skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I predict global scale climate engineering rather than our current coasts under water.
>because most young people are not interested in creating

Clearly you need to work with young people more :)

There is that misconception that all teenagers care about is watching TV or hanging out with their friends and doing nothing "creative" or "productive".
How wrong! I've worked with hundreds of teenagers over the past few years, and I've never met one who wasn't interested in creating.

By default, kids and teenagers have a thirst to create, to see how they can imprint the world they live in.

Sure, for a lot of them, what they wish to create is what HN would (sadly) scoff at (those dreaming of becoming athletes, singers, actors, writers, etc.). But the intent to create is there.

What makes the difference ultimately is how seriously they're taken. In our current society, they're just dismissed as ignorant teenagers, and that's what they become in a sad self-fulfilling prophecy. But when they're given the proper encouragement and tools to act upon their creative impulses, that's where the magic happens.
>time-suck that is high school

I don't follow, high school allows you the most spare time you will ever have.
yes, you can do it alone and I had some success building up my hardware company. But at some point I decided to change and bring in co-founders and our momentum just build up x-times higher.

First hand experience tells me too, that starting up a company alone is not only really hard, but slower as well, which these days speed is more crucial than ever.

I have to agree on common wisdom and recommendation here that if you want to start a company and create something with impact try to partner up. Finding the right partners is another whole chapter by itself.
Do We Really Need A Second Inauguration?
I used to work an 8 hour day, then go home, have dinner and go to bed immediately after. I then got a few hours sleep and woke up refreshed and with a clear brain between midnight and 2am. I then coded for a few hours until I started feeling tired again, went to bed, caught an hour or three of sleep and went to work. This had the benefit of me being better rested for my nightly hacking than for my daytime job, which didn't require my full alertness (I was stuck in a dull job at the time). The downside was that I had no social interaction with people in my timezone (other than at work).
I don't think you should make this sort of accusation without backing it up. Not so much because it's unfair as because it's probably mistaken: you're probably arguing against opinions you attribute to me rather than anything I've actually said.
When I read science fiction about people living hundreds of years from now, I wonder what science fiction they read. The characters in Star Trek, for instance, conveniently read Shakespeare and watch mid-20th century film and TV.
I think it comes down to personality. For better or worse, I have a personality that allows me to barrel into big-risk situations and not worry. I don't think it's bravery though, it's closer to naive optimism (hence the name of my blog).

If you have no choice but to be a Single-Founder, then it's probably down to whether or not you could survive your startup failing. If you can, then it's down to whether or not you feel happy taking the risk.
No need to name calling. I did not called you anything, lack of respect is not something that I encountered in many austrians but you're clearly one that does not respect people apparently, wish I am wrong.

As I said in the above post I am unwilling, I have more important things to do than entering in eternal ego wars on the net.

By the way: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

EDIT: I was rude in this comment and if you felt offended I ask you to forgive me.

Either way my problem with Autrian school is that it try to rely too much on logic and methodological individualism, probabilistic CFD using some Monte Carlo methods, I'm not against first-order logic since I'm a mathematician by training and I think the Austrian use of it brought some useful and good insights into economics, my main problem is with methodological individualism, I think it does nothing to advance economics as a science, you're right that Economics is not Physics, but them ever in Physics we have Fluid dynamics and Heat transfer models that use statistics[1] because they are complex and a complete model is unforeseeable in the near future, maybe there will be a complete model, maybe not.

A macroeconomic model is just trying to approach a complex system in the same fashion which have an additional problem, it deals with humans, mind you that generally every researcher in neoclassical economics[2] is well aware that their models have some assumptions that breaks at some point, Stieglitz and Kahneman have shown some example and general equilibrium is a favorite target. It's also good to point out that not every economist is trying to use their models to recommend banks or governments what to do, Krugman made an essay in the past actually recommending economists to advise policy, not every economist is interested in this however.

I believe this is enough, if you reply I will answer one time but bear in mind that I'm not an economist.

[1]: or numerical methods, my PhD thesis was in CFD
[2]: They all generally know about this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticisms_of_neoclassical_econ... Generally every
It's rather ironic that a company so high-tech it's looking hard at self-driving cars and asteroid mining has trouble implementing a calendar, a technology that's been around for thousands of years...
Thanks for the feedback.

I've spoken to a few financial instituions. The general consensus seems to be that we're not doing anything they didn't wish customers did already - which is contact the merchant for a refund before creating a chargeback. We've been told that in only around 18% of chargebacks have the customers even told the merchant they have a problem before filing the chargeback.

I do expect someone along the line will have a problem with it, in which case we don't offer services for customers with that institution (after attempting to change their mind!).

