skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To the author of the article: I have been staring at the screen for two mins after reading the article. I really want to say something encouraging and supportive; but I found myself at a lost of what to say. Maybe it is because I really understand what you mean by the sense of "impending doom." When I had the sense of "impending doom," I feel that people just don't understand--How can I not feel depressed when the situation is getting worse and worse? But life moves on.. And the situation will get better one way or the other. Ten years later when you look back at this, I am sure that you will realize that it is not as bad as you think it is... You have to stay hopeful!
The way pay phones used to work (and probably still work, when you can find one) was you dropped the coins in the slot, and they landed in what is known as the escrow hopper. Once you paid for the first three minutes, the call would go through. If the distant party answered, a pulse would be sent down the line emptying the escrow hopper into the lock box at the base of the phone. If not, you could hang up, and a pulse would come down the line dumping the escrow hopper into the coin return. It was a matter of the pulse's polarity.

If you could gain access to a pay phone's phone connection, you could splice in a simple circuit that would allow coin return signals to go through unmodified but would invert coin collect signals, thereby always returning your coins.

Of course, if you could tap into a pay phone line, you might notice that grounding one side of the line produced a dial tone, enabling you to make free local calls. Long distance was a less trivial problem, since the operator would come on and ask for more money, verified by listening to gong sounds (later beeps) that the phone would send when coins were inserted. An obvious solution was to play a tape loop of a quarter being inserted enough times to represent the required payment. Later, this came to be known as Red Boxing, the Red Box being an electronic circuit that replaced the tape loop, emitting the desired number of beeps to represent whatever sum was due.
What is particularly revealing is Ryan's confession about tracking and co-ordination challenges at 37 Signals:

"In some areas, it’s been really successful. I mean, there’s a lot of self-management happening at 37, but at the same time, what I noticed was that despite a lot of success with that, projects simply were not getting shipped."

"So, I was asking myself “What’s missing? Why isn’t this happening?” And I realized that what it really takes to ship product is coordination...And, if somebody doesn’t actually take care to schedule everybody’s time, so that the right people are available at the right time, with the right context, to work together and make all those things happen, it just doesn’t happen on its own."

We've been discussing the sort of culture we want at a new startup this week, and Jason Fried and DHH's opinions on tracking came up.

Jason in 2006 [0]:

"Christopher: We never tracked time. Not even in the client days."

"Nollind, we don’t track time. Tracking time is a waste of time. Things either get done or they don’t. If they don’t, everyone knows about it."

In a recent interview with Fast Company [1]:

"We don’t track things in that way. I don’t look at that. I don’t want to encourage that kind of work. I want to encourage quality work."

DHH in 'Refusing Administrative Minutiae' [2]:

"No time-tracking, no tick tock, just clear expectations of what the client was going to get. It really opened my eyes to “you can refuse to do the shit you don’t want to do” way of running a business."

I'm actually sympathetic to creating a company culture which tries to reduce as much 'big brother bureaucracy' as possible, and assumed that 37 Signals had managed this successfully by hiring late, and hiring good.

However based on Ryan's comments I get the sense self-management went a little too far.

Still, they've managed to achieve some success and financial reward :)

[0] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3133-lessons-from-launch-help...

[1] http://www.fastcompany.com/3000852/37signals-earns-millions-...

[2] http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3081-refusing-administrative-...
Erlang Distribution Protocol in Go
Failure is a life event, and it sucks. (Just like getting ditched, getting fired, getting sick, and so on.) Frankly, I'm glad I'm not in your shoes right now. But it's not the end. This thing you built will not take you down with it. You'll still be standing, and ready to move on to the next chapter.
Five unanswered questions from the PlayStation 4 event
Replacement for Erlang Port Mapped Daemon
Fuck them. Don't let it ruin your life. It was a gamble and they knew it. No risk. No reward. If it were a sure thing, credit unions would be giving cash. If they were investing their retirement funds, that's their issue, not yours.

I'm sure you worked hard. Tried your best. What else can you do. If it's over, move on and get out of the current gig now. Tomorrow even. It sounds like your investors already have.

You've made sacrifices as well. Call them tomorrow, thank them for what they did, shut the door and open a new one.
This is absolutely terrible news. I don't care if you "like the daily deals business model" or "hate the daily deals business model" - this is very very bad news for a lot of people. It will have impact on the rest of the industry and perhaps already has. We should be very disappointed that things have gone south in this way. We should work harder to build profit into our businesses and we should hope still that LivingSocial can pull itself above water... Best wishes go out to everyone there...
I think I'd say the problem is that Daily Deals is a fantastic and valuable service, but not a billion dollar business.

Daily deals works by drastic price cuts, the end. That means it costs the merchant far more than just what they pay the middleman. The middlemen can't charge more than pocket-change for the service or it just don't work.

