skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> So, the real question is if you can build a prototype, gain traction and make revenue, why is it still frown upon that you are a solo founder.

I believe the reason is because the odds of you taking this product and turning it into a company are less in your favor than if you had others to consult in your business practices. It's less about "startup cost" and more about having two or more heads in the problem space. There's a reason that critical applications often have multiple people running the show -- it's too easy to make a mistake and it usually requires more than one head to get right. It's not impossible, just hard.

So from an investor's perspective, think of it this way:

You're approached by 10 companies. (Or in YC's case, hundreds.) Many of them have a "prototype, traction, and revenue". They all look reasonably appealing. So which do you choose? The ones with multiple very smart founders? Or the ones with a single smart founder? Which of those will be more successful? Which will be able to more effectively hunker down around the whiteboard and come up with some new brilliant ideas when the times get tough?

OK, how about a harder one: You have one company with a bunch of smart founders but only a concept, and you have another company with one founder but a "prototype, traction, and revenue". Now which do you choose? This gets more difficult, but I'd argue the former choice will have a better chance at success, given equal capability of the founders. The former has validation in the form of N people believing in their company, and the latter has real customer validation. But the former has better /potential/ in terms of coming up with something valuable, whereas the latter has more potential to fail at scaling their business. This of course depends on a lot of factors though, and maybe the latter's prowess in building a prototype, gaining traction, and making revenue is convincing enough that they can make it through the long haul.

Case in point though is that for a VC, it's a numbers game. And with all else being equal, if you can invest in 4 smart people instead of 1, your odds of return are higher.

Also, to your first point, after you're making real revenue and/or have funding, nobody cares about how many "co-founders" you have. This is true. They care instead about how many people are on your team. Ends up really just being a semantic distinction based on your company stage :P.
Perhaps a better term for what the parent may have meant was 'collaboration' rather than teamwork. There are a lot of projects that truly require collaboration, and that's hard to do when you're only working when other people aren't.
You've made a good point. It's not as if built-in Android apps aren't important to Google, or they don't have a release process. I think heads will roll over this.
Brazil education standards contribute to learning crisis
In the bad programming I've seen, you are spot on. There's one area where I disagree:

"Good programming is self-explanatory.
Bad Programming requires explanation."

I disagree with the first part. Good programming may require explanation. Bad programming always requires explanation. Code is not always easy to read, especially in the implementation of complex algorithms. The presence of confusion when reading code does not always indicate that the code being read is bad. However, confusion is a natural consequence of reading bad code[1].

I would amend your statement to read,

"Good programming sometimes require explanation.
Bad programming always requires explanation."

[1] http://www.osnews.com/story/19266/WTFs_m
All this will only ever be solved by one thing and one thing only. Microsoft needs to tell these OEMs that either they give perfectly clean installs of Windows, or they don't get any copies of Windows at all. Think about how many people in the world hate Windows or PCs in general simply because their experience has been ruined by crapware. If Microsoft had never allowed crapware, what would the world look like today?
These Dead Sea Costmetic stalls must be everywhere. The same kind of cosmetic stalls are very prevalent in shopping centres here in Australia. They employ people with French accents usually and well, I think someone trying to sell you something in an accent also helps brainwash you into a purchase.

The calculator part of this story gave me a chuckle. For those who have been to Bali before (well any part of Indonesia, Thailand and those kinds of countries) bartering is in their blood and they too employ the same techniques using a calculator to sell you stuff.
I have no idea why they created some of these partitions, but when the author calls it a "mystery" partition, he apparently doesn't either.

So I'd treat this as a mystery to be explored, rather than concluding that Lenovo is intentionally sacrificing user experience for no apparent benefit to anyone.
Windows would probably not be as widespread as it is now
It's a new trend because then everyone discusses their age, and keeps the app bumped to the top. It's the secret to getting your Show HN seen by lots of people. Otherwise, you end up with 4 votes: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4744508 :)
long story short, we used iTunes as our source of music.
Im not surprised it is lenovo again. I bought a lenovo laptop and witnessed the crappiest of software I've ever seen to be installed on top of windows. I bought an additional Windows OEM CD just to get rid of the crap on my computer.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for the traditional "conservative" values of limited government, personal liberty and accountability, and fiscal conservatism.

