skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's not a binary thing. There are several types of failure.

Being locked up for fraud would be one failure that's unlikely to be a good sign for future investors.

Having a product offering that is ahead of its time, so there isn't a market yet would be an example of a good failure. You did everything right, apart from time things well.

The fact is, once you succeed, it's natural to stop trying. So there's way more data from failures than from success.

You can't really learn anything from one success. You could have just been lucky.

Just look at programming, you might iterate an algorithm a few times before you hit on something you think works well. Each iteration, you're learning from the failure of the last. You're assessing what you could make better, and implementing it the next time.
decrease weight, increase reps and slightly increase speed. aim to do around 3x the reps you would be doing according to the article before you hit failure. use freeweights as much as possible instead of bars or machines.

note - i'm not an expert and this is based on my personal research. its worked for me, though. i actually decreased in size but maintained strength after switching from one style to another.
I agree with you about a major difference between us on motorways and anits is the variance in our speed compared to that of an ants, which I presume all travel at roughly the same speed.

Interestingly, in the UK (and probably lots of other places) we have average speed cameras at road works which limit people to 50mph pretty effectively, this results in everyone travelling the same speed with no overtaking. Anecdotally I've found this to work quite well at keeping the traffic moving.
It certainly helps to get your foot in the door.
AT&T leaks June iPhone announcement information
This guy Tim Ferriss is a master BS artist.
Do you need one? Obviously not. Whether or not you should have one is a different question.

The best answer I've seen regards professionalism. We require degrees from doctors and CPAs and passing the bar for lawyers not because it's a guarantee of quality, but because it indicates that the person has a certain minimal level of understanding of the field's Body of Knowledge. Having that knowledge means that they are less likely to totally screw up and they have a rational basis for finding a solution to whatever ails you. Requiring a degree in CS, SE, or EE (I don't see the point of requiring a degree if it's not directly related to the field) does exactly this.

Of course, the argument then becomes should we be regarded as professionals or "just" programmers & hackers...

Disclosure: I have a BS in EE and an MS in SE and once seriously considered becoming a registered Professional Engineer (PE). I'm also a card-carrying hacker and I disagree with the article.
I am very skeptical of the article. It seems highly unlikely that with only four hours of weight training that he packed on 34 lbs of muscle. The research he quoted wasn't as esoteric as he purports. I was a regular reader of misc.fitness.weights around '01-'04 where the adherents of various methods slugged it out. The general consensus was that High Intensity Training (HIT) is no worse than other workouts at best, and even the proponents of HIT made no such outrageous claims as he did. There are enough bodybuilders and weightlifters out there that every technique has likely been tried hundreds if not thousands of times, especially with money on the line, and any technique that had such a dramatic result would have spread like wildfire.

The photos on that webpage already exhibit several of the tricks used by the exercise equipment infomercial industry to make the difference between before and after pictures more dramatic: untightened versus tightened muscles, posture, tanning, shaving, strategic placement of clothing. I will not guess at any other techniques he used which can't be proven by examining the photographs.

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
Which lib are you using for selector filtering?
Ive long respected the approach of Salesforce: whilst this is new info to me I am not surprised at the efficiency.

Pretty impressive that: 20 tables for all that data! And we are stuck messing with MySQL (etc) and all these new non-relational databases. :)
Preparation and disaster-specific learning can only take you so far, but http://collapse.reddit.com is a serviceable overview of that part. http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com and http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/ have a more nuanced view of social and economic collapse; 1950s style "nuclear armageddon" style survivalism is unlikely to suffice in the real world. For the last nail in the coffin of "guns and independence" style survivalism, try the War Nerd's treatment of the topic: http://exiledonline.com/war-nerd-apocalypse-never/. I wish I could figure a way out of his unpalatable dilemma: convincingly join a large church in a rural area long before the collapse, or die shortly after it happens.

(edited for tone--I'm an undeservedly arrogant bastard everywhere, but it only comes across as charming face to face)
Similar: http://treetop.rubyforge.org

Topic hijack: Does anyone know of a parser generator lib for javascript? I can't find one on Google.
Ok, I will. The value of restaurants is fleeting.

Here's why: The value derived from an individual from a restaurant is food, and perhaps being in a pleasing ambient environment for a short while. They derive value from the environment only while they are there, and from the food for the next day or so. After that, no more value unless you think he might have died otherwise, in which case he gained long term value in still being alive.

The deal with restaurants is that they continuously deliver short term value to a stream of people who, hopefully, come back again and again. The value of an individual meal is fleeting, but they're willing to provide that value again and again.

