skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm desperate.

You may think you're desperate, but you're not. Keep reading...

I'm almost 38. Start programming at 10. Spent 7 years in video game industry as programmer, project manager, CTO.

None of that matters. Today is Day 0.

I tried during 5 years to create a "startup".

You don't "create a startup". You supply solutions to other people's problems. When you do that properly, a "startup" is often the byproduct. Focus on their needs, not yours, and allow the "startup" to evolve to what it should become instead of pushing some preconceived notion.

I still have a half time job that pay the bill and give me enough time to create something.

That's great! Fantastic, in fact. You have the best of all world's: enough income, enough time, and enough connections to other things and people to supply yourself with plenty of demands to supply. You're ahead of 95% of others already. So please stop feeling "desperate" and harness the excellent position you're already in.

During these 5 years I created a game, a tool for geeks, a B2B project and lot of more things. I created some projects alone, with CEO partners, CTO partners. Each time, I have no traction, negative feedback, I demotivating and then I stop the project.

a. Focus on what someone else needs. b. Limit the number of others and needs to streamline that focus. c. Work alone as long as you can. You may surprise yourself at how much you can accomplish.

I read too much about pretotyping, MVP, lean startup, marketing.

Then stop reading and start doing. When you reach the point where you don't know how to do something that you must do, then reach for help, reading or otherwise, but not before then. Allow yourself to be pulled by your customer's demands, not pushed by what you think you should be doing.

Now I don't even know what to do.

Find a customer.

All ideas I have seems already made by someone else, and often better than I planned to do them.

That's a good thing! You want other people's great ideas. It's your execution, not their idea, that will be your key to success.

Each partners I meet seems too newbie to work with.

Then work alone and learn what you have do when you need to.

It's horrible because I have time and skills to do lot of things but nothing motivate me anymore.

That's because you're too focused on yourself, and not enough on others. Concentrate on satisfying someone else's needs by supplying something excellent. That's almost always enough motivation. You'll see.

I think all those failures killed me and now I'm lost. What a waste.

They weren't failures, but necessary learning experiences to get where you are now. Thomas Edison, Walt Disney, and Colonel Saunders all "failed" many more times than you have before they succeeded. And each one of them would tell you that those "failures" were necessary but not sufficient for success.

Take a deep breath, get rid of you're stinkin' thinkin', regroup, find a customer, and build something great. We both know you can do it. Best wishes.
What lessons and mistakes did you learn in these 5 years? Have you been avoiding them after they happened? Technical skills do not seem to be the problem here. If you can't gain traction, you probably aren't building products for your right audience. Were your attempts those SV types that try to go for it big targeting consumers? You may want to try the micropreneur route championed by Patrick McKenzie, Rob Walling, and Amy Hoy. If you already are, you may want to ask them for advice. If all things fail, what about write a book teaching others what you know and learn? If no one buys your book, can you try to teach more with your blog first?

Maybe you aim too big to begin. Why not set a much smaller goal, achieve that first so you feel good about yourselves. Then use that positive energy to fuel your journey forward.

Don't give up on your dream. If you do, how many more years do you have to wonder what ifs and swallow your pride working at a job you don't like.

You already pull in enough to pay the bills, so there is no worries. Try again. You can always find a contract to pay the bills again.

Whatever your mind can conceive, you can achieve.
"Feeling ambitious? Then check for the dot too: /.+@.+\..+/i. Anything more is overkill."

I personally prefer: /[^@]+@[^@]+\.[^@]+/

Basically the same except that it will throw an error if someone enters an extra at sign.
The driving force is that you want to correct an invalid email ASAP, preferably in the client with live feedback coloring, etc.. Most email services I know don't give you any immediate feedback, and some only give you a basic check that can bounce later. So claiming you just have to check for an @ sign and try sending means there is going to be a huge delay before you know about the error.

Saying the user will just come back and register again is not good. That's like saying if your page is very slow to load, users will just wait for it to load. They don't. They leave and never come back most of the time.

If you can't afford to write the code to help the users fill out the form in a way that will work, fine, that's something you didn't have time for considering the percentage of users it will help/retain. But don't claim it is useless.
We have some things in common - I'm 37 and started programming aged 9. I also got very burnt out, without realizing it, and then tried to start a bunch of "startups" without recovering properly.

I took about six months of very minimal contract programming work, at the same time as doing a lot of physical work on a "fixer-upper" house my wife and I bought in a cheap area. Then I settled on a project which I hope will turn into a startup, but which I'd be completely happy just working on anyway even if it never turns into a business - I'm just that interested in it. Consulting is still there to pay the bills.

Good luck!
No-one - it's the civil service. (The BBC pretend they aren't, but they are, just as much as the NHS)
How to annoy your shoppers by coercively distracting their attention.

