skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How do you answer, when are you going to get a real job?
i have my own answer, to this question that is just asked all to much, and usually if someone seriously asks me this i just stop talking to them. but, in all seriousness i thought it would be fun to hear how the rest of you have answered this question.

for me, i never earned as much working as i did through investment activity, and so i got this question a lot from mom, girlfriends, and well generally people i just do not talk to any more.
Prize economics?
how many of you follow the growing prize economy?

if you do, how large do you think it can scale?
I can't even figure out what this article is about. I think it's about Microsoft's attempt to use the threat of patent litigation to insert itself into the corporate Linux market and thereby gain influence over open source software projects, but the article never uses the word "patent"!

It reads like an outtake from the 47th minute of an hour-long private meeting. It assumes that the audience already knows the issues, the players, and the buzzwords by heart. It's a textbook example of how not to write for the public.

The irony is that there's a really good chance that I agree with this guy, but I just can't tell.
With all due respect, somehow his words remind me of Howard Stern :)
from Sao Paulo
The truth is that those people deeply envy you. Just smile and say " I am alright now"
He's right, NASA has seen the same amount of warming on Mars over the last 50 years as we have experienced here. It doesn't mean that Global Warming isn't really a problem but there might not be anything we can do about it except plan for life afterward. Even if it is man made do you really think a few light bulbs and hybrids are going to make any difference? You can't stop Global Warming at this point, no matter what the cause is.
Ever been to Davis, CA? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%2C_ca#Bicycling

The city logo is a bicycle, and there's a bicycle statue too...
http://daviswiki.org/Bicycling
Microsoft updates Windows without users' consent
I don't like the tone of this article, especially the first half (it was bordering on being racist...) - but I agree with the author. While there are exceptions, Asian culture is about obeying and following either your parents, your teacher, your government, or whoever else is above you (your boss).

It's so strong that even some American Asians today are trapped by it (fortunately not many to my knowledge). I actually experienced this when I first moved to the SF bay area. My gf (now wife)'s adherrence to her parent's wishes (even though she didn't agree with them) nearly drove me insane... even though I'm Asian myself, I guess I just can't relate anymore to certain aspects of our culture since I grew up where there were virtually no other Asians....
He said "all the planets in the solar system." I'd still like to see a citation.

Mars warmed for other reasons.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/070404-mars-...
What Not To Do When Writing Python Software
Free Labor Isn't Free at All (Part One of Two)
ERR5RS: extending the R5RS (Scheme R6RS dissenters)
Bugs Are Magic Tricks
MS-DOS 5 Upgrade Video
A Guide to CSS Support in Email: 2007 Edition (watch out for these when sending marketing material)
Isn't pg or someone supposed to be behind the scenes, pulling irrelevant crap?
Robot Maker Builds Artificial Boy
you should pick out a creative commons css template here: http://www.oswd.org/ - it's free

since you're selling websites it would probably be good to have a decent ui and maybe screenshots of what's on sale
Anybody here use Source Code Escrow?
Hello All,

A potential customer is interested in having us save versions of our application in escrow. In the event we go under they'd like some protection on their investment.

So I'm in the mood of pricing out some services that do these things. I've also asked our attorneys if they do it. Anybody here have a service they've used?
9 Habits to help you write a book
Boldly going where no mass spectrometer has gone before
Scientists to use x-rays to read fragile Dead Sea scrolls
For those just joining the party, some background:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47803
Bruce Lee is of pure Chinese descent.

Update:
I am wrong. According to Wikipedia, Bruce Lee's mother is of mixed descent.
Very interesting lessons to be learned from this. Most importantly that analyst firms like Gartner can be dead wrong with their "predictions" of the future. If you have experience in your industry trust your own gut feelings over those of some outside analyst (but do take their opinion into consideration)
I'm an Indian, but based in Australia. I doubt many Indian hackers know about this site or YC for that matter yet. Besides, most Indian startups focus on the domestic market, and the hacker community is more localized comparitively.