So the future as I see it for daily deals sites is small companies making decent money charging huge numbers of businesses tiny commissions to promote their sales through largely automated platforms. It's perfectly suited to a ten-man company, which is why I personally think the over capitalized megacorps are doomed.
Heh, yeah... remember the old Radio Shack DTMF dialers that were trivially easy to convert into a solid state Red Box? Those were the days.

http://www.phonelosers.org/redbox/tonedialer/
The 10 Commandments of Good Source Control Management
Curious question: If an entrepreneur raised money from VC, and things go south, is the entrepreneur's career basically "done" (e.g. blacklisted by every VC on the planet)? Can he start another venture and get VC money again?

How is it compared to being fired? (Being fired = you can find another job, might need to explain why you're fired to potential employer, but life goes on)
I'm now working on my third distributed high performance enterprise storage cluster. SCSI requires a certain (high) level of consistency per LU. And availability... and I'm delivering performance?

What? How could that be possible?

This blog post has so many assumptions about how nodes can and should behave that it's almost unreadable.

Faulty network? Get two fabrics. Nodes going down? RDMA to non volatile ram, and fail the I/O to the other node. This works for all your banks, airlines, governments, etc.

Heroku could do much better, but really: most of these startups should be hiring some ops people and design their own architectures already!
I've missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I've lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I've been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

Michael Jordan
I have not, but isn't it safe to say that if this money wasn't going into venture capital it would probably be going into something like oil speculation or mortgage backed securities, which undoubtably has much more negative impact on our world then giving some people jobs to try out their crazy ideas for a few years dont you think? It's good OP is concerned about his investors, but its just money from people with lots of it. His own money is more of a concern imo, but at least the job market is good for someone with his skills. He'll bounce back, hang in there!
Good story..

Own it. Own this failure and figure out (if you havent already) what went wrong and own it. This isn't just about damage control, this is about realizing the struggle in keeping a business a float is an asset, extracting as much data and knowledge will drive the success of your future projects.

And above all, do not let the investors forget you with a bad taste in their mouth. Own it, again. Remind them why they invested you in the first place, you never know what the future holds. Don't let it just burn up!
That is a great recognition for Dojo, maybe Dojo should showcase successful entrepreneurs/developers that have been active Dojo members.
Agreed, but, I don't see what a PhD has to do with any of these. My snarky, probably very ignorant, reply would be something like, if you want intellectual freedom, get a subscription to a library. Renegotiate your lowly Bachelor of Sciences' contract to work fewer hours, that'll get you physical freedom.

Seriously. IMO someone reading through, say, the TAOCP, Rudin's Real and Complex Analysis, Horowitz & Hill's TAOE, or any selection of good, difficult books like these, will have acquired undoubtedly more intellectual freedom afterwards than any PhD graduate. For starters, it's self-directed study, which is orders of magnitude harder, and more important to self-growth, than study directed by an advisor, or any bit of structure. It's also faster. It doesn't sink you in any significant debt, which is a plus on the order of physical freedom. It's much more eclectic, which is incredibly important, both in terms of the monopoly power you'll bear, and the scientific value your unique analogies between concepts will create. Hopefully.

Sure, there's no paper afterwards to show. My take is that, credentials or not, you'll still have to show your competence to a potential employer or investor, your exposition tailored to the particular needs you suspect they have.
I think what raganwald was saying is that the blog itself will be comment-free. If topics from it end up (legitimately) posted on HN, reddit, et al., with commenting occurring there, fine.

I did not take the description to mean that every post would have a link to "comment on HN" connected to a pre-spun-up HN post. (And, with HN's relatively recent changes to headers to disallow framing [1] in compliant browsers, there won't be any framed HN threads.)

I think that for the latter to occur (as opposed to not -- the current situation), would very likely go against the management wishes and objectives of HN. For several reasons: Relevance (or not); the ban on excessive self-promotion; the implications for HN should this become at all widespread.

TL;DR: HN is not Discus, and per my reading of OP, raganwald is not treating it like Discus, so all's fine.

--

[1] Last I checked, HN is now setting X-Frame-Options to "deny". Or, they have been, and I noticed more recently when it started borking a client-side extension I was using.

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP/X-Frame-Option...
I can tell you with very good precision that of the 8,760 hours in 2011, I only wasted 939 of them

That's pretty good for a robot but you can still improve.

As for me, I am a normal person, I don't need to track every freaking minute of my life or be "connected" to a million devices at any moment.
I still have full scans of local exchanges done with ToneLoc. The US Courier HST Dual Standard would detect "voice" and hang up which would boost it to around 240 numbers per hour. Ah the good old days.