If the Republicans ever get tired of using race baiting, warmongering and decoy social wedge issues to elect self-serving plutocrats and starts actually doing something to promote these values it's possible I might even vote for one of them some day.
Microsoft is considered to hold monopoly power in the x86 PC operating system market. Any leverage of that monopoly to reduce competition in a different market would be a violation of antitrust laws. Forbidding manufacturers from entering into agreements to preinstall antivirus software, search toolbars, and other crapware they typically install as a condition of licensing Windows would be such a leverage of power. Thus, they are legally barred from taking your suggestion.

IANAL
Already being discussed here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4797036
Well which is it 40GB available or 60GB available? I can understand how easy it is to be confused because the manufacturer has chosen to burden users with a confusing mess. It's entirely reasonable to expect more than 100GB of usable space, and it's entirely beside the point that some users don't need 100GB.
My girlfriend and I have been watching the PBS series: Craft in America[0] it features some amazing craftspeople and goes to show that while craft isn't as prevalent as it might have been in the past, it's still alive and well.

[0] http://video.pbs.org/program/craft-in-america/
It often means no formal education and less experience.
While I get that the question may have been largely rhetorical, I like to carry my music collection around on my laptop. I've been accruing it for over 10 years now, and y'know, it has my songs and stuff. While it obviously wouldn't kill me to not have it, having it on my laptop solves the "OMG I need to hear so-and-so, right now".

Also, if I don't have it on my PC, then where? It's a sizable enough collection that hosting it somewhere could get costly (and is, actually, I back it up to S3 [though looking to migrate that to Glacier now]).

Lastly, not everybody has the pervasive bandwidth you speak of. I live in Annapolis, and bandwidth is groovy out here on Verizon FIOS, but (ironically, I suppose) my office in Mountain View has horrible bandwidth.

Other than that, it's hit or miss at coffee shops, and if the bandwidth seems even slightly dodgy, I'd feel like a prick streaming my music over it at everybody else's expense.

Backing up to look at your other question, the 'Only 40Gb' is kind of a big deal. I mean, Microsoft Office and an Adobe suite together probably take up a quarter of that, leaving you at 30Gb, add a few more large applications and it's believable that you're down to 20Gb without any actual user data.

After that, your resume probably takes up a good 4 megs, and then it's on to cat pictures, MP3s and porn, for which 19.999Gb is not nearly adequate.
"But it also begs the question, when did "only 40GB" for your files on a laptop become a deal breaker?"

* When a laptop became a person's primary/only computer, like mine used to be.

* When you read "128GB hdd". A reasonable user would expect to have MOST of that space, not less than half.
It is just an example of a dead simple 10-line programming task to verify that someone knows the language syntax, conditional, iteration or recursion, and references/pointers.

Posing a complex domain-specific unsolved (or else it would be in a library!) problem that requires using library functions just wastes time and adds clutter to a quick coiding sanity check.
I can understand the perspective that after a certain amount of space, it may not be all that important how much space you have. Further, I can accept that disks ship with less capacity than the "raw" capacity listed in the hardware spec for a plethora of reasons (OS-size, software, etc).

That said, I find it rather silly that a disk ships with a certain amount of free space, but that space is fragmented arbitrarily over a bunch of partitions. Vendor-partitions should have almost no extra space if the vendor doesn't want the user to put things in them (Restore and Driver partitions). Fragmented free space is annoying for users. That , I think, is the salient annoyance expressed by this article.

There are some decent arguments for having big local disks, but very few(if any) good ones for disks that ship with randomly distributed free space.
MakeGamesWithUs co-founder here. Awesome to see the positive feedback for the young devs of our games! We've been encouraging our developers to show off their work to the HN community, in part because the community has been incredibly warm in supporting them, and we thank them for it!