However the wave is catching up: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=indian+startups and I'm sure you'll see a lot more hackers and startups emerging from India in the near future.
Bicycle culture in Amsterdam: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qk6YxhKH590
How about: don't run ads (except trailers) before films. It is so obnoxious to be forced to sit through an ad before something you're paying for. Especially in a theater. If an ad on TV bothers you, you can turn off the sound or go into the next room. If an ad in a newspaper or magazine bothers you, you can cover it or turn the page. But an ad in a theater you are getting shoved in your face no matter what.

Ads have a cost. People who think they can keep sticking more and more ads on things don't realize that they're gradually making whatever it is less attractive. But eventually you cross a line.
Thanks for the comment.

That was the whole point of the article. Success has so much to do with luck. I worked just as hard as I always do but what I did in the past just didn't work out. But I trusted my gut and just keep going.

Everyone is an expert. But expert gets to go home at night and being a lonely entrepreneur is 24/7.

Thanks.

Denny K Miu
Ashely Qualls is not allowed to touch  her assets
I have a real job and it looks like this..... (insert your job tasks here)
Ten secrets about working in IT
ArsDigita University, five years later
Introducing iPoor - The Real iPhone Killer! (parody)
Why i don't, because it's a read-only device, i need a phone i can write --type information into.
Ajax application security critical, experts warn
Yes, I've used Iron Mountain. It is about 2K per year to store DVDs . Then of course there are additional services such as getting them to verify data, run things on data, etc., none of which I have used. I had occasion to re-examine stored DVDs after a year, and all of them worked fine.
Getting Started with Cocoa: a Friendlier Approach
Ideas are a Commodity - Entrepreneurship is about Execution
A clean theatre would also be nice.
Hacking a car purchase is like hacking fund-raising? (Video)
Anyone who has always wanted to write a novel should consider doing National Novel Writing Month (http://www.nanowrimo.org/). I did it last year, and even though my novel was pretty terrible I still had fun and learned a lot from writing it.
Some examples:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50663
Congrats Brett!
>Using Lisp to read and write a configuration file means you don't need to worry about lexing and parsing either.

That was the point I was trying to make, apparently unsuccessfully.

>If you don't use Lisp, or if you don't use S-expressions, you will need to lex and parse the configuration file just to read it, compiler or no compiler.

Any time you build a lexer and a parser, you are building a compiler (I'm using a broader meaning of compiler - not necessarily one that outputs bytecode). There are many XML-to-HTML compilers, for example.

Lisp macros compile DSL's to Lisp. That's why a Lisp programmer rarely needs to think about lexing and parsing. It is automatic and implied if you address the problem in the right way. It's also why the concepts of data and programs are necessarily conflated in Lisp.
From NASA on Mars:
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/odyssey/newsroom/pressreleases/2003...

Warming on Pluto:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_warming_021009.h...

Additional links for other Solar System planets:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/november2006/161106suvj...
Denny says Gigamon "contradicted Gartner", and "Gartner was dead wrong". This is my space, too. All due respect, Denny, but, not so sure of your policework there.

Gartner predicted the demise of the standalone "intrusion detection system". Denny's product is enabling infrastructure for network monitoring and network security tools. It's not an intrusion detection system; it's lower on the value chain than that.

The market for intrusion detection systems, which are sold almost entirely to enterprises, evaporated in the 3 years following that Gartner report. There were several hundred million addressable dollars of it in 2003. Now there may be 50.

You probably don't care about this. But what you might care about is, there's a difference between bootstrapping a company into a 15MM/yr niche and funding a company to go after a billion dollar market. The former has an outcome like nCircle's, where you limp for the next 5-10 years of your life. If you do well, you get a "lifestyle company". The latter has an outcome like SourceFire, which involves private jets.

Lifestyle companies are great. But they don't have promising exits. The "Paul Graham Way" involves exits; murder yourself for 2 years, never work again. This is more the "Joel Spolsky Way"; end up with private offices, a 4 day work week, and an Aeron chair.

