skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I certainly don't have the answers either. But you bring up a good question:

So why doesn't Twitter just charge for API access? $X per K API calls? They charged for the 'firehose' (too much though, nobody seems to want to pay that much) but still.

Charging for API access (or the firehose) casts them in the role of a utility -- infrastructure. So too does their diminishing tolerance, such as it is, for "Twitter clients". One might imagine their investors prefer to envision the company's future not as a utility-style service upon which others build user-facing properties, but as a dominant entity in full control of all direct or derivative revenue streams, real or imagined. A utility-style valuation is not what they signed up for, so any lean in that direction is being corrected.
Probably obvious. A nuclear explosion: http://new.weavesilk.com/?dayj
Like a lot of things that come up time and time again, not because it's true.

A lot of people assume that because we've funded some companies valued in the billions, this is the only thing that counts as success to us. But that isn't true:

http://www.paulgraham.com/swan.html#f1n
My caffeine addiction
Technically nothing, I think. It will be nice to see clients with an option "Use you own tokens" and the official client token widely available for use.

For instance, I'm thinking about this for my integrations -- that's a token Twitter will never ban or throttle.
Perhaps, perhaps not. I think it is hard to make generalization given that YC and Techstars have not funded many solo founders. I think going solo is multiple times as hard, but sometimes that increased burn motivates people in strange ways. It also is a hell of a lot cheaper if the person is experienced to only have one, this can increase the runway much farther. One of the problems I see with YC and Techstars both is that well experienced people with mortgages and kids are at a huge disadvantage due to their inability to take as little as a group of kids right out of college. Perhaps well experienced solo founders are a different animal, it would be an interesting experiment to try and get a larger data set to see exactly which way it would go.
New York Techie Dixon in Talks to be Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
I have always been a night person and in my case having kids did not change that. I have a teen and a tween and still crank out the most code in the late, late night. In fact, I probably get up later than ever (having a wife that is an early morning person is, obviously, a prerequisite).
Show HN: We're siblings in high school taking on SongPop, thoughts on our V1?
Not sure if serious...

I think, and hope, that every self-respecting designer (whether of print, visuals, or code) tries to get as close as possible to the theoretical ideal, not intentionally make a subpar product with the hopes of staying in demand. On a related note, that's a pretty poor way to stay in demand.
My Favorite Portable Headphones
Love Zapier.

Appreciate the support man!
OK, no. I appreciate the support for single founders, but this isn't a supporting argument.

> If books can be written by one person and become successful. Why can’t startups?

Because books and startups have nothing in common? Lots of successful endeavors are done by a single person, but that doesn't put the efforts of a single person vs. a team on the same footing, /especially/ as the problems increase in difficulty. Here's a better example:

"If children can be raised by one person and become successful, why can't startups?"

Sure. There are many children who have been raised by single parents and have become very successful. But that doesn't mean /statistically/, this is as easy as having both parents.[0]

The point that is being made counter to this is very simple: Yes, starting a startup can be done by one person. As can a lot of things. But statistically speaking, there are more successful startups that have multiple founders than single founders. You already provided the pie charts in support of this argument! Now to be fair, correlation does not prove causation, but the point is generally: Starting a startup is hard. Understanding the needs of your customers and both developing a solution to meet these need and reserving time to convince them that you've met their needs (selling) is very, very hard.

One of Ryan Carson's arguments (#2) was in essence that having no co-founders means you can top-down dictate leadership. I don't know about you, but I'm not always right. I've never actually met anybody who's always right. Having a team who's on equal footing with you allows you to vet concepts before they catastrophically destroy your company.

To paraphrase Chris Rock: Yes, you can do it without a [co-founder], but that doesn't mean it's to be done.

A good co-founder will almost always make your business more successful. And that's all there is to it.

[0] http://www.human.cornell.edu/pam/outreach/upload/parentalcon...
Would you classify the US during the 1990s as a hellhole? The federal government was spending 30% less per capita than it does today, adjusted for inflation.

So, it's not silly to say 'try somalia if you want zero government'.

It's very silly, because it implies that the alternative to spending $3.8 trillion a year is to dismantle core government services.
Per the Constitution, all spending bills originate in the House.

Why this piece of the Constitution is followed, but practically nothing else, is beyond me.
In the example Django Reinhardt song, there's a bit where he plays the same pitch a few times fretted, then a few times on the neighboring open string.