We do have a layer of manual checks on each chargeback before they are processed. I like the idea of spot phone calls though - might add that in!
I used to be a rather paranoid "Big Brother" fearing type, but Google wins me over again and again with not only a user focus that attempts to win us over by being better than the alternatives in meaningful ways, but also by having a greater understanding of what we actually want.

It's kind of embarrassing how much of a fanboy I sound like these days, but I've just been endlessly impressed with their innovation.

As a side note, it was really awesome seeing something I wrote posted on HN. I feel like a real boy now.
Very nice indeed. Looking forward to the finished product. However,

"Perhaps there’s just some worrying stuff going on and you aren’t Irish enough not to worry about it."

What does this mean? Never heard that expression. Anyway, aren't the irish traditionally meant to be neurotic and guilt-ridden?
Two rules we use to manage interruptions:
1) If I have headphones on, IM me. I will respond when convenient.
2) If I am pairing, a server better be on fire.

We make the pair sacrosanct. A greater emphasis on pairing means there is one fewer person to distract you.

Still, there are times when a quiet room is necessary. Striking the balance between productive cross-polination of ideas and total chaos is a tricky dance.
Man stabbed with knife in the face, and Explodes 
Not Safe for Work
I'm not sure the book analogy is appropriate. Books require concerted effort until publication, then nothing (this is changing but still the case, at large). Start-ups require constant maintenance and improvement. Care to comment on that?
If you enjoy working at night and use Chrome, this extension has been a huge help for me(and my eyes):

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hacker-vision/fomm...
I knew it was just too good to be true!
You had a really biased sample, you only ever took on teams right from the start so how would you know. And secondly, there's only a few outstanding companies and they seem to be equally split. Most of the world's richest people are not from teams but single individuals. The google boys are the only split fortune in the self-made billionaire club. If anything, the evidence is against you.
> I don't foresee either an energy or a climate crisis. There is a hard limit on how expensive energy gets because at some point you can turn totally renewable energy into a fuel of some sort, ideally taking CO2 out of the atmosphere to do it. It's not cost effective now because energy is so cheap. But like I said: there's a limit to how expensive it can get.

I used to agree with you until I read this terribly thought-provoking article[1]. Now I'm not as sure. It was published by the Oil Drum, a blog I subscribe to for oil industry news, so the article doesn't have a hidden agenda.

The key insight I gleaned from it was the concept of the energy cost of energy sources.

I used to think that even if wind power wasn't as efficient as oil now, eventually oil prices would rise and wind would become a viable alternative.

However, what the article showed was that wind power itself uses oil in the manufacturing of the materials, shipping and construction of the wind mills, etc. You can think of the concept of the energy return on energy invested. And as the supply of oil dwindles and costs rise, that EROEI will change.

Oil at its start had an EROEI of 100:1, which means you could get a hundred barrels of oil for the cost of using one. Now it's at 20. Wind energy has an EROEI of about 20 over the lifetime of the equipment, but unfortunately costs a lot of energy up front, and only recoups that energy over time.

So the two issues the article raises is that as the cost of oil increases, it affects the EROEI of the renewable resources, and that because the majority of renewable resources all have upfront energy costs, they'll get hit extra hard. Politically, it will always make sense in the short term to cancel the renewable energy projects since you're using a great deal of the increasingly rare energy for payoffs in the future, when that energy could go to cost of living and make things better now.

I really think you'd enjoy the article if you read it, so I encourage you to do so. ("You", being cletus, wouldn't have posted this otherwise. You seem very smart and I've enjoyed your posts.)

[1] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/8526
The concepts are similar, but the implementations are quite different. In order to use BillGuard you must sign up for constant monitoring of your credit card. ChargeBack.cc is more of an a la carte service - you only use it when you want to perform or resolve a chargeback.
Probably not the same exact technique, but some people are researching self-assembly for post-silicon transistors.
Velato - A programming language that takes music as input
Yes, this definitely needs some clear explanations. Without it, a suspicion raises that it is some kind of scheme to abuse chargebacks at the cost of merchants, and I as a consumer would not want to be a part of it - it would only lead to me paying higher prices.

However, if it is an attempt to reduce high costs of chargebacks that the banks usually create - this is a most welcome development that has potential to make this market more sane, which is great.
Check out f.lux

http://stereopsis.com/flux/
Recognition issues are comparatively easy to fight (unless it was an Amex payment, as they charge merchants more to get more screwed over) but you still get dinged with the chargeback fee and potentially a higher discount* rate because of the larger percentage of payments that have been charged back.

