skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The "top 10 reason for startups to fail", "top 10 ways to succeed" and the like are getting tiresome. Can we put this all into a book for everybody's reference? I feel like we're going in circles here and every two months someone rediscovers something and writes anohter "top 10" piece of hard-earned wisdom.

There must be a way for us to accumulate knowledge as a society rather than rehash it. Right?
It's incredible to think that such amounts of manpower and money can be put to use solely to develop a special effect for a movie. Millions of dollars and hundreds of people over the course of two years working for what? A special effect. Truly fascinating.

I wonder if investors in movie get the rights to the software that gets created in the process, and if they view it in and of itself a good reason to invest.
Not generally no. There is certainly some racism in Australia and some areas that you'd roughly compare to parts of the American "Deep South" in terms of backward attitudes, but overall Australians are pretty tolerant.
Electrolyzed water called a 'miracle liquid'
Startup Life 102: Leadership
I agree with this comment. When we raised our seed round last year, we had a number of first time angel investors back out at the last minute (or we had to kick them out) because the transaction costs were too high. For example, one newbie angel wanted all sorts of protectionist clauses in the agreement because he was paranoid. I would seriously try and stay away from these guys.

BTW, nice site!
I love that story too! Can anyone point me to a collection of stories like that? I have read "Hackers..." by Levy and "The Soul of a New Machine" by Kidder.
Wikitude Augmented Reality for the G1
I don't think you get credit history by putting correct data into your Facebook account.
I thoroughly enjoyed this particular TED talk. 155 people over 2 years (although they started the project in 04) for all of this technology for a single movie? Damn.
The right to violate copyright is part of our human rights?

Now I'm an occasional pirate (mainly TV, since I'm not in the US), but these guys are bonkers; I know pirating is wrong, however these guys seem to think that nobody should have the rights to their own work, and anyone should be allowed to take what they want without giving anything back to the owner. Is it just me, or is that absurd?
Woz wasn't an entrepreneur in this sense. He was a hacker who lived for computers and planned to work at HP his entire career.
The Jargon File has three more: http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon_47.html#SEC54
Great post.

Compliments the article I read just prior to this:

"Working For Somebody Else Never Amounted To Anything - Wayne Huizenga "

http://tinyurl.com/c6fg47
Amazon.com’s Kindle Goes From Good to Better
But when we assemble the book, let's select entries from authors who are not ashamed to say who they are, something about their credentials, and what personal experience makes them worth attending to.

All I get from "TheRiskMaster" Tim Draper is his 'complete profile:' http://www.blogger.com/profile/14560806142417410222 ??? Plus that he's a fan of Nat&Alex, as witness their link on page of the blog.

Are we supposed to believe that this is the Draper of draper-fisher-jurvetson ?
Top universal business tips
Like Dan Lyons?
That would be cool!
If you're a serious startup, you're not monetizing off display ads.

:)
In no order as they come out...

Title attributes or tooltips for all buttons. I don't know what they do.

Fade the modal in/out faster, make hitting ESC or clicking the faded are close the modal (the X is rather small)

More importantly, the whole way you manage going to URLs (and "freezing") is very unintuitive and backward. For starters, the arrow to "type in a URL ... [as far as I intially read]" points to an unfamiliar icon. I go there and see "freeze" and "unfreeze" which makes no sense to me. Freeze what? It was not clear that the main window was meant to show a URL rather than being an introduction to the service.

Furthermore, I'd never expect that typing a URL in chat would control the window on the right. It's a chat box. I type in it, and what I type goes into the chat log.

I greatly suggest the following:

Put an address bar above the window, or in the window, and next to it a "lock" or "freeze" button which says "prevents this URL from changing". Furthermore, it'll pay dividends having this bar up there when you add more options.. like maybe "new tab" and things like that.

Initially have the URL be the actual URL of your "welcome" page... (eg: http://chatterbloc.com/welcome_to_new_room.php) It will immediately tell me two things: "oh I can change the URL" and "I'm currently at the welcome page, lemme see what it has to say."