A good steward wants to serve the customer, either by engaging them or not, as the customer prefers. A bad steward wants to engage the customer whether they want to or not. A really bad steward thinks the customer is too stupid to notice their coercive attempts at the latter.
No regexp in the world will tell you if an email address is real.
Why Are Tornadoes So Hard To Predict?
Thanks for the detailed info. All the best!
Take time off and recharge. You'll be able to spot solutions to problems easier if you're not under pressure. Sort of like when couples try very hard to get pregnant and can't. Just take a break for a while, get interested in something, focus inward on yourself (physically and spiritually) and the ideas will come. Also read this: http://www.jamesaltucher.com/2011/03/10-things-you-need-to-d...

And don't forget even startups created by people with lots and lots of money and huge successes in the past screw up trying to make things too. (Airtime)
Such a wave travels at well over 800 kilometres per hour (500 mph) -quoted from wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsunami
Working in a grocery store is different. Usually, the response is is "Where on this shelf is the BrandX Turkey Sausage Gravy packet?"

(Of course, an old grocery retail tradition is to "reset" the store -- moving sections around and moving products around within sections, to increase the time customers spend in their local store. I wonder when this practice will become common for website portals like Yahoo, to increase the time spent on the page with ads?)
It's possible you're getting downvoted because of the way you phrased your post.

>> At the same time so upsetting that I am unable to completely read it all.

At first I interpreted this as, "[it is] so upsetting [because] I am unable to read it all". It makes it sound like you're complaining that the page didn't load all the way, or something. I had to read it a few times to understand what you meant. It could have been less ambiguous worded as, "At the same time, I am unable to completely read it all because it's so upsetting". If a reader misinterprets this sentence, the rest of the post becomes incomprehensible.

>> Time to Google if this is 'normal'

"this" is a bit vague here. What do you want to know is normal? Being upset by articles in general? Being upset by articles specifically about rare diseases? Being upset by this specific article?

>> Starts to Google.

Narration is the kind of thing I'd expect to see in a chat room, but not HN. It makes your tone much less formal, and some might see that as inappropriately flippant for a serious topic.

>> Does anyone else feel this way about this and other things?

"about this" is vague, again. The "and other things" clause makes this question so broad that it becomes tautological. "Does anyone else feel [upset] about [things that are upsetting]?"
Fearless
> Do you simply mean that you expected the shell to validate this, and not try to execute empty files?

I understand what happens here and why there is an error message in zsh, but I'm surprised by the fact that bash does not signal the error (exec returns -1, after all).

Bash includes logic to parse ELF[1], so I guess that after exec fails it tries to parse the file and has a special case for empty files.

[1]: http://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/unix/BashSuperintelligentExec
cough Windows 8
We always say no because, at least for me, it's pretty rare that I actually need help. I am, in general, capable of following signs and locating where in the store I need to be. Maybe I'll have to ask where they put the widgets, because it turns out they're in sporting goods instead of tools as I'd thought.

But now, assume I'm shopping for clothes. This 19-year-old girl doesn't know me, she doesn't know what kind of clothes I wear beyond what I currently have on. She doesn't know what kind of price range I'm looking at, or even what particular clothes I'm currently looking for. I could stand there and relate all these things, at which point she can point at shirts ("how about this one?") until we find one I like... or maybe I can just go look at the shirts myself?

If I'm in Radio Shack trying to pick up a transistor, there's almost no chance the kid behind the counter can help me. He just wants to sell me a cellphone. He might not even be aware that the store stocks electronics components, much less what a transistor looks like. Any real help will have to come from the Internet; I surely can't ask if these two diodes are equivalent, or if this coax cable is suitable for VHF operation, because he'll just say "yeah, I think so" and try to sell me a phone.

If I go to a car dealership, the last thing I want is to see someone walking toward me, but we all can relate to that.

About the only time I really want someone to come ask if they can help me is at a gun shop, because the things I want to see are usually locked in a glass case or hung up on the wall.
Don Melton on Blink, Servo, and more
... And remember, the password can only be 8-16 characters [A-Za-z0-9] because we wouldn't want to do accidentally cut yourself on some other 'weird' character like a space or underscore or something. ;-)
I cannot believe that people can have that question. Or, well, I do believe it, but then my second question usually is: did you ever use linux/bsd or any OSS project in the past?

I don't want to be rude at all, but the suggestion of "contributing to an OSS project" makes a lot of sense if you already had to work with/use OSS software. Because, if you had to use one of these projects, you would probably already understand the most important social aspect of it. Coding, IMHO, is just secondary (and is not necessary at all).

