skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I doubt its going to be pushing "develop for linux" that will be a problem, most games aren't using many os calls and those are generally easily ported anyway.

The challenge will be getting developers to program for opengl/sdl/openal instead of directx, something they could already do on windows but have chosen to go the directx route. The mobile push has opened a lot of developers up to opengl ES and opengl in general sucks less now so this may not be as difficult a pitch as it would have been 5 years ago.

What would be really cool, is if valve decided to throw their weight behind building a direct 3d state machine for linux, I know there is work underway there but I would imagine valve could seriously speed that up along with being in a position to apply pressure to the video card manufacturers for support in a way that the OSS community simply can't.
Another possibility is that US people tend to work longer hours and for more days of the year. Workplaces are not good conditions for exercise and food. And once away from work it is easier to go for convenience (eg fast food) due to limited time availability.
Please don't make this another 'ruby is better' thing, OK?

Just use 'pip install' and forget the rest, this is overwhelmingly the most common advice. If you don't follow this advice and you still complain about installing Python packages, you are inflicting that damage on yourself voluntarily.

Most things you need to use on Windows have exe/msi installers, if you cannot get pip working on Windows (it's not rocket science though)
Not just latency, with 10 gig Ethernet doing udp/multicast it can be a pretty huge effect throughput wise (TCP with a card that supports offloading not quite so much).
Yes! I hate how the really valuable knowledge is just tied up inside the walls of big industry. People making money are too busy to teach others how to do their jobs.

I'm always in search of these types of answers, and rarely get them on the internet. I've looked up those questions about starting an airline in the past.

Maybe we can't start an airline, I understand the barriers to entry, but if we got a look at the mechanics of the whole thing maybe someone could disrupt just a small segment of it. That person sells some software to the airlines and makes lots of money. That person then works as CTO for an airline. That person moves up to CEO. That person later leaves and creates an upstart airline that disrupts the industry as we know it. This is the way these things happen all the time, there's no reason for pessimism.
I'm a developer that would be interested in helping this come to fruition. Maybe starting a github repo with the site's code would be a good start for others to pitch in.

As for the domain, howdoistart.com returns:

"This domain is for sale. Please contact Curtis Stock at curtis.stock@yahoo.com for more information."
Hive in the cloud
Maybe Apache should have a braindead on/off setting, so it works better than Nginx after a single tweak.
I wouldn't call it "fault" as so much as it is "responsibility". Of course, he's looking at it from the negative, but otherwise the initial success and growth of his company was to his own credit. Owning up to what you have control over is freeing, yet burdensome. One also has to realize that one does not have control over everything, and when others take away from what one has done, forgiveness is still a necessary process do undergo.
Maybe I'm a lot more cynical than I thought, but I think this is the best definition of a startup in this thread. I'm continually amazed by stories on HN where people invest significant portions of their lives and/or wealth with no idea of how they can generate revenue.

Now I AM going to get cynical by saying it's in the VCs' interest for this to happen, because they can swoop in and grab the few that do turn out to be profitable. The HN dream is a bit like Hollywood - most of the hopefuls who chase the HN dream are going to end up eating ramen through three or four pivots, before they realise quite how bad the odds are against them. Sorry for such a black thought at the start of the week!
I'm pretty certain he isn't suggesting that. The context he is largely talking about is running a business where you are in charge. Not a woman talking a walk through the park one night...
> I've never used megaupload or piratebay for anything other than ripping off companies of content they own and have right to hold a monopoly over. Every person I know does the same thing.

Everyone, really?

Myself and many people I know actually do (also) use those services for legitimate purposes. In fact, when TPB got blocked by the larger ISPs in NL, the first times I was bothered by that was when I was linked to their blog (blocked) and when I was linked to a legal torrent of someone distributing some large data files (forget what) via TPB.

Another case in point, a significant part of MU's 25 petabyte that is being held, isn't infringing either.

I'm not saying these services aren't being used for illegitimate purposes, they obviously are. I just find it surprising that you, or anyone you know, has only ever used them for anything but such purposes.

edit: while I'm here, I might as well point out that characterizing the confinement as "somewhat unethical" is kind of an understatement IMO.
Why would a 16 year old be denied a beer in Germany? Sixteen is the drinking age for beer and wine. And then 18 for hard alcohol.

I think the drinking age in the USA is a joke. At 18 you are responsible enough to be given a gun and kill people in the military, but you are not yet responsible enough for alcohol.
Actually even this tidbit (contracts) helps. Identifying the challenges/obstacles is very valuable as it opens it to creative solutions to those problems that may not occur to insiders.
"Blogspam" is slang used to refer to a specific rule on HN, rather than a literal description of content.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please submit the original source. If a blog post
reports on something they found on another site, submit
the latter.
In my case at least, the support for these guys is because the treatment is so unethical. I don't believe mega upload or thepiratebay should be legal, but I want to see Kim dot com freed because I don't believe the FBI should have the power to arrest New Zealanders and take all their property. I want to see the pirate bay founders freed because I don't believe that solitary confinement is a valid punishment for copyright infringement.