We've been bootstrapping for a couple years now. It's definitely cost us time, and we have the constant hazard of falling into a lifestyle company. I'm not saying one approach is better/worse than the other. But if you're selling to enterprises, ignore the analysts at your own mortal peril.
Sprint to Offer Wireless Shopping on Cell Phones
From the journal Nature:
http://cc.oulu.fi/%7Eusoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf

Quotes from Scafetta, N., and B. J. West, 2006. Phenomenological solar contribution to the 1900-2000 global surface warming. Geophysical Research Letters, doi: 1029/2005GL025539.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/03/21/solar...

An article from the Telegraph citing some scientists involved in the new Solar findings:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/07...
In 75 years I'd be more willing to bet that the notion of a "desktop OS" will be irrelevant. :-)
That is a valid concern, however it doesn't mean you have to worry about escaping all text properly. You can simply handle the elements as lists, and code won't get executed.

As an exercise, I tried parsing a few entries in that java log format from the article, but changed a few things. In particular, I replaced the message string with one written with unescaped text that the user might have been responsible for.

I suck at Lisp, but in 28 lines (6 defuns and 1 defparameter) here's what I got for output. Note that (FORMAT T "injection") gets printed directly is not executed.

Entry:("2005-02-21T18:57:39")('SEVERE)("A pretty bad thing has happened! The user did this: " (FORMAT T "injection") ".")
Entry:("2007-09-11T18:57:39")('SEVERE)("A very very bad thing has happened! The user did this: ...")
Entry:("2907-09-11T18:57:39")('WARNING)("A sorta bad thing has happened! The user did this: ...")
Music industry doing something smart (A&R social net)
Complete with "2.0" name: Scoutr

http://www.scoutr.co.uk/home/

I registered and reviewed a track; pretty smart implementation...
I wouldn't quite say ideas are a commodity. The reason they're worth less than naive founders think is not so much that everyone else has them as that they are only 5% finished.
Maybe Howard Stern modulo entertainment. :)
Now that is a man bites dog headline.
WIRED 1997: "101 ways to save Apple"
Here's the code, with "jlog" instead of log. I must have log defined somewhere (like I said, I suck at Lisp).

(defparameter *handlethese*
'(date level message))

(defun date (obj)
(prin1 obj))
(defun level (obj)
(prin1 obj))
(defun message (obj)
(prin1 obj))

(defun record (record-data)
(if (car record-data)
(progn
(if (member (car (car record-data)) *handlethese*)
(funcall (car (car record-data)) (cdr (car record-data)))
nil)
(record (cdr record-data)))
nil))

(defun process-jlog(record-list)
(if (car record-list)
(progn (format t "~%Entry:")
(funcall (car (car record-list)) (cdr (car record-list)))
(process-jlog (cdr record-list)))
t))

(defun jlog (&rest record-list)
(process-jlog record-list))
I'd say make trailers optional too. I personally don't care for them -- I generally only see movies that I've read about online or heard about from friends.

A lot of people do like trailers though -- maybe set the start time of the movie to be the actual time the movie starts, and then let people interested in the trailers come early? Or, maybe, have the trailers live up to their namesake and show them after the movie?

Maybe I'm in a minority -- do trailers bug anyone else?
What the article doesn't mention is that 23andme was co-founded by Sergey Brin's wife, Anne Wojcicki. Apparently he isn't investing, but Google is.
Q:Where are the Indian hackers?
A:Mountain View.
It only lasts about 6 months. Then it continues in spurts. After some years, you're basically defined by what you're doing, not that you used to be a student at X or employee at X.

In general, you will need to find like-minded individuals who have started their own businesses, regardless of field or age.

At the same time, you do want to meet people like you (in person) even for short bursts of time. Not just older adults who have had their own business, but young people your age also cutting their own path.

In a few years, you will find that many naysayers will have lost their jobs, swapped careers, or switched majors during the several years they've been telling you to get a job. Only then will they realize that you're not doing this to avoid work, but to ensure work. Employees who don't like their jobs will feel you should suffer, too. Employees who are happy with what they're doing won't tell you to get a job in a negative tone. Instead, they'll be impressed and tell you to keep at it.
Changing One Species to Another
Interesting quote from Craig Venter:

Now we know we can boot up a chromosome system. It doesn't matter if the DNA is chemically made in a cell or made in a test tube. Until this development, if you made a synthetic chomosome you had the question of what do you do with it. Replacing the chomosome with existing cells, if it works, seems the most effective to way to replace one already in an existing cell systems. We didn't know if it would work or not. Now we do. This is a major advance in the field of synthetic genomics. We now know we can create a synthetic organism. It's not a question of 'if', or 'how', but 'when', and in this regard, think weeks and months, not years.