As we've all experienced, most of the work we do through school / college goes mostly unnoticed outside of the classroom setting, and we really feel getting feedback from a community like HN will encourage the developers to continue to make awesome products, as well as inspire others who are also around their age.

It's often tough for young developers to get excited about what they're building when most people their age and focused on school/sports/girls, and we hope these kinds of posts will show young devs that they aren't alone.
There is a dream, a purpose slated only for you.You cant bureaucratically design how nature will channel talent and let it flower.The single founder plan hurts those who are very good at winning an argument by doing than by talking.They might be hoping to show something works in order to get others on board.Putting a rule that they must come in with someone deprives them of that opportunity to show what they are worth.
If it is a bug, try filing a bug report. Saying "it doesn't work" on a forum isn't an effective problem solving technique.

http://crbug.com
Google+ answered the question of how to get social signaling relevance in search values.

Really? First this answer has been known since the MySpace days at least -- and quite likely before then. Remember Google bought Orkut?

Google+ was more of a reaction against Facebook than some holistic answer to some problem that no one else could forsee. It was more like, "Google late to the game with a competitor that no one wants to use".
If you're in MacLand, you have iTunes match which is pretty nice. I'm not sure if there are similar services that are more open wrt target platform.
This article reminds me of another article about what science fiction writers thought the year 2012 would be like (how we would have burned through all out fossil fuels, etc). Just goes to show how little we can actually predict the future,
Was it through this process? I'm curious because having access to song previews could make for interesting applications.

http://www.apple.com/itunes/affiliates/resources/blog/song-p...
Firefox To Warn Users Against Search Engine Hijacking
Ryan has built businesses before Treehouse - ThinkVitamin and Carsonified for example. He knows the people, has the connections, the talent pool to pick from.

PG's YC (using YC since that's the case being used) are tend to be populated with fresh/younger people, who probably never ran a business prior to YC.

Not really fair to try and compare the two and draw conclusions that will blanket the other side of the argument.

Are you going to succeed right out of college as a single founder with your very first business? Probably not.

Would you succeed if you had decade of experience under your belt, built previous successful businesses, know the industry, know the players, and etc? Most likely.
Okay, let's be real -- why does HN care?

Raise your hands, come one everyone, how many of you would buy a laptop with only 128GB of HD onboard?

How many?

Let's count.

0?

So what's the fuss? This clearly is not designed/marketed for you.
Question (maybe a dumb one) but how does an algorithm account for symbols that might mean a series of letters? Or a symbol that stands for a different letter depending on the symbol before or after it?
It was fun, but sometimes _really_ hard to determine if I was actually participating in the game or just spectating!
Have you not seen the G+ results sprinkled through Google search? Everything before G+ was just a test. G+ was the actual execution.
This maps pretty well to my own experience. I find that the young Republicans in my slice of the Northeast are overwhelmingly social conservatives, for reasons they frequently cannot elucidate. I have encountered few genuine "fiscal conservatives" (that is to say, those who are not "cut everything I don't like, but keep spending on the military!"), and the few I have generally prefer to call themselves libertarians.

I would also note that there are plenty of social regressives/fiscal apathetics who call themselves "libertarian" because it doesn't have the stigma of "Republican".
It's not (just) about monetization, path, lock-in* or sour grapes, though the first 2 figure into what really drives the interest the HN startup community has in analyzing Twitter's "pivot" –which analysis tends toward criticism for more semantic reasons.

Entrepreneurs and developers building startups want to find the best vectors to balance offering things people want with things they're willing to pay for (whether directly or indirectly) and it's thus interesting when a company that's veered to far in one direction has to change its course.

There's a judgement here (meaning in the larger discussion and not just Dalton's post) however it's more evaluative than merely moral.

