skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Very well done! If you had a blog, I'd read it.

I think that getting to the psychology of the problem as you are attempting (or succeeding) is a very worthy task that lots of people need to be working on.

I'm no water vapor ignoring tree-hugger, but the inefficiency of our current work system where people heat and maintain homes that are empty for 12 hours a day, go to office buildings that are empty for 12 hours a day, using a car that they use for two hours a day, to do work that could be done at home, is insanity.

Why do we tolerate this as companies or as employees? We can seriously look for solutions, or we can wax cynically about "the man". One path leads forward, to a solution.

If your hypothesis is correct, there are compromises we can do, to satisfy the inner-ape, while gaining some efficiency.

- We can remove people's personal effects from their work areas, so multiple people can work in that cube. On Monday and Tuesday, it a marketing guy. On Wednesday and Thursday, it's an engineer. On Friday and Saturday, it's an accountant. Let groups that never interact anyway, REALLY not interact, and as a bonus, you reduce your necessary office space by 2/3rds while still maintaining ape bonding time for two days a week. The other three days of work, people work at home, freeing up our highways by 2/3rds as well. Actually, we free up our highways by 3/5ths (math left as exercise for the reader) because now we have staggered our weekends a bit. Nobody works on Sundays still, but accountants work on Saturdays.

Would there be tons of coordination hassles, with accountants needing to talk to engineers about their annual budgets? No, not really. Because our whole premise here, is that none of this face time is actually needed from a business standpoint. Internet and telephone would be just fine. It's needed at a deeper level, among team-mates and up/down hierarchies, but it's not needed from one tribe to another.

The accountant tribe and the engineer tribe will never form an alliance, they are evolutionary enemies. Why force them to live in the same jungle?
Financial Discussion Using Twitter
I use antirez' visitors:

http://www.hping.org/visitors/

It's quick and simple. Sort of the opposite of analytics. But it's a nice way to quickly see what's happening.
Fascinating.

The talmudic-inspired process would reduce to our modern proportional instincts if debt can be subdivided and resold.

Consider the case of the 100,200,300 creditors against the debtor with only 100 left. If being owed the larger amount is a disadvantage, the 200 and 300 can each sell their amounts in excess of 100 in 100-unit chunks to third parties.

Then, there are 6 creditors each disputing the 100, and all of them get an equal 16.6-. Assuming the original 200 and 300 sold their excesses at only a small discount to that expected return, they get nearly their proportional shares of the original 100.
Is there an option to opt-out? If not, my resignation will be on Zuckerberg's desk by Monday.

I realize the potential Facebook has with it's member base, given the inherent nature of Metcalfe's Law but I use Facebook to keep in touch with my friends who aren't savvy or willing enough to use Twitter; a networking site that doesn't expect it's users to sit by idly while companies poll and query us to sell products otherwise we wouldn't even blink at.
I use and love Mint but Shawn doesn't seem to have any intention on growing it outside of a self-hosted web script, which is a shame cause there is a huge opportunity I think.

But in his defense, he's got a nice income off it with very low support requirements. Lets him do a lot of other cool stuff so I know he's keeping busy. He's definitely a smart guy.
Do you recommend finding one from anywhere though? Or checking with the people you already know that you think would be a good fit.

I'd agree with the latter, but I think finding a co-founder from scratch is a pretty massive task. Like harder than being a single founder and succeeding (If you're determined enough).

Seems like the best co-founders are people you went to school/college with, or worked with, or worked together on open source - all things that take time.

Having no co-founder is better than settling for a less than great co-founder surely?
whoa. I just went to their site, by the looks of it they have all features requested here and more.

Specifically, they allow you to track one user's fate which is something I always wanted: http://getclicky.com/media/screenshots/visitor.gif

They also got data export, APIs and real-time stats.
I mean that if a submission actually is offtopic, users will flag it and editors will kill it. And once it's dead it will get no comments or upvotes.
Almost certainly high time preference rather than what the study claims to show.
I think "Do you speak good English?" is correct given that the adjective "good" indicates the quality of his English.
"If you can convince someone else to go in with you, then you've done a good enough sales job that you'll be able to get customers."

Sorry, but that's terrible advice IMHO. You could convince any number of people to be co-founders... That doesn't mean in any way that they would be an asset, or that your startup has any legs. Convincing 1 person isn't that hard a job (For some values of person).

I think you should amend that to something like "If you can convince someone to quit their job, and go in with you, who you also think would be an asset, and be able to work with..."
A lot of cutting-edge music doesn't come from the field of music. John Cage's work was influenced by literature. Brian Eno created ambient music by listening to music in places he went. An AI couldn't discover breaking-ground things like that. Not through synthesis.

