I'm saying that if you replaced TLS with a protocol with a design proof, you could easily end up less secure.
Oh, I got Set-Cookie and Cookie mixed up in my head. You're right.
The apparent message of the entire piece is "Want to be upper class? Just start a business!" without any notion of either (a) how the average person could do so or (b) how we could begin to change our society/culture in a way to facilitate the average person being able to do so. Result: it comes across as something you believe everyone should be able to do as is.

Also, be very careful about sentences like "The middle class has a culture of spending most money as soon as you earn it." There are certainly parts of the middle class that are like this. We all know the concept of keeping up with the Joneses and overextending credit in an attempt to do so. However, there are also large parts of the middle class (and, again, the lower class you so ignore) where it's not "culture" it's "necessity". Sure, maybe some could survive on 20% less but at the cost of things you might take for granted--living in a safe neighborhood, eating healthy food, or having health insurance. But, no, surely it's just a culture of unnecessary spending.

It may not have been your intended message, but it's certainly the one that comes across.
Apple Announces iPhone 5 (See picture here) 
Live Coverage of CNET: http://live.cnet.com/Event/CNETs_Apple_event_live_blog_Wednesday_September_12
Open Culture
IPhone 5 officially announced-5"retina + 4G LTE + 18%thinner
Factoring is the simplest way of making code better. It makes me uncomfortable to see loads of repetition like this.
I will say that the premise is really interesting, "Everyone Should be Upper Class". That idea alone is probably why it made it to the front page of HN. But ultimately this is not well written. There were no citations or strong evidence besides a figure in the last paragraph. The writing meanders and doesn't support the argument well. And the argument isn't really made clearer until half way through - upper class means business owning and it is in our best interest to own or start businesses.

I'm going to make a anecdotal generalization of my own and say that I see these problems in a number of blog posts that make it onto HN. My two cents: If you're going take on a tough or controversial premise then take the time to argue it well, don't gloss over details, please revise, revise, then revise some more, and finally have other people read it before it gets released to a wide audience like HN.
A proposal for the freelancer community
I have been working as a freelancer for some time now and I have a proposal for the freelancer community. Paid vacation days are one of the things that I miss as a freelancer. While there are no Federal laws in the United States that require an employer to offer paid vacation days as a benefit, employers of choice offer employees paid vacation days. Vacation days are quite common in Europe with Switzerland having a minimum of 20 such days per year, U.K. 28 days and Germany 24.

The proposal that I want to make to the freelancer community is to include a percentage of the working hours as vacation days for every freelancing project. This might be chosen depending on your experience and the country that you belong to. For example, about 10 hours for every 160 hours of work sounds reasonable as vacation hours. This would make for about 16 working days in a year that we can take off for vacations.

What do you think about this? Does this sound reasonable or you would still prefer charging for what you work and then take unpaid vacations?
Actually, you completely agree with me. A Scrum Team very explicitly is self-managing. Agile processes ARE frameworks for coordinating self-management at the team level, and which have been found to work repeatably. That doesn't mean a given one will work everywhere. Specifically, Scrum is probably not ideal for startups doing something truly new, since it assumes there is someone who can prioritize features by their business value.
The SSRI meta-study you're referring to is very interesting.

However, anyone reading this should know that there are routine antidepressants which are not SSRIs and do not work as SSRIs are purported to.
It depends on the benchmark.

Each of the major browsers - Chrome, IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera - have benchmarks that they beat the competition at.

Competition has made all of them very fast.
Care to name a few better places?
A better comparison function:

Variable time until some threshold number of repeat failures occurs (e.g. 3). After this, manipulate the comparison time in such a manner that someone attempting to do this sort of attack would come up with a dummy password. If they come up with said dummy password, alert the user of an attempted attack.
Five Best VPN Service Providers
Isn't "trolling" intentional? If it's just because you don't know better, it isn't trolling.
Why Can't Facebook Determine Friend Groups?
If you find Moodle frustrating, you're going to be suicidal if you try any of the major competitors.
Charles Nutter: JVM JIT for Dummies
An even better question is how many people lose interest in checking Facebook every day because their feed is filled with baloney.

