skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
He laid off half his staff.

Then he laid off half his staff again.

He's spending 20 hours a week on the phone with irate creditors he's trying to renege on.

His investors are saying they're going to ruin him.

He laid off half his staff again.

He's being sued 6 times over.

One of his creditors is physically stalking him.

The press is writing stories calling him a fraud.

He hasn't slept in six months.

His customers aren't paying.

And he's pissed that his staff is accepting other job offers? Because he "made" them?

I helped kill a startup in 2001 too. I didn't tell myself I
had done a favor for the people I brought along for the ride.

I mean whatever, I'm being a drama queen about this. I just hate the meme that startup employees owe founders anything. Most of them have no idea what they're getting into, and founders like it that way.
>There are probably coders that will cringe that I just used a couple of shell commands to do this rather than write up a long, well-documented, properly OOP, TDD, etc "right" solution.

No, I don't think so. This is not technical debt. This is simply the right way to do it. More complicated is NOT better! A lot of people, for some reason especially people who like classes and MVP and templates think that more complicated is better, and will write insane amounts of code to do a very simple thing. I think that's wrong.

The reply is usually something along the lines of it'll be easier to do this and that. But they are not doing this and that, they are doing something simple. Add the complexity when you need it - not in advance.
Don't forget, if everyone achieves expertise, the average person's productivity will still be in the middle of the pack.

The American system puts a great deal more money per capita into education than China. Therefore, in money terms, the success of Chinese students to become select cadres comes only through their own hard work and an excess of good luck, not to be attributed to the Chinese education system.
If you have the dedication to run, or do some other cardio exercise, for hours a day you can lose fat quickly.
Good point. With 'them', I meant to refer to Scientific American.
You can measure calories burned pretty accurately by measuring CO2 exhaled. Measure the concentration of CO2, the length of the exhale, and the force of the breath and multiply to get a quite accurate view.

Hmm, you might also be able to use a pulse oximeter to measure dissolved CO2, plus a chest band to measure respiration. Dissolved CO2 should more or less match CO2 concentration in breath, so you would not need a visible cranula on the nose.

Carbon is not the only thing the body burns, hydrogen too, which makes water which can't be used to measure calories, but because the majority of what we eat has about the same ratio of hydrogen to carbon, measuring CO2 should be enough.
Tutorials - HTML.dk
HarperCollins Pays Big Advance For A Book Of… Tweets
You're not supposed to do anything. But like all things, opportunities exist to do something beyond the ordinary. Look for openings, ways to stand out and to gain experience. College can provide someone who doesn't have their parents contacts to stand on with the opportunity to build social capital that could extend to other things.

Game? We're talking business or the "startup game" if you will.
Lots of big companies do this too - for example Agilent is doing this now.
During the final year of Silicon Alley Reporter I made cold calls and set up lunches to sell folks on our new product, Venture Reporter (the rebranded Silicon Alley Reporter). It works. When people see the CEO making sales calls, they respect the company and take it seriously.

If I got a cold call from the CEO I would think they were desperate, doubt that they would be around in 6 months, and probably decide that I wanted to do business with someone more stable.
No lawyer is going to let you accidentally draw up a contract that would get you sued for firing someone; you'd probably (I say this as if I know, which I don't) just lose things like your noncompete.
I just feel like sharing:

I am currently a High School senior. I'm three for three as far as colllege acceptances go which makes me feel incredible but I am still unsure where I will be going or how I will pay.

One side of me wants to start a business as soon as possible. Devote my time to fostering the network of websites I own and expanding my web design services to clients. There is plenty of other stuff I do as well, but I don't know if that's a realistic way to go on. I recognize that college will provide structure when I need it and I hope that it will get me to focus.

I wonder what college did for successful entrepreneurs. Rather how to take the most of college as an entrepreneur.
>> The stories on the frontpage now are still roughly the ones that would have been there when HN started.

Subjectively, the frontpage and discussions have grown quite bland here; without necessarily corresponding to a reduction in the quality of each article, it feels as if the range of content linked has become homogenized.

Objectively, however, it's quite clear that the range of content hasn't strayed much at all (witness archive.org). This failure to change lends a certain banality of tone to the site that is almost unbelievable.
Another case of scheme in name only. Why does everyone call new lisp-1's scheme instead of lisp-1?
"In the Software arena, smart kids out of high school can do a lot if college is not holding them back. But try to start a laser / semiconductor / biotech company with high school kids if you dare."

Exactly. We've inadvertently created a culture that rewards extremely shallow achievements. Thirty years ago, brilliant 20-somethings wanted to send men to Mars and build super-colliders. Today, the smartest college kids are trying to build social networks for dogs.

