skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I apologize. I thought I was quite clear here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4676144 and I was overly brusque in my latest response (due to the language above).
The problem with your argument it that it rests on a false premise, that you should start the calculation of a $100M exit with the 1% chance you will raise funding. You should actually be multiplying this by the chance that you'll have a 100M exit. And I think far fewer bootstrapped companies have that outcome than VC funded companies. FWIW I don't think being VC funding is success, but adding fuel can certainly help it grow. Just because it didn't work out for you doesn't mean it isn't a powerful tool to a startup founder.
It looks fairly average to me.. but it is great your getting exposure. I hope something good comes of it.
If you are really that far along with your PHP skills, I don't think presenting an index.php as embedded HTML with a few string assisting PHP functions grants a lot of confidence to a knowledgeable employer about your skillset.
This looks great! It seems to make Stripe simpler (since Stripe is essentially simple payments for developers, but non-developers have a hard time grasping all of their docs). If you don't plan on expanding it too much, you might try to talk to the Stripe team and have them integrate :)
If all non-important participants are getting part of the net, that guarantees that net would be negative.

Why even bother asking for it and putting it on a contract?
Ask for tiny gross part or for small hourly raise, but treat net share exactly as zero.
Just because you cant sell something does not mean that it has no value.
I agree this isn't a particularly refined article, I'm just saying he does make a point. A lot of programmers, myself included, have a tendency to be a bit narrow-minded.

And no, I suppose I don't have a specific example. I just notice that the programmers I know who are more than just coders are considerably more efficient, and come up with better, cleaner solutions.

This is, of course, only speaking from personal experience. And in regards to your "extreme underwater basket weaving club" example, well, maybe it does. I learnt Latin for a while and as useless as it may seem on a day-to-day basis, it did wonders to my logical thinking.
Ask HN: How can a Non-US Founder, accept credit cards for US company
Hi,

I'm from India, never been to US.

I'm looking forward to launch a SaaS Project, for this I'm in the verge of incorporating in Delaware. In my research so far, I've looked into Stripe and braintree payments for payment processing.

They both require Social Security Number (which I don't have), while braintree payments requires one full-time employee in the US.

Is there a way to accept subscription payments through credit card for US companies, without requiring SSN? Has anybody done the same?
I honestly started with an index.php because that's the easiest way to serve a static site on heroku. I just intended to put up a static site, then built a couple functions for efficiency in formatting. It wasn't intended to be a demonstration of my programming ability; it was designed to be something quick thrown up in a day.
Amazing start up for web creators →
The expected value is wrong here, because it imagines a distribution where you either go big or you go home with bubkis.

The truth is that there are a lot of things in between. Owning 33% of a company that is making millions, and is funded, but not sold for $100M, gives you a nice income and you work on something you like. And all this time you were hiring great people and receiving a good income. If you compare that with the lifestyle business, where you have to grind it out, you have a lot more risk in the lifestyle business actually.

So no, not only was the math in the calculation wrong, but really, VC is about scaling a startup (in the Paul Graham sense) into being worth tens and hundreds of millions of dollars and beyond. It's often worth it for the people you meet and the potential exit.
The critical mistake here is a misunderstanding of how probability works. If we know that x% of startups succeed, that doesn't mean that each group of founders starting a startup have x% chance of succeeding.

Some people are orders of magnitude more likely to succeed than others. For those it's a good idea to start a startup. For the rest (a much larger group) it's a bad idea.
Startup School Speakers
FYI, this rule has been changed:"Obviously, our office encourages lifelong learning and wants Minnesotans to take advantage of educational materials available on the Internet, particularly if they’re free. No Minnesotan should hesitate to take advantage of free, online offerings from Coursera."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/10/19/minnesota...
In the rest of the world, curriculum vitae is almost synonymous with résumé and is used more often to convey the same meaning.
I'm super surprised that the plans for 2013 don't include a charging station in the Bay Area, seeing as they're headquartered here.
Judging from all the bear raids on GOOG lately, it might be a good time to buy.
Not to be snarky or pedantic, but you're describing a Heuristic, not a bias. On the other hand, Wisdom is in large part knowing what not to do as a starting point. It may be wrong, which would be in error, but a true bias probably not.

___________

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_bias
Sherlock holmes: eliminate the impossible, and what is left, however improbable is the truth. &tc.
Paint Me Yellow: Portraits by Anant Rohankar
Yes. Its called a competitive market - I don't know how you can seriously argue against such a thing in the modern world, where all of us rely on it (price competition) for basically everything we buy.

