skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Creating yet another complication for jails and chroot.
This particular piece of advice is something I want to highlight:

Learn about system administration. I don't have much data to back this, but I've found that many of the famously successful hackers have at one time in their careers been sysadmins. E.g., ESR, Robert Morris, Tim O'Reilly, and many more. Try browsing resumes of your hacker heroes and see if any of them don't have this qualification. Such work gives you an important practical perspectives on usage patterns, systems topologies, hardware limitations, lifecycles, automation, tool availability, user-friendliness, user-stupidity, etc.

This is very important piece of advice-- any great developer should be a minimally competent sysadmin (and any great sysadmin should be a minimally competent developer).
Yes. To the best of my knowledge, the first paragraph is typical journalism cluelessness. Nobody is talking about harvesting algae, there's no way that would be feasible. Don't know whether to blame the journalist for editorializing on the availability of algae or if (s)he was misled by a source.
You mean 3dfx. Apparently their assets were bought by Nvidia.
This is probably simultaneously one of the funniest and most offensive startup review requests I've seen on HN.

The best part is that the site is really well done from what I gathered with a cursory glance. The main issue I see is that it's basically built to attract gold-digging whores, which is fine, but why would any "established men" pay for this? I would imagine they have no trouble finding these kinds of women in real life.
So, technically you could have an attorney as an employee for a month or two and have him/her represent your company in the court?
It's always fun to see the graph of a startup's user-count-double-up start on the time axis a month after you left.

I'm hoping OKC continues to kill it.
What do you mean when you suggest hooking into plentyoffish? And why do you also say they may not like it?
In Praise of the Lifestyle Business
I can see this being a useful and popular niche app, but what's your exit strategy? You're applying to YC with this, who's likely to acquire you? How will you monetize?

Not necessarily a critique of the site, just some questions YC or investors will certainly ask during the application process.
"It's really just complete gibberish. What is it?" He added: "When is this idiocy going to stop?"

And I wonder why Orcale is struggeling?

It's also funny how the previous Marc Benioff worked for Oracle before, left, and started one of the biggest "Cloud" success stories. ie Salesforce.com
Nice design. I've recently built a more general dating site and I see in your site many of the issues that I've been dealing with.

The chicken and egg problem is the biggest. Until you reach "critical mass", whatever that is (1k, 10k, 100k), it is difficult to open the kimono and give potential new users a peek. That can definitely drive away traffic.

OTOH, you need more for people to go on. You need some sort of hook. In my case, I took multiple screenshots from key areas of the site and assembled a tour.

You guys sound pretty seasoned, so I'm sure this isn't news to you--just an idea. There are many ideas around conversion and most of them just take time.

The other issue that was a big surprise for me is the sheer number of scammers out there. I'm spending more time building features into the backend for identifying scammers than anything else these days (still early days yet). Aside from the IP geolocation technique, email addresses posted in their profile text, and the unique form of bad English grammar from the West Coast of Africa, I'd be curious to know how you identify them. The target demographic of your site is bound to attract a disproportionate number. (BTW, for the uninitiated, geolocation only works for the amateurs logging in from a cybercafe in Lagos--most of them know how to use proxies and emerge in places like Michigan or Colorado. Typical bad grammar: "I will like to know more about you".)
Unfortunately, nobody can be told what the [cloud] is. You have to see it for yourself.
I thought the limiting problem with this type of technology was that the type of algae needed was very expensive to obtain. I'm no bio-nut though.
Gag me with a "lifestyle business"
Sure, it's hard to measure some costs and some benefits. It's hard, even impossible, to objectively compare them. But it is important to acknowledge that trade-offs exist, and foolish to ignore them. The cost-benefit framework is useful for the reason that it forces people to look at the trade-offs.

It is foolish to give infinite value to the benefit of preserving nature. If we are willing to preserve nature at any price, then we ought to shut down industrial civilization, kill off 5.8 billion people, and go back to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. However, few people think that cost would be worth the resulting benefits to the environment.