Frankly, that's not a trend worth celebrating. A society where an advanced education isn't an economic advantage is a society going the wrong way.
pretty much the key point to take away from this, is always ask for freebies, it costs you nothing...and who knows someone might hook you up, you'll never know unless you ask
I sell a downloadable program over the Internet, and so am fairly familiar with the notion of writing installers. (Note that this is a B2C program for highly non-technical users.)

Here's life:

a) Users will click past any screen you put in an installer, even if it comes with pre-checked options for reformatting their C:\ drive and shooting their dog.

b) Every additional screen in the installer costs successful installs, and hence conversions (if you're using free trials).

Accordingly, I don't ask users where to install to. I ask the system where program files is and it goes in the default directory there. Period. I don't ask them what to name the shortcuts in the start menu -- its named after the product. Period. I don't ask whether to drop an icon on the desktop, I do it. If they want to delete it they can hit a delete key as easily as unchecking a box, but it saves 100% of users another screen to process. etc, etc
That is very interesting.

At the college I teach at we have courses for administrative assistants and I thought perhaps you could sell courses that are cheaper and better.

Good luck on figuring out how to monetize your site.
Heh, thanks. I try to follow the Golden Rule.

@gruseom: link me, and I'll check it out :)
Don’t cage customers
That's just not true. I meet a lot of startup founders who are working on very hard technical problems and have hopes of changing the world by solving them. The Etherpads, for example, had to literally prove theorems to get their real-time collaboration sw to work, and they hope eventually to use it in a whole range of applications.

You could just as easily argue that thirty years ago (I was actually around then and old enough to be paying attention), technical people just wanted safe jobs solving circumscribed problems for large organizations.

The truth is that, all other things being equal, each generation of people is roughly equally ambitious. Past generations weren't golden ages compared to the present, or vice versa.
Not so Dorky
I'm 21, working at a startup as an engineer, working on my own small startup, and making a considerable amount of money over everyone I graduated High School with. All without a degree.

However, I feel that I've been quite lucky and am far more the exception than the rule. I'm actually quite jealous of some of my friends who are getting ready to receive their Bachelors in the next year. As different paths as we took, I somehow feel that I'm lagging behind them in terms of achievements. So I'm back in school this semester. Just one class to make some iota of progress towards my B.S. Comp. Sci.

You certainly don't need a college degree to be a successful entrepreneur, but I've often found it quite hard to apply theory to practicality when you don't know the theory in the first place. When all is said and done, I'd like to have the holes in my knowledge filled and kick that much more ass at what I do..
http://www.meetup.com/Hackers-and-Founders/

But I've never been, mostly due to being dependent on others for rides.
But most news and comparisons are about these successful people who have ran startups successfully who have dropped out from school.

Could it possible that these are really people who dropped out after studying for a few years having learnt what they can or realised what they cannot learn rather than people who never went to college.

This is a big difference.
damn. Who does? Forgive my ignorance. I'm a med student in New Orleans. The Valley is somewhere vaguely near a port city where I had dim sum once.
I've noticed a trend tho. The dropouts that became successful were dropouts from Ivy League schools. Does that mean people from second tire schools should stay in school and finish their degree?
I love the concept of YC to death. I don't think there is a better way to get a web start-up going than to have it incubated in the amazing circumstances that YC provides. Though I've not yet applied to YC, mainly because I saved up my own money for seeding, but also for other reasons, I'd imagine the key benefits being exactly what Sachin has listed in this post.

The least of the benefits is definitely (and should be) the money. Even without money, somebody could foreseeable devote a small amount of time to hack together something. Granted, without funding it won't be as fully fleshed out, or built in as short amount of time, but it's likely that actually doing it isn't going to be the key point of failure.

What YC gets right is they put you in an environment where you're more likely to not just do it, but do it right. Not just the product, which absolutely benefits from the groupthink of lots of smart, devoted people in so small a space, but the company as a whole, for reasons that Sachin has listed.

I'd imagine the hugest benefit of all being the social proof, and investor day. If you're back by YC, you've already got a foot in the door: smart, experienced people have invested at least some money and resources into your idea. These people have delivered great companies before. I guess it's kind of like recruitment day at a top university. The best meet up with the presumed best.

Anyway, I need to ask, are there any such "investor days" open to the public? I'm getting nearer and nearer to launch (now considering filing a provisional patent which could delay things), but I'll have something substantial to show that really deserves attention.
Art of Type: Squint-Free Small Type
Try college! (If you can afford it.) You don't even know what all the options are yet.
>> Now I know the article is just whining from someone who doesn't want to pay taxes.

Do you know anyone who does want to pay taxes? Also, when did ad hominem arguments become valid?

>> job-killing regulation

The US Chamber of Commerce rates California as the worst state in the nation for business. 50th out of 50. Intel, a CA-based corporation, just announced the creation of 7,000 new jobs. In Oregon, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.