The idea is that truly great music isn't music that takes an existing style and moves it. Great music is the music that creates something that isn't already there.
Also, US health care costs are approximately twice those of any other industrialized nation. Auto workers are not getting benefits that are disproportionate to workers elsewhere. Rather, auto companies are paying inflated rates for ordinary benefits. The entities which really benefit are the various health care monopolies (drug companies and so-forth).
I don't understand it. In the case where the guy leaves 200, the first 100 is contested by everyone, so an equal split should be 33.3. The second 100 is contested by the bigger two creditors, so that should be split 50-50, leaving totals of 33.3, 83.3, and 83.3.

Clearly I'm missing something.
Yes, I'd certainly recommend a cofounder (a) you already know and (b) who's technically very good.

It's an interesting question how bad a cofounder would have to be before no cofounder would be better. I think as long as you got along well with someone and they encouraged you to work, they could be pretty middling technically and still be a net win. Merely having someone enthusiastic to bounce ideas off could easily make you 2x more productive than you might be alone.
From site:

What is Ready Lisp? It’s a binding together of several popular Lisp packages for OS X, including: Aquamacs, SBCL and SLIME. Once downloaded, you’ll have a single application bundle which you can double-click — and find yourself in a fully configured Common Lisp REPL. It’s ideal for OS X users who want to try out Lisp with a minimum of hassle. The download is approximately 73 megabytes.
they troll by using "nerd" for headline

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reclaiming

To reclaim is to bring a word back to a more acceptable course. [...] Reclaimed words [...]

'Nerd' by technophiles and people with a deep interest in science fiction, video games, and other obscure, niche hobbies and interests
Bay Area isn't really drab and grey though. It's 65 and sunny right now!
If it had some data or even speculation about why practices diverge, it would satisfy my hacker curiousity. Otherwise, it's just one of thousands of arbitrarily-different little things between cultures (if in fact it is true, about which I have my doubts).
Let's play with some numbers to see whether this is a viable income model for facebook.

Gartner, one of the largest marketing research companies in the world, had an operating income of 133 million US$ in 2007 according to their annual report. 56% of their turnover comes from market research, the rest from consulting and events. Assuming that all divisions have a similar operating income per 1000$ this puts the operating income of the market research division at $75 million.

Assuming a P/E ratio of 10 this values the marketing research division of facebook at $750 million.

In other words: If facebook marketing research executes perfectly and becomes the world leader in this field, which is very crowded with a lot of large players that have been around for many years, it will be able to account for 5% of their current valuation of $15 billion.

Even if they did pull this off, which is unlikely, it would still be a drop in the ocean.
As others have said, you dont need managers to do what you are doing. You probably do need executives, not managers, when you get to the point where you need serious skills outside of engineering.

HR, legal, administrative: just outsource it to an administrative firm.

Raising money: get a CEO. You will need to get one in the VC image. Make his remuneration dependent on the investment raised.

Sales: figure out your strategy first. Sales forces are expensive.

Engineering: probably needed if it's outside your area of expertise, say software for hardware guys. Then you want a doer, not a manager.
We live in public (and the end of empathy)
Don't think about the worst case scenario if you start a business. Think about the worst case scenario if you don't do a startup.

You are 40. Every day you work 9 - 6 at the BIG firm. Even after getting promoted several times, getting the corner cubicle in the process, you are a relative nobody amongst the other 1000 managers. You hate your job and you may be starting to hate your life. There have been 5 different economic slumps during your career, having you worry about your job and your family's survival every time.

The opposite case: You have started and sold two companies and are now working on the third one, after taking an year-long sabbatical in Egypt. True, your first startup failed and you had to eat ramen for a few months, but it only made you stronger, and no one remembers that now.

Of course, I'm exaggerating a little, but you get the idea. You will experience failures, but that's the small price everyone has to pay when they aim for the sky.
Because "computers are useless. They can only give you answers" ;)
I've been to Berlin several times. Most everyone I met spoke better English than I do. I asked some of them whether this is a common German trait and they said yes, but primarily amongst younger people.
How Photographers Help Parents of Stillborn Babies
I don't know whether to laugh or cry at this - what did you expect? Giving a company tons of details such as who you know, who you are, what you do, who you live with, etc, for free, and you think they're not going to use it to make money?

They're not a charity as far as I know.

Even if you 'resign', they still have your data.
Best practices seems to be moving towards rewriting that url into http://news.ycombinator.com/item/461131
Science also creates atom bombs...
Ask HN: To porn or not to porn?
Hello everyone,
Well, I have reached a crossroad and need to figure out how to proceed from here.
I am, like most of you a founder of a startup(s)... long story short I have lost my job that was funding my startups and currently have no income. my 2nd start up is about to launch any day now and all our hopes (5 people) are hanging on this to succeed.
My first startup was a failure/success, it has won many awards some very "prestigious" and still gets tons of traffic and not to mention gets me some positive recognition but NO MONEY!
basically, Traffic is not enough to make any real money.