Thus my suggestion would be: if you never dealt with an OSS project before, try to find some OSS software which you genuinely like and try to use it (and well) and follow its development. Once you did, you will certainly know how to contribute. There's nothing more to it.

If you are already familiar with OSS, but so far never found anything "interesting", the best thing to do IMHO would be starting your own. Release something that you did and that you would like others to use.

Most importantly, do all of that for fun. Don't do that because you have to and because they said "it would be helpful". Helpful for what? Coding style\quality varies wildly, as is the community around the project itself.

The biggest difference between a "professional" and OSS project is exactly this: people work on OSS project for many reasons, but it's mostly for fun or passion. Some projects strive for quality, some for functionality, and some just solve an "itch" somebody had. Understanding the social aspect, again, is the biggest differentiating factor.

There's no point in contributing to OSS unless:

1) you released something that you like to maintain
2) maintain something somebody else released
3) fix an itch you have
4) having fun coding (or any other activity around said project)
> He said "We need a real bytecode for the web

That's what I was talking about, too. Since processors have essentially plateaued in performance improvements by increasing raw clock speed, the only growth options going forward are wider designs – increasingly unorthodox features (e.g. hardware-assisted TM) for which there is no historical precedent.

I'm further hinting that no matter what utterly ideal format we pick, not 40 years from now.. perhaps not 10, perhaps not even 36 months time, some market participant will drop an architectural feature that completely obliterates contemporary thinking about what such an ideal format should look like. And once again we're back to x86-level cleanliness.

So why take the penalty of a brand new mostly incompatible design when non-delusional incremental improvements would have got us there anyway..

> The bitcode you're referring to is LLVM. It's an architecture-independent assembly that can be used to target most major real ISAs

http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.compilers.llvm.devel/4376...
I have always wanted to study combinatorics or linear algebra at a graduate level.
Just remember how it's pronounced
Seriously. Don't feel guilty? You're going to scare a fair number of customers away, such as myself. If every time I go into a store I get a question like that which can't easily be dodged, I'll probably stop going.
Walking around wearing headphones (even if you're not listening to anything) is a simple way to signal that you don't want people to try to talk to you.
Exactly. To further elaborate, try the following in python, if you have the memory:

>>> x = list(range(100000000)) + ["break"]

After some time, you get a list with a hundred million integers with a string at the end.

>>> len(x)
100000001

Now take the sum:

>>> sum(x)

On my machine, I get a traceback, but after about half a second of hesitation. Python's been iterating through each of those elements, testing to see if it's an integer and building a running sum, only to throw an exception because it didn't expect the string at the end. That means that in order to avoid memory corruption (or other terrible fates worse than an exception), Python must double-check each element of the list as it goes; it cannot take shortcuts.
My goto for email validation is /^.+?@.+?\..+?$/

Incase I've typed it wrong, that should basically work for anything that contains at least one @ and one dot, in that order, as well as at least one character at beginning, middle and end. It's served me well thusfar.

Edit for clarification:
The reason I prefer this over just checking for an @ is that if you're just checking for @ a common mistake like "me@hotmail,com" will be considered valid.
Poetry or a novel "comes out" not from the expert knowledge of a language, but from having a feeling, an urge, an idea to express, a theme. Wording is second.

Similarly, a project (which could become a startup) "comes out" not from having skills or experience "with Java", but from an urge to change (create or build or just do) something.

Where such inspirations comes from? From closely observing what is around, from becoming aware of "what is".

So, do forget your tools and skills for a moment, and try to find something, which you would like to change or improve, not to create a startup, but in a way of "just do it". Startup, like a form, is second to the content.)

I might be wrong, but nginx or redis or Scheme "came out" this way.
I would, of course, reply to "Are you after pants or tops today" with, "I'm a man, you idiot, I don't wear 'tops', I wear shirts"
Don't bother even reading it. His solution is to "Just send your users an email. The activation email is a practice that’s been in use for years, but it’s often paired with complex validations that the email is formatted correctly. If you’re going to send an activation email to users, why bother using a gigantic regular expression?"

Want to know why it's not more common than the regex "method"? His method has its own host of problems - what if your mail server is down for six hours - will people come back to your site six hours later when they get the email? What flags will get set on your sender account when Gmail gets 100,000 bogus email sends? Do you force your users to "Look in your inbox and click the activation link" for every email address change also? There are others but I've made my point. There's a finite amount of "stuff like this" that users will put up with - you can either put the onus to "get it right" on the user (regex validation for emails), or you can put that onus on your system.

An argument for another is always, "If a user can't get their email address entered correctly, I don't want them as a customer". And you can take that multiple ways - technical difficult entering emails, "challenging" email addresses, etc.
I wonder if it was meant to be pronounced 'meame' or 'me-me'.
Thanks for the link.