>> public sector unions...
The interchange at I-880 and CA-237 in Silicon Valley took 6 years to complete (yes, you read that right). Just a bit further north, the interchange at 880 and Mission took at least 5 years. Can you say "union featherbedding"?

>> advocacy groups

Enviro impact fees add $7,000 to a house in Texas. In CA, they add over $75,000.
I really cannot stand the idea of making message queues that speak the memcache protocol. That's like having a RDBMS that only speaks HTTP.

Memcache is an impoverished language for messaging. Which is ok, because it's designed primarily for cache fetch and retrieval. Just like you wouldn't really want to go fiddling around with database cursors through HTTP (looking at you, freebase) you don't want to describe queueing and delivery of your messages over memcache.

And it's not like there aren't alternatives. Stomp is a perfectly acceptable protocol for simple messaging. If you need to do something fancy and complicated, there is also AMQP. Both protocols are supported by mature servers that are proven to run in highly available production systems. So why, other than a case of NIH, would a company want to spend time writing and supporting one off infrastructure like that?
> Maybe you want to elaborate on this point, because I don't get it. How does the fact that businesses are owned by people equate to the fact that they should be protected from taxation from their valuable property?

I didn't say that biz should be treated differently. I said that taxes paid on biz owned property was actually paid by people, mostly by their customers.
See also this post: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1142559&cid=270...
Whenever I start with a new language, I read an O'Reilly book from cover to cover. For Python, this is the one I chose: "Learning Python" by Mark Lutz.
At my Japanese employer salary assignments are done by grade and there is essentially no deviation for individuals. The company does not have managers ask engineers whether they are getting paid enough, because engineers rush to say "I am thankful for the opportunity to work here and am glad to be paid the same as every other engineer in my grade." I have said it myself.

Then once a year when they recalculate grades, they tell the I-can't-believe-its-not-a-union "Do an anonymous survey and tell us what people actually think." They even follow the recommendations a portion of the time.

I love your stance on not doing anything formal. But if you took an anonymous survey of all the American engineers at my company, you'd probably hear "Do anonymous surveys or people will give you the answer they think you want to hear" from 100% of them. (Population size: 1)

Also, convenience samples have some well-known issues: if somebody was totally soured by their experience and cursed your name, would you still be talking to them on a regular basis? (My company has the same issue with its salary survey, incidentally: the people who are most dissatisfied with the amount of money offered no longer work here. Funny how that happens.)
I read this and found it very motivational. It also matches my own impression that the last few years, too many fake startups got the spotlight when us the hardworking, real entrepreneurs, were ignored (I say this with some self-derision).

To me, the only silverlining in this economic downturn is that the few startups left are real. No more "social network for cats."
I don't see how you can argue that each generation is equally ambitious, while also arguing that the previous generation was seeking out "safe jobs".

I agree that people are probably as ambitious as they were decades ago on an individual basis, but that doesn't mean that their goals have stayed the same over time. Even in the last decade, there's been a massive shift of technical talent toward entertainment technology, whereas it's getting harder and harder to find R&D jobs in physics, chemistry, biology and computer science.

There are always a few companies doing interesting technical work, but if the number of under-employed PhDs I know is any indication, the fraction of companies doing R&D is pretty darned small, and getting smaller every year. It's much easier for a PhD in Physics to get a job as a sysadmin at a web startup than it is for her to get a job in her field. I think that's sad.
I like the trick for getting around index creation and deletion, I wasn't aware that MySQL required a full table lock. I checked the docs for DB2, and it allows read/write during index creating -- is this a MySQL only limitation or do the other major databases impose the same restriction?
Yeah, you're probably right. We should do some kind of anonymous survey using Wufoo.
> The business doesn't necessarily need to be based out of California, which means that money doesn't necessarily stay in California.

Biz taxes are paid by customers. So yes, some of the savings will go to out of state customers. If you want to argue that CA should have fewer biz that serve out of state customers, feel free.

> Also, while that business can reinvest in the state, I just don't see how that can quickly reach the needs of citizens.

Huh?

> A corporation saving millions might pay its employees more, who will pay income tax, which will eventually reach a state government

Now I understand. You don't count money paid to employees as "reaching citizens". You think that the only money that "reaches citizens" comes from govt.

That's an interesting position.

> Warren Buffet nearly destroyed Arnold Schwarzenegger's campaign when he stated that prop 13 was terrible, specifically targeting the reassessment clause.

Yes, Warren Buffet. The guy who argues for the estate tax yet has arranged things so his wealth will never be taxed. Moreover, he sells insurance to folks whose estates can't be so arranged so they can pay the estate tax. (In other words, he profits from the estate tax.)

