skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I didn't dislike his comments! If anything I probably enjoyed them, from what I remember. It's just this whole post reeks of "YOU BULLIES GOT WHAT WAS COMING TO YOU", which makes me wonder, who were the bullies? And how did they get what was coming to them? I don't mean that as snark, I mean that as an honest question. What's the lesson we're supposed to learn from this, if any?
Thanks for sharing the reality instead of writing articles like "How I started X and made Y in Z days". This is really painful to read.

This is one reason why I will never take money from an external investor. There are some scenarios when you definitely need an investor's help. But right now, the trend is almost like "it's a cool factor to seek investment for your startup".

The problem with taking money from someone else is that, you become obligated/answerable to them. Remember, we all start-up because we don't want to go down the traditional working-for-a-corporate route, because we don't want to be answerable/obey no one/their orders. But seeking investment (in most cases) just defeats this purpose of starting up.

Why the hell would someone want to be answerable to a third party for running YOUR company in YOUR way?? And what happens when that company fails? You need to either apologize/console the investor that you will somehow get back his money. Contrast this with having no investors at all, worst case scenario would be you lost all your money. But that's much better than losing someone else's.

I find nothing wrong in trying to build an Saas that generates $10000-$50000 a month in revenue from day one, without external investment, instead of seeking millions in investment for a bunch of photo filters on a phone only to later worry about monetizing the idea.
If you haven't had moments when you thought "Never again" about HN, then
you haven't been here long enough. If you haven't taken any extended
breaks (weeks/months) from interacting on HN or even visiting HN, then
you haven't been here long enough.

Maybe edw519 is taking a well deserved break? Then again, maybe he has
left for good? Of course, maybe he got tired of the endless argument
that is the current state of HN? But also, there may be some other
reason?

HN has changed. In fact, HN has been constantly changing since its
inception as "Startup News" six years ago. You might consider the
changes to be "good," or you might consider the changes to be "bad," but
either way, the rate change is fairly consistent.

pg (and RTM, and TLB, and JL, and ...) has found technical
countermeasures for many of the common ailments of discussion systems.
Sadly, a lot of the advancements are not public, but if you pay
attention and have a lot of free time to invest in studying, you might
see some of them at work here on HN. The trouble is, no matter how
bright these people are, they can't mitigate all of worst parts of human
nature, and particularly, they haven't managed to compensate for the
human propensity to disagree [1].

Though it sure seems as if most of the newer HN members haven't read
Paul's "disagree" essay (linked below), Paul was still prescient enough
to realize HN could (d)evolve into an "argument site," rather than a
"contribution site," and the result of the rise as an argument based
site would be driving away the contributors.

Whether we've quietly lost another great contributor with edw519 is yet
to be seen, but if he is gone, he'll be missed by me and most likely
many others.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
> There are now a lot less PC games produced every year

I am curious where you are getting this information
He made some insensitive comments about/to Aaron Swartz before Swartz committed suicide, and some sympathetic (and not representative of his comments prior to the suicide) comments afterward. Those comments probably had little to do with Swartz' death and changing one's mind about something probably shouldn't be a crime, but the Internet is reactionary, and pitch forks were brandished.

He may also simply be on vacation from HN. I sometimes go a month or two between posting. But, then, I've never been as active here as Ed.
You sound like the worst employee ever.
I think you grossly overestimate Blizzard's grasp of balance when compared to the SC/SC2 communities' grasp of balance. Compare the solutions and balance opinions of Dustin "Rocks are Balanced" Browder to Sean "Day[9]" Plott, for example.

In the mutalisk stacking example, it ended up being a very good thing in terms of metagame balance. At the time, top Zerg players were having tremendous problems breaching Terran static defenses, and it proved to be relatively "fair" for them to have that option in the mid-game. Also worth noting is that just because it's simple doesn't make it easy; it still required good APM/Micro to manage and a solid understanding of the magic-boxing techniques.