Oh, and for a while there was soundblaster support that said, "Yo we found a carrier" whenever it hit a modem. Good times.
Though many online businesses in Thailand let you pay via bank transfer, which can get around the fees in many cases. That's not something that'd work in the US, but it's very common over here.
Ah! I had heard of several similar things (Chromium Embedded, etc.) but this one is new to me. So that's what Light Table is written in!
Fun fact: Stripe is backed by three out of five Paypal founders.

In my layman's view, that's a prudent move, similar to neutral/risk reversal stock trading strategies. Of course VC is about more than just money, but still.
I noticed that today too, I don't like when sites force behaviors like that. Groupon used to be the biggest offender, Quora still use these tricks.
These cultural traits are older than colonialism. Christian crusaders commented on them in the middle ages and they're the reason that Arabs have a reputation for dishonesty in the West. They're not incompatible with building a large empire if you're enemies are similarly disfunctional.
I imagine they will become unsecured debtors
Nah, man. Only nerds and failures talk like that, brahiem. 


Wise words indeed. One of the things that has always bugged me about certain portions of the startup culture is that over valuing of 'success'. As far as I am concerned, if you learn something from the experience, you can't fail.
Yep, all very true and totally agree. Never just one individual responsible, I just dropped the name of the biggest one for the sake of briefness. I think it was Danton that said something like, "My only regret is to go before that rat Robespierre" when he was giving his last words after being arrested for realizing how screwed up the revolution had become with his and other's control of The Committee of Public Safety.

Also pains me to see (at least at the time, not sure if it's true anymore [perhaps you can elaborate on the public view of Marat now for me] ) that Jean-Paul Marat was made out to be a martyr on his death instead of despised for his role in fueling the flames. I'm not French (some day I will visit when I can), but I do have a large interest in French History (and European History in general) as well as revolutions and how people act during them. Revolutions kind of serve as a reminder of how little human nature changes during a time period that is meant to change humanity for the better. It unfortunately seems to repeat itself with nearly every revolution since, which is ashame.
You never would have thought by their office space that anything was wrong... http://www.businessinsider.com/living-social-office-tour-201...
My girlfriends makeup site embraced pinterest in early 2012 which resulted in gradual traffic growth from females who have been strong contributors and buyers.

I feel its more saturated now but still a great platform to leverage.
What was your old startup 8 months ago?
MIDI.js - Sequencing in Javascript
Enactivity - A new way for groups to start doing social activities together
Google didn't invent search engines. It didn't databases. It didn't invent web crawling. It invented a better search engine (Page Rank) that didn't clog up the page with portal crap. Meanwhile, Bell Labs invented the transistor, C, etc. Xerox PARC invented the GUI, Ethernet, and e-mail. Etc.

I think that makes calling Google the "greatest technology organization ever existed" laughable, not to mention historically revisionist.
Congrats for completing 6 wonderful years. I regularly read HN since past 1-2 years. It's been a valuable source for providing news about startups and programming. I also contribute my own articles to HN and the HN community has been extremely helpful in making me a decent writer.
>> Wireless boosters are "saving the carriers money by not making them build more towers, but now they can charge you for improving the holes in their own network," Feld said.

>> "For some reason, the commission has delegated authority to the carrier."

I wonder if the FCC is receiving kickbacks from the carriers for implementing these rules? Is this worthy of petitioning the President to call of the dogs at the FCC? I can just imagine some greedy, beady-eyed Scrooge type at some large unnamed carrier wringing their hands in anticipation at the prospect of adding ... more fees to our bills.
A friend of mine just opened a surf shop at your intersection.
?? Mic capture is all that's needed for the narration like what happens on twitch.tv.
I don't want to sound like an ass, but the parent comment was right. Now, I understand if you thought the comment was snarky, but your comeback was even worse.
Fuck it - that is the game and "investors" know it. Go drink an awesome import beer. Rent a comedy and laugh your ass off.
Yes, with the gap for the recession, that makes perfect sense to me. Also, you're forgetting that as sample size decreases variance increases. The ten year sample is larger than the six year sample (2006-2011) that you've set up. I expect variance.

Also, I count only 73 in ['95,'05). Are you counting ['95,'05]? That's 11 years. 7.3 per year is really not that different from 4.8/yr (29 in ['06,'12)), which includes two to three years of recession.

As for this:

> First of all, would you mind showing me the sales data from Steam? No? Then how do you intend to use that as part of your argument exactly?

I'm not interested in winning a debate with you, I'm just trying to demonstrate what's true to any fair-minded people reading this. If you want to pretend that Steam sales didn't account for a huge portion of all PC games sold, and therefore that the PC sales are extraordinarily under-represented in the last few years of this chart, be my guest. It's only yourself that you're deceiving.
Reminds me of chicken farmers that bred chickens that produced the most eggs - which resulted in highly aggressive chickens that would kill and injure their competitors and break their eggs. Or the wheat farmer that selected only for the largest kernels of wheat and got a crop that only produced a few massive kernels.

