skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A quick 180 like that seems rather odd to me, whatever the reason, and I can't imagine that Hollywood would have been happy with that document.
All else aside, the concepts "opinion" and "right" are orthogonal. An opinion doesn't need to be right, or even plausible, to be an legitimate opinion.
Writing a double-negative like that forces me to do a double-take when trying to understand you. Or is it a triple-negative?

I'm going to go with, "there were so many inventors, its invention was inevitable" as my interpretation, which I believe is the most correct rendition of the story of flight as I know it.
It's not that uncommon in CS. I just started a Ph.D. program (Robotics at CMU) straight out of undergrad and a decent number of the other incoming students are in the same boat. It varies depending upon the field and the university. For example, several of the top mechanical engineering programs require a M.S. to apply for the Ph.D. program.
> If you had no other data other than what is presented, and there isn't, you would want to start a company with 2 founders.

Your next two sentences explain why this isn't true.
Did you blog about it? give examples?
What else can be solved with fractals?
Reposception
I agree that working from home requires you to have a clear list of tasks to complete.

However, I dispute that it's the best way to work. It puts a larger overhead on communication. I've noticed that extended periods of working alone cause development to drift away from the core requirements because of this.

I find what works for me is being in the office most of the time. It allows you to pick up on a lot of stuff that you just can't do when you're not there.

If the rare occasion comes where I need no distractions to blitz out a ton of code, then I arrange a day to work from home.
Debug Mode Is The Only Mode
The title is accurate, and that is all the data presented tells you.

The implication that this can indicate which number that gives you the highest chance of success is completely bogus. Without taking account failures (or distribution of attempted companies by founder count) you have no data whatsoever for discussing what is most likely to succeed.

Makes me ask, what is this doing on HN?
its not even that simple
I really need to write a script that resubmits this link on some sort of exponential backoff schedule; it's a reliable fountain of karma.

I suppose it could also resubmit old posts from silver-circle bloggers (JacquesM, Yegge et al) and from various comp sci classics -- picking random essays out of the E.W. Dijkstra archive, for instance.

And I guess I could fold in my old idea for "karma arbitrage" -- resubmitting here anything rising on /r/TrueReddit and vice versa.

"Heresy! Great evil!" I already hear you cry. And yet the invisible hand forms a pointy finger on all these things; what am I doing except to most efficiently recycle all the things that HN holds dearest, thus freeing up eyeballs for novelty?
Pretty slow. This is intended to demonstrate how Go concurrency works, so there's a lot of communication overhead.

Someone ported djb's primegen (uses the Sieve of Atkin) to Go, and got comparable performance-- .7s for primes up to a trillion. https://groups.google.com/forum/m/?fromgroups#!topic/golang-...
I think his computer/software is defective.

Testing the "random distribution" like it was done - with a small sample size - is ineffective at best
I wonder what the git blame command will contain...
perhaps there is a reason why they wrote Java's instead of Java is?
I read the first chapter and found that his evidence was based on conversations with other programmers. In this day and age, there's enough information for the author to collect more empirical evidence in the form of commits to open source projects.

One could take a sample of GitHub projects and commit times. You would have to find out the contributors' time zones, and adjust accordingly.

You need to balance the hobby contributors against corporate contributors i.e. those being paid to contribute.

If you wanted to make things really interesting, you could try and gauge code quality based on time. Perhaps trying to assign bugs against the commit they appeared in.
Wow, thanks for posting this!
Car & 401K is a terrible idea for generating cash. Keep your day job (or find a day job) and build apps on the side until you think you've found a winner.

Putting money into marketing is a difficult question. I feel like it works if you have apps that are already generating money, so that you can use that revenue stream to fund the marketing for your other apps.

But if you are just starting out, you should try the $0 marketing approach of contacting bloggers in your space (in their case, educational app blogs) to see if they'll review your app.
Its an interesting question. I think that if you're going to have more than one person leading, they should typically be leading separate parts of the business (sales / tech).