I can imagine software that would analyze fret noise, vibrato, timbre, hand positions, etc. to get a decent shot at reproducing a performance -- basically, what a real player listens for when transcribing -- but right, this is a really hard problem.
No, the mundane was not disparaging. It was the previous sentence where you suggested that anyone defining success differently from you was "behind", which is exactly the point. Consider the alternative, where you simply argue for why a certain threshold is the correct one for success, without casting a judgement on people who think differently than you. It doesn't even matter if the statement is objectively accurate; it's irrelevant and disparaging.
Einstein's intelligence was due to unusual features in his brain
The post begins by quoting me at length, and ends by dismissing what I say as "rhetoric," and I'm the one making this a conflict? If this had just been the usual post arguing from anecdotal evidence that it was no problem to be a single founder, I wouldn't even have responded.
I'd second PHP (plus a framework, perhaps). I suggest PHP mostly to avoid friction. If I had to start w/ setting up rails, I would probably have given up before finishing the installation.
December Does Not Exist In Android 4.2
Adding a “source” attribute to Ruby objects using Rubinius
If it hadn't been for my co-founder, I would be insane at best, and at worst, divorced and nearly dead. We keep each other going, pick up each other's slack when we're having a bad day/week/month, and keep each other energized throughout the day.

I'm sure you can do it alone, but I wouldn't want to.
Well I had a disputed charge I was planning on seeking to have overturned, so I've just tested the chargeback.cc system with this dispute as a trial
His position and yours aren't incompatible. He says he wants to "succeed" -- he didn't say he wants to get "really big" anywhere.

In your "startup = growth" essay you laid it out very clearly. From the investor perspective, the only thing that influences success (returns) in any way is when a company gets "really big". Everything else is noise.

But he's just giving a founder perspective. It's not contradictory, and to me it makes sense. I would definitely call what he described in the post "success", i.e. using the proceeds from a previous company to start a profitable new one.

You might argue from the data that he could have grown faster with a co-founder. That could be true in aggregate, but there might be some other factor which makes it untrue for certain situations. As he points out, there are also risks involved, i.e. fights between co-founders which I think you pointed out as a huge source of failure.

Also, you only really have data from YC companies, which lately are biased towards having multiple founders.

edit: I guess the undertone is that people perceive that you've redefined the rules of the game (certainly "startup = growth" does that) and are trying to restore some balance in the dialogue. I think they perceive a misalignment of interests in terms of pushing for extremely high growth whereas you would argue there is none.
"Because my brain is hemorrhaging during my day job."
Chrome Canary: Wouldn’t Use It If You Paid Me
Disposable digital cameras are coming.
Video: Rebuilding a Verizon cable vault devastated by Hurricane Sandy
So, who are your customers? Businesses with chargeback problems or customers filing chargebacks?

The followup is how are you intending to step between customers filing chargebacks and their banks which are a phone call away?
I'm building something, and I haven't found the right co-founder yet. I constantly hear "you need a co-founder" from around the startup community.

I don't know the exact source, but I suspect some of this is just repeating what people have read in pg essays.

Reading pg's clarification of what he means, I think the community has taken his observation that you can't make many millions without a co-founder, and mis-read it to mean you can't build something you love and put on the table without a co-founder.
My first failure
5 iOS Apps to Up Your Instagame
Very good points made here, thanks so much for posting them.
Clearly, Hollywood/RIAA has some of the finest politicians money can buy. They got both parties to agree on something.

You'd think with all the anti-SOPA protests that the party that just lost the election would be pushing the issue. Hollywood and the media -- key copyright industries -- have never been friendly to Republicans. So they wouldn't make many new enemies with an anti-copyright position.

Meanwhile, they might be able to detach younger, technology-savvy, Internet-loving freedom junkies from the Democratic party by taking an aggressive stance on that bloc's core issue.

While many HN'ers seem to be donkeys to the core, I daresay a not-insignificant number would vote Republican if that party managed to get its head out of its elephant (the usual idiom features the wrong party's mascot) and put libertarian principles on the front burner.

Of course, hoping that politicians -- of any party -- will behave in a way that's actually in the public interest is probably a lost cause.
This: http://investors.dressrush.com
Given your anecdotes, what do they have to do with the statement you're quoting? It really seems out of context.
You're definitely right here -- I'll be doing this. Thanks so much for the comment.
So, age is irrelevant to you, but nationality is?
Hmm, I just used his punchcard thing @ http://nightowls.swizec.com/

And apparently I do 60% of my work on wednesdays.... wtf.
Please note that the actual name for a "fractal tree" in the research literature is "Streaming (cache oblivious) B-Tree" (or at least they've very very closely related).

Writing good code wrt memory locality is SUPER important for writing high performance code, whether its in memory work, or larger than ram (eg for the DB). Also a fun exercise to try to understand how!
Perhaps I should rephrase this.

The odds of getting onto the NYT as an author is the probably the same as creating the next billion dollar company. And I think the ease of technology has gone down so much that the amount of effort it takes in writing a book is almost the same as writing a basic web app.
So, if productivity gain has improved so dramatically, perhaps we should question our decades old assumptions.