* Despite the name, you want the lowest discount rate you can get: it's the fee charged by your acquiring bank on top of interchange, and is basically the only thing in credit card payments that you have any ability to negotiate. As you'd expect, having more chargebacks hinders your ability to get the discount rate lowered.
It's almost as if a company is comprised of thousands of individual minds and abilities and priorities instead of one laser focused brilliance.
I'd hate to have a cofounder. I'd really have to find someone with same amount of passion and who's on the exact same line. I don't like people messing with my vision, having too much control. Don't get me wrong, I listen and take in other people's advise and views, but I want the final say.

Also, I think a lot of people look for funding, while they don't even need it, but that's another issue..
Before You delete all you social media life, Frostbox it. 
I recently come across more and more people who wish to delete all their social life permanently. I am not going to be the Facebook or Twitter, Flickr, LinkedIn or Instagram evangelist, since everyone has got their own reasons, but I think it's worth storing all the contacts, and definitely the photos (my Flickr has go over 4k pics) somewhere safe. Frostbox is a new site that covers all of the above in one place. Also gmail and file/document backup all in one. It's like Dropbox for social media. If at some point you decide to bring your digital life back, you have somewhere to start.
It's hard to anonymize a data set that's both small and has a lot of variation.
This comes up time and time again...a win for Paul Graham is not a company that makes 3.4M in revenue anaually. He is searching for and betting on billion dollar enterprises like Dropbox and AirBnB.

Success for PG is very different than success for many others.
I hate open office plan environments. I feel very lucky to work from my own home office full time now. That being said, I've done my time in open offices. Some things to try:

- Try saying "No" to interruptions. This is probably better worded as "Sorry, I'm really heads down on something right now - can you shoot me an email about it, or maybe I can come find you later?" Do that enough, and people will grow out of the habit of constantly interrupting, because there's no reward.

- Develop a signal for your coworkers that indicates you're in "heads down" mode and that you shouldn't be disturbed. When I worked at Google, one of the SREs had a sign on his desk that said "If Cody is wearing the rockstar glasses, he is thinking and shouldn't be disturbed". I've also visited offices that have sliding whiteboard doors on their cubicles, and the office policy is that if the whiteboard door is open, you're fair game to interrupt, but if it's closed, you need to be left alone.

- In ear headphones may be better than noise canceling, if you haven't tried those. I have a nice pair of shure's (SE210's) with these tips, which are pretty similar to earplugs: http://compare.ebay.com/like/290692040848. I also had custom molded earpieces made, but I could never get one to make a good seal. The other one was great though, so it might be worth a shot.

- Try coming in early or staying late. Any time spent when the office is more empty will likely be more productive.

- Hide:) Conference rooms are good, and out of the way couches or stairwells sometimes work.

As someone who is way more productive in quiet environments with minimal distractions, I wish open plan offices and "bullpen" environments weren't so trendy among startups.
Almost all of the links are specific analyses, but these two caught my eye of interest: Both are rent-price dimensionalized for geography by tube-stop.

http://blog.rentonomy.com/posts/75

http://blog.rentonomy.com/posts/74
Can you give me an example of a country without government subsidized healthcare you'd like to live in?
That's a shameful distortion of what I admitted.

Pron explained why the association with your comment was unfair and I admitted that it was. Your comment, however, remains.
I've never had trouble with chargebacks, personally. I try the merchant, and if they don't play ball, I contact my card issuer. It's been pretty painless, so I don't see the point of this service. Is my experience just abnormal?
According to this comment: https://code.google.com/p/android/issues/detail?id=39692#c17

It's caused by the convention of the Android datepicker to store month values as 0-11 instead of 1-12.

Dates are given in 1-31 as expected; and years are given in e.g. 2012 as expected; but months are given in 0-11 which is totally inconsistent with how people normally number months and how the rest of the API works.

So for January 1st, 2012, printing 'getDate()', 'getMonth()', and 'getYear()' would yield '1-0-2012'. It's a badly designed API and I'm surprised there aren't more instances of this breaking.

(I ran into this once in our codebase, but we managed to fix it pretty quickly).
Yes you can.

Best part is focus, clarity, and instant decision making. If you feel you have a great idea, just go for it. Don't waste time convincing others.
Here's a thread where you knock "mundane, income-producing businesses..."

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=175469

As it turns out, it's a carsonified post. Strange.

I also remember a post where someone listed a whole bunch of awesome bootstrapped companies and you said, basically, that none of them was at the level you consider successful.

EDIT -- here's the one I remembered! Awesome, the thread from 549 days ago no less: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2556959

Where someone mentioned a list of successful bootstrapped companies with million $$ exits or revenues and you say: "If you constructed a list of the top technology companies, few to zero of these would appear on it." http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2558576

Okay, so those companies are (edit: NOT) "Top Technology Companies" but neither are thousands, perhaps millions of group founded, vc funded companies that follow your path either.

Your attitude toward bootstrapped and single-founder companies is one of extreme negativity and I don't think it's warranted.