Buffet is a great stock picker, but if you're looking to him for advice on good and evil....
Perhaps it means people with a wealthy background have a higher chance of trying to start their own business?
Get wireless for less
Really a great way to do things... thank you so much for sharing this.

I can't really see any disadvantages to doing anything this way. You still obtain access to data in a relational sense, though where normally you compare columns of a table you'd now do joins. For example, you can get the unique users that have submitted a link by joining the index_link table to the entities table, then joining that to the index_user table.

The problem here seems to be that sharding would prevent this type of operation... so how do they get around this? It's possible they just don't need this data, but lets assume they do. I'm presuming they have some slave(s) munging non-realtime-needed data into whatever real relational tables they choose. But, if the problem because realtime, I'm at a loss as to how they'd do it.
This is really interesting.

We did something similar for GameClay. I stored game properties as JSON-encoded dicts stored in MogileFS, then had a "regular" MySQL table that would point to the MogileFS key for the file, then the Python code would just read it out, use a JSON library to parse it, and manipulate it as a Python object. We had normal MySQL indexes on all the game metadata that appeared in the UI, so if you want all arcade games that nostrademons has posted, it would do a normal index search on (nostrademons, "arcade"), find the Mogile key for that, and then fetch it.

We never got to the point where we'd need to shard, alas. I'd like to think I would've thought of the index-per-table approach independently, but probably not.

Curiously, I did things this way for ease of development, not performance (and there were probably lots of little things that would've killed our performance anyway - it's really hard to diagnose performance bugs until you have real users banging away). We needed a storage system - MogileFS and MySQL work out of the box. We needed a data format - JSON works out of the box. We needed to be able to change game schemas rapidly, since we kept finding our existing design was not really fun to play with (and that's what killed us, ultimately). The rest of it followed pretty obviously.
I think it depends on their exits. My thinking is if the startups have good exits, then they probably should be pretty happy with the experience. Can pg share a little stats on YC startups exits?
Intro to Palm WebOS
Their privacy policy mentions: "patent-pending edit synchronization algorithm". I'd much appreciate hearing about their experience with a software patent (I'm in a similar position).

Unless they want to not publicize it, to avoid anti-patent sentiment? e.g. two TechCrunch comments:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/19/etherpad-shows-google-d...
There's a chapter in the Topher Cyll book "Practical Ruby Projects" on how to write a Scheme interpreter. Haven't gotten around to it yet though.
My point was that if you can make as good a case for x > y as for y > x, then x = y.

Do you have any evidence for this massive shift toward entertainment?

Surely there are more research jobs in biology than there were 30 years ago, considering biotech was mostly invented in the intervening period.
In a nutshell, could it be argued that kludges are fine as long as the programmer?

• knows the exact location of the hacks.

• Is aware of the repercussions and is assured that the system can get away with the kludges for the time being without any hindrance in the system’s effectiveness to get things done.

• Knows how to fix them if need be.

• Communicate the situation with others, including the fellow programmers and the managers.
Wouldn't that penalize people who write comments in their editor, then copy-paste into the comment box?
> The problem is that I live where I can get a hardware design job.

There's some hardware design in the foothills, where there are tons of small towns.

San Jose has a couple of "diverse" communities (one downtown) as does Palo Alto. Mountain View and Redwood City have at least one. I don't pay enough attention to Sunnyvale, Santa Clara or the southern east bay cities (Fremont, Milpitas, Union City) to know where theirs are (if they have one.), but I suspect that they do. (San Leandro and Oakland do.)

Yes, you'll need to drive to work but if you want to live in a "walk everywhere else" community, you can.

Meanwhile, the majority who either don't want that or don't care have other choices.
The "common knowledge" of the IT industry is not a some language or notations, but a logic (not a common logic, but a science) and mathematics.

While considered as "abstract" and "having nothing to do with reality", /proper/ branches of mathematics capture many aspects of programming, so new languages/technologies/whatewer are not perceived as a "reinventing the Foo from the last century", but as a "another appilcation of Bar from the Baz field", which is much more fruitful comparison, due to depth of the mathematics itself.
I'd like to try this. It seems like he only has spreadsheets available for Excel though. Anyone tried to make something similar for gnumeric or maybe google spreadsheets?
We don't do any joins in MySQL. We query the indexes in all of the shards in parallel to get a list of entity IDs and then query the entities tables in all of the shards in paralel to get the entity bodies as a second operation.
> mismanagement in California and everything to do with the availability of cheap, green, hydro power in the Pacific Northwest.

What makes you think that mismanagement of CA has nothing to do with the cost of power in CA and the availability of "green hydro power"? (CA occasionally tries to tear down power damns and has stalled construction of one of a major one, somewhere around Folsom, for over 20 years.)