It's easy to bring up example like Steve Jobs and Wozniak. But creating a web app nowadays is considerably easier than building the first PC. Even marketing is easier now. So, why is it that we still hold the same belief about starting companies?
The benefits of being a solo founder are pretty obvious (eg I can start now, I don't have to deal with another person or worry about equity etc) but the disadvantages are not very clear if you are just starting out. This is why balanced advice from experienced people is useful.

You seem to be suggesting that PG's advice is at the very least creating bad vibes or perhaps even that he is trying to reshape reality for mercenary purposes. This is frankly a bit nuts considering how much carefully considered free help and advice PG gives out in his essays alone.

PG's original point is sound. The OP's blog post could have said what it wanted to say without falsely attributing PG's or Techstars' motives to greed.
Will do! For the record, I was referring to the sort of user who installs "tuning" software in general, I was not referring to your product specifically. No insult was intended.
We’re Getting Very Close To The Perfect MacBook
I think you shouldn't have, because I am atypically alert to digs at you and I didn't detect anything like what you describe. It is the prevailing wisdom that founders need cofounders, and he was just trying to put that in perspective. I'd put money on it: He's probably actually an admirer of yours.
Why monopolies and commoditization would pollute the cloud
Never mind the bollocks, who flamed you for the title.

You did it right, your posting got 85 points, so far. Its on HN about for 10 hours. So around 8500 people did read your page. This will likely triple by the long tail of twitter and facebook.

Well done. Tomorrow about 24000 people will know that you are a great coder. That all that counts.
Looks like they've already disavowed this memo: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4799352
Not like the couldn't release a model with twice the storage at the same price along with another model with LTE working. Maybe later, maybe not.
That specific photon? In hindsight, 100%. If you had to guess for any given photon, approximately 0%. But the odds that some photon would hit us is probably not too low.
Do you have any hard news links discussing Freescale's roadmap? I'm about to commit a design to i.MX6 and if that's the end of the road, that's useful news.
That's ridiculous. Dalton is the natural expert to point out just how far Twitter has sunk. Twitter's a metaphor for broken Silicon Valley "ethics".

Dalton is building disruptive infrastructure.
Since when is debunking a bad idea .. negative?
I am surprised no one has yet responded to this citing "Betteridge's law of headlines".
The way I see it, if your product is technical then .io is fine. But if you eventually want to market to every tom dick and harry then you better get a .com. Another strategy is to get a .io until you can afford a .com. Also, if you can market your website to achieve a million users on .io domain, you can raise enough money to buy the .com. My 2 cents.
RethinkDB API
Never Apologize For Having An Opinion — Especially When You’re Right
Patio in the back of Tied House. Going on right now for you stragglers who can't make up your minds :) you're still welcome!
At the risk of incurring massive downvotes: if anyone happens to have a key for the game laying around, I would be very interested in getting one. I'm sitting on the edge of my chair, waiting for this game to go public. :D
comment 13:

"In the future your major political affiliation will not be the nation state or even the corporation. It will be your IT infrastructure provider IE Apple, Google, Microsoft or their 2512 counterparts."

would be an absolutely /awesome/ sci-fi novel.

Of course, for it to be realistic, consumer needs would have to grow dramatically faster than moore's law. As it is now, it's too easy to start a new consumer IT provider business, the infrastructure is too cheap. I spend rather more compute resources per customer, dramatically more than google, and I've got two thousand customers, me being some nobody kid.

If current trends continue (e.g. consumer demand for compute power trails moore's law by quite a lot) the per-customer cost of providing IT infrastructure will be so low that those providers will not be able to demand much by way of payment, otherwise some kid like me will show up and do it cheaper. If you notice... most of the online consumer infrastructure providers, right now, are not in a position to charge their customers anything at all.
> And I think the ease of technology has gone down so much that the amount of effort it takes in writing a book is almost the same as writing a basic web app.

That I agree with. Well, I agree as much as I can, because I haven't written a book, but I have written a few web apps (and have started a company). Let's say for the sake of discussion they're reasonably similar, even if perhaps they aren't.

Yes, creating technology is a lot easier than it used to be. Marketing is probably easier as well. But I don't believe whatsoever that building a web app is the same as building a billion dollar business. There are a few examples of business which got lucky, fine, but having started a startup myself, I can say (in line with many others, pg included) that running a company is so much different -- and so much more difficult -- than just hacking up a web app.

Steering a company to massive success requires so many difficult decisions and skills that often have nothing to do with your core competencies (unless you're one of those mythical creatures who can 'do it all'), that you need the support of at least one other person who is either A) better at it than you are, or B) can work together with you to figure out how. Those mythical creatures are the 11% in the pie chart, but the other 89% of us need more manpower behind the wheel.