The problem with a single individual managing responsibilities is that there are still plenty of tasks that need to be done so it becomes a question of what you can automate and what you can outsource for as cheap as possible. Basically, good delegation and management skills.
> Makes me ask, what is this doing on HN?

1. Collecting karma for the submitter. ("Why X is foo" followed by "why X is NOT foo" followed by "Foo is irrelevant, it's actually all about bar").

2. Promoting the guy on the other side of the link. Unfortunately Vibhu Norby is one droplet in the indistinguishable white mist that makes up the ever-expanding Svbtle Borg, so it probably isn't working all that well.

(Yes, I totally do 2. Every chance I get to link to myself, I take.)

Problems:

1. How did Deloitte define their data set? (edit: I found out, it's in the report)

2. Does fast growth == success?

3. How is a founder defined?

4. What about companies that failed?
Another good way to collect User Feedback
Actually, I thought it was interesting to know what the breakdown was amongst successful startups since I've never seen any data about it, only anecdotes. I did the research. It took several hours. I happen to have a place where I can share the research with people that might care and have something to add. Clearly, I am mistaken.
With regards 1), as an end user of a given communication protocol, I would like there to be a plurality of clients available for that protocol. C.f. email, usenet, irc, ftp, etc.
The Unix philosophy has nothing to do with this.

It's not like the stuff inside the script can't be standalone classes of the "do one thing and do it well" variety --they just don't get to be processes.
And yet, he has said himself he doesn't code nowadays (in the kernel at least.)
[update: i think i was wrong in a previous version of this post]. i think you need an extra 1/(1+z)^2 for expansion. see, for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luminosity_distance where there is a (1+z) correction to D (and you want D^2 for area).

that would decrease probabilities by ~1/100.

that seems reasonable given ctdonath's comment - tens of photons a second at a telescope sounds like it should be detectable (IR is harder than optical as it has higher backgrounds).

am also unsure about the ^2 (i think you're worried whether it's intensity or not? i don't know either).
Interesting how people without good IDE support rationalize things.
>There are a handful of counterexamples, like Amazon, but Treehouse is not one of them yet.

Still it's does a lot better than 90% of YC companies.

Why compare it to Amazon-size businesses? With or without a co-founder, those are few and far-between anyway.
This must be setting a new record for an old article.
Swizec has done just that. You can help him out by giving him access to your GH commit history here: http://nightowls.swizec.com/

Don't know why he hasn't mentioned this, maybe he just hasn't come around to writing about it yet.

disclaimer: I'm one of the guys he interviewed.
Erm, ok, let's follow that through.

I don't even need to look at the data to say that in the US most successful companies have at least one white, male founder. Does that mean that if you start a tech company and are non-white or non-male you should make sure to partner up with one to ensure success? Is it just a bias due to demographics? It it a real factor related to an intrinsic advantage of white males in making successful startups (even if it's just an external cultural factor)?

Or, is it a much more complex issue that can't and shouldn't be so easily infographed and turned into a convenient piece of folk wisdom?

Taking this data, which incidentally is extremely incomplete, and using it as a rubric on how to start your company is little more than cargo cultism.
The information here about a single founder backs the "doing it alone" thing, the top topic here in HN. (http://ryancarson.com/post/35939367603/you-can-do-it-alone)

I'm happy that there are a bunch of single founder companies. I'm planning to start one, as a single founder.
I guess I'm just cynical about a pattern that I see played out here on HN a lot.

Whenever controversial something hits the front page, there's always a spate of quick and easy responses that turn up in the next few days.

That being said, I think my list of problems still remains.

You say that you have a breakdown of how many founders different successful companies have.

Well, you are already ahead of Ryan Carson and Paul Graham in that you've risen above an exchange of anecdotes at 20 paces.

But I think you oversold it in the title.

"How many founders do successful tech companies have?" is not supported by the data.