Though (perhaps thankfully, given the response to my post) the relatively simple nature of this means that its (if not now then soon) going to be a price-competitive industry anyway.
I'm not familiar - if there's a better way, please let me know. If you just try to serve an index.html, it doesn't work.

http://kennethreitz.com/static-sites-on-heroku-cedar.html
And how would one know they are orders of magnitude more likely to succeed than others?
//There must be a way to highlight which are your best skills, like this OP's resume progressbars?//

In fact, I do have one similar to progress bars. Have a look at the skills section in home page (http://veerasundar.com) where I show a strength bar for each skill.

When I ported the skills section, I just decided not to include the progress bar.. may be I should add it there too.
I've talked about this in several essays. Someday soon I'll write one specifically about that topic.

Curiously enough, one of the best ways would be to apply to YC. We have a huge amount of data about which founders succeed, and we work very hard to identify the probable successes among the applicants.
This is all bad code practices. Why use eval since we have a fast JSON parser.

Why use map/reduce for user interaction queries. Since we have mongo's JSON based querying.

Btw. Mongo can also vurnable to JSON queries with taking query JSON directly from the user.
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Existential Types FTW
Researchers crack Aussie state transport system, get free rides
That sounds like a great concept for a TV show.
Housecleaning, Then Dinner? Silicon Valley Perks Come Home
I don't see any mojibake?
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Www.ftc.gov/bcp/edu/pubs/consumer/credit/cre35.pdf
This is one of the few business advice pieces I've seen lately on HN that is both USEFUL and USEFUL OUTSIDE OF THE USA (or outside any other "growth accelerating" places that popped up in a few other corners of the world...), despite being specific and inspired by US based business experience only.

Nice to see the other side of the pond is not really a "different planet" :)
SEC STALLS ON IMPLEMENTING JOBS ACT RULES
That would be the joke/flame about PayPal.
Why is it Dark at Night? [video 4min]
Oh man, I was really, really just hoping for this. I've been avoiding putting one last piece into my server because I didn't want to use redis. I'm going to play with this in a couple hours.
Plus the dudes who sell these things get to make another round of cash.
Rural folks may be statistically less likely to be aware of the issue or make a fuss.
Please do let me know how this works out for you.

And I mention it in the blog post, and I mention it in the README, but I feel I should reinforce this:

This. Is. Alpha. Please don't use it in your mission-critical code.

I'd like to run a lot more tests on it. I'd like other people to run tests on it and let me know what they think. This is my first time writing anything this complex, and I want any and all feedback I can get on it.

Thanks!
Looking forward to the essay.

Slightly off topic, but how does YC feel about applicants that are currently employed by YC-backed companies? Somewhat conflicting, no?
You cannot turn off the referer passing in the browsers of all visitors to your website.
Mission critical implies far more importance than this project deserves.

Spotted a typo on the line "OnNodeExit", "Applcation".
Unfortunately many young artists are literally begging labels to make them famous. They assume that money comes along with that, but its not necessarily the case.

I was one of those people once and got a fairly standard (crappy) deal. We're still 6 figures in debt to the label even though the records made a profit.
A real startup life tweet
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"wildly successful" is usually a good proxy for "make a dent in the universe" (assuming he/she didn't literally mean physically denting the universe).
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Thanks! Fixed the typo.

And I guess my point is, I've tested this. I can't seem to find any problems with it. But I do not have unit tests for the larger routing algorithm, only the routing within a Node. In my tests, it always worked out, but I would put my confidence in this at about 70%.

In essence, I was ready to release this software to the Go community, have them kick it around a bit, see what came of it. I was not expecting a HN frontpage. So now I'm slightly panicked, and hoping to God that people don't think I'm an idiot for the rest of forever.
I'm sure lots of people make money to varying degrees, I just don't get why anyone would agree to a share of the nominal profits when this sort of thing is so well known.
Creative ways to clear landmines
I don't get it why you said it's interactive. But I like the simplicity of the design. I also built mine, but not in Github, well here http://jpbalb.in/resume.html

Just a thought though, is self picture important in the resume?
No, just arguing against your suggestion that they are not crimes if they are not detected by straightforward means.

If someone detects a murder by extremely technological means, say while using muons from cosmic rays to image though a structure like they are doing at Fukashima at the moment http://prl.aps.org/abstract/PRL/v109/i15/e152501, then that murder is still a crime whatever the method of detection.

Now it is reasonable to argue that growing weed should not be a crime in the first place, but to argue that growing it indoors should not be a crime on the basis of the level of technology required to detect it, does not seem to make any sort of sense.
> And I think far fewer bootstrapped companies have that outcome than VC funded companies.

This is almost certainly true. But you're also likely to hold a fraction of the equity you'd hold in the case where you bootstrapped.