Ignoring the costs of environmental activism is short-sighted. Environmental restrictions are not free. They cause real deprivations. We ought to acknowledge these deprivations and consider whether or not they are worth the benefits, even if there is no objective "right" answer.

Sometimes we will decide environmental rules are worth it. Banning CFCs was probably a smart idea. Sometimes, however, we will decide environmental rules are not worth the cost. The Kyoto treaty would cost hundreds of billions of dollars to implement but only push off warming by a few years.

As for the rest of your posts, sorry I just can't follow the logic. I do think cost-benefit analysis is worthwhile, though.
Comcast.net Home
Yes, essentially I follow the same simple system. But to avoid adding each bin directory to the path, I create for each application an executable script in /usr/local/bin that performs an "exec /opt/package/bin/app-name $@". The only directory to add to the path is /usr/local/bin. Then, as you say, managing multiple application versions is as easy as repointing the symlink in /opt.

No need for package managers that do who knows what to your system.

The one exception is for shared libraries, which I build to /usr/local. That way 'make' can find them easily without fiddling with LDPATH.
Cloud Computing Helps Scientists Run High Energy Physics Experiments
E-waste Reduced By Fees At Time Of Purchase
The only time management advice that I took to heart was "If it takes less than 5 minutes, do it now, don't schedule it." It is amazing how much stress it saves, particularly with my SO, and it takes about as much time to do it as write it down
Tesla Model S Unveiled
Indeed- elite MBA programs aren't higher risk higher reward than less prestigious ones. They are simply higher reward.
I would expect it is skewed towards English speaking countries.
Google is still actively hiring engineers. While they're letting go some sales & marketing people, recruiters, head-hunters, interns, and engineers are still green-lighted.
So in the original image, a gamer would buy a used game from GameStop instead of a new game from Best Buy.

If a used game will suffice, why would the same gamer not just buy a $40 game from Dawdle instead of the $60 game from Best Buy?
My statement says X is not evil but Y is. Then you replied saying the combination of an aspect of X, with Y, is evil.

Your reply is consistent with my statement, not contradictory, and is indeed a weaker statement. I say Y is wrong straight out, but you only criticize it in the presence of something else.

Yet you seem angrier than me, e.g. the CAPS, and you presented your comment as being about how Google is more evil than I said. So you or I must be misunderstanding something here.
damn, I've checked the discussion every 10 minutes since the article was posted 7 hours ago and no one is discussing it.
Here's the geographic breakdown of traffic to my site from HN. It's a small sample size, but hopefully it's better than nothing.

United States - 52,
Australia - 3,
India - 2,
United Kingdom - 2,
Argentina - 1,
Canada - 1 ,
Israel - 1 ,
China - 1 ,
Russia - 1
The general implications of this are quite interesting. It means you can compete with Google at anything where really good customer service is an advantage, because the concept of customer service (except at such low granularity as generating good, fast search results) is so alien to their culture.
Second the sign up bit. You have no credibility nor clout as a new service, your users will bail as soon as they see a sign up. At the very least tease them with sample searches.
You've hit upon the problem.

The real niche here is "Rich but extremely socially inept men, slightly ugly but still shallow gold diggers".
Room service gets tiring when you travel as much as I do. With Established Men,
I look forward to beautiful girls on every trip.

Who talks like that? Seriously if you are going to fake reviews, at least make them sound real.
First, we definitely need critiques, and as many as possible.

Aside from ad revenue, the plan for monetization is to charge for the data we collect. On a subscription basis, we want government officials, interest groups and lobbyists to pay for the data we collect. We give anonymous and accurate data that identifies earmarks, demographic trends, hot button items, etc. The catch is that the people receiving the data need to agree to a minimum amount of interaction with the users on the site (social networking). We also charge them monthly.