Explain features and stuff at this welcome page.. like that I can type "goto <url>" in chat to navigate . And that I can prevent navigation by freezing by locking the URL.

Make back and forward buttons.

Finally, let me name the room and give me a short URL.

All in all, a nice little service akin to Gabbly, Twiddla, etc. I like the iciness of it.

Hope this helps.
That depends on what you consider feedback. In this case, the "feedback" was:

'you are a faggot. this facebook sucks. the one should come back. i want to kill you. go fuck a man'.

I kid you not. Do you think people (any people, nevermind those who build products that are given away for free) deserve such abuse?
Here is an example of one that suffers from that problem:

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/

More than once has it happened to me where I click on the very prominent icon "stackoverflow: a programming community exploit" when I want to either check out some new feature implemented or read some question that is discussed in the blog but I am sent right back to the blog's home page and not the the site itself.

The link to the main site is right below the icon but the two should be swapped. The current way is just not consistent with my general web experience. Yes, a small inconvenience as a user but an inconvenience nonetheless.
A developer's introduction to Google Android
More stuff:

What is the point of "Reminder"? How about "share this room" instead. Reminding typically means sending me something that is time sensitive.

Second, pop-up blocker comes up. Unless you're offering something extremely compelling, I'd be so annoyed as to leave. Pop-up blocker shouldn't come up for "onclick" events... you are doing something wrong in javascript.

Third.. the more I think about it, the more I wish you had an address bar up there, and some sort of "help" thing near the chat window which would list out commands, like "!map" and "!<url>" and stuff like that.

Best of luck.
everybody I know always says wikipedia is a non-trustworthy source of encyclopedic information (unless verifiable in some other source). And plus there are several wikipedias out there, it is open source - and it doesn't even make 1/1000 of the money GOOG does!
in what sense is it a monopoly?
If they're falling behind on their goals because of that, sounds like a case for RescueTime. If not... oh well?

In a typical day at the day job, I'm physically at my desk for twelve hours, and am physically typing for two of them. Count another two for talking to coworkers. The other eight are downtime between tasks.

Aside from the Japanese corporate need to keep up appearances and not have engineers go home at 5:00 on the typical day (which, but for appearances, I'd be able to do four days a week), my bosses are very enlightened about the subject: they set reasonable deadlines, and when the reasonable deadlines are being met they do not micromanage professionals' use of time.

We have a few people who do OSS for kicks. The guy behind me is some sort of volunteer for BSD, if I recall correctly.

I read. A lot. My bosses know it and explicitly encourage it, on the condition that I bring the stuff I learn back to the company. That's the same attitude they have about my off-the-clock economic activities -- "training we don't have to pay for, please, do as much as you want!" Although even knowing that was the arrangement I was pretty darn shocked when the boss strolled up one day, dropped a printed copy of my site on the desk, and said "Teach [coworker X] how to reproduce the effect you're using on this page. He needs to implement it for [Y] University's course registration."
"Who ever would have guessed that installing OS X would be harder than installing Linux, and would have less hardware support?"

given the fact it is purposefully done NOT TO be installed on non-Apple hardware, I guess anyone could easily guess that...
Home And Bedroom Adds Keetsa Mattresses.
Keetsa Mattresses are one of the very few mattresses that are both eco friendly and made from memory foam.
strangely enough I was poking around Android this weekend as well - http://shout.setfive.com/2009/02/23/hello-android/

all and all, pretty smooth experience. now if only we had some Android phones...
"When someone tells me "Linux sucks" or whatever, I just kind of laugh at them and move on."

you, sir, are certainly not the average Linux fanboy.

Oh, and 2009 is the year of Linux on Desktop. Again.
Build a Billion From the Ground Up
Pipelining and increasing max requests is considered harmful. Please do not enable these.