I find the 'raise nothing, hold all the equity, exit for >$1mm' (or don't exit and live a happy, very comfortable life) far more enticing than 'raise money, hold a fraction of the equity, exit for $100mm', especially when you factor in the lifestyle differences between the two scenarios.

That said, I recognize that other people hold different opinions. More power to you folks, but—at least for now—I'm sick of the rat race.
it is one marker of success. being utterly and fervently in love with one's work is another, and this may or may not coincide with massive growth. dmor is correct that life is short; given that "making a dent in the universe" is kind of relative (see this excellent piece on our small ness: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4674932) and some times more ego-driven than altruistic,
I see no shame in optimizing for happiness in one's lifetime. For some people this may simply mean a decent salary (which may not be an "average" goal for some people), but this was not how I read this piece. The OP appears to have found her own way to do something she loves, profitably and within a short amount of time. This is fantastic. VCs may not want to fund her, and it doesn't look like she wants them to. pg points out businesses like this in his growth essay with no judgment. I wouldn't pass them either.
> Owning 33% of a company that is making millions, and is funded, but not sold for $100M, gives you a nice income and you work on something you like.

Odds are that your VC isn't going to see eye-to-eye with this approach.
There is no misunderstanding of how probability works here.

100% of people who start businesses believe they can succeed, otherwise they wouldn't start one.

Clearly given that such a high percentage of businesses fail, you are not qualified to judge your own chance at success. Therefore the only time you can know that your percentage chance is higher than the average is when you have a 3rd party that is skilled at evaluating such things that tells you so.

In the absence of such, your chances just fall back to the raw figures that the article gives and so the analysis stands up.
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This exemplifies what bothers me about pieces of the startup community. The focus on building something that can grow as fast as possible and be sold for as much money as possible- with lasting value and long-term prospects of the business not even on the radar. Sometimes it almost tastes like your garden variety scam.

I don't have a problem with growth, or with exits, but I'm not a fan of what I'll call the house-of-cards startup model.
Study Shows Crop Rotation Improves Sustainability
Substantial improvements in the environmental sustainability of agriculture are achievable now, without sacrificing food production or farmer livelihoods. When agrichemical inputs are completely eliminated, yield gaps may exist between conventional and alternative systems. However, such yield gaps may be overcome through the strategic application of very low inputs of agrichemicals in the context of more diverse cropping systems. Although maize is grown less frequently in the 3-yr and 4-yr rotations than in the 2-yr rotation, this will not compromise the ability of such systems to contribute to the global food supply, given the relatively low contribution of maize and soybean production to direct human consumption and the ability of livestock to consume small grains and forages. Through a balanced portfolio approach to agricultural sustainability, cropping system performance can be optimized in multiple dimensions, including food and biomass production, profit, energy use, pest management, and environmental impacts.
Most professions would love to spend $40-60 on their tools, instead of up to 6 digits.
It may be the middle of the night, but I laughed far too hard at your comment.
I'm no mathematician, or even close, but I don't believe only a person's beliefs translate to their real-world chances of success. A lot has to do with your work ethic, motivation, ability to work long hours, focus, upbringing etc.

I also don't think 100% of people who start businesses believe they can succeed. I'm sure a large percantage are trying to wing it and hope they get lucky.
Only the most expensive PowerMacs had multiprocessors; iMacs, PowerBooks, and iBooks vastly outnumbered those with top-end PowerMacs. Which also meant there wan't much point in writing heavily threaded programs unless specifically targeting high-end users.
How will you deal with chargebacks?
Nitpick: Almost. There is a Dutch keyboard layout, but nobody uses it. Nobody, as in, there's more people in the Netherlands that use Dvorak than people that use the Dutch keyboard layout.

The Dutch commonly use the US keyboard layout, which makes sense because Dutch and English have the same alphabet.
Big Bang: Is there room for God?
There does seem to be some flaw in this argument. Within those people who have orders of magnitude higher probability of succeeding, how do you differentiate? My general point is the it is impossible to assign a probability to an individual's success (since there is only one data point). So for calculating probability, you will have to aggregate many individuals and see how many of them become successful. The OP's understanding of probability is entirely accurate if we talk about general set of people who are starting companies (assuming figures quoted are accurate).

Of course, within a set you can create many more subsets but that doesn't mean original set is wrong.
Nice calculation, but it doesn't contradict the 'rational' argument at all. Slightly disappointing: looking at the title and first paragraph I expected some weird statistical wizardry on why the calculation of expected values is fundamentally flawed somehow.
(Which would be surprising, given that it's an important mathematical tool in quantum mechanics (even though the formalism there is different).)