My point is not to confuse a steady stream of short term value with a discrete instance of long-term value. I can use a well-built chainsaw for far longer than I can use a New York strip steak from a high class restaurant. Maybe you and I are discussing value from different perspectives though, but I'm not arguing that short-term value is a lesser degree than long term value. I'm just arguing that they aren't the same.
I think so.

In fact, I believe it so much, that's my startup: http://www.chuwe.com - "Stackoverflow for startups and small businesses."

As brandnewlow pointed out, starting it is a massive uphill battle - chicken and egg problem as it were. The software's only small part. We're attacking it in what we hope is a novel way, but you would have to find an approach unique to the area you were targeting, I imagine.

If you're interested, I've been planning on open-sourcing chuwe in a bit after we make it a bit more robust. Contact me and we can work out something if you'd like to just take the software and modify it to your own niche!
I don't know about Chrome, but last I tried with Safari (greasekit) and opera, they did not have 100% GreaseMonkey compatibility yet, unfortunately.
Are you able to set a top-limit cap on the amount you spend or the number of users?

I'd be interested in hearing real numbers, in regards to how much you had to invest in Mechanical Turk to get a decent response to further your application.
Augusta, GA, USA
It's refreshing to see such care taken to avoid conflating correlation with causation. Even when faced with such a complex system, you can chip away at the mystery if you apply some discipline.

Although I am a little curious about some of the less-mainstream theories: "Other hypotheses were untestable at best, such as claims that the bees were being abducted by aliens." With our pride, we always _assumed_ the aliens would _naturally_ want to abduct us!
Telephony’s Tale of The Tape: Shrinking Landline Customers
Targeting Social Buttons on Blogs
I like this talk a lot. It's a very important goal to get the minimum done to start testing and to start getting feedback on. However, one dangerous thing I think communicated here is, and I paraphrase, "just put an ad on adwords to a page describing something and see if you get click troughs or signups".

Jason Fried at 37signals has spoken a few times on how little business they got from adwords (might still be the case). I remember comments from him 2+ years ago, that their adwords account was just kind of forgotten about.

Since a very tiny minority of their customers ever come from adwords now, I wonder how much smaller that would be if it was just a signup form and a few bullets of what Basecamp was going to be.

The point is, if Jason Fried had created Google adwords ads 3-4 years ago about what Basecamp was going to be before they started even putting a couple weeks into it, it sounds like he would have had a false negative.

Don't get me wrong though. I'm pointing to more about the problem with relying on adwords than the overall philosophy of the method.

Afterall, 37signals uses their blog to do this technique instead of adwords. They would leak out stuff about CRM and Sunrise many months before they ever finally had Highrise out for sale. I'm sure they got tons of great feedback on their blog and people clamoring for "yes give me simple crm!" as a strong positive signal that they were on the right path of a lucrative product.

So yes, get the minimum done and start testing on it. Just don't solely rely on taking a Google Adwords ad out though.

I recently was on a panel at the University of Illinois talking about entrepreneurship and Inkling. I was with Keith Schacht, one of the original founders of Inventables, and now he's doing craftedfun.com. He 's also religious about testing early concepts. I love a story he had about how he had an idea about some kind of mobile application the employees at a bar would use.

So right then and there he drew some stuff on paper, then went to 3 local bars near his house and asked to talk with a manager. He then bugged them each for a few minutes about his drawings on paper. And from those conversations he decided not to execute on those ideas. Sure this took balls, and he's crazy like that :)

But we all could be doing this more. And probably know someone who we could probably be bugging about something we drew on paper who could reasonably be a future customer, before we commit too much of our precious time on code and marketing.
It is indeed a diplomatic approach. Less drama is better for business.
I hope it's good advice, because it makes sense to me, and I will probably take it to heart.

I see that some people here don't think there's much value in this article. I've grown to believe that different personal/productivity advice like this appeal to and are effective for different people, based on their personalities. For instance I read Getting Things Done, and I just can't keep that up. David Allen must be a machine, I guess. Not me.
I voted you up, but I disagree to some extent.

I expect that if you're creative, dedicated, and put in the time to tackle the "long, hard slog" you'll have something of considerable value by the end of it. In fact, if you can get the momentum necessary, you'll have precluded others from even entering the field.

But you're definitely corect that the right persona and pre-existing followings basically super-jumpstart these types of sites.
> governance has probably heavily suffered

We managed to settle a continent back when government spending was about 1% of GDP (as compared to 30% today), so government mostly breaking down wouldn't strike me as a big problem. Heck, Somalia has functioning water distribution companies, cell phone companies, etc., even without any government.
as a site? sure.

as a business? hard to tell.