Even now, in SC2, the idea that workers don't collide with each other when given a command to mine a remote mineral patch is necessary at high levels of play to use the drone drilling technique in order to avoid a pylon ramp-block, which is an extremely simple technique for the protoss to use, but disproportionately difficult situation for the Zerg to deal with. Even with the drone drilling technique, it's still relatively uphill and requires good micro. (see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M9CA9AahV1E )

As for the complicated "Blizzard Approved" maps, they're present in the ladders, but most have tweaks. Of particular note are the GSL (A/THE pro-league in south korea) maps that actually include a neutral supply depot at the bottom of the main ramp to prevent pylon ramp-blocks from being viable so as to prevent drone drilling from being necessary.

Similarly, KESPA (korean e-sports association) was one of the driving forces for map balance in brood war, and their version of the Lost Temple was considered very balanced for reasons much more strategically significant than "people like it".
کتاب مکاتب | كتاب جامع موبايل
That TechCrunch article makes no sense. They accuse edw519 of doing a "complete 180 degree turn" because he first said said Aaron Swartz "should take responsibility for his actions," and later said he was stunned and heartbroken by his death.

Unless you interpret "take responsibility for his actions" as a samurai would, there's no inconsistency here.
I've got nothing against either endeavor, I just don't like the way Groupon and Zynga in particular go about it. (Thus my "more harm than good" accusation)

Otherwise, there are plenty of small business marketing and entertainment companies I really like.
The coupons that you're talking about are for specific products. The idea being that you come in to get that price on one thing, and wind up picking up others at full price.
He's the 4th most upvoted HN user:

http://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

(pg is the first, but is not listed there :)
I think the take away should be that if anyone missed him, they should try to reach out to him and see if he's willing/planning on coming back.

All of us have been bullies at different times in our lives, even if it was just for a moment. No one's perfect, and what happened to edw519 could have happened to anyone. The mob mentality some people adopt in these situations just proves it.
I guess they bought a lot of ads.
My point was to complain about what RapGenius needed by describing an extreme that doesn't exhibit the behaviors your post describes. However you were speaking in terms of Heroku, and my post reads like it's trying to deride that. My comment reads pretty awfully, actually.

I guess I'm just frustrated with how much I hear about cloud services solving the "ops problem" when in reality all I see are people ignoring having a rigorous architecture for their applications.

There are extremes that solve just about any problem RapGenius is facing, because I bet you their traffic, I/O and CPU profiles are not that difficult of a problem to solve for their specific case.

I highly doubt that RapGenious needs over a hundred geographically disparate nodes in a virtualized multitenant environment, (notably because they are the one tenant!), but somehow that's what they're using and they don't understand what it means for them.

I'm sorry that previous comment sucked, and possibly sorry for this one.
>midis that played on my professional homepage

We're partying like it's 1995 again!
If Aaron hadn't of killed himself then this issue wouldnt have come up. People felt bad because the whole community seems to have felt the same way at that time with the knowledge they had.

Unfortunately in such a big community you get a lot of people that need a scapegoat that they can blame and in this case Edw519 was one of them.

I dont blame him for leaving the community to be honest. It's not what it once was and may be not worth his time and energy if he feels he's not getting much back.
People have flagged your post. It probably will be thrown out of front page soon!
It sounds like they've got enough redundancy that a single drive failure (or even an entire pod) isn't an issue - they use cheap drives and simply swap them out when they fail.

I wish Google's hard drive failure analysis [1] included failure rates and failure scenario statistics for different models, vendors and consumer/enterprise classes too.

[1] http://research.google.com/archive/disk_failures.pdf
Oh gee! That's not good. I wasn't aware of any rule I violated... what is the reason for the flagging?
I have Linux talent, where are the desperate companies you are talking about?
Why did Microsoft make Windows 8 hard to Power Off?
http://ux.stackexchange.com/q/25687/4679
For those who are considering a so-called "equity" offer in lieu of salary, please read Stas Bekman's post on "Employment and Stock Options Explained (2000)" [1]. It contains some of the best information I've found on the subject, and it's fairly succinct.