I would be supportive of punishments befitting their crimes. As long as they are punished far in excess of their crimes, they are victims and deserve our sympathy and support.
Thinking on this further just now, one of the biggest concepts of the series is how the tiny Foundation had to survive purely by out-thinking and out-maneveuring the larger Empire who had more people, resources, etc.

Fundamentally - no pun intended - isn't this what we do for a living?

By the numbers, our startups are in the same position. Our competitors have 100x the revenue, cash on hand, employees, partnerships, patents etc, etc. According to the spreadsheets, they win.

Instead, lack of resources becomes hunger and creativity. Lack of people becomes a lack of bureaucracy and results in flexibility. When you have very little, "losing everything" isn't scary.

Challenging the Empire just got to be a little more fun. ;)
> Who still uses it?

Apparently Netflix, http://opsec.eu/backup/OpenConnectDeploymentGuide-v2.4a.pdf
Third-party Python packages depend on each other all the time, and (once again) breakage is a problem with the packages as they are produced, not with the language itself... on Python as on Ruby
Arduino, 3D Printers, Kickstarter, and BitCoin
Aren't you homeless? Your first priority should be a getting a job so you can get out of debt and put a roof over your head. Then worry about big ideas like changing healthcare.

To be perfectly candid, the reason people dismiss you is that someone who seems incapable of providing for themselves to take care of their basic needs is certainly incapable of starting a hugely disruptive business.

Sorry if this is harsh. Just trying to help.
The problem with this is that for questions like "how could I build a cable company?", answers don't help".

If you want to build a cable company, a payments system, a new government, or colonize mars there is no high level answer. There are hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of sub-questions that need to be answered. Eventually so many that you need to hire people to ask and answer them, and you won't even know what the question was.

The truth is that if you really want to go to space, no one will help you. Not because we don't want to help you, but because we can't. We can speculate, and dig up research or law or economics---but at the end of the day, all you're doing is inviting us to help design your bikeshed. If you can break down the problem, figure out which questions to ask, what information you don't have, and who does, that person might be able to help you. By the time you've gotten that far, you're already on the verge of sinking your life into this---and if you want to build a cable company, that's what it's going to take.
Nauseating. Piracy killed the real Usenet, and now pirates are upset that enforcement is killing the goofy little playground they built inside its corpse.

When I was 18, I ran a competitive (on the Freenix leaderboard) full-feed Usenet server for the ISP I worked at. Every ISP in the world could have provided full-feed Usenet access, but for the assholes who loaded the system down with ASCII-encoded binaries. Even while it was possible for an independent provider to offer Usenet to customers, it was still a total nightmare because of the ludicrous storage requirements for binaries, which ensured that only an ever-dwindling number of providers would take the time to offer it at all.

It's startling to me that there's a Usenet at all anymore, since it's essentially been reduced to a collaborative system for sharing pirated binaries.
Yes, it does. Read this: http://mailinator.blogspot.com.es/2010/02/how-i-sped-up-my-s...
which it's a deeper take on the subject.
Frankly, freedom, absent anything else, is pretty useless. You're free to move to Antarctica, where I suspect you could build private infrastructure, etc.

As a thought experiment, still on the headlights: there is no state. I strike a man with my car and kill him. Then I continue on without telling anyone. What discourages me from this? Clearly he has no recourse.

Another: I make my money extracting rare earth metals. The byproducts are toxic and radioactive, so I pay someone to drive them 100 miles away ( on a road I built) and dump them near a town. What prevents me from doing this?

Edit: as I was writing this, I realized in the first example there would probably be a market for professional avengers. Sort of like insurance, the rich could pay a small force monthly so that, should they die, their paramilitary outfit would investigate and murder the perpetrator. It sounds like it would make an awesome anti-randian story about the absurdity of following capitalism to a logical conclusion
Hyperboles are great for jokes, but bad for arguments.

Many people take hyperbolic statements too literally and are quick to argue with them. By arguing the point, the person who made the statement is put on the defensive and the conversation descends into petty bickering.

Next time you are about to react to a hyperbolic statement, take a moment to consider whether the person making the statement actually believes it or is just saying it to express their feelings on the subject.

Consider the statement: "Fish is the worst food ever!" Obviously, there are worse foods, but-- do you really need argue that? Can you even win an argument about taste? Who are you really impressing by arguing about that? Also, why bother?
One of the main principles that Collins destroys is that "great companies are started with a vision." He basically says a lot of great companies started with weak ideas, but were willing to change (or pivot in your writing.)

