skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It certainly would be interesting to go through crunchbase and do some exit analysis for each of the companies. I would hypothesise that there would be a really high failure rate of companies who do not charge. Conversely a "huge exit" rate for companies who charge would be insignificant.

It will be interesting to get your take given your position with a stable paid business vs stackoverflow - which do you see as the best long term?
Ask HN: How many of you (coders) use marijuana?
With the recent public talk and growing awareness about marijuana and the failed policies against it, it occurred to me it would be interesting to get an idea of how many fellow programmers use marijuana and how it affects their work. I find it specially positive in my work, as an aid to better concentration and also greater creativity.
I like products that make money because it feels to risky to do otherwise. Places like Digg have almost no hope for making money at this point outside of an acquisition, never mind the crazy amount of dilution all the VC money brought them, making the size of that acquisition much, much larger.

Without a way to make money, you end up having to take a lot of money. In return, you give up most of your company. So now you're working for somebody else and waiting around for an enormous exit so that you can then work for somebody else for a few years so that then, maybe, you can escape with enough to cash to do it again? That sounds awful.

I'd rather have half a dozen small companies that together bring in enough to live happily off of than a single company that is predicated on a gamble and a hope that it will make me filthy rich sometime within the next decade. At the end of the day, all I really want to do is hack, write, read, and play video games. I don't need to have a company acquired by Google to do that.
They chose the worse of two evils.
I think it's this:
"I could walk away from tarsnap tomorrow (or get hit by a bus) and tarsnap would keep on running and making a profit."

To me that's a fundamental understanding of business and is worrying.
Do your perceived effects of Greens+ match the (somewhat inconclusive) results of this study? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15217524?dopt=Abstract...

I'm interested in trying it and would appreciate any extra information.
'use'? somehow it seems so innocuous that 'use' is way to strong a word that said, not me. marijuana makes me stupid to the point i forget i have muscles.
True, that's a very good point.
I just sent you an email. I am happy to answer any questions that you or anyone else has.
Fair enough. I too am optimistic about people's ability to change (and mine as well) but I have found that it is usually very gradual, in the order of years.

Once in a while though, some major catalyst materializes in life and changes one radically in some aspects. I have reason to believe that diving into a startup is one such catalyst. From personal experience, starting a startup on the side is not. Most likely because it violates PG10 [1] guaranteeing that you never gain enough momentum to break free from your old mindset.

[1] Startups in 13 Sentences. Sentence 10: No distractions.
This is much more complex than it looks. I'd trust either of these before I trust those simpleton attempts, but it looks like some of them may be complete. Too hard to read the site for the longer ones though to actually find out (why is the regular expression in a little 2 line scrollable area? And why are they are not encouraging the use of extended syntax that can be commented?)

http://www.regular-expressions.info/email.html
http://search.cpan.org/~rjbs/Email-Address-1.889/lib/Email/A...
Not I. Cannot stand the stench of it.
Hasn't the primary business model of media companies (newspapers, radio, TV, etc) been advertising since the rise of widely circulating newspapers?

That apparent historical trend makes me suspicious of claims that the ad-based model won't be the backbone of many (or most) internet media companies.
I haven't personally tried piracetam, but erowid has a good section on piracetam and other nootropics. It generally seemed from Erowid that nobody had any bad experiences unless they were also on hard drugs.

Piracetem:http://www.erowid.org/smarts/piracetam

Nootropic Vault:http://www.erowid.org/smarts/smarts.shtml
Something like Digg will clearly be where a lot of people get their news. And given the network effects, it was smart to focus initially on growth. The result is that at this stage they have a site that's big and unprofitable. Bad luck for them this stage coincides with a huge recession; but few saw that coming. Except for raising/spending too much, they seem to me to have followed roughly the optimal path.

You cannot do better than that. Optimal isn't always great, but it is optimal.
Do a majority taking neutrotransmitters feel there has been some improvement in mental condition? I suspect most people do not. If it is not unhealthy to take one neurotransmitter, how many in combination become unhealthy? I would expect the benefits of these drugs to become more apparent when they were in combination with each other but any potential negative effects could also be magnified in combination.

You could fund research into what cognitive enhancement drugs did in healthy populations. Undergraduates would line up to be paid to take these drugs.

There's also the underlying ethical question of dosing people with combinations of neurotransmitters. We haven't studied it yet so we don't know what the side effects are. Is animal research appropriate? Do any of these drugs work on other primates? Has anyone ever tried to teach monkeys mathematics? http://www.scribd.com/doc/13134612/Naturrecom456702a argues for more study into the area, though they use as examples drugs of much more proven ability for cognitive enhancement than piracetam.
Autodesk Launches Project Dragonfly, Web-based 2D/3D Home Floor Planning
@micks56 - re your legal search using natural language -

Are you able to compare, say, Wests results to those of a pure google text search on the keyword terms?