I have no doubt that if just a couple reps/groups find this useful, everyone will jump on board so they aren't left behind. Not to mention, most are spending other people's money, not their own. :)

As for exit plan, this is not completely established. We expect that the application continues to evolve and automate on the back end, leaving us free to hand off to new management without a significant learning curve. Right now, we envision our target buyers to be large news sources, especially if they are political and intend to take advantage of social networking. CNN maybe? FOX? MSNBC? Washington Post? Since newspapers are going by the wayside, there are plenty of companies out there who need a new niche fast.

Thoughts?
He's saying that sales and marketing is less valuable than engineering, not that it's not valuable, which is (usually) true. If you had to lay off a bunch of your staff, wouldn't you lay off the least valuable ones? It's not a personal decision, it's a business decision.
I have no idea, unfortunately. We've never tried to analyze anything about the traffic except the number of unique visitors and page views per day.

CO2stats would know though, since they keep track of where people are to analyze their power sources. I'll ask them.
my guess is that the site has 0 users, so they do the registration bit, to build their membership.

since these guys sound like the MBA types, like everyone mentioned, my guess is that their business plan goes like this:

Year 1: Get driveby registrations, who driveby, register, find out the site is crap, and leave.

Year 2: Open up search results, so that users driveby, find a few results, register, find out they didn't get a response, and leave.

Year 3: Have the core group of users, who use the site and actually have results. Start charging $49.99 for something.

Year 4: Become profitable

Year 5: Sell for billions, make profile on the site, and try to get laid.
The answer was right in the article -- tractor feed paper. 10s of thousands of pages without having to refill a tray.
(She doesn't have to live in the U.S. to be an American.)
Amazon Wish Lists Are Dreadfully Insecure
This site seems like a thinly veiled escort site. Is that the intention?
FBI posts fake hyperlinks to snare child porn suspects
Cassette Tape Portraits
googles sales are pretty low touch - I guess that is out of need to massively scale (just ask anyone who has tried to contact a human there !), so having a large sales force doesn't really make sense for them.

I guess this is using the "cover" of a great recession to do this, although the fact that they talked about it on a blog kind of means its not really a case of timing. It does sound like the don't just want to turf these people out but are going to try to find them something else to do, where possible.
I know a couple of "established men" who find their golddiggers on the internet. Think "rich guy in south jersey/upstate NY", not "rich guy in NYC".

Another problem I see is that many golddiggers try to market themselves as nice girls (and perhaps even perceive themselves as such) [1]. Going to a site like this kind of makes things more explicit than the participants want it to be, no?

[1] Men tend to be more honest with themselves in such matters, probably because self-deluding men never get laid.
GoGrid is a great company to work with. Here's a link to another AWS posting.
http://apps.ycombinator.com/item?id=422225
what are the other properties? largely direct marketing plays im guessing?
Photoshop isn't a bad way to design a web template. The problem with knowing too much about the underlying tech is that you limit yourself in imagining what's possible (e.g. you naturally want to avoid too much css trickery). That said, I wish designers used Fireworks for doing compositions since it's much closer to the web's model and easier to convert.
On a previous posting here at HN I noticed comments about google checkout (in comparison to other ones) which has already scared me off ever using it - there is still a lot of choice out there, when it comes to money, you want a human to talk to.
A commercial relationship is (or should be??) "higher touch" then a consumer one - but google don't want that at all. So that alone makes commercial usage a risk.
Right in one.
The blog post is much, much more powerful. I'm sticking to PayPal.
Was Emusic.com hacked?
In retrospect, this is a bad business for Google to have gotten into for that reason. They are not good with the type of problems that come up.

I was using paypal the other day & thinking the same thing about them. I came to the conclusion that they never would have made it today. Paypal is harder to use & more confusing then the Banks' online banking platforms. In a way, that's a huge missed opportunity. If they were the super-easy-to-use-and-understand-without-feeling-dumb type of company, they might have taken a stab at being an online bank.