First, it's based on a list of "fastest growing". Lots of companies grow fast and then abruptly stop growing. You just substituted one metric in for "success" and didn't say that's what you did.

Second, the list is based on self-submitted reports (scroll down to "Selection and Qualifying Criteria") -- "Deloitte has not audited the ranking ... Some companies that may be eligible to appear in the ranking are not included because they did not submit the required information or otherwise declined to participate".

Third, it doesn't deal with failures, which is more interesting because that is the default condition.

Fourth, it's restricted to North American companies only.

Fifth, how did you define "founder"? That seems to me to still be a slippery wildcard in this whole discussion.

Take Ryan Carson's case. He owns most of the equity. Is he the sole founder? If "founder" is based on legal control, yes. What about the day-to-day? He says he has an employee who is a de-facto co-leader. Are they a founder? Maybe not. What if they'd been there right from the start? And so on.

Good on you for doing the tedious slog of looking up a hundred companies, but ... well, I think you've oversold on the title.

And that's what my gut, knee-jerk, ex-Slashdot cynicism reacted to.
What these people need is the kind of person who specializes in disaster management. It really doesn't feel like what they have there should be unrecoverable.
did this a month ago. my site is still in alpha
copythisproject.appspot.com
Can you give an example?

(Perhaps we mean something different by "legitimate"? I think I basically consider an opinion to be legitimate if it's plausible-or-better.)
Interesting to note how people without good programming languages rationalize things.
copythisproject.appspot.com
Very true, when I tell people I am a software developer they either assume I live in a mansion with 5 ferraris or that I eat nothing but ramen and sleep in my parents basement and not much in between. Sadly the second is probably closer to the truth.
Show HN: Build a Kindle book of PG's essays
Lipo-?
RipCorder Video, Faites vos screencasts rapidement sous Mac Os X
How to Learn C# Part 2 - Namespaces
Care to elaborate the downvote?
Is this not perhaps a function of the Apple culture's obsession with "feel" and also the app store review system.

There might be a fear (rational or not) that not testing a particular device could lead to 1 star reviews due to it not "feeling right".
I want to put a reminder that Windows itself provides a lot of background command scripting via WHost

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/documentation/windows/xp/...

Things like accessing namespace folders, creating shortcuts, etc are easier through this WHost interface than the raw API.
Ok, got you. I can answer these. Indeed, it is not representing all fast growing companies all around the world. However, it doesn't have to. Like I said in the post, there is no reason to believe that biases how many founders they have. Companies with two founders are not more likely to submit themselves to such a report. Anyway, almost all of them are businesses generating tons of revenue. A large percentage of them are public companies and many are 10-15 years old. Feel free to look them up.

A founder is someone listed as a co-founder either on the management page, Wikipedia, or in press mentions. It's not really slippery. It took so much time because I wanted to make sure I was doing it right.
I think that’s pretty obvious, the people that wrote that passage down, I assume some time ago, were also of the same species and as such experienced the same circadian rhythms.
The Sinofsky Letters: Defenestrated Windows overlord corresponds
I wonder what I did wrong on my testing. How did you test and against what version? Do you have a public version of your app or tests?
I think you will see more variety in successful smartphone apps simply because a phone can be used in so many more situations.

A PC app with a list of knot types is not especially useful if you can't take it on your boat with you.
From what I hear the battery life of the Nexus 4 leaves a lot to be desired, and LTE would only make that worse
In your position I'd have pointed out that the data set shows a clear departure from Benford's Law, suggesting that something about single founders is weird.

> Like I said in the post, there is no reason to believe that biases how many founders they have.

Different cultures have different ideas about individual risk and teamwork.

> tons of revenue ... 10-15 years old.

Gosh, you mean young companies have more scope for rapid growth and therefore wind up on a self-selected list of rapidly growing companies?

In no way could this sample be biased against failed young companies.