[1] http://stason.org/articles/money/investing/everything_you_ev...
I think that's pretty unfair. The guys who get screwed the hardest and have the fewest places to land are, quite often, the guys on the bottom. What of his post is poor advice for those guys?

(Yes, founders take more risk--though "fuck, out of a job" is not a risk to be minimized. Founders do also get much more exposure and have a better chance of finding somewhere to land immediately if things go south, as well as foreknowledge of the southerly state of things and a head start on finding that escape route.)
Nvidia 's new futuristic HQ
Video Analysis of the Russian Meteor
"Indeed, the fact that Google co-founder Sergey Brin can sport the specs on the New York subway without being hassled by the regular public, suggests that either people aren’t overly aware of the technology, or that it is seen a being overly dorky and not for the everyday person."

The paraphrased version :

One of the richest and most notorious entrepreneur in the world was not being harassed in a subway while wearing google glasses suggests that the glasses are seen as overly dorky...

Expending on this logic :

Be careful not to wear Warby glasses in the subway, somebody might harass you and this will suggest that you might be you be a rich and famous entrepreneur.
A lot of people are saying just own it and move on. Well I'm going to try a different approach. I hope you see this. I've been leading a team the past couple months building my first major app that has traction. It's been a roller coaster already but today we were able to get a version into TestFlight and see it on my phone. It sucks, it's still buggy, and it's not up to my standards yet but it was the most exciting thing seeing something that isn't perfect yet come to fruition. Something I've thought about and lost sleep over and spent countless hours designing and planning. It's finally starting to come alive and I'm leading a team of awesome developers that are making it happen and it's so exciting seeing it become real.

Now I know that you had to have this feeling with whatever you built. Remember back to those times you kept refreshing the page to see how many new users or page views you had since the last time you refreshed. You were excited about it. You were elated to a point where you felt you were unstoppable. What happened from here? Really ask yourself this. Ask what roads you took that lead you to where you are. Just saying you 'ran out of innovation' is a pretty crappy excuse. Some decisions you let happen led you to where you are today.

What I want you to see is a glimpse of that same spark you felt 2 years ago when you first launched and when you were building your app. I am in the opposite state of mind as you are currently. Things are looking good for me but that's because I choose to see it that way. Even when things are crap, I know that I can make them better if my heart is in it and I trust my gut.

You have the same power. You've already admitted defeat and chose to fail. You said it yourself, you're going to fail in two months and I've already given up. YOU CANNOT let your mind get in that state. Find out what is blocking you from taking it to the next level and get there. If you are a true entrepreneur at heart, find that spirit you had in the early days. It's not hopeless, it's just what you see it as.

You can be another story of failure or you could just as easily be a story of success. It is what you make it. I don't believe that there is no way out and you're doomed to fail because your lack of innovation. Some things you should kill if they don't work, but you better be damn sure it won't work because it's a bad model and not because your innovation just ran out.

You wrote this and posted it to HN. You're trying to find a way out or you're trying to find out what to do next. I'm telling you. Search deep inside yourself. Remember you only live once. You were given a good chance based on that initial passion and energy you had. Find that again. Figure out what you need to do to turn things around and do them. If it's killing them fine, but kill it being happy and confident. If you need support or someone to talk to, my email is in my profile. Whoever you are, if we are at all in like minded spirits, you just have to dig deep to overcome this mountain, and before long you will regain that vision and compass of where to go.

Edit: a few words
How do you get such smooth fonts on Firefox in Windows 7? This is what I see on FF/Win7: http://i.imgur.com/KEFZSti.png
I for one enjoy my employee beanbag chairs :(
Facebooks social graph is incredibly complex, the code that maintains it is slightly more complex than what you would need for 1/10 the users and 1/100th the social graph.