[ To do that you'd need some example of large legal texts fully online and thus indexed by google - I dont know if that exists ]

Its sometimes hard to discern the value of the tech versus the quality of the implementation + usability factors - but your observations are interesting. I wonder how search on medical information compares...

gord.
http://www.fusionio.com/Products.aspx

Have you seen the startup Woz has started working with?
I worked in a company where the VP of Engineering didn't report to the CTO. It made some sense because the CTO mostly directed the 6 months into the future vision of the company (next features, next product). This worked ok because the CTO had a research team that reported to him and the VP of Engg had the development team reporting to him but it was not optimal.

The issues we faced were:

- CTO+Research team builds some amazing enhancements for the product but have to fight to get them into the next release (Dev claimed there was no time for regression testing..but next cycle there will be)

- Dev team thought the research team were ivory tower elites (even though this was not the case). There were Ph.D.s and people who never went to college on the team.

- Research team eventually thought they were superior (reaction to having all their input regularly ignored by dev team)

In short, if your company has a legitimate need for a research or forward looking team, there may be a way to make this situation work, but not without regular political disputes and bitterness between teams. Try to find a way to have the VP report to you.
Without a way to make money, you end up having to take a lot of money.

That's not true. Digg may have raised a lot of money, but Reddit got big on very little. They were ramen profitable when they were acquired, and could easily have stayed that way if they hadn't been.
I agree. Up to a point, it seems to have a beneficial effect. Especially in design, perhaps not so much when it comes to data modeling and logic.
Arsenal Confirms Chimp's Ability to Plan, Study Says
Isn't Hacker News already close enough to an RSS feed? It's just aggregated links, like any ordinary RSS feed would be.

Plus, I don't think I would want to load several articles at once like you propose. I enjoy being able to choose which articles I want to read.
Are you assuming their intention is to keep the sixtyone.com music community closed to major pop artists? Would that be such a bad thing? How would they then handle an indie act that becomes bigger down the road? Who or how would they measure a band's "popularity"? I think it would be great to see major artists branching out and using different distribution mechanisms. Please, leave it up to me to decide what music I want to listen to, not some third party who decides if a band isn't cool enough anymore for their community or me.
It would be more constructive to say exactly what about this article you found to be lacking, rather than bashing the whole site.
Videos are poor solutions, because they require the user to follow at the video's pace, and pace is very hard to get right.

The more general problem is that most people don't know why clipping things is easier than just copying and pasting. (It's worse on the Mac, because cmd-shift-Y automatically clips to a sticky note, meaning the online solution isn't adding much at all.)
It's normal for the VP Eng to be a peer of the CTO and report directly to the CEO. That said, you are almost certainly being marginalized. Your CEO likely knows he needs your irreplaceable understanding of the company's technology, but otherwise wants you out of the way.

Replacing you as manager is probably not going to work out well unless he already has someone good in mind. CEOs rarely understand how much difficulty they'll have identifying competent tech managers. He's in danger of finding someone who does a great job of "managing up" and a poor job of getting things done efficiently and correctly.

If you can't prevent the hire, making sure you hire someone competent is probably the most significant thing you can do for the company.
Turnkey Linux Software Appliances
Awesome Talk! Really enjoyed it. Feel so dumb now :)
Couldn't agree more. If I was hiring I'd be less interested in the # of patches you've submitted to Rails and more interested in examples of how you've solved problems, in code (irrespective of the language) and in other parts of your life. Speaking of other parts of your life, I'd also really like to know you HAVE other parts of your life and you're not spending every evening chowing Cheetos with the local Ruby guys. That's totally great now and then but I'd want healthy, happy, diverse and interesting employees, not just zombie Ruby monkeys who only read DHH, et al blogs and can't think for themselves. (To be totally clear I've always had the impression that most of the people like DHH in the Ruby community also expect their community members to think for themselves as well and engage in healthy debate.)
Jos Buivenga, along with John Gruber, is responsible for introducing me to the world of typography. I'm seconding this guy as a terrific resource for free fonts, and as a great read if you want to know where designers get their idea for fonts.
At my old company we called the CTO "chief termination officer". It was basically the de-staging area for tech people who had enough visibility that they didn't want to get rid of them outright.
Rules are useful even in social situations. Sure, experience and intuition will be a lot more natural and successful, but not everyone has that to use.

And besides, everyone needs a little work on social skills, and rules will at least give them specific suggestions to implement. That's why advice columns are so successful.