Maybe the future is not in pure software, but software + genomics.
Well written. As someone who works for a major IPS vendor - I can point out one more area in which Gartner was way off. Namely, the market sizing for the IPS industry. We are #1/#2 in the industry in terms of market share and by extrapolating from sales graphs and such it seems that IPS is nowhere close to the billion dollar market that Gartner said it would be. Another distinction that is obvious to an engineer but not to an analyst/VC type is that IPS is just a marketing buzzword. IPS = IDS with the option to drop packets and block flows. As for your comments on ncircle, I agree that they are limping. But I am not so sure they're addressing a niche any longer. The vulnerability assessment people (worked for one of those as well) are busy going after the compliance market -- which doesnt seem like so much of a niche given the kind of $$ enterprises are spending on SOX.
Fair Use Worth More to Economy Than Copyright, CCIA Says
Jeff Barr: Kidnapped By Hackers
This is my problem. I'm from Russia and I'm working on YC application for this winter funding right now. But those co-founders here in Russia I've been counting on are just afraid to start a startup.
I already have a real job, the fact it does not suck does not make it less real.
From the Nature piece: "Solar variability is unlikely to have been the dominant cause of the strong warming during the past three decades."

About Scarletta and West: "However, they emphasized that their findings do not argue against the basic theory that significant global warming is occurring because of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse" gases." http://www.dukenews.duke.edu/2005/09/sunwarm.html

The Telegraph article is vague. That's an example of why rms asked for journals.
I kind of said the opposite: Gartner was right, and people stopping buying IDS. By your market share assertion, you either work for McAfee or TippingPoint; the combined IPS rev for McAfee, TippingPoint, IBM, and SourceFire is over $500MM.

I'm an engineer too, and I get that IDS and IPS are basically the same thing in different form factor, but product packaging, deal structure, and go-to-market are just as important as whether your pcap_loop hooks up to a switch fabric shared memory buffer or the BPF driver.

Sheer unstoppable excellence will always be valuable, but controlling for that, an IDS company (or a company tied to the fortunes of the IDS market) is a bad bet.
Linux.com:Hosting multiple projects with DrProject
+1 8 )
There is an important lesson here: if you can get just one high-profile person to back you, your business idea -- no matter how silly or impractical -- will make a splash.

The stated goal of 23andMe -- "personal genomics" -- has been a holy grail of just about every geneticist and molecular biologist since the advent of DNA sequencing. There are thousands of brilliant, experienced scientists who have been working on the (substantial) technical problems for years...and yet, an investor and a sales rep for Affymetrix are going to make it work?

No...the only reason that 23andMe has traction is because one of the co-founders is married to Sergey, and because Esther Dyson is on the board. Beyond that, they've tackled a problem that is so big, they don't even know how out-gunned they actually are.
Maybe we need to start a national start-up writing month :-)

I have several freind who do NaNoWriMo every year and say it is simply wonderful.
There is an important lesson here: if you can get just one high-profile person to back you, your business idea -- no matter how silly or impractical -- will make a splash.

And people wonder why there's so much interest in applying to YC.
There's lots of stories on that site saying tank on empty results in overheated and broken fuel pumps.
Perhaps. But my estimation is that the ycombinator folks put in more effort to screen people than is the case, here.
Thanks again for everyone's comments (especially from thomasptacek and bharath).

I am really not trying to take any positions here and make any comments that apply to situations. I am also not trying to disparage Gartner (we subscribe to their service now because they provide values).

Again my point is that success in a startup has a whole lot to do with market timing and no one has a crystal ball (not even for the experts). The best that we can do as entrepreneurs is to keep our nose to the grindstone and do someting that generates revenues sooner rather than later.