Yes, that law was an exaggeration but there are plenty of examples that include specifics on where the headquarters is which is effectively the same thing.

As to pork, the 50 billion sandy bill 17 billion relating to sand and then a bunch of random junk such as 33 million for Amtrack which is a for profit company. Now in this case nobody felt the need to hide it, but there are plenty of past spending bills aka law that have really specific contract requirements. EX: 693,000$ (~1/20,000th the budget) for beef improvement research in Missouri and Texas went to the Beef Improvement Federation as the only group meeting the requirements despite not being directly named in law. Granted by it's self not a big deal but plenty of things such as vary narrow import tarrifs stick around ex: refined vs raw sugar. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/sc019
Google Glass looking for style, partners with Warby Parker
The unwritten rule of not forcing painful introspection onto people.
Lunar phase
"investors are in a sense "buying" your time, not much different than consulting"

Brilliant. I've never heard the concept of investing in a startup phrased so well.
VB Surf! Looking forward to checking it out. They went from empty to open in like 5 days... I wish I could ship software that quickly!
Mining the First 3.5 Million California Unclaimed Property Records
Yep. For those not familiar with the area, LS headquarters are almost literally a stones throw from the White House (read : very expensive real estate).

The "Hungry Academy" mention is easy to miss, but that's actually an entire floor unto itself.
New Yahoo homepage
> "What's the lesson we're supposed to learn from this, if any?"

1 - Put down the pitchforks.

2 - Be good to one another.

I'm very much sounding like a broken record these days, but even predating aaronsw's suicide, the Tesla-NYT debacle, and recent newsworthy events, HN's crowd has been quickly descending into Reddit/4chan level of hysteria. Every news item has been spun to its most sensational extent (and then some), and the membership take turns shaking pitchforks and burning effigies of whatever simplistic villain we've decided was worthy of our collective rage today.

It could be Ortiz, or Aaron, or Broder, or Musk. This community has become less empathetic over time, more verbally violent, less rational, more prone to sweeping judgment, and much more absolutist. I am not enjoying this shift in attitudes at all.
Do note that interacting on the net is one thing, dealing with a network of people such as friends and colleagues at a firm, is an entirely different ball game.

Unspoken comments, reading between the lines, motivations behind bringing up a topic, moods, wit, having to respond to aggression immediately, saving face...

Its on a different level.

----

In the case of HN, personally I feel its more polite not to mention it and see if someone with real experience echoes the same.

The reason armchair psychology should get downvoted is the same reason idea-guys get downvoted when they talk about something they don't know much about.

Although I have to admit, I've seen my experience on HN change. Earlier someone would chime in with real information, now I see similar arm chair diagnoses (on subjects = all) crop up.
> Why have zero (or negative) income to get post baccalaureate education if you can go work somewhere (for money) and learn on the job?

Well, ok, so here's the thing: If you apply to grad school in one of the physical or life sciences and they don't offer you a TAship for your first year[1], then they are politely telling you to f*ck off. It's "generally understood" (which means that nobody knows this unless someone tells them) that any serious offer comes with a TAship that will just barely pay your rent in a crappy one-bedroom apartment with a little left over for food.

[1] And make wild promises about how everyone has a full RAship with ponies by his second year
Define "breaking". That's the key here, how does copying something without doing damage to the system (I.E. deleting files, leaving backdoors etc...) be treated the same as, let's say you walk into an unlocked office, stick an open folder's worth of files into a copy machine (also located in the office, I.E. cp, mv) and leave without taking the original folder's contents.

At worse, it could be trespass since entering is not disputed, but then the website/portal/office or what have you, should clearly mark which areas are verboten to unauthorized personnel and what exactly "unauthorized" means.

Does "unauthorized" mean you don't have any permission to view or copy at all?
Does it mean, you have permission to view, but not copy?
Does it mean you have permission to copy, but not a whole lot at the same time?
Does it mean you can copy to your heart's desire, but not redistribute?
Does it mean you can redistribute, but not edit?