Yahoo Answers holds the potential to encompass every use case for StackOverflow and all your offshoots. However, I sincerely believe that the added context that a site like StackOverflow provides (being that it's curated specifically toward programmers) does provide real value. That sort of context injection could certainly be carried over to other verticals (provided the sites can attract seed contributors and curators).
whoa cool a bank management software connected with an online game :> the first that spots a bug will buy a REAL island and retire on it
Yes, that's a good example of why not to use S3 as a simple backup destination. However software like Jungle Disk on running on top of S3 adds versioning and deleted file retention to make it act like a real backup system.

Having a local backup is great too, but that won't protect you from fire, flood, or theft in many cases.
Most of these kids use net cafes by the hour or quarter hour, so if they don't achieve a net-positive scam, they take a loss. Not sure the 'big guys' are making money from crime, just operating an internet access business.
Liberia’s Blackboard Blogger
Did a single person invent the telephone, or the car, or computer?

No, several people happened to invent them at pretty much the same time. It's just luck as to which got the credit for 'inventing'.

Sure, if no one innovated, then we wouldn't progress, but that's not what I was saying.

I was just saying that the OP "if it weren't for this guy you wouldn't be starting all these startups on shoestring budgets" was wrong.
A degree will help you get your foot in the door if you're looking for your first programming job. Once you've got some real world experience, that's going to be much more valuable than what you might have studied in school.

A lot of places (especially smaller companies, in my experience) are more interested in seeing examples of your work, even if it's a web page you designed or an open source app you've contributed to in your spare time.
GPU Programming For The Rest Of Us
the pictures are definitely played up, as is a lot of the rhetoric.

for me, the process worked because i wasn't very strong to begin with, but was athletic. its much easier to put on muscle mass when you don't have much to begin with, as opposed to being a bodybuilder to start and then try to use this process to bulk up even more. there are diminishing returns.

the point of the post is valid, imo -- minimal time and work, when done intelligently, does show large results. in this case.
No but I guarantee you that the phds get to stay during a recession then the non-phds who are expendable.
Despite the oddly condescending tone of your reply, I appreciate the links. Thanks. I didn't know about collapse.reddit.com, but I shouldn't be surprised that there is a forum dedicated to this topic.
To get a job? Yes, especially if you're entry level. To start your own software company, work on open-source, freelance, etc. probably not.
My larger concern would be coordination of food distribution from farms to cities.
> I can't think of a smaller/simpler/quicker way.

ordered list.
bravo. the misunderstanding of economic latency combined with our natural hyperbolic discounting seems to lead to the majority of misunderstandings about economics (besides the basic fallacies and terminology).

It seems that everyone has been infected with short-term thinking and forgotten how to run a regular business. In short-term thinking you don't care about whether or not you're going to do business with anyone again, because you're unsure whether they will be around to do business with. This kind of reasoning is infectious. What we wound up with was a "race to the bottom" in terms of who could make the riskiest highest leverage moves.
I agree, but monetization's always difficult.

The trick is finding a niche that you're interested in, can serve well with the site's format, and has money.

If you find that niche and you approach it in a novel way, then you can (likely) serve it infinitely better than a general questions and answers site like mahalo/yahoo answers.
Exactly. This is what Jason seems to miss. No one sets out for failure nor do they think failure is a good thing. The axioms and other well-known phrases were designed to keep you going after failure, not to inspire you to fail.
Something like SO could work in other fields. But, the devil is in the details of the moderation and incentive schemes. The features of the site matter, but not nearly as much as the community. So, it is more of an anthropology and sociology problem than a build-a-webapp one.

For law and medicine, for instance, you'd have to fight the mindset of "online is not reliable". In programming it is fairly easy to check if someone's answer is trustworthy because you can go and test it yourself relatively quickly and unambiguously. In other fields establishing the credibility of someone answering a question is a lot more tricky. That said, I think bar associations have (bad) sites to ask each other questions.

I agree with Jeff that you can't make a general site of this sort without an intense amount of moderation. (he said so in a recent SO podcast)

In short, it all comes down to the community. And it is probably hard to figure out what incentives and moderation to have for a given community if you are not a part of it yourself.
Too bad they blocked Boxee. Not that it is hard to get Hulu working on Boxee again(I love the rss feed hack). But they won't truly replace television for most consumers until they are allowed to embrace the home theater computer in a meaningful way.
GotMirror?  GotMore?  Poetically?
Agreed. With Chrome supporting it's multi-process security and Safari/WebKit exploring the world of ACID3, HTML5, CSS3 and many other advanced "we'll do it later" technologies, the only technical reason why Firefox is still relevant is it's extensions.