Also unanswered: are there fewer single founders because there are fewer single founders to begin with, or is it because they fail more often?
PHP URL Routing Class - Afro
You buy music to show support if you can't make it to a concert.

You buy music because Youtube usually has horrible sound quality.

You buy music because you want to listen to your music on your iPod or preferred MP3 player.

You buy music because you want to hear your music as it's released, and not wait for someone to upload it on Youtube in 3 days.

You buy music because you have obscure songs that don't exist on Youtube.

You buy music because you'd rather have local files in case you have no Internet.

You buy music because you have a superior alternative to Youtube, as in playlist management, Replay Gain, and more.
If everything is so obvious then why the discussion here? Why the book? Everyone here (I hope) is a human, so they must know their cycles, why the talk then?
The article being #1 on the front page tells a lot about how much driven (we) solo founders really are! ;) Go for it!!!
It really depends on the review unit it seems. The Verge [1] seems to have had a good one and gave the battery 9 out of 10 possible points while saying this:

"Battery life was also top notch. I'm used to getting just about a day of use on my Galaxy Nexus (that's taking it off of the charger around 8AM or 9AM, and putting it back on around 2AM). Some days it doesn't quite make it that long, depending on my workload. The Nexus 4 fared much better. At the time of this writing, I've had it off of its charger for 10 hours and 30 minutes and it's still got 45 percent battery life. Yesterday before I plugged it in, I'd had it off the charger for 16 hours, with 18 percent of its juice left. To say it's holding up for full work days would be an understatement; even with heavy use, this battery more than pulls its weight."

[1] http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/2/3589280/google-nexus-4-rev...
I'm not an audiophile, but is there a significant difference in quality between an MP3 file and a 720P youtube video?

Streaming 256kps would seem fairly trivial on even a mobile connection these days.

I know I can use spotify on my phone over 3G at 192kps.

It would also just seem to be a question of "when" before somebody releases a really good music player application that just uses youtube as a backend.
If a greater percentage of successful businesses are started with 2 people, there must be a good reason for it. If businesses were more likely to be successful with one person, wouldn't you see more people opting to go down that route in aggregate, irrespective of anything else? Businesses are units designed to succeed, they would not (in aggregate) do something to counter their own success, especially with something non-obvious like how many co-founders you start with.
Ben Klemens about his '21st Century C' book
You wrote a recent blog claiming the entire word of startup for high growth companies suitable for venture funding. While I seem to remember there being asides that other models were valid businesses and valid choices the overall impression given was that any company not swinging for the big win didn't deserve to use the word.

Your blog post was completely right that they don't make financial sense for Y-Combinator or VC generally but it didn't need to claim the word. Just calling the VC suitable companies 'high growth startups' or 'venture companies' rather than denying any other new business the use of the term would not have lost anything from the meaning without appearing so dismissive of other models.
#29 seems to be missing. I didn't know comments can be deleted on that site.
Founder Quotient: How To Measure Founder Strength
Submitted for the mock-up cover alone.

Previous discussion here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4794171

His other book, Modeling with data, is also freely available as a pdf: http://modelingwithdata.org/about_the_book.html
Competitor: Streaming video may cost Amazon $1 billion a year
Not sure what the point of this is.. can someone enlighten me?
"I'm perfectly happy arguing with people on the internet because arguing is my favourite pastime - not programming."
Is this real? If so I'm surprised he got that much interaction from him
If you are trying to explain what namespaces are, conceptually, then it may be better to talk about the general idea of scope.
Lead Compiz developer leaves Canonical
I thought about covering scope and some of those issues, but the article started to get really long. I do agree it ties in with the subject matter well, and will likely be 2nd part to the namespace discussion.
I had a similar thought after they released Google Now. Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. all collect user data, but Google stands out in how hard they try to bring value to the user from all the data they have.
Ola, this is brilliant!
Even if some within there would want it, others would sabotage any such attempt. Their dependence on lobbyist money is too strong.
This is fine, but where’s the lyrics ? I’ll argue people want to see lyrics display inline when they do a lyric search. I understand licensing will be an issue with the major labels but Google could take a bottom’s up approach. Before Myspace collapse, it was on top of the social network world. Developing software on the web for indie musicians helped Myspace get to the top. Soon majority of independent musicians and their fans were using myspace. When Myspace become a popular place for discovering music the major labels all did deals with Myspace. If Google made effective cross promotion/sales tools with lyrics search for indies, I believe the majors will follow
US firms drawing a line on after-hours email
Here's a very easy way to get out of a Dead Sea cosmetics selling pitch:
Say: "shalom, ani merusut haHagira, efshar lirot et Ashrat HaAvoda Shelca?"
Translates as: Hello, I'm from Immigration, can I see your work visa?