Both Mozilla and WebKit discourage this and for good reason.
Ron Schnell FAQ
Where to start counting, 0 or 1?
My hypothesis:
It's more usual to start with 0 when counting steps and with 1 when counting things.

Maybe that's why programmers start with 0, they usually count steps.
Age also starts at 0, nobody is born being 1 year old, although we are living our 1st year of life.
Races also start at 0.
When you want to know how many eggs are in the basket it makes little sense to say, oh i have an empty basket, 0 eggs, let's add some, now i have 1 egg, 2 eggs, etc.
I've seen this too, very annoying. Guy talks about his (ISV) business, but there's no link to be found, at least not in the time I searched.
The story is a PR thing. The collaboration is a business development thing. Keep them separate. Right now, focus on the story. in 1 month (after the story), go to a decision maker and give him your proposition. Mention that you were covered by them recently. Include the article if appropriate.

The reporter is probably not the person you want to talk to about partnering with the paper. After the article is published, you might want to contact her and let her know how much you liked the article. Use the conversation to get the information on who you should contact about your collaboration idea.

Also, what is the collaboration idea? Do you mean selling your services, or giving them away for free to the paper as a way of increasing your userbase?
I quit my job about a week ago to work on my business. I've found that I'm on HN a lot less now.

For me, the idea that I had to be physically there and making a big show out of getting stuff done made me do less. Knowing that I can get up and leave and take a walk any time at home to think about a tough technical problem makes it a lot easier to get stuff done.
Is it still 1996? Clicking on one of the reference sites listed in the article feels like stepping into a time machine:

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/

"Guide to Grammar & Writing" should have a knowledge exchange with "Guide to Web Site Design & Style".
At my last job we worked until the work was done. The problem was that we couldn't start our work until the developers gave us the build to test. Because of this there were days where I might work 2 hours in 8-10 hour day. There were others where I worked 18 hours in a 24 hour work day.

I think using productive 'hours' of work as a unit of measure is little more fair than using lines of code as a unit of measure.

What of the epic hacker of hackerness who finishes in an hour what takes most coworkers a week to finish. If he is only spending 10 hours of the week doing real productive work is he a benefit to team or is he hurting the team?
always start with 1.

0 means nothing in any situation
I failed you HN readers...
I agree. I've long chased-after a notion of "information density" -- you want to get the best bang for your (written) buck. Zinsser's book is one of my favorites.
Selecting good co founders is valid however I believe trusting them in tough times is even more important.
"Verbs ending in "d": shipped, launched, built, sold."

I wouldn't want to see such an obvious oversight on a resume.

Should read "Accomplishment Verbs"

I also disagree with the "churn" criteria. I think it's becoming more and more acceptable for an employee to have a broader range of employers over a shorter period of time. The "company man" idea is dying. Sure, different industries will have different standards, but I tend to think that the trend is heading away from 20 years at the same company. It typically pays better to keep moving, and employers should (and are) realizing that the brighter candidates are the ones who are always looking for better opportunities.
good idea, but really it needs to not jump around on the screen like that.

have captions dock at the bottom and then extend a line from the caption to where the actual item of interest is, then update the line dynamically keep the text static so people don't get queasy trying to read that crap
I sympathize with your last sentence entirely, and with your "sort of" reaction to the article as well. Out of curiosity, how do you feel about talking to users? That's one thing I don't feel ambivalent about. If someone is using what I've made, I really want to talk to that person and find out what would make them happy; if they're happy I want to find out what would delight them. I'm kind of hoping this will make up for the lack of some of what the WSJ considers "entrepreneurial" qualities.

