skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Looks like I'm in the majority on this one; there's no way I would've been able to save up a significant amount without then thinking "hey, if I saved up that much..." so I went with what I had. Fortunately not being a financial idiot goes a long way, even when that just means not living on debt.

While a side project might technically be a startup, for purposes like this poll, it hardly seems relevant; that doesn't carry nearly the risk -- real or perceived -- of actually working on something new full-time.
I don't know too many startups that need to scale in minutes as opposed to hours. Even sites that have taken off have usually had growth over a period of months or years. I do think it makes sense if you are doing something massively cpu intensive that has hugely varied demand (video encoding, etc).
Actually I consider diamonds to be a very valuable anti-indicator. If I meet a woman that insists on a diamond worth three months of my salary as a token of my commitment I eliminate her as a marriage prospect.
You left out a (probably very common) option: You have an earning spouse.
Someone needs to explain the difference between correlation and causation.

Birthday parties are very strongly correlated with living longer. Party every day, you'll never die, right?
I already brought some Indignation Sauce to this topic: http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/2012/07/08/dont-waste-yo...

Mark Suster is right about the financials. You won't get rich.

I will go further. The VC-istan startup promise is empty. You probably won't get investor contact unless you negotiate for it. Why would they help you get the connections needed to be a founder, when the alternative is that you not get those and never be a competitive threat?

Many of these VC-istan firms develop horrible cultures as the engineers realize they won't get the leadership opportunities they were promised, because those are going to go out to entice new hires. You get a lot of ill-advised code throw-outs that exist only because someone was promised, in hiring, that he'd have that authority... so he uses it on the first day without even knowing what's being tossed.

I don't think you should use "learning" as justification for taking a bad deal. Not if you don't know the people, because how do you know if you're going to learn anything?

In general, higher pay tends to lead to higher-quality projects, not for the obvious reasons, but for this: your salary is how much it costs your boss to waste your damn time.

If you're a founder or a key hire and you trust the people involved, it's different but, in general, don't use "these are my learning years" to justify an awful deal.
Founding a startup: what are the first steps (other than building the product)?
Okay, let's say you have an app idea. You have an idea person and an engineer to build it. You both have day jobs, you're going to start building this thing on the side as an MVP and try to get some traction with it before it becomes a full-time thing. You don't really need anyone else to get this job done except for some crowdsourced UI.

What other things would you do right away? Would you just build the app and see what happens? Any business-oriented things that you should focus on right off the bat, or can everything wait until you have a product in market?
You need to stand up for yourself. You made a joke to a friend sitting near you. Adria Richards eavesdropped, then decided to take a picture of you without your consent with the intention of shaming you on Twitter without warning, causing you to lose your job. You shouldn't be apologizing, you should be planning legal action.

Adria Richards should be blacklisted from tech conventions for being a whiny, self important turd.
To be honest, I've had a lot more problems with gems external to rails than problems with rails itself; and this particular case seems like an issue that should have gotten caught via testing.
It is only "popularly reviled" among leftists because the Citizens United non-profit corporation was producing right-wing speech. For my part, I agree with the ACLU that the decision was a resounding victory for free speech.
Regular job 9-5 is how I fund everything. I do my startup on the side, nights and weekends. I know it will work.
It doesn't have anything to do with financial security. Look, if your man is spending three months worth of salary on a piece of shiny rock, he is exercising poor financial judgment and that is a signal against future financial security.

Women want diamonds not because of any symbolic reasons ("Diamonds are forever!") but because of reasons that are much more practical: they want to be able to show off the diamonds to their group of (female) and boost their social status among them. At the end of the day it is nothing more than a way of saying "I am better than you!"

This is why many women will accept, at the rational level, that diamonds are horrible and stupid and even evil (since they fuel all kinds of violence in Africa, where they are mined). But most of them will not be able to bring themselves to accept substitutes such as sapphires, rubies, or emeralds. Because that would make their female friends think that the guy does not value them as much (or that they weren't able to find a guy who finds them worthy enough for a diamond).

Social status. That's what it is all about.
While "Family" technically includes spouse, I see how my use suggests only parents, grandparents, and other relatives; I'll add "Earning Spouse" to the list
Github's code doesn't rely on the security flaw to function. Their code should keep working after the security fix.

Anyone who has ever consumed an API to build something they don't want to break understands this.
Are there people who wait for such circumstances to repost?
Three years a go most people recognized Flash for what it is. The only platform on which Flash works well is desktop Windows, and even there it's a CPU hog with serious security vulnerabilities. By 2010, Gruber had been writing about Flash' many faults for years – this was 3 years after the introduction of the iPhone. Lynch must've known Flash was a sick puppy, he just couldn't bring himself to euthanize it.
> That are very pragmatic reasons to invest in signals of social standing. It minimizes the cultural friction between yourself and the people who can help you get ahead, who are overwhelmingly people of high social standing themselves.

