skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Presumably it's the "mundane" you think is disparaging. But it was in reply to this:

More of us should be focusing on building simple, focused,
small-team web apps that meet everyday needs. Am I saying
we should kill our dreams of changing the world? No. But
we all need to admit that YouTube, Facebook, Bebo, Google
and Twitter just aren’t the norm.

Instead of desperately trying to create the next
phenomenon, which is highly unlikely, why not aim for
something that’s definitely achievable?

I.e. The word "mundane" was simply a reference to the concept he introduces of something that is not a phenomenon, but instead meets everyday needs.

Considering that the example Merriam-Webster gives of the use of mundane is

the mundane concerns of day-to-day life

it seems to me I got about as close as one can to choosing the perfect adjective for things that "meet everyday needs."

This is why I hate arguing on the Internet. All this work for nothing.
that's interesting.. i would have said from feel that accelerating and especially sprinting up hills i was pulling up - but perhaps the benefit is just that my feet are stuck to the pedal at the top rather than lifting off.
It seems like we are having two different arguments. My main point here has been that material scarcity will likely be a non-factor in the future. You seem to be in agreement with that point, but seem dead set against the practicality of space mining.

Throughout my comments I've maintained that molecular assemblers/disassemblers (and possibly VR) should drastically lessen the amount of materials we consume. I'm simply saying that if we do run into scarcity issues, worst case, space mining should be many, many orders of magnitude cheaper within this time span.

Right now the US goes to the expense of floating rare earth elements on freighters from halfway across the globe, simply because we don't want to deal with the pollution, real property rights, safety issues, regulatory issues, and eyesores resulting from US mining operations. With the expected reductions in cost to achieve orbit, in 2112 the asteroid belt could very easily be the new China.

Now you could argue that the same breakthroughs that allow cheaper space mining would allow us to cleanly and efficiently extract resources in greater number from the earth - "molecular mining", if you will. That may be the case, but it's really impossible to predict to that degree of specificity at this point in time. We're probably arguing over what in the future would be the equivalent of going to the Walmart down the block or the Target across town to get a package of batteries. It probably doesn't matter.

Besides, the amount of materials we need really depends on how ambitious humanity wants to get:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain
Just to clarify - are you suggesting that small businesses can take on problems that some of those large businesses are having?

Wouldn't that require a lot of insider information as well as connections within those companies?

I guess my question was a lot less daring - how would one approach task of finding problems/needs within reasonable reach of his own social or geographical vicinity, such as identifying a small-to-medium businesses niche and approaching those, based on the assumption that it's easier to approach this kind of businesses.

Thanks!
My Sublime 2 Setup
Your examples all seem very flawed. Startups solve problems, problems that MANY people (customers) have.

Writing a successful book is not the same sort of problem solving. Neither is founding a religion. And developing a programming language may solve a problem that one developer has the time and dedication to solve.

Startups with multiple cofounders have multiple views of the a problem and will have a better chance of finding an optimal solution (wisdom of crowds) vs a single cofounder.
You did strawman. I never said capitalism should be unconstrained. I said a lot of things but nothing to that extent. Instead of responding to what I said, you created a straw man.

Just to clarify:

"A straw man is a type of argument and is an informal fallacy based on misrepresentation of an opponent's position"

You misrepresented my position. I chastised you for not responding to what I said, but that is not the same as misrepresenting your position.
I don't believe you gave any examples of that, what you did what put forward a postulate with very little weight.

With respect to health inspection. The problem is that most people don't care about health inspection as long as they don't get sick.

I.e. Yelp is useful for detecting whether people get food poisoning perhaps. It is not useful for detecting when 25 year old meat is being used which it actually is some times.

Detecting that takes quite a lot more effort.

So again the internet is good for many things and is able to disrupt a great many areas and already have. But don't make the mistake of confusing technical disrupting with political disruption.

I don't understand what me working at Square has do do with anything.

I believe in as little a government as possible. That does not mean that I believe that there should be no government at all.
I was a midnight programmer until I had a family and more importantly kids. I've always been a somewhat nocturnal person even before I programmed. Now with a family I'm more of the early bird programmer, who starts working at 6am. You get the same peace and quit,,, but there is still something different. Maybe it's that with mignight programming, you really can have a long stretch and with early bird, you are limited to a relatively short period before others start showing up on the radar. I think the pitch black of night also helps.
When I worked in an open office, we had a small team of developers. We all wore headphones when we were in the zone, and we communicated during unofficial "quiet time" by using campfire. Eventually, we all started to complete 60 - 90 minute quiet time focused work sprints followed by 5 minutes of break time and joking, before starting the cycle again. It was weird how we all fell into a similar pattern. It made our team stronger, though.
Sorry I can't do better than Wikipedia; apparently this is 'segmented sleep' [1], and before electric light it was entirely natural. Apparently the extra hours were used almost exclusively for sex, since there was no electric light.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segmented_sleep
How would consumers find out about you? If I buy something online, I would call merchant first, then bank. How would I find out to use you first vs. going to merchant and/or bank? Thanks!
Amazing and Inspiring Creative Digital Photo Tutorials
If you are serious about solving problems, you should be talking to customers rather than talking with your cofounders. So, is the value of having cofounder more of an emotional support given that you can equally just hire someone?
532x Performance Increase for MongoDB with fractal tree indexes
Yes it has, just to name a few:

kernel: Wireless drivers, aslr, pf etc.
userland: ssh, ntpd, carp, bgpd etc.
Isn't that awesome, the galaxy is huge, our planet is tiny, and yet all the objects in the whole galaxy have photons that reach our little planet, the lens of that specific telescope even. The photons traveled that far, that long, just to be finally absorbed by that telescope. What are the chances of a photon from an object that far away to hit specifically this location?
I think there is a big need for this type of service. The majority of my transactions are fine, but there are times when I have a problem and getting it resolved is a huge hassle. Like last month when the NYTimes charged me $15 but a bug in their database prevented me from actually using my account. Took 2 painful hours to get a refund.

In those cases I assume the merchant has better things to do as well, and it seems like a service like this could offload some work from their support staff and, by adding things like exit surveys, turn those small number of bad experiences into positive, constructive experiences for all parties.
Mine: http://new.weavesilk.com/?dao2
Introduction to Competitive Programming Contests
Assuming pirate connections use encryption, how can Verizon tell the difference between piracy and legitimate downloads? How do they know that "torrent" isn't actually videoconferencing, online gaming, remote desktop, or VoIP?

For that matter, there are plenty of legitimate torrents -- when I last played World of Warcraft, for example, Blizzard was using Bittorrent to distribute updates if they were above a certain size threshold. I also download Linux distros over torrents -- a small way I can give something back to the creators.

Also, it bothers me that a private company would be able to cut off the one wire bringing freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of association into the home, with no oversight and no appeal process.
But haven't you been consistent on the co-founder line since before YC was founded, and hence before you had significant data? Wouldn't that bias your YC data as well, which as far as I know only has a tiny minority of single founders?
I just applied to TechStars Cloud in San Antonio for http://commando.io and was denied as a single founder. I knew it was a long shot, but had to apply just for the amazing opportunity that is TechStars and the mentors and experience.

Being a single founder is bloody hard. Mostly though it is lonely. Nobody to talk with, nobody to bounce ideas around and debate features or implementation with. Should we use MongoDB or Riak? Being a single founder you make all the decisions. Also investors believe if you can't convince anybody else to join your company, than its probably a bad idea. I don't necessarily believe this, since I am myself a single founder.

So, why is finding a co-founder hard. I moved up to San Francisco over a year ago, left my pool of friends, and drove up in my car with everything I owned. Finding people in San Francisco that are either not already doing their own startup, or already working at a badass company is extremely difficult. Even more, there is the catch-22, I don't have any capital to pay you, but I have equity. Again, not a really convincing proposition for a rockstar developer or designer.

Startups are hard, the hardest thing you will probably ever do. So being a single founder is just not mentally healthy and as productive as having co-founders.
Well that didn't last long. It seems the whole party has been affected by Romnesia.
Main reasons programmer work at night would be some or all of the following:

1) Access to resources - be that free internet, the home computer or faster internet.
2) TZ, its the internet and opearates on all TimeZones and with that people interact across timezones and with that night seems to always cover many cross-over times.
3) Distractions, there are less distractions, less noise and with that easier to focus.
4) Coffee overshoots, with that the late hours make productive time.
5) Whatever reason they want, code knows nothing about daylight.

As for the sample of your book I glanced upon I would wonder if any programmer would want to read it, and any manager who would gain from even a hint of insight into programmers, would not be motivated to pick such a title.

If anything it is more a chapter subject for a larger book on how to deal with modern persona's in a work enviroment.

That would be my approach, but my main reason for coding late at night is covered in all the above though less distractions being the primary. Now if you had a chapter on how to justify too your boss that you will be working weird hours, that would be something a programmer would be interested in.
Yes I have a CS degree and I loved getting it. It was an okay liberal arts school, in other words, the CS department was nothing incredible. It was actually my introduction to programming and I fell into the program purely by chance. Ended up loving it and surely would not have gotten involved with computers or programming otherwise. For the last two out of three jobs, having a degree was not a requirement, but these place were very startup-ish. I think the answer really depends on how big the HR department is (or whether there is even said department). My current job could care less about degrees, they looked more for skill and love of programming.
Why is the price capped at $10? I'm sure there are people who'd be willing to pay more.
I sort of think we'll figure out how to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Richard Branson has offered a $25 million prize for it.
http://www.virgin.com/subsites/virginearth/
The world uses 85 million barrels a day and its currently $85 a barrel. That's $7.2 billion dollars spent on oil per day. And $2.6 trillion a year.