If in fact someone builds a "lifestyle" business, it is not the worst that could happen to our family.

Good luck, everyone.

--Denny--

Denny K Miu
These don't sound like dissenters to me; more like just trying to design a R5.5RS to ease the transition to R6.
Hi Matt,

This is Nick from NCC Group again. I sent you an email but I still wanted to get in touch to discuss your requirement more. I can say that as a company you are effectively stealth still because I can't find a number for you.

Our escrows end up being about $1500 per year, then with additional customers as low as $625 per customer if you choose to go with that agreement.

Regarding the data and deposit verification that epi0Bauqu mentioned, a basic level is included in our agreements and we have the highest level in the market available upon request.

Give me a call when you get a chance.

Nick

408-441-4660 ext. 108

P.S. I like the frog mascot
And of all the people who read the news about Iraq that week, how many people can name a single thing that happened in Iraq the day the iPhone launched? Probably no one. Whereas I bet most people can still recall the key details of the iPhone launch.
Introducing handbag rentals with StillChic, a la Netflix
10 years later conclusion: listen to the "experts" but only follow your instinct.
The studios and theater owners punish the people who don't pirate films the most.

If you pay full price for a theater movie you have to sit through 15 minutes of ads and trailers.

If you pay full price for a DVD, you have to sit through the trailers (which you often can't fast forward) and a bunch of annoying FBI messages.

If you pirate the film, you see exactly what you want - a movie.
Sometimes, people confuse luck for skill. For every 1 of Gigamon's there's 1000 failures. As much as any rational person hates to admit it, luck is #1 thing successful startups have.
Sketch and storyboard artists for film and animation often use sharpies for this same reason. You want to convey an idea first - people often zoom in on the finest detail in a drawing or design, and using inexact lines makes the design itself the thing you focus on.
Helsinki is not that bicycle-friendly at all. More space for bicycles on the roads would help a lot more than a route planner. It is good progress, I don't deny that, but it certainly doesn't make Helsinki the most bicycle-friendly city in the world. Amsterdam and Copenhagen are probably years ahead of Helsinki.
Oohs And Aahs: Vowel Sounds Affect Our Perceptions Of Products
Related to this topic is the famous kiki / bouba study, where certain word pronunciations are found to naturally sound "sharper" or "rounder."

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
How to Trim Your Bacon with Google Mail
Except Gigamon is yet another example of a company that made something people want, and succeeded despite other factors because they understood their customer. This doesn't look like an example of luck dominating.

Luck's role here was to keep them from doing something something the news.yc community would consider dumb, i.e. setting aside what they knew about their customers in favor of what they thought an analyst group was saying.
Google is backing private moon landing contest
Isn't it time to make a blacklist for pundits and "journalists" who's prediction and advice are demonstrably off the mark?

For example:

James Daly: F
10 Overrated Business Books (and What to Read Instead)
Curious, how out-gunned are they?

Affordable DNA analysis could be a very sellable product. I had my DNA analyzed before as part of a medical examination. (I believe what happened was they tested for certain sequences that confer certain allergies or a likelihood of developing some diseases). It wasn't cheap, not complete, nor timely. If this is what 23andme is doing, and it's cheap enough like OTC drugs, that's pretty cool.
Just got a recommendation from the attorney (and he checked with other attorneys) to consider Iron Mountain. So it's looking like they get the node for now.

But man it seems very pricey to me. NGC (the other big one) is about the same. Think there's a startup idea here? The problem is the stability of the escrow agent I guess.
UPDATE : hey i just heard about Yahoo's "HackDay India" . well that might not be too bad a place to find 200 odd hackers assemble together 8 )

links to the hacker's above as well as hackday india at my blog http://bosky101.blogspot.com/2007/09/where-are-indian-hacker...
Someone at my company observed:

My favorite part:
"Robotics, Hanson believes, should be about artistic expression, a creative medium akin to sculpting or painting."

Which may be tightly coupled to:
"The company, which has yet to break even.."

but functionality and beauty aren't mutually exclusive.