I am seriously considering starting a pay porn site (my friend owns 7) and explained how I can make some decent amount to at least keep paying the rent.
I have already contacted an attorney because I am concerned about my name not being affected by this... I frankly dont want to be associated with porn and explained to me how to make start this with out using my name.

My question is this:
Would you (startups/entrepreneurs/VCs/funders/anyone in the industry) do business or be associated with someone in the porn industry?

Thank you.

P.S: If its not obvious I have started a new account to hide my identity.
Can you tell me more about these "remote working locations?" What is ROAM/Jelly/etc?
Great music is the music that creates something that isn't already there.

Why would a human, but not an AI, be able to do that?

John Cage's work was influenced by literature.

AI's cannot read literature?
You're not alone. I think it's the suggested search results. Almost never useful. I've switched over to yahoo in my toolbar. I think the top search engines are close enough in quality that their results are only distinguishable by interface (there's been research, though I can't remember where). When they change the presentation with that "did you mean" they do more damage to the brand than improvement to the results. It's Google's version of Clippy.
Some of those numbers seem very suspect. For example, it lists Houston and Boston as almost identical, with Houston slightly higher. Anyone who's lived in both cities can tell you that's ridiculous; the BankRate.com COL calculator shows Boston as almost 50% more expensive:

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/movecalc.asp?a=0&d1=100000&#...

The list above also puts LA significantly higher than SF, which is also ridiculous. BankRate has SF at 15% higher:

http://www.bankrate.com/brm/movecalc.asp?a=0&d1=100000&#...
Knowing some of my friends who went into science, you could say science is a religion of its own ;)

But jokes aside, this is a pretty shallow statement to make.
Tell that to the Apollo One astronauts
Why would a human, but not an AI, be able to do that?

Because AI operates according to structures that have been designed by human hands. The human mind is incomprehensibly more complex than any AI. So you could make AI that does innovate, but its innovations would still be far more predictable and routine than any that a human mind could come up with.

AI's cannot read literature?

John Cage would read Finnegans Wake, draw lines up and down pages, and derive poems from words formed by what his line would hit. A computer would never think to do that on its own. There's a fine line between genius and insanity, it is said - and computers can't be insane.
"Even if you 'resign', they still have your data."

Before you leave, poison your data.
Sure, I think family can provide some of that motivation/sounding board (My wife is bored to death of me talking to her about Mibbit, but she listens, nods, makes comments :) Sometimes it seems helpful just to say ideas out loud).

I think though that the 'encouraged you to work' can quickly be fulfilled by your users once things take off. There's nothing more motivating than users emailing with feature requests, or telling you something is broken.

For me, the biggest irritation not having a co-founder has been the ups and downs. When I think "this thing sucks! It's stupid it's all wrong it's broken rubbish I should stop it now", there's no other co-founders to balance that out.

I'd agree with the 2x more productive being possible. Also very cool if you start to get competitive with each other - "Bet I can get this new feature done by end of the day" etc
When I heard latter-day Beatles I didn't recognize it. Two years ago, all I knew by them were the oldies. I'd hear Let It Be or Across The Universe or Eleanor Rigby, and I'd ask what band it was playing. I think I had that revelation something like 10 times, and finally, after Why Don't We Do It In The Road?, I took the time to listen to their entire discography.

Zappa you can't tell. In the last 3 months I've listened to all 60 of his albums because he never repeats himself, not even song to song. Even on Freak Out!, his debut, you can't guess from the first song just how incredible the third song will be, or that from there it will move to doo wop or kid's songs. He does it all. If you've heard that album, you can't tell what Absolutely Free or We're Only In It For The Money will do. After that he does a postmodern doo wop album and moves on to jazz fusion and movie tracks, returning to pop rock just in time to release an album consisting of only guitar solos.

With Zappa, if he's not singing you can't tell it's him writing the songs. He's the single most diverse composer I've ever heard.

I've just made an impromptu collection of Zappa songs - http://omegaseye.com/Zappa.zip. His rock songs never sound the same, his pop doesn't sound like anything else. The closest he ever gets to generic is Fountain of Love, which has a surprising guitar line, a very complex choral arrangement, and quotes from Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at the end. I could give you more songs from any of these albums, or show you other albums of his, and unless I told you you would be unable to guess it was Zappa.
I always wonder about this. Often is difficult to find someone (even if you know them) who is even remotely as motivated as you are about the product. It's even harder to find someone to take the huge dive too, especially if they aren't as gung-ho about what you're doing as you are.