Its a lot like email. The email address that only my friends have, I watch all day. The email address every asshole I've done business with in the past 5 years has I check about once a week. (Everyone important has my phone number.)
There's no reason a nice GUI couldn't be thrown on to the front end of this.
The situation for slavery in America was resolved only because of civil war. For the problems that exist in China, the Chinese government's number one fear is that something similar could happen because they can't fix their problems any other way. And while ignorant people in the west may cheer and comment that it's necessary to break a few eggs to make an omelette, that is not a situation that would be considered preferable by any means for anybody.

I always see a lot of people complaining about Foxconn and the like, but nobody offering any solutions that would actually work. It's especially annoying when they don't acknowledge exactly why the problem is so difficult to solve, considering all the political, economic, social, and technological trends that contribute to the problem. IMO, those who criticize the problem, but can't offer any viable solutions, should at least put their money where their mouth is and not contribute to the problem. This means they shouldn't buy any electronics or in fact, shouldn't buy many things. Most stuff is made in China these days, or other countries with similar lax issues.

It's a complicated issue, and I see too much straw man applied to this issue too many times.

Living here, I realize most people have no idea how poor the vast majority of people are in China. I had no idea until I came here. I'm not saying the situation is acceptable. I am saying the situation is too complicated for the commentary we see over and over again.
There's medication which doesn't. Bring it up as a concern!
Well, there is at least one good thing about having only smaller businesses. They are more governable by nations, unlike transnational corporations. Since power-aggregations, like motors, tend to need a governor for stability of the overall system, that counts as a good thing.
Sure, if you have the choice. But that's were the Hacker News startup culture and the enterprise development culture diverge. In a small startup you can dictate the tools. In an enterprise company you may not have any say in the matter. You can either complain endlessly about it (and boy howdy are people willing to complain endlessly) or you can do your job to the best of your ability with the tools available.

I understand where you're coming from though. I just think that you need to know a lot of context about the developer in question before you dismiss him/her over their tool choices. You need to know why they used those tools and how well they learned them.

But what it really comes down to is how fast the developer can learn something new. I'm fairly confident that I understand enough about programming language concepts to be up and running with a new language in a few days. I might not know the API (if one is provided) but I will probably be able to contribute to the team pretty quickly.
How to Start Marketing Your Startup While in Stealth Mode
So it sounds like the best feature of the start screen is that it isn't too hard to avoid it?
Apple iPhone 5 Launch Live Blog
SSRIs are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to antidepressants.
Perhaps I'm too resistant to change but I don't really see why the Start Menu had to be removed. The new Metro UI is great for touch based interaction but I can't believe it would have been that much work to retain the start menu as well and place the default option in a setting somewhere. If you're primarily a desktop user then you keep the familiar UI and can flip to Metro as desired. If you're a touch user then Metro is a no brainer as the default. In the scope of an operating system I can't imagine that would have been all that much more work?
As an introvert, I appreciated the beer fridge when I first started because it helped me get to know the other introverts (everyone). At the time none of my IRL friends were in this sort of work environment so it was something to "brag" about. Back home my family had these visions that my workplace was like google or something and I'm sure they also bragged.

Four years later, I haven't had a beer at work in a long time. At the literal end of the day, I want to go home, relax on the couch and hang with the wife. Right now I'm looking around for a new job because I've realized the current place's motivation for the beer machine is to use as a distraction for the uncompetative salaries and lack of benefits. I geniunely like my co-workers, but the company not so much.

As a side note, all my friends do military contracting type stuff work and get paid substantially more. Four years later, perhaps the jokes on me.
Show HN: An easier way to manage beta tests & get insightful feedback
Very intriguing post, Mike! I have to agree that placing too much priority on these things can make a company seem cheesy. BUT I personally would rather work at a place that is not "all business, all the time." People should enjoy their jobs and their careers, and I think that's mostly what these companies are trying to accomplish. Your post is a good reminder, however, about how to prioritize work and play at the job site.
Lerner assumes that innovation is simply a function of money invested. It's not. Innovation is created independent of money.

Furthermore, by dismissing social media as a fraternity drinking app, he demonstrates a myopic view of how social media has transformed our society. Afterall, social media quantifiably shaped political debates in the Arab Spring (http://www.washington.edu/news/2011/09/12/new-study-quantifi...).