It's like playing music. I've played the trumpet for years.
Sure I don't consciously think about the specific fingerings that I need to use next, it just comes naturaly. But I got that intuition from many hours of practice following rules and doing drills. I wasn't just handed a trumpet and told to play something. And when I'm having trouble with a section of music, I break it apart into tiny sections, and usually slow the tempo down. None of that is natural, but it's all necessary to play a piece of music.
I think they both have their strengths and weaknesses. I am a fan of both, but there's a certain fun factor here that is missing.

The idea that fun and "serious discussion"/work are mutually exclusive is the biggest disappointment, to me, of the HN culture. It's just not true. You can have it both ways. In fact, you should demand it. Remember, this stuff is supposed to be fun!

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000979.html

And given the fact that a flirting article (WTF?) is on the front page, perhaps this part of the HN culture is changing. Unlike the stultifyingly boring drug war article, at least that's sort of fun..
Thanks very much.. I have been fascinated by Singularity ideas recently and that was one of the important ones (understatement) that I hadn't read.
I havn't in a little over a year now. Current company drug tests and I enjoy a paycheck more than I enjoy getting high.

That said, I do very much enjoy it and have had some "breakthroughs" related to coding projects while high. Moderation is key, it can be great for helping you think about things differently, but if you overdo it, you can certainly do more harm than good.
Real Analysis and Abstract Algebra textbooks at http://www.mth.pdx.edu/~erdman/.

Both textbooks were written by John Erdman under a creative commons non-commercial license. They were recommended to me by a math professor and both books are really high quality.
Fun fact: Control-Shift-A activates the subversion menu from TextMate on OSX, which I use all the time. It is a pretty random key sequence though :-)
To me, the idea that fun and "serious discussion"/work are mututally exclusive is the biggest disappointment of the HN culture. And it's just not true!

For me, if it's not fun, it's not worth doing:

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081101/how-hard-could-it-be-th...
--
For his part, Jeff says he didn't want our new venture to feel "like work" -- that if Stack Overflow wasn't fun to do, he didn't want to be doing it. If I had tried to make him play by my rules, I don't think the project would have come together, at least not as well as it has.
--

Good work is fun, almost by definition. And that should come across in your comments about the work, too.
I definitely read the same thing as spolsky, based on your language that you're not nailing the managing up and out parts of the VPE role, which is why the CEO is looking for someone else.

I know a lot of people project negative intentions onto the CEO in this situation, but it's his job to make a call about what's needed here and it seems like his call is that you aren't up to snuff. At the VPE level, it's not enough to be technically right, you need to be able to turn the engineering group into a cog that runs with the other cogs that the CEO is putting in place.

When I was in this position our board introduced me to some potential mentors with more VPE experience. They all had one identical piece of advice: measure everything and then use that to control the dialogue about engineering with the board and the other managers.

That advice seemed overly political to me (especially the bit about controlling the dialogue). I've come to two realizations about it.

One, a lot of the people who judge you have extremely strong personalities and if you aren't presenting an equally strong opinion, then you won't be able to have a conversation as equals. Facts are what give you backbone.

Two, when you put down an engineering process, half the value is in making your team more efficient, and the other half is in presenting a predictable interface to the rest of the company so that they can get their jobs done. That outward part of your responsibility was the key realization as these people took on more responsibility.

I don't think all is lost for you. Some people would probably project onto the CEO that he has a personal dislike for you, but all you can really infer is that he wants a different type of leader in the VPE position. You would show that type of leadership if you went to him, explained the problems/risks of finding an experienced VPE, and then laid out your plan for becoming that person including asking for a mentor and a proposal for an engineering process that gave him more insight into the company.

Now you might not want this role or might not have the opportunity. In that case, life is too short. Go start your own company.

I think the situation if fascinating and wish you'd left some way to contact you. You should definitely put together a strategy for any of the roles, VPE, CTO, or former-employee, and get some good advice.
MBA is a degree, not a job title. There are tons of MBA product managers and tons of MBAs who can code.
Exercise is great.

Sleep is great. I've figured out that if I don't get enough sleep, I usually end up wasting more time than I would have got sleeping.

That said, you definitely need some time off from work. I'd suggest taking off a full day (24 hr) a week from work. Do what ever you want, sleep, watch tv, play a sport, just don't do work. Tell yourself to think about work later. It's a good time to catch up on any lost sleep and de-stress.
(in response the section below the line)

This is really a criticism of me, personally.

You don't like me. I don't have a problem with that at all.

The idea that everyone has to like everyone else is unrealistic and dishonest. If everyone likes you, you probably aren't doing anything very interesting.
Why I don't use standard user story format that much
The simplest thing is finding and blessing 30 people with the right to kill flagged entries? And trusting those 30 people to do the right thing?