Translation: I have shitty friends and assume everyone else does too.
Earning Spouse: Someone else in your direct household earning enough money
That sounds like a successful path to growing healthy companies.

I'd like to be in your 'business shoes'.
It's scummy practice to ask for a tweet in exchange for a huge UI pack that took hundreds of hours of work that you're getting completely free?!
Why are diamonds bullshit but bitcoins not bullshit?
Jeet Framework
I had about two weeks of cash left at the time my product finally got traction. It was right down to the wire.

Ah, bootstrapping...
Additional EBS-Optimized Instance Types for EC2
To be honest, the reason such content is rare, is because nobody wants to share it. I make more money from using my skills for myself, than from consulting or writing books. I was publishing stuff little by little, but time constraints made me stop.

Another point is that everybody wants to learn what works, but few people ever put it to practice. The only person I have ever helped that has actually paid attention is Dan Shipper. And it was mostly helping him with the Firefly landing page.
Honestly, as soon as you've started a company and actually worked at it for a little while, you realize how little that means. A company is a legal entity; it's easy and (can be) cheap to establish. Building a business is a totally different matter, and I don't think people understand how different the two are.

My guess is that most rational people who attempt the former learn to respect the latter, and either do a better job the second time (or, rarely, figure it out the first time) or decide they're better off working for someone else.

Of course, that formula fails as soon as some gasbag gets VC money for spouting the right spin... but hopefully that's a very, very small minority. :)
bitcard.ly would be apt.
I love my Pi. I just got it a week ago and it's already handling wireless backups from my laptop, syncing my Fitbit, and hosting all of my media (external drive with its own power supply and minidlna on the pi). I also plan on using it to host a central git repo for my personal projects, and I'll probably end up using apache to run a simple in-house website for various pi-related tasks (my girlfriend isn't as tech-savvy, but it would be nice for her to be able to easily restart services and such).

These things are fantastically useful, all we need now are cheap monitors and you could definitely set up a (albeit somewhat weak) computer for the change in your piggy bank!
I'm not really trying to single "you" out, FWIW. I'm using a generic "you" at a website full of people who likely choose to drive around in the suburban wasteland that is Silicon Valley, who likely work in an industry that repopularized the sprawling suburban office park, and the hypocrisy of their complaining about how other peoples' lifestyle choices are hurting people in Africa.
Open sourced 4 side projects
I just open sourced 4 side projects: a Google Apps purchase order system, a social fitness and nutrition platform, a virtual phone system, and an API building platform
I don't like a lot of sales people out there either. Mostly due to their old school style of selling. But that doesn't mean I don't learn from them. Hell, I'm learning from a car salesman right now. And those are the worst (well, aside from stock brokers).
While I don't think it will ever see the support that bitcoin enjoys (or even litecoin for that matter) the model you are describing is provided by another alt coin call PPCoin (http://www.ppcoin.org/static/ppcoin-paper.pdf).
Quantifying My Job Search
On my first one, I had about 5k I gathered on small jobs during college years. Lost it all (and then some more), had to sleep in a client's floor for a week+ before I could afford a (windowless) roof again, but didn't give in for almost 2 years.

On my second, had enough to pay my bills from side-projects. Didn't make any money, but didn't get to sleep on the streets (which was sort of bittersweet - among the "survivors" from this period are companies such as Rovio, Gameloft and Kiloo)

On my third, had enough money not to have to work for a year or two. Got to sell the business in a good moment, for a reasonable amount.

From first to last, my actual anxiety about losing what I've amassed was exponentially higher on each try. I guess having more to lose plays a VERY important factor in determining how much effort/faith you put in a project (and how much pain can you endure before giving up)...
Commitment, really? How does it signal commitment? Are men that give big diamond rings less likely to cheat or get divorced?
In a practical sense, cubic zirconium stones are indistinguishable from diamonds as well. Unless someone breaks out a diamond tester, no one will be able to see the difference. Yet consumers continue to purchase real diamonds.

If a much less expensive synthetic diamond were to enter the marketplace, it would have the same problem as a CZ. Anyone who purchases one would either have to be honest about their purchase, and therein lose the social status benefit, or lie about their purchase, in which case they might as well have bought a CZ.
Your teacher was asking the wrong question. Ask these same women if they'd rather have a larger diamond at what would be twice the cost were it not for technology, and they'd probably agree.

If we want to help fix this diamond bullshit, we've got to reframe the discussion. It's not about natural vs synthetic, it's about cultured diamonds vs blood diamonds.
I left a comment on the blog but I thought I might get some reactions here:

Excellent post.

I have two advices:

1. Don’t quit your job. Why do so many people fall for the glamourous “all in” scenario? I work three days a week as a freelancer, and the rest I spend on working on my products (http://weekplan.net and http://taskarmy.com). Things might not move as quickly as if I was full time, but I don’t risk to jeopardize my family’s wellbeing and I can keep doing that forever.