$25 million is less than 1/100,000 of what we spend on oil per year. If every American chipped in 8 cents, we could double the incentive.

Sounds like a kickstarted project I could get behind.
I think a page called "Who we are" [1] should answer that question, and not describe "what we do" (again). Especially with something involving such sensitive information.

[1] https://www.chargeback.cc/who-we-are
Plausible reasons have already been suggested somewhere else[1], in summary chipset makers are creating dual purpose chips with dies that support LTE, but have fuses burnt and a cheaper price tag to restrict their usage. Even if you could reverse the fuses, there is still a lack of hardware and calibration for it to be possible in the nexus 4.

[1] http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/13cods/nexus_4_t...
> You did strawman

Nah
>PS: It may be a mainstay of sci-fi, but there is little actual evidence that asteroids are going to have particularly high levels of any of the really rare stuff. (other than H3)

Untrue. Iridium is the rarest element in the Earth's crust. The majority of the known deposites come from asteroids.

It's not just Iridium, either. Compare these two charts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Elemental_abundances.svg and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SolarSystemAbundances.png

Why are they so different? Basically all the heavy and iron-loving stuff sank.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_catastrophe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetary_differentiation
That's curious. 8 or 16GB? I haven't run into it myself, but I've heard that low free space will slow down the Nexus 7.

Stuff like better animations for the app switcher made my own Nexus 7 feel faster after the 4.2 update. Of course, that's just a perceptual change.

Prior to 4.2, Chrome with many tabs open and Adobe Reader were my only major annoyances. Chrome seems somewhat better, though since I've cut down on tab usage and started using Firefox more I'm not sure how much it's really improved. As for Reader, I just use ezPDF for larger documents now.
U.S. judge in MegaUpload case partially unseals search warrant
It's pretty pointless to talk to people who reject empiricism. They're nothing more than barbarians.
That's what I mean. I hired a designer and an intern to work on my startup. I am not working alone. But then I don't have a cofounder. And this is being discriminated in the investor world.

Why is that? Is it because it's harder to control from an investor's point of view? I actually think it's a self fulfilling prophecy. Like 001sky mentioned. The conventional wisdom is that you should have a cofounder in order to be successful. And it's really hard to break this once it's THE conventional wisdom.

So single founders don't get investment, so they are less successful. Then it shows in the data...
Javascript is the same. On 2012-11-18;

>> (new Date()).getMonth();
10

but getFullYear() and getDate() give 2012 and 18 as expected.
https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.lang.lisp/KMdpv4MwI4M/A...

An April fool's joke.
The association is not same as causation. I think It would be more useful to derive or at least inference the causation of success/failure from your data.

For example: if someone can't convince other people to join, how could he be able to convince customers/investors later on. This implies causation. I would love to hear more causation like this for the single founder startup.

There are relationships and associations everywhere. If people look at the data between skin color and success, they will find relationship. but it doesn't mean people succeed because of their skin color. The causation is more useful information than the mere association.
* Flask fan here.
Flask is not a "micro" microframework per se.
It provides a thin facade over werkzeug - which is anything but lightweight or micro.*

Another Flask fan here. If Armin says Flask is micro, and other frameworks which aren't considered micro are far larger than Flask, what makes Flask not a micro framework?
As for your other example (which is about bootstrapped companies, which is not even the topic of this thread), I'm not gratuitously introducing the concept of top technology companies as a way of disparaging the companies he lists. That concept was introduced in the grandparent:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2557078

What sentence in that comment is false?
Startups are a function of the morale of the founder(s). When it becomes zero, the startup dies. And there will be hopeless times when it'll almost approach zero. Empirically, having a co-founder can be a huge boost during those times which in turn means you're increasing your odds of success by playing longer. You can definitely do it alone (kudos), it's all about increasing your odds.
"If team is so important, how come the world’s biggest religions were started by one guy."

We don't know who founded any of the biggest religions. We know almost certainly that Jesus wasn't a real person because the story of his life predates him by hundreds of years. We know that hinduism wasn't founded by a single person. Buddha and Muhammed may have been real people, but there isn't any definitive evidence. And Steve Jobs had a co-founder.
I wonder if there are more successful co-founder situations because there are more companies that start with co-founders?

A few single founders:

Overture (Bill Gross), eBay (Pierre Omidyar), Napster (Sean Fanning), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), AOL (William von Meister), Digg (Kevin Rose), SuccessFactors (Lars Dalgaard).