Wouldn't it be simpler to automate the whole thing, and let the algorithm do the work?
This should be a poll, you're unlikely to get a comment from most people on this issue.

Use http://news.ycombinator.com/newpoll to create a new poll.
And Spanish unlike Italian has the exact word PG was looking for to say 'a success', and it's is perfect for startup founders: 'exito'. Of course it's derived from the same Latin word as English's 'exit'.
The Possibility Jelly lives on the hypersurface of the present
Sure, that's true; I should have said "MBAs who are not software engineers". I think, however, that peterb was using "MBA-driven design" to imply "design by someone who knows business but not software engineering", and I replied by using it in the same colloquial sense.
Your old design looked fine to me. I didnt notice "nine separate colors" until it was mentioned in the article. For me it looked like 3 sections showing 'What', 'How' and a 'Quick overview'.

The whole 'snip it' concept was clear from the front page image itself.
Life's Too Short - Write Fast Code
What a great piece. Thank you very much. I found you by signing on to FriendFeed and looking at popular people. I picked you because your name appealed to me, and then I was excited to see you'd written about something I'm working on over in Cork, Ireland.
"Relentlessly Resourceful" describes me well. Thank you for coming up with such a powerful descriptor.
I had no idea that this was wide spread among hackers. Although, thinking about it, it makes a lot of sense. Working in an abstract rational world and in an almost always stressful environment tends to bring this stuff out. Also, i found that people to tend to be "deep thinkers" always have these problems. Wonder why....

Some great tips here. I had a similar problem, although mine was a clinical depression induced by malaria medication i had to take while on a trip to Africa. What i did was to rest for a while and then start coding whenever i feel like it. In a couple of weeks, i found that i was coding for more than 10hrs a day. That was 3 years ago.
I should have added: if you can prevent the hire, probably the most significant thing you can do for the company is to learn how to correct the problems, real or perceived, that have led to the desire for a new engineering manager.
It might only be giving you the illusion of helping. Can you benchmark test yourself with and without it?
Ironically, while you're probably correct in programming design, I'm a national master in chess(which requires reasoning and logic), and I know about a handful of chess masters(FM/IM/GM's) that actually smoke dope. Allegedly, it helps to mentally slow the game down and reason each move out into their potential move branches. In the time allowed, they're able to visualize moves several iterations on down and concentrate better on mentally traversing them to figure out their best move.
I am trying to think of a test that can be run on my West search engine and Google. West's legal resources dwarfs Google's. Google might as well be considered non-existent in the area compared to West or LexisNexis. That is just what those two companies do. They have people that enter cases into databases as they become available. Google just doesn't do that.

I haven't thought of a fair test to run yet. The two engines do different things. My West can search case decisions, statutes, administrative codes, briefs filed to the court, secondary sources (sort of the research paper of the legal field) and the news.

So I tried doing a search on the news only. I searched "ycombinator" and the results returned are news articles only, whereas on Google someone probably wants and gets the YC home page, this site, or the actual function. None of those show up on the West site.

Then I ran a search of these terms on each (I didn't enter quotes on the actual searches): "massachusetts custody modification"

On Westlaw, I get cases, and statutes on point. With extra terms I will easily get to cases that deal with my specific issue. On Google, the first link is a divorce resource site and the rest are for lawyers.

Searching statutes might work. But the main reason statutes search well on Google is the Cornell Law site. The quality of results for statutes is probably a bigger testament to them and their cataloging efforts.

I would say both search engines hit their target markets well. Most people searching "massachusetts custody modification" don't want 20 decisions of the Mass SJC. And people searching the same on Westlaw don't want attorneys. Google is much much faster though. It returns in a fraction of a second. Westlaw took about 12 seconds to return 10,000 hits. First three hits were decided yesterday, which is pretty cool.

There is a group of people creating an open legal database. I can't remember its name. I think they are based in the San Fran area. I think it was started by some hacker that worked on opening up some other government data and is now on the court system. I have the bookmark buried somewhere and of course can't find it. Does anyone know which one I am talking about? We could maybe test that database versus the commercial West one.
Yes we are talking about numenta.

http://numenta.com/for-developers/education/htm-related-pape...

Unfortunately the three (why aren't there more?) independent papers didn't use HTM, and certainly don't answer all my questions.
I changed it to "secondary mantras" in the original.
You already do.

That's what I meant: that YC is happy to fund startups that don't make money initially, if that's the right strategy for that kind of startup. So if you're planning to start the next Facebook or Twitter, by all means apply.
You tweet essentially saying "its for charity, and if you want to be charitable let me know". If he doesn't respond, he looks like he doesn't want to be charitable, to the public. This is sort of like blackmail imho.
Yeah, make this a Poll, and I might 'fess up. Did I say that?