2. Outsource. Why try to do it all? Work on your business not in your business. I currently have an accountant, a bookkeeper, a web developer, a virtual assistant, a writer and an adwords expert working with me. They are not all working full time, I only pay them when I need them. I strongly suggest you train your outsourcing skills today to learn what can be outsourced, how to express what you need, and where to find the right talent. Get a virtual assistant today starting at $6/hour: http://taskarmy.com/virtual-assistance-outsourcing
In case anyone's interested, I think this is a Github Issue on the same bug:

https://github.com/rails/rails/issues/9813
Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Shintoism etc.
I have only used English-Spanish, but as far as I can tell, the results are approximately the same (translating individual words with appropriate verb conjugation but no regard for context).

You can test them out in their browser apps:
http://www.bing.com/translator/
http://translate.google.com/
This has to be some of the best research done on the public Internet itself in the past 10 years. I'm not sure what I'm going to try and do with the dump of data, but I can't imagine not finding something to extract from the ~600GB.

Highly illegal, yet highly intriguing that building a 400k+ node botnet is this damn simple.
No software is a panacea. Decisions are made which favor some use cases over others.

When you are as large as google or facebook or github, those decisions which don't naturally mesh with your workflow become more painful over time. And when you have enough in-house resources, the cost to working with the existing solution far exceeds that of extending it on your own or building your own.

Hiphop is a good example where Facebook saw certain things they wanted to optimize in PHP, and it made far more sense for them to work on their own thing (many of those decisions underlying hiphop make sense for facebook but not for most companies deploying PHP)
If cannabis use is illegal where the conference is held, the conference organizers might be responsible for attendees' smoking.
If a few blocks is 3 or 4, you might want to keep that HD around. Could be worth sending it to a professional data recovery firm and having the platters removed etc.
Hint: Many pseudo-random number generators take the square of a seed value to advance to the next sequence.
Talk to people, ASAP. Hone an elevator pitch, go to a coffee shop, and pitch strangers the idea in exchange for buying them a cup of coffee.

Tell them it's your "crazy cousin's" idea, and that you don't think he should quit his full time job for it, but you wanted to see what other people thought of it before you got back to him. (This will make it so that they'll be more honest with you. If they know it's your idea...they'll feel bad telling you it sucks).

Are people giving you their business cards and asking you to email them when it launches? That's the litmus test, make it so that people want what you're pitching so bad that they GOTTA HAVE IT TODAY.

Otherwise, don't even bother building it.
Show HN: GApps powered purchase order system
My path is not the same as yours. You have to find out for yourself. Go out, don't take no for an answer, and realize that the only thing keeping from success is failure. Fail more.
Show HN: A social fitness and nutrition platform, powering iburnd.com
Acknowledging that nations still have political, legal and economic significance is common sense and is not nationalism.

Worldview from some assumed national perspective = nationalism.

For example, viewing the entirety of the global internet in terms of the fact that certain other countries (that may be nominal enemies of 'your' (hah!) country) are connected to it.
Whether the person reporting the incident was personally offended or not still does not make his inappropriate behavior any less inappropriate.
Show HN: A Twilio powered VBX with multi-tenant and payment support
Even if you don't redefine mental illness that way the negative connotations are bullshit.
Show HN: API builder, user management, analytics and management platform
I'm surprised nobody's given the obvious algorithm yet: while(i < BigInt(2).pow(10000)) ++i;

Before anyone complains, this algorithm is correct and does not break any of the rules as far as I can tell. :)

I think the timing attack is probably what he's really looking for.

Edit: as mattvanhorn pointed out, answer() is void, but that's ok... changed to a "constant time" algorithm. :)
Did Bitcoin just break 'Psychological $60' heading past $100 or will it crash?
Force a race condition on the variable `root'.

if (n.divide(root).equals(root)) {

Try to set it to 2^20001 on the first funcall and 0 on the second.
You can get rings cut from meteors (even two from the same meteor). There's a variety of looks depending on the type of meteor, they're rare, and they're "natural".
Stress on strong pain. Not a pain.
RSS Subscription Extension (by Google) is back
Perhaps you're right. But I bet a lot more people would be willing to lie about how "real" their diamond is if there was no way anyone could prove otherwise.
Basically I am just speculating wildly, however I think that $60 may be a 'mental wall' for a lot of traders in BTC that could signal a quick movement either to/past $100 or trigger sell-offs.
> Do women still want a man who is financially secure? What about independent women?