The more I think about it, the more I'm annoyed by that article. The way it begins - "Make sure you're cut out for it first" - seems self-refuting to me. The inner drive that causes someone to do creative or bold things doesn't sit down to ponder 10-point lists crafted by pseudo-experts before deciding whether it's "cut out for it". Every time I listen to this kind of thing I later wish I had ignored it.

p.s. I've done consulting and freelancing too. You're never working on something that is your own. After a while, you realize your soul is starving. Meanwhile you've become a crack addict, where the crack is your hourly rate.

pp.s. That doesn't mean it isn't better than being an employee, which is a form of serfdom.
Shoulder Satchel Formosa Exporter
Jai ho lyrics by pus-sycat dolls
Then and Now: A Fast-Forward Tour of Gadget History
What's your business?
Launching a site on Reddit
Thought it might be interesting to see how a site is launched on Reddit, in case there are any interesting comparisons to launching on Hacker News.
I think the point is that there are other rights besides copyright, the right to privacy for example, and that where they come into conflict copyright should not automatically supersede all other rights.
The proverbial undertime. Imagine what would happen if geeks could realize their potential? We would had all kinds of cool software right now, and even enterprise software would suck a lot less.
When my littlest brother was learning to count, he would count the first object twice (0, 1) then continue as normal.

Honestly, it depends on the situation, and I think you got it right. Things start at 1, steps start at 0.

But starting at 0 presents a problem. If I have a set of stairs with 5 steps, I either count the ground or the landing in my steps but never both. If I want to get to the middle (3rd) step, if I'm at the bottom I just count 1, 2, 3 steps and I'm there, but if I'm at the top I only count 2 steps down. There are really 6 positions I could be, but only 5 steps. You guys may have this down, but it still trips me up sometimes.
What is the good reason?
This isn't reddit. The CSI gui gag is not likely to get you massive upvotes here.
Misleading title. I've never heard of Meez before this article and I'm taking that as my friends haven't either.

Reading the article it states that Meez overtakes Facebook on number of minutes per visit. Thats not really a good unit of measurement. Especially since facebook can largely be managed by reading your email or other tools and then logging in only to send a reply.
Age starts at 1 in some countries. I know this is the case in both Taiwan and the Philippines, not sure where else. Someone who is 10 in the U.S. would be considered 11 there.
7 Habits of Highly Effective Twitterers
Mio.tv Picks Up Spanish Social Network Wamba For €4 Million
This thread pretty much debunks the "miracle liquid":

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/02/23/electrolyzed-water-a.ht...
There is a link to his other website: http://www.dfj.com/team/TimDraper.shtml
As a writer myself, I consume these sort of guides religiously, but they always have a journalistic bent; fiction rarely seems to be considered. [1] This is usually excused by these guide-writers with a remark that "there's no one true way to tell a story well."

Indeed, there are many ways, perhaps an infinite number, but there are just as many ways to tell a story badly, and it would be helpful to at least ponder upon some of them, rather than telling each author to start from scratch. I'd love to see a guide that just works through the corpus of the standard set of famous authors, and points out the various choices of narrative construction and prosody they made along the way.

Sadly, not even the university courses I took on this specific subject did this well; they seemed more to be "here, look at this author; he writes well, does he not? You should read him, and perhaps osmose what he knows, somehow." This is not the scientific method; we do not teach people about gravity by repeatedly dropping things on them. We experiment with variations, seeing how each change affects some variable--in this case, the experience of reading--and then declare that some or another technique has certain statistical effects on readers.

---

[1] Fiction is not orthogonal to HN--narratives in general, and the allegory in particular, can be just as valid methods of information delivery as plain speech--but that's another rant.
With the exception of 2 & 8 this list basically boils down to "they have poor management skills"

I'm not one who is opposed to the young founder who starts a company right out of school but startups need to seek out someone with actual experience as soon as possible imho. Steve Jobs (John Sculley) and Bill Gates (Jon Shirley) both did it.

Ideally a successful startup can combine the energy and fresh insight of a young founder with the experience and management skills of a seasoned businessman.
Make it part of the "is it <some holiday>" network. Everday, I'd like to figure out if it's a holiday by deduction... so that's a lot of traffic for you.