What happens when you find the person, make the deal to bring them on board and their work input/contributions are minimal? What happens when they don't make attempts to help out the way you expected? I think this happens a lot and it's aggravating because it's wasted time and creates a strained relationship.

I've found just building it on your own first as a means to prove what you're talking about is more convincing then just talking about it. Most people aren't leaders, they are followers. Most friends I've had aren't as interested or bail during the "idea phase" and then are "ready to help" when I've iterated a few times.
Too bad that the tactics that served the French so well in Algiers can not be applied in Iraq.
Would love to hear more about all this. Relevant links, blogs, stories?
What Is The True National Pastime?
I really do agree with your first idea: I would love to give my referals a login/pwd that would show the stats associated with their referal links: pages view/goals/$
Are atom bombs of negative value? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blasting

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_nuclear_explosions

Peaceful nuclear explosions (PNEs) are nuclear explosions conducted for non-military purposes, such as activities related to economic development including the creation of canals. During the 1960s and 1970s, both the United States and the Soviet Union conducted a number of PNEs.
I love that quote. Who said it?
It's huge, but not $16b (lol at previous FB evaluation?) huge.

The thing is that maybe, it isn't huge enough precisely because current tools aren't that good. Setting up a focus group is a PITA.

Letting any business make questions to a big audience is awesome. If FB restricts this kind of polling only to big companies, it will fail (for varying degrees of fail, specially expectations on FB making lots of cash). Because it's the big companies that have the money to gather this kind of data currently.

Now, if any business could tap into the Facebook audience, that would be cool. Google has proved that < $1 dollars transactions, in internet scale, can make billions. Now if the mom and pop pizzeria on the corner of a NY street could do their market research on FB... or if anyone looking to expand their business can reasearch what's the average income on neighboor town, what kind of sauce they prefer, what they drink...

Also, there's a huge PR opportunity there. This data could be free to the government (and ngos). A few press releases here and there saying how you helped to determine what citizens want would generate good karma for FB.

Do you remember when everyone was afraid of MS? If this FB stuff gets any kind of traction, Google will release its own thing. You can't be better than Google at data mining. Granted, there's not much personal data with Google than FB has. But why do you think FB doesn't like the idea of cooperating with Google on OpenSocial?
This doesn't surprise me.

There is much much more wisdom (read: concentrated intelligence) in real religion (like Judaism or Christianity) than any modern/post-modern mind is willing to agree...
Thanks for the prompt replies, everyone ! I do understand the importance of a co-founder and am in talks with a couple of people I worked with before.

A couple of reasons why I am hesitating are :

1. I feel like I should get some experience in a startup before I start my own.

2. I know the idea has merit but I haven't done any market research yet so it might end up worth nothing.

Do you guys think one should work for a startup before starting one's own ? Is the experience VERY helpful ?

I thought about doing that but then I feel I wouldn't have as much control over the proceedings as I would like to have... to take the company in a particular direction.
Maybe? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima
You have to consider pairs of creditors, i.e. for any pair chosen, the amount they are awarded must satisfy the principle of equal divison.

From the article:

The same condition needs to be met: the assets are divided up such that the amount received by any two people reflects the principle of equal division of the contested sum. Furthermore, the division is a unique solution.

He also gives the algorithm at the end of the article.
Reminds me of this Kurt Vonnegut quote:

“I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist, maybe my brother, would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty — and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine. Scientific truth was going to make us so happy and comfortable. What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima.”

—Kurt Vonnegut, Bennington College address, 1970
I know what you mean. I do the same thing with my girlfriend, sometimes you need to just tell someone so you don't blab to the wrong people.

Co-founders are nice for a good checks and balances type system, to see if you're new ideas are on some sort of right path.
New Android Tutorial Site
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
Pablo Picasso
Spanish Cubist painter (1881 - 1973)
Yeah, I got that, but why when you can do it without pairing? This method would get exponentially more complex as the number of creditors increases, especially for a people who still had nothing but an abacus to work with.
If you don't want to be associated with porn, why would you want to associate with people who associate with people associated with porn?

In other words,

If you don't want to be associated with porn then don't associate yourself with porn.
> I frankly dont want to be associated with porn

Here's some business advice:

What exactly is your secret sauce that's going to make your site better than (or even halfway as good as ) all of the thousands of competing sites? There's no free way to make money.

Here's some moral advice:

Don't spend your time doing things you're ashamed of.
I've always been under the impression that there's no shame in work done well.

Just do good work, then.
Bear in mind that the US is almost as large (population-wise) as the EU, is a collection of Europe-size states, and we don't have to get work permits when moving between states. Unfortunately we haven't extended that courtesy across the Atlantic yet.