Whipping up a Rails app in a weekend is not the same as running a company.
I think there's real potential to take on SongPop. SongPop's interface needs work, and SongPop doesn't really feel as responsive as a native app, since it kind of isn't - it's Flash compiled to native with Adobe AIR.
Ruby Hoedown 2012 recap
"As a general rule, civilians in the Gaza Strip know if they are near a target."

So say, anywhere they are.

http://www.alternet.org/inside-gaza-hospital-israeli-militar...
No, quite the opposite. Nothing is rushed in Ireland and there's a general attitude of not really spending any effort worrying too much about things that might be important to non-Irish folks.
Personally I tend to get headaches when programming during the day. At night I just feel more relaxed and able to think more clearly.
The surface of the sphere of the light that is traveling since an event "soon" after to the big bang is (4 * pi * (15000000000 lightyears)^2) (I don't know how to handle the space expansion, so I will simply ignore it.)

The surface of the main mirror in the Hubble Telescope is (pi * (2.5 meters)^2)

The gravitational lens gives a 8x magnification, so the telescope picks 8^2 times the light (not sure about this ^2).

So, the (approximated) probability that a photon reach the telescope is: (pi * (2.5 meters)^2) * (8^2) / (4 * pi * (15000000000 lightyears)^2)~=5E-51

http://www.google.com/?q=(pi*(2.5%20meters)%5E2)%20*%20(8%5E...)

So, it had to be a very bright object! Or saying it in another way http://xkcd.com/811/
Jump on http://reddit.com/r/ingress

There's an invite thread there, and secret item codes. Also, +google on a request on G+.
I think climate change is inevitable. Whether from human causes or from the natural climate cycles we must assume that the sea levels will change, even if only temporarily from a historical perspective. Even if the sea levels only rise 1 metre for 5 years, that is still a big refugee problem.

What is worrying is that those most likely to be affected by rising sea levels are in general those least able to cope with it. We must assume that there will be hundreds of millions of refugees, from Bangladesh, from the tiny Pacific Islands, or even from New Orleans and Venice. Will humanity let them die? If not then those of us living in higher elevations must start planning now for how we will accommodate them.
For me, a non-Retina 13" MacBook Pro with upgraded memory and SSD hard drive approaches the perfect machine. It's cost effective and blazingly fast. The extra cost associated with a Retina display isn't worth it to me, especially given the premium Apple charges for the SSD upgrade.
How does one know the offsite repository's are clean if svnsync runs at set intervals? What if part of the attack was to make it look like happened at much late date/time after the malicious code was mirrored and backed up to the offsite repositories?
House Republicans release watershed copyright reform paper
would get if 15"
Why not move the loop to your script?
Does anyone know if this affects TI's Davinci line?
Having looked at both web.py nad Flask, web.py seems more elegant at first glance.

I like the mapping of a resource to class and method names to class method.s I am not sure I like Flask's method handling and having to do if ... elif .... else (maybe I just found some bad example, so please correct me).

Also url dispatching at the top makes it easier to understand what's going on rather than having it spread to each of the decorators somehow.
How about an automated way to do it?
Ask HN: Big Logo Argument, Edinburgh Startup Weekend
We are a group of 9 idiots taking part in the Edinburgh Startup Weekend and we are about to break apart at the seams because we cannot agree on our logo!

This is the home page which at the time of writing, has both logos up:

http://www.ZebRez.com

... and we'll keep both viewable here on a more permanent basis:

http://www.ZebRez.com/logo

Half of us believe that the top is clearly better, half of us are convinced that the bottom one is obviously the better choice.

Even worse, of the 60 or so other participants and passersby that we managed to grab and interrogate, the decision was more-or-less 50/50 too ... and always with strong feelings on both sides.

Just to put it all into perspective, this is just for an online reservations Web service, based upon Stripe Connect, which we think is going to turn out to be surprisingly useful ... but ... we are still at each other's throats over this damn logo argument, I'm up at 2AM writing this plea ... and the final pitches are at 5PM on tomorrow night!

So, we figured, why not get this argument settled, for once and for all, by the folks at Hacker News: should we go with the top one or the bottom one?

Thank you from all the argumentative idiots on the ZebRez team.
Show HN: Beta launching a Klout for Professionals, reserve your username now
I find that I am usually able to do the best critical thinking when I am more awake but I can be the most productive in terms of cranking out code when I am just tired enough that my mind stops racing. For me this period happens between 11pm and 2am and it usually ends with me nodding off and holding down a key or two. Undo is super important at that point!
My point was that I would use a telephone or skype. Using twitter for the wrong purpose and complaining about it is like complaining that it's hard to hammer in a nail with a screwdriver.
Make Games With Us is accomplishing their goals much more effectively than I would have thought possible. They're doing God's work.
anyone know if Ingress is US only or is it global?
Nyopoly Presents Shopping 2.0; Choose Your Style and Pay Your Price