Breaking and entering isn't applicable as-is to the virtual world. Law makers need a completely different mindset to approach information security.
Wow .. show's that long term tending of a community could be more valuable than techcrunching etc ..

What will HN's stat's be in 10 years!
Estonia has ~15000 people working in the tech sector. There are 1500 tech/IT companies, 26 of them above 100 employees. IT/Tech is ~5.8% of GDP (2010).

Here is one Estonian Startups list:
http://hub.garage48.org/estonian-startups
- all in all, there are 100+ active startups in Estonia, which I would say for a country of 1 million people is quite a startup culture. Estonia now has I believe 7 or 8 European startup accelerator Seedcamp winners, trailing only UK, Seedcamp's home country.
and it is still a huge part of the market.

bf3 sold more copies on PC than both "hardcore" consoles combined.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/18/mouse-keyboard-st...?
Batman equation - Wolfram Alpha
He did buy an ad free version. Selling at loss is no excuse for crippling the device after sale.
Check out this post on stackoverflow.com as well:

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/54506/is-this-batman...
I think I heard the Amazon-supplied ePub converter can work better sometimes, but I haven't tried it. It may be the one on this page: http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?ie=UTF8&docId=1000...
I believe there is another step beneath hellbanning where it doesn't show up at all.
I have a feeling I'll regret this, but I flagged your post because:

1. In general, meta discussion like this does not improve HN, but is a distraction from useful content and discussion.

2. It's none of your business how edw519 chooses to spend his time.

If you want to start some kind of crusade, either to bring edw519 back or prevent HNers from "scaring people off" in the future, I think you're fighting a losing battle. If you valued his contribution so much, why not follow his example and contribute positively instead?
Some of my thoughts:

It is very common for high schooler resumes to get no attention. After all, these companies want college interns. And to top it off, you're a high school sophomore. Most HS seniors never get internships either.

I'll second what jfaucett said. It is much more important to show 1-2 projects that you actually shipped, rather than 10 projects you never finished. This should make intuitive sense.

Things on your resume that are not very impressive: 1) Your GPA (high school GPAs are meaningless to a startup) 2) Software Dev Club VP (high school club leadership is meaningless to a startup)

Honestly, it's a turn off when the first 3 things I see on your resume are that you're a sophomore in HS, your GPA, and a club leadership position, since I know how meaningless those things are. You should put your experience/projects at the top, since those are the most impressive. I'm not saying that you shouldn't include those other things (GPA, club), but they should be at the bottom of your resume.

Some notes 1) Get your app on the Google Play store. 2) Add a link to your django-based news aggregator 3) Countervail is down. Get a version up on your own domain (randallma.com) and link to it just so you can show it off.

In fact, you should get your personal website up and running so that you can have a digital resume that actually shows people your projects (with links and screenshots). A drab resume is not going to get past HR.

Your Hackers&Founders description also has a grammar error.

Finally, the high school students I know who got internships at software companies ALL had some sort of inside connection - typically through their parents or a family friend. See if your parents have any contacts they can leverage.
They can't even get themselves to put this on a fresh domain, because then they'd miss out on all the search engine user cookies. How surprising.
ummm - it already looks cool...
This is an example of a flawed business model, copied (from Groupon, et al), then over-funded so that the economic viability of the Model does not surface as soon as it should. In the finance world these often called Ponzi schemes, just saying...
Google and Facebook both have entire teams devoted to collecting employee referrals for engineers and give bonuses to employees. I have worked with both of these teams and it is a really effective way to find people who already have the trust of someone you have on your team, which is basically the goal of interviews anyway.
You shouldn't lose more sleep over your investors' money than they do. And by the sound of it I can pretty much guarantee that you are losing more sleep then they are, if they are professionals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem

How does consistency apply here for example?
What Your Culture Really Says