Collins primarily looked at established, large businesses. You won't catch him saying that his ideas primarily applies to start-up success. His point is that start-ups are all about luck, and he points out how many a lucky start-up blew their lead because they couldn't figure out how to establish a company.

So, rather being in opposition to your thoughts, there is a lot of common ground.

Other than that, some great thoughts. I would add that I have seen brilliant people that could not network or were not resilient. I think both of these need to be added to your startup advice, and are important success factors.
There is a big difference between negativism and cold reality. For example, these three posts in the original Ask HN thread:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893858

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4893826

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4894378

Are all actionable, informative and realistic. They aren't negative comments. Sure, there were some "This is dumb and you are stupid" posts in the thread, but most of the replies were sincerely realistic.

It really wasn't middlebrow dismissal...it was "this is going to be hard, and here is why". In all honesty, that is exactly the sort of feedback I would want as someone doing basic research in an area. I would want to know why it is going to be hard, why certain interests/business ideas are entrenched, etc.
Peopleware is a great book to read, highly recommended and I hope DeMarco and Lister write a sequel as I'd love to find out what they think of balance balls and standing exercise desks.
Would be great to see some sort of description of what it is before signing up.
They all are but the different formulations of ARBEIT MACHT FREI.
> I am still quite intrigued that technical people somehow support the likes of KimDotCom or this guy.

I think part of what makes this difficult for some people here to understand is that they do not do a good job of differentiating "support Dotcom" and "support Dotcom's right to due process". He may be guilty as hell, but if I think the justice system is being abused or circumvented, I am going to "support" that person. It doesn't matter how obviously guilty he is, he deserves the same protections and considerations that we give to any other accused.
Ask HN: Does using PHP hurt adoption of my project?
My company has cleared me to refactor & open-source (MIT) an AngularJS+D3+PHP dashboard tool I wrote (similar to Chart.io, but intended for integration with existing admins/backends).

My fear is, despite the PHP backend simply being a connector for various data sources, the audience for this project would be apprehensive towards contribution or usage because of PHP's stigma.

I can fairly easily convert the backend code to use Node instead, but would only want to do so if it helped get more eyes on the project and improved chances that others could help me with contributions.
It would be interesting, if they are able to control the cell division, to see what applications this could have in oncology.
Agreed. Thank you 1000x!
The immediate flaw in that approach is that "patio11 et al" are top contributers because they post a lot and have valuable opinions - NOT because they are always right. They're not (I'm confident they would agree here). Therefore their opinions would be inappropriate as an AI training set.
Yeah, it's been pretty successful at driving additional walking for me. I'd been meaning to get more exercise, but finding difficulty getting motivated -- now I pretty routinely walk a couple extra miles per day.
I've been reading Fooled by Randomness by Taleb, great book, same topic.
Yes, I think you've gotten through to me. You're willing to hold strong opinions regarding the core discipline of the Western Tradition in a state of abject ignorance, on the grounds that actually educating yourself on the topic before forming such an opinion is analogous to committing suicide in order to understand suicide.

That's as bizarre a rationale for willful illiteracy as I can think of. You seem content with it, and I wish you well.
Google’s looming hegemony
Oh yes, hyperbole is the worst!
Not an NLP guy by any means, but aren't we at the point where we can at least guess sentiment algorithmically? Couldn't you combine that with the commenter's history, the length of the post and the presence of charged words such as "nonsense" and "silly?"
> Had they offered me real treatment,

I don't know what you mean by real treatment, but a doctor will offer you what he knows is best based on his education, experience, past medical history and medical tests. If that's unreal to you, well, I don't know what can the doctor do about that.

> what is wrong with the bigger picture that I and other people would consciously choose to take our chances on unproven methods rather than accept what little was offered us.

I am sorry but I am missing the bigger picture. If the doctor could help, he will. If he won't, some other doctor would. It's a service industry after all. But when doctors say they can't help you, it's because they can't. What's the bigger picture here? Modern medicine has limitations, error rates and unknowns. People acknowledge and work on them.

As another commenter pointed out, the "alternate medicine" that actually works is called "medicine". If eating some fruit is curing cancer, it will be researched and integrated in modern medicine. The pharma companies or any other researcher have no reason not to accept things that work, whether they are manufactured in a lab or found in jungles of India.
Did you read the post? For him, Ingress is kids/family time. He's not the only one I know playing with his kids. Running around outside, hunting locations, competing against a shadowy opposition? That sounds like excellent quality time with the kids!
This isn't about getting rid of the George Carlins of the python scene, this is about getting rid of the Morton Downey Jrs of the tech scene. Being a bit blue is a lot different than using degrading, insulting, and irrelevant images in your talks. Codes of conduct like these aren't about stripping away all four letter words, they're about getting rid of presentations like "perform like a porn star," which only serve to detract from the larger scene and message.
So in other words, your actual definition of startup is "a company that doesn't make any profit"?