Also in the USA there's no such thing as No Refunds No Exchanges - if you pay for something by credit card you have extensive consumer rights regardless of the merchant's policies.

Finally, the real reason these sales pitches work so well is they MAKE SKIN CONTACT - and there's something about the actual physical touching that makes the sale a lot easier.
I'm more interested in how this was automatically generated rather than in the end product itself.
New web site to learn languages
Yes, but Android does not have them yet, and that is the place where it would really be useful.
Oh, lighten up. It was totally open source and many people, including jenkins-ci, have taken my idea and improved upon it, which was exactly my intention with the project: to apply the automatic curation principles of Wikipedia and apply them to F/OSS as a whole.
What happens when you have a good IDE and a good programming language?

I say we have both!
it has an LTE baseband chip but no amplifiers for the LTE frequency bands, no matching antenna and no LTE royalties paid.
Show HN: A simple, virtualenv powered Django test and deployment web-app
Agree 100%. We assume as programmers that because we learned something that is intellectually challenging, that means we have a license to explore other areas of science. Sometimes that works, but sometimes it simply doesn't.
have the mongodb architects commented on this?
Show HN: Embedding SSL inside HTTP
- and the Redditization of HN comments...
This brings plenty of low-level (or higher level) method call and related structure definitions for Windows.

You can for instance get processes informations, start a wave sound, and many more.

Scroll down to the middle to see API calls.

One use-case is using CoffeeScript or JavaScript to write tools that would benefit from these calls (could be system tools, or not).
I wasn't disparaging the "better at night" programmers ... why should you switch if your work habits are right for you? In fact, I'd rather not talk anyone into switching as that would mean more people up early and less quiet for me.
October 28th wasn't exactly "ages ago".
LTOA: http://www.recursivity.com/blog/2012/10/28/ides-are-a-langua...
Can anyone else comment on this? As mkuhn points out, reviews are very mixed.

Battery life would be the deal breaker for me.
Having IDE support is a feature of a language. You have to design your language so that IDE support is possible [1]. Most dynamically typed languages and functional languages fail in this regard and if you use such a language you always are jumping between API docs and your editor.

[1] http://blog.efftinge.de/2011/04/dear-java-killers.html
The tone of the mail sent to Sinofsky are irritating. But he answered them very politely. I can't find any problem with it.
It's a set of guiding principles. But you can either be pragmatic, go for the good rather than the perfect and make continuous small steps in the direction of your goals. Or you can sit back and refuse to vote for anything that isn't a pure manifestation of your utopia. Neither approach, IMO, is inherently better that the other. The latter rarely get anything done, while for the former, I've seen some examples of securing small, rather than big steps in the wrong direction being touted as successes.
Does anyone know which ballpark Go is in, performance-wise? In my mind, it's a bit faster than Python, whereas I would expect it to be closer to C. However, I have no clue how I formed this opinion, so actual benchmarks would help.

I wonder how it compares to pypy.
I wonder what percentage of founders make the "single founder" percentile, if there even is one.

Also, I really like the name "Saar Gur," maybe because of its brevity. Is that just me?...
Debug Mode is the Only Mode