They did succeed because the technology was the key. From reports, the technology was just so far ahead of anyone else' that nothing else mattered.

Google is not in that boat. There are all sorts of solutions and they all work. It's not adwords where "it's my way or the high way".
Teach me to be rich … and give me a Kindle 2
Dropbox is one of my most important tool.
It allows me to switch between my linux and window computers without having to manually having to transfer data.
It is simple to use and understand.
Corroboration or alternative theories most welcome.
I went back and looked at the applications for the current cycle, and roughly half the groups we invited to interviews tied for the highest grade from Rtm. Which was a B+.
Yeah, I was just musing that us engineers love to focus on things which don't really matter. It's an interesting phenomenon, and I do it all the time too. I wonder if the solution is as simple as continually asking ourselves, "Am I spending my time on one of the most critical aspects of the project?" Anyway, I didn't mean anything by it. :)
I just graduated and got a full time job. I leave work around 5ish, I hit up a cafe and usually work until 8-10. I get home relax a bit, I go to the gym around 11 and then bedtime for me. Lather, rinse, repeat...

I've learned what I need to do to not burn myself. I've fine tuned it to the point where it's become sustainable, at least for a while. I try to exercise four times a week, eat healthy, get at least 7+ hours of sleep and to, once in a while, change things up dramatically to break routine, such as going to a different city to work.

My job pays the bills, I don't have very many responsibilities and my goal is to start a company which will provide a steady source of income and open up other doors of opportunity.

Bottom line: You can have a full-time job and start a company.
About the same. Overall there is very little variation between cycles.
I'm not sure if it was sugardaddyforme or sugardaddie.com but I was reading about a site where they verify your income to make sure that you are truly a "wealthy man" Apparently, it was the only dating site where the number of female users greatly outnumbers the men.

An even more ridiculous site is ashleymadison.com. Its also done quite well.
there are already lots of credit card processors that compete on service. they cost more to use (both in fees and your labor to setup). people buy on cost then wonder why their cheaper solution isn't as good as the pricier one. like people who buy the cheapest airline ticket then gripe that the food wasn't good. you get what you pay for.
Australia > India > UK ... that's interesting !!
I consider using Adwords using Google for business and that is indispensable for most businesses.

Also, Google Apps has been stellar for business email so far.
In this day and age, it would be fun to publish a list of "MBA density" by industry or company. Compare eBay and Google with AIG for instance and tell me which one had the highest MBA density().

I have no clue where to get accurate data on this. But I have full confidence in HN community to send me a link to a reputable answer.

() obviously defined as the percentage of employees with an MBA degree within an organization
Interesting point: "At some point, it may be required that the rest of the team that started the company with the CEO may need to be changed out for an executive team with experience at the “growth-stage” versus just the “start-up” stage."

While I've definitely worked with founders who weren't fit to run a big company (lack of focus, lack of common sense, blind to customers' needs - you name it...), the "experienced executive team" that replaced them seemed to go out of their way to run the company into the ground. I have now seen this happen 3 times (both at companies I've worked at and friends' companies).
Concept Mockups: Ubiquity Shipped With the Firefox  Bar
nice. thanks for digging into it!

Do you think you could make this data public, maybe starting off with startups that didn't make it, including YC's comments when they were evaluated during the interview?

I am sure there is a lot of great info in there that would help other startups. It would be like using etherpad for writing essays :-), we could peek into YC's thought process.
Neat little app. I like the simplicity. Haven't quite figured out how the personality quirks/fun factor stuff fits into it all yet though.

Off topic: Oddly enough, I looked at the info about you and have actually run into your site before through your other project Sched. Cool personal page. I actually emailed yesterday regarding the Developer API on there to see if we could use it on our music festival site. Hope to hear back!
Even, for a small company, something like adwords. The problem I have with AW is that if I change the wording of an ad (say, to add the price, or change the price or other "trivial" changes), I have to wait DAYS for the ads to run. I know others who say their changes take effect within a few minutes. I get no direct answer other than "we try to treat all of our customers equally."