Also, why pay for the privilege of imagining a better outcome? Imagination is >free< and virtually unlimited, surely.
I know they are still a very expensive part of the car, but I look forward to when you can pull up and simply swap out an empty battery for a full one (easily automated).
Awesome post...useful advice for solo founders like myself.
>Business = Marketing + Advertising + Sales + Idea + Implementation + Finance

I'd say Business = Marketing * Advertising * Sales * Idea * Implementation * Finance
This is some really sophisticated trolling. Hats off.

/me grabs popcorn.
Exactly. I'm entertaining myself every time I release some software and imagine that I'll sell millions of copies :)
The funny thing is that the value provided by YC style funding isn't in the funding itself. It's in the network provided by the VC (and to a lesser extent the marketing).

This is best reason to enter YC with an established (but small) company: to turn your small "life style" size business into something with a very large reach.

I'm sure that the latest batch of YC companies would agree with my reasoning. You give YC a fraction of a small pie to greatly increase the chances of your plan to turn it into a big pie.

My 2-5 year plan: build a $2 - $5m business (and the core team) in Europe around an idea that has the potential* to be a $500m+ business in America: then give YC a slice in exchange for their advice.

* What I'm working on has massive niche in a sector far away from the web. So we can build the idea, business and tech out away from the prying eyes of the incumbents. Now most of the incumbents will have trouble competing with us (different strategy), with one massive exception. If they knew about the niche we knew about, they would fill it (the niche along can support several $100m + companies).
Why viewing conversations on Twitter is not easy
I'm not saying that a person's belief translates to their success. In fact I'm saying just the opposite. I would imagine most people starting a business think that their chances are higher than the average person because they are special in some way.

The article is effectively saying "Statistically you are probably not special, so you may want to reconsider taking the risk".
Better Place (http://www.betterplace.com/) does this with their electric cars. They set up around ~10 "swapping stations" around Israel, and additionally installed charging stations in most malls.
yep i opt out and consider it my tax paid free massage. TSA Blogger Bob really should highlight this feature. Almost free sorry for the dude who does it but hey he is getting paid. Unfortunately they may wise up and go full ballsy because of the flak from not doing a proper frisk. As for all this talk of low dose rads try asking anyone who's ever had skin cancer.
I fully agree. From the title I had assumed that Tesla had added a new model with a supercharger option.
He does contradict the "rational" argument that you should only factor in money when doing your expected value calculations.

> Imagination is >free< and virtually unlimited, surely.

I guess he gets more entertainment out of knowing that what he is imagining has a chance of becoming a reality.
There's a reason that I qualified the statement.

They used a factory-calibrated scales, which uses impedance to measure your body fat percentage.

I don't trust the measurements: if you're using impedance to measure it then hydration and the salt balance in your body will dominate any small scale changes in body mass (7kg is < 9% of my body mass).

The initial measurements look anomalous, the muscle % and fat % were well out of bounds with my girth/height when compared to the US military-sourced base lines.
It also allowed him to more easily modify the text in his editor. The problem with this blog post is people are taking it to mean "two spaces are superior", when he is really saying, "two spaces are better for me, with my tools".
Cliffs: he doesn't mind lighting money on fire because he thinks imagining winning the lottery is fun.
The author supports bringing in especially the brightest minds which are always a super scarce resource.
You don't hear complaints because no one is going to find a bug caused by weak memory ordering without already knowing about memory reordering. In real buggy code, failures are so rare that most developers will never personally see a failure. Even the article's contrived case that should fail a hundred times more often than real code does, only fails one time out of a thousand. And if the bug only causes a slight graphical glitch, well, the developer will never notice it on their own. Or explain it as a hundred other things.

I've seen several people who thought they were smart, write code that needed memory barriers and never realize it. Or think that volatile made things safe. Getting them to accept that their code was buggy was hard.
There is that Stanford math PhD that won four lotteries. http://www.forbes.com/sites/kiriblakeley/2011/07/21/meet-the...
He isn't trying to say "two spaces are superior", he is more saying "two spaces are more helpful for me, with my tools". Just because he prefers one form doesn't mean he hates the other.
Cool idea, but I wonder why they didn't use something like RabbitMQ which already exists and is proven?
Reminds me of a dilbert comic:

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2011-02-12/
99 Life Hacks
I don't think the internal service economy really increases a nation's value relative to other nations. If I buy a t-shirt from my neighbor and he repays by cleaning my house ... not really that scalable I think.

A key requirement IMHO for a functional service economy is high enough differences in salaries (so that there are people who can afford to buy services in scale) and low-cost workers. In Finland, and broader in Nordics, we don't have either.
Text re-encoding for optimising storage capacity in the browser