Also edit and bit tongue in cheek: Wal-Mart was a single founder company, so the top two retail giants in the entire world were founded by individuals rather than groups, so that data tells me that to be the BIGGEST in the entire world, maybe you should consider being a single founder.
It may not be same in magnitude, but direction certainly looks like that. And again there's nothing wrong with AAPL per se, IMO, there's a trend about cell phones - every 4-6 yrs there's a leader and then that leader is replaced by someone else! AAPL has gone past it's prime day as the leader in cellphone market. I know it bleeds the hearts of AAPL fans, but markets don't care much about that!
You think revenue will follow?
Ah, sorry I was actually confusing 2 separate comment threads. :-/

I see your point.
may be not - sony had quite a wide range of products to sustain, when you are essentially banking on one or two products, it's very hard!
Actual article - https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1018963/Articles/SpotifyScaling.pdf
Does anyone know how they do remote collaboration? Distributed pair programming for instance.
The small print (http://biz.turbulenz.com/developers):

>We're sorry to hear that. Publishing with Turbulenz gets your game in front of a larger audience. We don't charge an upfront fee and we expect to help you achieve higher user and revenue numbers. If you still don't want us to publish it, contact us about alternative licensing options.

>Our mission is to create the greatest online gaming experience. We have heavily invested in the tools and technology to enable this experience and provide these to you free of charge. In exchange, we receive a 30% fee for helping you publish and promote your games to millions of potential customers globally. In fact, we take it a step further and provide services other online platforms don’t. For example, we take care of hosting, servers, analytics, marketing, payment processing, and we even provide developers with a live staging service (Developer Hub) to A/B test and optimize different development versions of a game.

So they're going for an app store model by using a free API as bait.
> months are given in 0-11 which is totally inconsistent with how people normally number months and how the rest of the API works

That numbering is consistent with Java and the constants in the Android API.

http://docs.oracle.com/javase/1.4.2/docs/api/constant-values...

http://developer.android.com/reference/java/util/Calendar.ht...
I've written a book (non-fiction), and work for a startup. The latter is considerably more complex than the former.

It's often better to write a book by secluding yourself in a room or cabin. You can't run a startup that way.

A book has a clear ending. A startup does not.
Well then, I guess reality has a pro-Palestinian bias too. 38 Palestinians killed so far, 257 wounded, mostly civilians, vs. 3 Israeli civilians killed.
Simple, Lightweight jQuery Pagination Plugin
If Linux developers were to adhere to the POSIX standard, would compatibility be an issue?
Well then - I guess there's not much point in arguing with you.
It is the same reason "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM", namely its a variation of conventional wisdom (now).

Which, perhaps, is also to say its a combination of factors:

1) Herd mentality (also known as 'social proof')

2) Porfolio theory (diversification of ideas, attention to details)

3) Network effects (iff younger teams, 2x rolodexes >1x)

4) Adverse selection (co-founder is a vetted hire; early hires are hard; and may imact outcome disproportionately).

So not entirely irrational either.The question is: is it remdiable and is such remidiation cost-effective? Two considerations: must be so for <investors> as well as for <founders>. But yes, a heuristic being overly generalized, is it seems to be a variation now of cognitive bias.
Of interest perhaps is that personally I find that as winter rolls around my sleep patterns get later and later. In the summer I'd guess I sleep 2am-10am in winter it's more like 4am-12noon and I can't for the life of my shift this. Every year as winter rolls in almost like clockwork it changes.
I think all this solo-founder talk is missing a key thing that even Ryan Carson acknowledges in his post. You can't do it alone forever.

I think this may be part of the investment bias. The same reasons why you will eventually need to promote people to very high positions in the company, could be the reasoning behind starting with people in those positions, or having them in place by the time you go for funding and essentially making them founders at that point.

Keep in mind, I'm a solo founder.
You're right, and I didn't doubt that. I meant it's self-inconsistent with how days and years are handled, not necessarily inconsistent with other calendar APIs within Java and Android. Sorry I wasn't clear.
i feel "panniers lol" is an appropriate response here.

my jersey pockets are full, that's the point.
One thing that popped right out to me was how similar the top banner looks to the Paypal top banner.
POSIX doesn't specify "pulseaudio, PAM and systemd". So, mu.
The goal with ChargeBack.cc is to divert unhappy customers away from the traditional chargeback system and into direct contact with their merchant. It is backed by sending unresolved disputes through the banks, but if we get to that stage I consider the chargeback failed on our behalf.
I think it's probably harder to be on the NYT best seller list as an author than to run a billion dollar company. If you consider the number of writers vs the number of startups, I think the odds are probably the same. So, if majority of the NYT best sellers come from single authors, what does that say about the actual potential of a single founder being successful?