(Of course there's more social reasons like Safari for Windows lagging, my guess is that it's too "Mac-based" with the custom windowing and font-aliasing.)
If you have a network of people who can get your foot in the door for a job, then no, it's not a necessity. It would be very difficult, though, to get past most HR screening without some sort of degree on your resume.
He had his own segment on The Screen Savers, a fairly popular geek/tech show, for some time. That's where he plugged Digg. So yeah, he was pretty well known.
Would it need to be absolutely positioned on the page? If so, how do you front-end guys handle this cross-platform?
the iphone3.0 is not the next desktop. it's just the next killer app for the iphone.
I can see what you're getting at, although I find it deeply depressing, but that isn't how I read the article.

The case of Jacob (Kobi) Alexander would also suggest it can be made to work.
The Javascript trap I willingly step into
It works the other way around, as well.

With a college degree in Computer Science, I had a world of trouble finding a job that wasn't programming. I'd apply for different jobs and inevitably end up on the 'CS major' pile on some recruiter's desk. Grr.
Next step up in magnetic media
I'm more than a little impressed with Passenger. It didn't exactly adhere to Debian conventions, but it's new and nothing in Ruby-land does.

Regardless, it was a breeze to set up, and seems to be running great.

It looks like a lot of effort was invested into this -- I wonder if they'll be able to make money.
It's still money laundering, I believe. Remember, possibly laundered money, like possible drug money, is guilty until proven innocent, and since they sometimes literally bring cases against the money rather than any person, there's little pretense of upholding the money holder's (whether they're legally the "owner" is often at question and depends on jurisdiction) rights.
Isn't this a bit meaningless unless we have some sort of repository?
I like the concept, after a brief look at the site here are my thoughts:

1) The site has a clean look but is fairly boring and bland. Get some more color and design going. It's hard to separate content visually etc.

2) As a side project it looks cool but I don't see the startup potential. Where's the money going to come from? Ads on floor plans? Your click thrus will be low I fear.

3) How do you get more content? What's the motivation for me or for a conference center to get their floor plan on your site? I'm not sure it solves a problem that existed before. Was navigation of conferences and hotels that big of an issue?

Some ideas:
1) Make mobile access possible a bigger selling point. If I can get to it from my iphone or blackberry etc then that makes it a bit more useful.

2) Find your way to draw in more content.

3) Find your line to profit. Is it a directory for conventions + this nifty layout and mapping utility? Do you rent a higher quality system for events willing to pay for it?

I'm not trying to cast dispersion and such, good luck on it :)
I agree that start-up is the problem, but sometimes users who just wander in can make a question-and-answer site very successful, even if the operator is obscure. What's crucial for getting lucky this way is good usability of the site and a crew of volunteer moderators as the site develops. My best example of success in a Q and A site is College Confidential.

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/

It isn't perfect, but it is chock full of information about the college admission process, and its online atmosphere of politeness and regard for other users' questions readily differentiates it from most other competitors running sites on the same subject. The site operator is pretty good at getting press notices and other free publicity, and quite good at search engine optimization, but mostly he's good at building a helpful and friendly online community.
How I’m using Twitter for PR: A Case Study
Actual Revenue For Twitter, Courtesy of Microsoft
The "way to make exceptions" is to incorporate your startup and sign an IP agreement with it.
Ask HN: Do your users actually use those social bookmarking icons (ShareThis/AddThis)?
I don't use them so I find it hard to imagine that others do. Has anyone found these to be a useful addition to the their site (based on tracking statistics)?
Ask HN: Review my prototype (webnodes)
Webnodes is a site which will be centered around hosting online communities which are transparently, and democratically governed.

A key feature is the recognition of good discussion, which is one reason why threads are displayed as trees.

There are lots of little bugs which need work, but what I'd really appreciate is feedback on the usability/readability of the thread layout.

Thanks to reddit/proggit for providing the test data. For those who are interested, the source code is available at http://github.com/csytan/webnodes/tree and will later be made available under a permissive license.

http://www.webnodes.org
Ask HN: Deciding between microISV and something bigger
I'm looking for feedback, pointers, anecdotes, etc. I started building an iPhone app (one that is actually useful) with the thought of making some extra money. As I've thought about it, I've thought of some ways that it could be expanded with a web presence.

The question that I have is this: How do you decide when an idea is "big" enough to justify really "going for it." Or is it a function of people over idea (e.g. the right people can make a go of most any idea)?

I'm still slugging away on the original idea (don't want to get distracted :), but I'm sitting with ideas that might be worth pursuing.

Also, FWIW, I don't have the advantage of being single with no kids and no mortgage, so turning in a YC app isn't really an option. You whippersnappers have it so good these days.
Downloading Communism...
My guess is that vast numbers of first-worlders would die waiting for someone else (the government, the rich, whoever) to save them. Somalia was better than much of the rest of Africa by a lot of measures around 1999-2001, but things haven't gotten better since then, partly due to the destabilizing tactics of its neighbors, who seem to prefer tyranny or kleptocracy to anarchy, there.