Make an API for it, and charge.
If you are serious about high performance check out varnish:
Privately, Hollywood admits DRM isn't about piracy
This happens in all areas of work, it's just that the geeks are honest about it..at least when asked in an anonymous poll on the Internet. I happen to not be a slacker, and a casual observation of the room around me makes it pretty obvious that most people waste huge amounts of time and effort. There is no reason to believe that it would be different in a profession not related to computers.

The reason there are consulting companies where the annual wages are more than twice as high than in the economy at large is that these companies have focused employees that put work first and life second, squeezing results out of every hour. In a regular company, you'd be insane to put in the kind of effort that these guys do, because you wouldn't be rewarded in any halfway reasonable way. The system breeds mediocrity, but there is thankfully a world of smaller companies (and in the extreme, startups) that allow overachievers to get compensation for their effort.

There is a corollary to this observation: it isn't really necessary to work more than 4 hours a day to have a good standard of living. Unfortunately, this particular niche isn't yet filled by any kind of company. Solo consulting may (marginally) work, but you won't get the best clients. There's an opportunity here..not to earn big bucks, but to create a different kind of company. How few (although focused) hours can each employee work and still earn more than the median wage?
I hope you're saying this tongue in cheek because Michelangelo (like most of our great artists btw) ofcourse did have a dayjob. He was struggling for money for the better part of his life, taking on jobs that he hated. Where do you think the "poor artist" or "suffering for art" memes come from?

There was no such thing as a "record deal" in the old times either. You had to suffer until your popularity would pay for itself - and without the leverage of mass media, too.

There's a great book about Michelangelo by Irvin Stone that I'd wholeheartly recommend to anyone interested. It's not dry teaching material but his life told in the form of a novel: http://www.amazon.com/Agony-Ecstasy-Biographical-Novel-Miche...
While #1 is pretty obvious, #2 came rather a surprise to me. Partnering with an 'artificial' cofonder can get you into more trouble than having none at all.
Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) Reducing Desktop Costs
The traditional PC as the corporate 'thick client' has long been at the forefront of desktop computing. It has represented a favourable compromise between functionality, performance and cost. However, a number of challenges remain: Desktop Management: Centralising desktop management is an extremely difficult task in the face of a broadly distributed computing environment and the corporate workforce, who increasingly require secure on-demand access to their desktop environment from anywhere. Furthermore, desktops are notoriously difficult to standardise because of the variety of PC hardware and users' needs to modify desktop environments.
The one biggest firefox speedup that linux users can get is by installing a Minefield nightly (Firefox 3). It's a night and day difference.
Lists of Free Food and Coupons for American Families
Python Developer Center from Sun Microsystems
How the three-tiered beer distribution system works
With computerized registries, age surely starts at zero, as in zero year and so many months. With rounding, age 1 will start after the sixth month.

For children's growth status tracking, the UN has a method in computing for children's age and have been localized. I have used the Philippine reference and age is computed in months. There is a 0 month age.

Culturally, I would presume you might be referring to parts of the Philippines where people start counting age at one. I have never heard of this. We celebrate the first birthday the usual way: one year after birth.
Gene could allow lab-grown teeth
Even when using serverside javascript, you still end up with at least 4 languages; javascript, html, css and occasional sql queries.

Rails is actually not that bad, letting you use ruby for everything from javascript and html templates to sql queries and configuration. The future is languages that can be tweaked to express anything like lisp, ruby, python, groovy and one day also javascript.
http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=pirate+bay+80+percent
Spicejet
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Trying to work out from the map whether that's noisebridge - if not it's very similar.

https://www.noisebridge.net/wiki/NoiseBridge
Wow, that looks good. Just what I need in fact, I can stop writing my own backprop FFN using NumPy now and use this, which means I can get on to the more interesting stuff quicker! Thanks durin42 for posting this!

Now I just need to find a decent RBF implementation and I'm set :p
Use asterisks instead :)
Gmail is Down
so much for those 5 9s I guess...

That's the second glitch for google in a very short time.