Apple is designed for growth since their inception (when they were still a startup, by anyone's definition of startup) and that haven't changed much ever since (except, perhaps, on the Scully phase... and probably now, under Cook): they kept iterating fast on new products, predating their own margins with internal competition and all those other small things companies designed for growth do...
The enduring Apple TV Fantasy
So if it's a wiki, how do you intend to make a change, given that it's static? I'd be interested to see how your solution to that design issue compares with the solution I came up with over a decade ago.
5 Amazing iPhone development resources that are totally free.
I totally agree that it would reflect very nice on them if they sponsored the different BSD projects a bit. I was just pointing out that Clang redeems a whole lot nonsupport badwill.

OT: Japp.
Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen
Saying that that was a proof of spending 15 minutes to search about Reddit API would save his time implied that kybernetyk didn't do that research.

But kybernetyk already said he did the research before and that Reddit's API is not good enough for his requirement.

So this is not the case that 15 minutes of research will save the time. And his comment meant he assumed kybernetyk didn't do research, i.e. being dumb for not doing search.
This is an understatement.

"Ingress is causing a surge in mobile power pack sales." Might hit closer to the mark. A majority of the high-level players I know are tethering a Nexus 7 to their phone, and attaching their phone to a mobile power pack. My phone gets slightly less than 1 hour on it's own.
Use n to go to next occurence of your search pattern and N to go the other way.
Do you have a source regarding the fan mail and visits from his mother other than the sources that you have stated you will not accept because you believe there is bias?

Here is a Swedish press report covering her attempts early on to see her son, which were denied.

http://www.dn.se/nyheter/sverige/misstankt-for-dataintrang-f...

This article covers more on her getting the run around.

http://debatt.svt.se/2012/09/18/hanteringen-av-gottfrid-har-...

She has since reported that she saw was permitted to see him once, on September 18.

On November 10th she reported she was allowed to see him one hour a week, but some weeks it is cancelled because the guard that must listen to the conversation is unavailable.

> "I am allowed to visit him for an hour every week but this week the police men that must go with me to listen to our conversations didn’t have time to do so,” says Kristina.

> “This has happened before. Of course the uncertainty this creates makes his time in isolation more difficult. This is of course also obvious both to the police and to the prosecutor.”

http://torrentfreak.com/pirate-bay-founder-arrested-again-on...

The source here is torrentfreak and his mother, which you have suggested are lying and misrepresenting the situation. Strangely, there are no other sources I can find detailing how often and for how long she is allowed to visit. Given the widespread international interest in Sweden's abuse of human rights here, it is quite odd that there is a near blackout of reliable news on the case from the Swedish press. Since you live there perhaps you have some insights into why this would be so?

Do you agree that she was seeing him at most 1 hr a week, or do you have reason to believe it was more often?

Do you assert that someone held in solitary with the exception of a 1 hr visit each week is not really being held in solitary?
Not by default, put

set incsearch

in your ~/.vimrc
Oh, but they are riddles. Hanoi tower, permutations, travelling salesman kind of problems. Algorithmically tricky (not hard, the problems are in textbooks for ages), but trivial from a programming perspective. The kind of problems that a physics major would think constitutes programming, but mostly irrelevant to complexity met in either the industry or CS academia.

I do some machining as a hobby; there are decades old teasers like turning a cube inside a hollow cube on a lathe from a piece of round stock. I feel like those are very much like Olympiad problems in nature, and just as remote from real-life machining exercises.
Looking again, I have to wonder if he (Chris Lintott) knows he (Patrick Moore) was too ill to survive that long.

I think for the last five years it seemed like Moore made a side comment about not being around to see the results of X telescope building programme or Y space probe.
This doesn't cut the mustard and should not excuse LG and Google for the purchasing chaos. People who ordered just a few days ago have already received their phones, while others have been waiting for weeks. Some people are even ordering a second phone just to see if they get a shipping notification, and if they do, cancelling their original order. It's a bit of a farce.

http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1962514&...
Nice to see that the amound they manage to get seem to increase (which I admit is a guess but the numbers wouldn't make sense otherwise as they wouldn't keep asking for more if they didn't manage to get what they asked for or close to it).
This is exactly the mentality we need to see more of. Dismissing good ideas is not just unproductive but actually destructive to the overall progression of thought - which is why we're here in the first place.
To be less hyperbolic, recall the parabole of the... circle.