In this case we've created tomatoes that grow amazingly huge and fast and pretty looking, and yet they taste much worse. No one was selecting for taste.
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Agreed. They must have known the response from Jack Daniels going to 80 proof, and were probably informed by the New Coke reaction in the 1980s.

The stated goal was to deal with a supply shortage. They were willing to dilute their product in order to increase supply, on the premise that the taste didn't change from 90 to 84.

JD's justification for going from 90 to first 86 then 80 was that customers preferred the lower proof. JD drinkers could tell the difference but MM drinkers can't?

They had three choices: raise the price, lower the proof, or create a new line for the cheaper proof. They chose the one with the most free marketing.

I don't like being a marketing toy, and as you say, there are plenty of other bottles. When my bottle, with its pretty red wax, is finished, I won't be replacing it.
I had a company fold up on me like this as a team manager. I was close to the founders and they ALL did just fine. I also did fine. The only one I fault were some damn famous investors that didn't even respond to requests to have us meet at their related hiring portfolio companies. Cold.

Everyone else (including the founders), love them -- we all ended up on our feet and were better for the whole awesome startup experience.
The problem with those varieties is they don't produce the same yields.
Second this. Bootstrapping is great, and it's even underrated. Most people raise too much too early, and it ends up hurting them. In the end VC capital is a tool though, and you can use it well.

One position from which raising money might be a good idea is when you have a product that is already scaling and shows strong product/market fit, and you know (know, not think) that going 10x on spending is going to let you grow a lot faster.
Agile, Offshoring and Dreyfus Model of Learning
Impressive Article Marketing Principles For Competitive Campaigns
Retriever: a new bootstrap theme
...there's some cargo culting in legal writing...

Some? In my experience, it rises to the level of "massive amounts of".
It really was the best scanning software around. Even today, I'd take a good bet that its the best.
An elegant dashboard to manage all of the ads on your blog.
Advert.ly gives bloggers/content producers a super easy and quick way to manage the ads on their websites. They can create, edit, delete, activate or deactivate any ad instantly and visually from the dashboard. No more editing code and uploading files.
That's exactly what's moronic with investors, they invest in the company, not in the founders. Unless you made them money, they will ignore you.

Until next time you succeed then, they will start following you back and talk about old days how it was fun and exciting.

Yeah, exception exists and they have a track record showing it.
New Phone App for Encrypted Text Messages [video]
It sounded like you supported what the original commenter said, not to worry about investors.

Having a slack attitude towards money (our own money or others) doesn't build a business or an understanding of value that ultimately ends in a revenue stream.

It's nice of you to share you story -- I don't think many folks do. I have similar experiences (good and bad), but I think the one thing that really stands out for me is that investors are in a sense "buying" your time, not much different than consulting...... :)
Agree, technology for the sake of technology and growth for the sake of growth does not a business (or social good) make.

I love so much of what YC does but I wish their motto was not "Make something people want" but rather "Make something people need" because the two can often be diametrically opposed. Kinda like how a parent should not always give their child everything he/she wants (candy at every meal, constant attention, making a mess/scene everywhere you go, etc).

If we as startups only tried to make stuff people "want" then the world might end up looking like the dystopian society in the 2006 film "Idiocracy".
You should never count on stock options being anything other than a nice bonus that likely won't materialize. If you're taking a significant haircut on salary or benefits in order to have a shot at a big payday, you're doing it wrong.

Join a startup because you think it'll be a fun ride, not to make a million dollars.
I just confirmed that the same occurs with Chrome 24.0.1312.52 (Official Build 175374). I'm quite sure that I am viewing it in a proprietary viewer. Specifically, the Chrome PDF Viewer. Surely you've seen these buttons before?

http://i.imgur.com/80dO12V.png

In both Chrome and Chromium, clicking save here does nothing and "Save As" is greyed out in the right-click context menu. "Print" works in Chrome (though it takes time to produce a preview before I can print to PDF), but locks up Chromium.

This anti-user bullshit is usually less prevalent in non-proprietary software.
An intelligent species is different from a technological one, by a huge magnitude. That's not to say that dolphins aren't worthwhile to communicate with but there will never be a dolphin shakespeare, or pythagoras, or einstein, or da vinci. The options for being able to communicate with a technological species are astronomically greater than with a non-technological intelligent species.
"What is interesting to me about Estonia now is the lack of overall diversity in the tech sector there. The biggest tech employers seem to be the government, the banks, and Skype."

I believe that's not unique to Estonia. The biggest tech employers in my country are the government and the banks as well (No Skype here).
> You must be a very different knowledge work than I am. Every 3-5 minutes I'm typically typing something into the my URL bar to get the appropriate page on the internet to solve my questions.

I do that with Westlaw. Apparently it's been around in digital form since the 1970's, though it was a dial-up service back then.