I think I draw a flag because I sell educational software, and they want to make sure that I'm not selling homework answers or term papers (or whatever they are worried about). I would benefit from some sort of flag that says they've checked me out N times, I'm probably good for the N+1st time (with maybe random checks afterwords). Or let the ads run and check concurrently.

For example, I shop sometimes in a supermarket that lets me scan the items with a handheld scanner and pay at a self-checkout lane. When I first started doing it, I was randomly (?--I assume) audited fairly frequently. But after very many (over 8 months maybe?) honest check-outs, I haven't been audited in at least two months. It seems I've earned some trust, and I find myself shopping there more because of the convenience.

Putting some sort of trust-factor into Adwords would be useful for me. Alternatively, somebody that could get me the returns that Adwords can (big hurdle) but puts in a trust factor would get my attention.
i like the design too, although it's a bit cluttered with unnecessary stuff. i've removed a couple of things and think it might look a bit more clean

http://4feets.com/img/establishedmen2.png
What kind of joker correlates the % of people visiting hacker news to the hackers. You are retarded - don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

Its like saying - lets see how many people visit a second grade news site which has a finance section, and that would indicate the geographical distribution of people interested in Finance.
I think you are being a bit pessimistic here, what could possibly go wrong compiling a vanilla kernel? :P
It's entirely up to the bargain you strike with the individual company.
Open Source Textbook Maker Flat World Gets Funded
> you never know when the good karma from those favours will come back to you!

I think you may have inadvertently provided the definition of 'douchebag' that you accused the poster of missing :-)

Less facetiously, I think he was referring to people for whom status and power was an end, rather than a means or a side-effect. When you're very determined to reach a goal, all of your actions are informed by your thinking; when your goal is status and power, and you start treating your interactions with people as another means to that end, you would probably fit the poster's definition of a 'douchebag'.

I think the poster meant to contrast this to people who study a field (say economics) for its own sake, because they enjoy it or because they hope to make a useful contribution; by 'useful', I mean one that will benefit others than themselves.
Unless and until you're bringing in real money for Google, make no mistake: you're in a consumer relationship with them, not a commercial one.

A merchant that's sold a few hundred dollars worth of stuff is never going to be important enough to Google to bother putting a real person on. It may suck, but that's the way it is.

If the vendor in question had a few more zeroes on their sales figures, Google would make sure that the complaints were valid before shutting them down.

But I agree fully with the basic point - any small vendor should think twice before relying solely on Google Checkout.
I've always viewed the 'Do No Evil' mantra in the same vein as the 'Don't think of a pink elephant dancing the salsa in your pyjamas'.

What are you thinking of right now?

[Edit] Seriously. If you go to work everyday and someone tells you to 'Do No Evil', my bet is that you'll be thinking more about Evil (even just to avoid it) than you will about Good. Add that to human filters like uncertainty, laziness, or optimism, and that 'evil' gets released into the world. As a buzz phrase 2001, it was great; as a corporate mantra 2009, it's biting them on the ass.
A good feature for HN would be if someone adds a new account (one minute ago when I checked this one), submits some sort of trolling or moronic comment that gets down-voted a few times (which hopefully this one will), it should be flagged, looked at by an admin, then just purged. Obviously no good intentions with the creation of the account or the comment.
YouTube EDU Launches, So Go Learn Something
Sling Media - SlingPlayer Mobile for iPhone (Coming Soon)
Facebook Raising Another $100 Million to Fund Increasing Server Costs
It's a great list as long as your startup doesn't intend to ever make any money! No accountant, no business people, nothing of the sort? Speaking from experience, the business management side is very important if you want your venture to be successful (or take advantage of success when it comes).
looks good from design view, also I would like to see some cool looking but cheaper electric roadsters as well!