*to be fair, lock-in is kind of annoying.
Not in Australia :( It also says its not compatible with the Nexus S. But considering what I went through it work this out, I think it's just not in Australia yet.
It's a solid state drive. Plenty of us have them.
That space has to accomodate more than just the data you produce.

Big budget modern games have 10-20GB footprints. Visual Studio 2012 needs almost 10GB before you have written a single line of code. Office is another 3-5GB and most people install that. If you have 8GB of RAM, you're going to have a multi-gigabyte swap file and a ~8GB hibernation file on the disk. There's another 10-15GB gone.

I have a laptop that was partitioned similarly to the one in the article. It has a 160GB SSD. It came with two restore partitions a bit over 20GB in size. Windows 8 and the drivers alone used up almost 70GB of what was left. I started out with about 60GB of 160GB free (don't ask where the other ~10 gigabytes went, I have no idea).

I have nothing installed but a code editor, Photoshop, Chrome, Thunderbird, a git and SSH clients. I keep no music, large documents or videos -- they're all in cloud services.

My HD is 30GB bigger than the 128GB SSDs a lot of these new computers are shipping with, and I regularly have to find files to delete and run "disk cleanup" to purge system temp directories just to keep from running out.

You need more work space than you'd think just to operate. Carrying around more than a few albums of music isn't even an option.
Be the guy who sells the pick axes during the gold rush, not one of the guys panning and mining for gold.

To be more specific, I've had exactly one 'hit' iOS app. It sold 60,000 copies in late 2008. But I've made my living since early 2010 on iOS (and rails) software consulting and development for other people and through http://www.cocoacontrols.com.
Agree, with one exception: pg isn't arguing about "success", he's arguing that single founder companies (which he further qualifies to mean "and that have no early employees") will not, statistically speaking, grow into large companies.

Of course, pg's stacking the deck by disallowing early employees for solo founders (which he does by claiming that early employees are "founders", and thus, support his multi-founder hypothesis).

I do think it's correct to say that companies without employees are rarely very large, but this doesn't seem all that insightful.

The more interesting question is why pg disallows solo founders with early employees? The vast majority of large, successful companies actually fall into that camp, and not the multi-founder camp, of which Google is a large, successful example.

To pg, a "founder" is apparently an early employee who (a) wants the company to succeed, (b) plays some kind of "important" role (e.g. is not a janitor), and (c) has some skin in the game to benefit from "success".

I think that's far too broad, and that we should call them early employees with equity (i.e. what they are), not "founders" (what pg apparently wishes them to be).
Napster is probably most accurately described as originally conceived of by Shawn Fanning, but the company was founded by Shawn Fanning, Sean Parker, and John Fanning (Shawn's uncle), and Jordan Ritter is often considered a co-founder (who is IMO probably the strongest of the team).

It's not as complex as "who founded PayPal" (merger between two companies). Or anywhere near as complex as Facebook.

No one is arguing that a single person can't create software. (and, the "invention" aspect of creating a new product is almost always solitary!)

pg's argument (and the general argument here) is that to grow to a big, successful business, cofounders are highly correlated with success. That has to do with everything after the initial idea.
So basically if something doesn't personally effect me I shouldn't care about it?
What's the point of a web site that tells users next to nothing? All I see is a statement that you might try to sell me something (without letting me know what, or for how much) if I give you my email address (no thanks). I am actually redoing my house room by room, so I might be in your target market, but if I remember Decora at all it'll be as 'that link on HN that wasted my time'.
Apologizing, in general, makes you look weak.
I don't know of any Windows 8 tablets/hybrids with a larger disk than 128GB. I plan to buy the Surface Pro the moment it's available, and 128GB is likely the largest disk that'll have too. Right now I'm on a laptop with a 160GB SSD.
Relevant anecdote: I once left a terrible job soon after realizing that the only thing that I derived any joy from was eating way too many peanut M&Ms every single day.