Most of my female friends are professionals (graduate degrees, well-paying jobs, etc). The vast majority of them (literally 90%+) want a man who is financially secure. Part of it is attraction, but it's also part pragmatic. Most women will have kids at some point in their lives (the %-age of women who remain childless by 45 is actually trending down slightly after peaking around 20%), and even in 2013 the burden of child rearing still falls disproportionately on women. Women are still the ones that, disproportionately, compromise their careers to take care of children.[1] Given the statistics, even "independent" women have a rational reason to seek financially secure men.

[1] A longitudinal study of graduates of the UVA Law School class of 1990 found that while women and men went into private practice and to large law firms in similar proportions, after 20 years almost all the men were still working while half the women had either dropped out of practice entirely or were part-time.
I think you can create a new instance of SecureRandom() that provides the same value that we are looking for.
LOL, you stoop to trawling through a random user's comment history to attack his own integrity? My god, nearly everything you've said is in defense of Google in one way or another:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=capo
Thanks! Doesn't work for this one though, it seems.
Do you think you'd be able to keep up the nights/weekends commitments without cofounders?
Yes, it is obvious that this is a Bad Thing. That's why, no matter how succinct, I don't think your comment is particularly useful. I didn't find that it added anything to the discussion.
I felt this way when shopping for a diamond. I thought it was bullshit. Plus, I figured the diamond salespeople were full of shit as well.
Toosell blog | Do you know about the Parts of an LED Light
I was one of those folks who contributed to the Firefox announcement ads, but I don't really believe that it succeeded because folks pushed it rather than it simply being a better product. Yes, some sites at the time worked better in IE, but on the whole, the experience on Firefox was better and that's why folks supported it, not because they disliked Microsoft or something. (And yes, because we support proper web standards.)

Firefox was a spinoff of Mozilla and was a pretty good browser from v1, and within a year of release was considered the best browser available.
20 Primary Pakistani Government Sites Compromised
I guess I am in the majority - five years ago, I was just coming out of graduate school and gave myself three months to become 'ramen profitable'. To my amazement (and especially the amazement of folks around me) it worked out, just barely, which gave me license to keep going.
Apple had an RSS reader too, as part of Mail. They killed it and deleted everyone's data with no warning.
Rethingking Design Thinking, by Don Norman
At JobKaster, we all have an existing job, and are working nights and weekends.

I'm married and have a baby on the way, so I have to be able to support my family and manage risk.

Could we grow faster if we were full time? Maybe. But we might as well prove that the project is going to be profitable before we jump all in!
Trivium: 17mar2013
I'm learning at my current job and it just keeps coming. I hate to admit it but the amount you need to learn just to get an idea of what you didn't know before you knew it is staggering. If you're young enough, I say learn as much as you can. Don't waste those few years at companies that won't develop you as a person. You can only push so many cogs before you get jaded.
The Psychology of Productivity
After releasing the code overnight the report's writer found 420,000 suitable botnet endpoints ... The botnet was able to spread quickly and efficiently just using the four login combinations and was soon reporting back in healthy numbers.

That doesn't actually say he infected 420,000 machines, does it?
Pretty much.

I'm not saying it's right, but it does feel scummy. If you think about it, it feels way less scummy to just ask for money. Asking for a tweet is like saying, here you can have this free thing if you degrade your friends' experience on twitter by a tiny amount first.

Do it a bunch and it adds up.

Whereas me paying someone one dollar doesn't degrade all of my friends' twitter streams.

I know I don't want to read people's "free stuff" tweets. I'd rather they didn't show up in my feed. I only want to read recommendations when they are genuine. Not when they were required.
Startup jobs at $200k are fairly rare, and not really accessible unless you're an executive implant. At least in New York, very few startup boards will sign off on an engineer salary at that level.

0.25 percent of a post-A company is pretty weak sauce. You should value equity at a fraction of what investors do. First, investors are diversified. You're not. Second, their stake gets the VCs control and an excuse to hand out executive positions to their underachieving, middle-aged friends. Yours doesn't. Third, your equity comes with a cliff and I can name a couple startups that are notorious for firing people days before cliff.
Simple: self directed education is simply a superior learning method for some. Lectures in digestible formats alongside the ability to take on whatever material you can think of. Frankly, I couldn't stand my university and felt like I got almost nothing out of it. MOOCs have allowed me to really dive in and explore more.
Damn, I wanted to post that comment :D the other crowdfunding site might launch a research project on how to maximize crowdfunding using machine learning
Is there a decent resource for learning how to sell a product? Most of us can code and implement the technical parts of a business, but what we need is a Codeacademy for marketing. Something that's not run by slimy "internet marketers" or contains vague advice full of handwaving "use Google's Adwords tool lalala~"
Reminds me of a feud we had with a website called ChampionSelect.net

Back then my brother and I were huge LoL fans and we decided to build a fansite for the game.

You can see it here (it's no longer active):

http://web.archive.org/web/20120506035929/http://www.oracleo...

We used Twitter bootstrap for our UI and that other site whined that we copied their style. When they were just using the default styles.