And then I guess there are many examples where one of the founders is actually driving the whole thing even though he/she has co-founders.

In some ways the whole discussion of co-founder/single-founder seem to be missing a bigger point which should be; What is needed to be a successful company?

How the equity falls out and who get to call themselves co-founders seem to be less important.
XBox Music no match for YouTube Music - Trending
Can XBox Music make a dent in the crowded online music arena or is YouTube music going to crush everything in sight?
I can't see why you'd chose to nurture a conflict here; you're picking on a small part of his post, reading it in the worst possible light, and blowing it out of proportion. It's everything you hate about message board arguments, down to its position on the comment thread.
I feel the same way. Underneath all the high ideals people like to spout off about Twitter it all just comes off as sour grapes and armchair quarterbacking. Everyone knows how to solve Twitter's problem unless you work for Twitter seems to be the message but we've heard all those ideas enough times and I'm quite sure Twitter is aware of alternative ways to run the company. So are we really going to think so highly of ourselves as to think we have the solution and the people running Twitter are just morons? Large companies do some idiotic things but I think we need to give them a little more credit than that.

Now, am I saying we shouldn't blame Twitter? Of course not! The people, particularly and especially developers, have every right to be upset and the criticism of them locking down their API, changing the rules, bending the rules unfairly, and just generally acting in bad faith are justified. That said, in the end your point still stands. Twitter is a business and this is how it has chosen to become profitable. We have two choices now. Either deal with it or not use/develop for it.

In my own personal opinion, I think that despite the anti-Twitter sentiment within the developer and tech community Twitter will still thrive precisely because of what they're doing now whether it's right or not. Obviously Twitter has decided that the prospect of losing the developer community is worth the risk. Hey, that's business.
Congrats on publishing your book. Wish you much success!
Yes, this an example of an odd composite.

As I said 2xy + x + y creates odd composites (numbers that are odd and not prime).

I'm not saying this is prime. I was saying that the other patterns below are prime. However, since I posted this, I found a flaw with the 7 +6n +1 and 7+ 6n + 2 pattern. However, the 5,5+6,5+6+7, etc pattern holds up for up to the numbers I checked. I still have further investigation to do...
No they are not. And not very many people are.
I love working for this company. The passion is contagious!!
Also, much of the Nexus 4's design is reused from the Optimus G which has LTE.
Steve Jobs didn't build the PC. Wozniak did. I am not trying to build a rocket in today's age. I am launching a website. And I know how to build it myself. I can hire a designer to help out with design. I can hire interns to work on marketing. Why is it such a taboo that I am a solo founder in the investor's world?
There was an exhaustive debate around this a while ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4195208
That's really pushing it PG, it's quite clear what your actual intent was. You dislike arguing on the net because you don't want to be called out on your mistakes.
Many banks did retain a portion of their loans. WaMu, for example, and Countrywide. Typically they would sell off the AAA tranches of the loans to other banks (for use satisfying reserve requirements) while keeping the riskier tranches for themselves.
That's one from the Art of War - win the war before going in to battle?
Not only can they cut of the connection, but they can do it specificlly for what you use it for.

Still, as long as my speech is protected, It is only bad guys who suffer.
How The Apple Store Celebrates An Employee's Last Day
I actually thinks it's also pointless but sometimes I give a try to see why they think empiricism is more a evil than a good way to try to infer about the world, I edited the post to see what happens.
"Deal!" says the time-traveler after you offer to impoverish yourself for the sake of a religious argument about how wealth is denominated. You can look up the purchasing power disparity between the average 1913er and yourself; the difference is stark before you consider that any American homeless person in 2012 has better medical care than did Woodrow Wilson.

Time travelers tip: avoid Europe for a couple years, and boil your water.
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I'm not sure he's doing any of the things you claim. Pretty much any opinion he gives in response to a post is going to "nurture a conflict" simply because he's pg. But I think HN would be worse off if that caused him to stop giving opinions altogether.

Also, it's hard to see how he's picking on a small part of the op. A significant portion of it references pg, quotes him, and speculates on his thought process. What small part, exactly, did he pick on, and how did he blow it out of proportion? If anything, it seems to me that he agreed with the gist of the post, while at the same time clarifying his own position.

Ironically, your response seems to commit the very crimes it criticizes.
Large Social Networks don't understand mobile
How i discovered "success" in the happy donuts restroom
nah, the i-banks lost the skin in the game when they went corporate in the 1990s. leveraged loans of various stripes are not held by i-banks, as a rule. there is also the issue of derivatives, so bottom line is almost all fudamental underwriting is now a sales-job, a loss-leader and bait entre vous into a world of mirrors, assymetric information and, opaque market making. TLDR there is a reason glass-stegal was put in place.