When depressed people self-medicate with food, bad things happen.
You need to be the change you want to see. Become a moderate Republican. That's what I did. Seriously.
and the 486SX had a math co-processor.
None of the things you describe require multiple "founders".

I'm a solo founder, and have 10+ people who have equity in my company, that I can talk to about any of the things you described above (and do).

I'm still just the one founder though.

Do people not talk to employees? I don't get it. Apparently, there's a belief that you can only bounce ideas off of other "founders" around here. In my experience, that's completely false.

I also, BTW, bounce ideas off of other business owners, friends, relatives, people on the Internet I've never met, etc. Being a "solo founder" hasn't prevented any of that.

And I'm an introvert!
Can't you just wipe them all and reinstall the OS?
>In fact, single founders + early team, which the single founder recruited.

You're redefining terms. A founder is a founder. For example, you may try to call Wozniak an 'early employee' of Apple Computers and Steve Jobs the founder, but then you'd be playing with words. Both of them are universally acknowledged as founders.
Blame the reviewers for not focusing it. Also this is why I stopped being an early adopter.
I really don't get it.

The snacks are there if you want them. Nobody is forcing you to partake. If you run 5 miles every morning, a 160 cal. bag of chips isn't 'bad' for you. If you are a full-blown couch potato who avoids any type of physical exertion like the plague, then yes, by all means, skip the bag of chips.

It's just so simple. So simple ...
Only if you go out and buy a retail copy of Windows, essentially paying for it twice.
Hey dumbasses, look how smart I already am! I think I'll just go fuck someone my own age, don't you wish you could??? HAHAHAHAHA

GET FUCKED!
The current law enforcement/public safety system (P25) is even worse than LTE on many metrics -- it's easy to jam AND fails open/insecure due to both protocol and radio UI/UX problems. Matt Blaze, Perry Metzger, et al. found a bunch of crazy problems with it and have done talks for the past couple years.
Yogurt is full of sugar.
You and I could, yes. But

a) Not everyone can

b) We shouldn't have to

My Mac is old and I need to get a new desktop system for home. I've been debating between a reasonably good new Mac or a really really good souped up PC for the same price. These are the things that remind me of why I went with a Mac the last time around despite the fact that I disagree with a lot of Apple's design decisions.
I'm prototyping on an i.MX6 Quad dev board from Boundary. It's nice, I'd call the chip an incremental step from the i.MX53. Trying to benchmark it against a Marvell Armada 610 and it's no contest.

Allwinner is a comparable ARM core, but I wouldn't design it into anything I'm building for more than six months at a time. It's like all of the other noname chinese cores (Ingenic is the other one that comes to mind, but they're all MIPS). They just come and go with no warning.
You can set swap to 512MB and suffer no ill. Some people disable swap altogether, but some apps may need it.

You can also disable hibernation if you really need the space.

Also, WinDirStat is a great program that gives a graphical display of what's on the drive. It's a must-have program for SSD owners on Windows.
Few years back I was using 500 GB HD on my laptop. But after the emergence of SSDs, I am now happily using only a 128 GB SSD on my laptop and have moved all media, backup and other files to NAS/cloud.

I would have been upset had I found my SSD could only hold 60 GB of user data.
Predicting the Future is Easier than it Looks
Why is the most preeminent newspaper in the world still calling saturated fat "bad." It's almost trite at this point to explain that there are no studies to support this.
You can download an .iso (from MS) of whatever version of Windows you have and use the serial that came with the device to activate it.

YMMV, but it works on the Thinkpads I own.
Transformation Priority Premise Applied
Using tabs would remove 75% of the file size due to spaces; and make it readable for people who prefer 2 space indenting...
Expectations. If I pay for a 128 GB SSD drive, I 'expect' to be able to use 128 GB.
iPhone sync. With the pics, music and apps you can easily occupy 32GB.
Secrets of the Chrome Developer Tools (video)
Hollywood Kills Republicans' Copyright Reform
So is sugar water.

You CAN buy "real" yogurt, you know?