Yes, I do not understand very much the mechanics of the basic income but the problem I try to think of is not exactly 'have enough money for a decent living', which is serious, but something more abstract: being able to work at what you are good, because you like it, just for that.

Nowadays unemployment is exactly the opposite: being unable to do anything at all. This is a real drama.
Exactly, unless people start off being nice, complimenting you, agreeing with you and telling you how great you are you shut them off, instantly. For as long as I've read your blog and twitter feed you simply will not have a conversation with anyone if they start out by disagreeing with you.

Your feed swings between wonderfully interesting and insightful and arrogant and galling. On a daily basis I debate whether your insights are worth having to wade through all the angst. So far I keep finding in favor of your wisdom and insight but its always close.

If you toned down the arrogant and galling parts you would be a much greater leader in the tech community, more people would listen to you, and you would probably be advancing your goal of an open web far faster than you are which would be a win win for everone. You seem to want to be a leader, but you don't want to adapt to the limitations that come with being a great leader, one that people want and like to follow.

You didn't say "anonymity correlates with cowardice". You said anonymity correlates with untruth. Those are too completely different things. Anonymity does correlate with "cowardice" thats why /. has called them anonymous cowards since the dawn of web time.

There can be a LOT of truth said under the cloak of anonymity. Do you think Bradley Manning was a "coward" and a liar for using Wikileaks to give him a shroud of anonymity when he was speaking truth to power in his way?

When dealing with a personality like yourself anyone who who criticizes you under their real name knows they are going to regret it. You are the one compelling people to speak to you anonymously because you don't accept criticism, you instantly block people rather than engage in dialog and you broadcast your grudges on your blog like you did with Marissa Mayer.

You have the luxury of being self employed, so am I. You can say whatever you want under your real name, as long as you are OK with the reputational damage yourself. People who work for other people can't if its going to explode in to a reputation damaging, and employment endangering, flame fest which is what happens to a lot of people who engage with you. Some people operate under different constraints in this world than you and you don't seem to recognize that.

Not sure why I'm still trying to engage in a dialog here. Chances are you stopped listing right after your last post. That is most definitely your style.
So you're saying you weren't a web dev before, and that you went straight to Node.js.
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act used to threaten journalists
Indeed. Exporting everything to Flickr would be a mess, and I don't think Flickr would handle a library that big as well as a service designed for it.

It's looking like this doesn't exist though. Is there any place you can add startup-ideas to a list and hope HNers take them?
Why check it's an email at all if you're just going to presume it works?
This has been an issue since the day I started programming for the web, back somewhere in '95.

It has regularly come up on HN, and pretty much any programming related forum I've used since the mid-90's.

As an industry at the heart of the information society you have to wonder what the hell we are doing wrong if we cannot stop this constant regression into well known bad practices.
I'll second all the anecdotes on this page plus add that I often won't even enter stores, especially small ones, if I judge it likely there will be too many "vultures".

I don't begrudge retail workers, really - I suppose they have a job to do. But geeze I wish they'd be more intelligent about whom they bother, and when. If I have not made eye contact beyond the initial "hello", then I probably do not need or want to be "helped" and following me around proffering same just makes me feel uncomfortable.
> Those are the big winners who strike gold on Kickstarter and Youtube. They didn't win because they were "luckier" than us, they won because they were literally better than the rest of us at what they do.

What made/make those people better? Their drive, their talent, their education? How much of this can you attribute as their merit and how much is actually luck?

I've come to the conclusion that most (an unscientific 99%) of a person's success is due to luck. To me, the biggest evidence of this is: we don't choose where we're born.

The above means that we have no control over what genes we get, as well as our initial social and economical situation, and our general environment. Given that pretty much everything else evolves from there, what can you truly attribute to anything else than luck?
Firstly it seems like its time to take a break. When you disillusioned you need to stop for a bit. Perhaps do a while of "normal" work.

Secondly I would advise a frank and in depth post mortem. Find out really what when wrong and when. Perhaps it was just bad luck but more likely there are mistakes you can learn from.

"Each partners I meet seems too newbie to work with." This phrase stands out. Perhaps its just because your upset right now but generally when someone blames everyone else it means the problem lies with them.
We don't always say no, we just say no when we don't need help, which is most of the time.
Android Builds on Travis CI with Gradle
I think that the domain part of email addresses could be an IP address. Depending on how IPv6 addresses are displayed there, they won’t contain a dot.

Somewhat artificial, yes.
Not useless, but validation of the presence of a valid email does not validate the accuracy of the email. It may be valid and still wrong. Therefore the return on investment, and the possible exclusions of valid email doesn't justify the time in most cases. So not useless, but certainly a poor investment of time.
No sweaters, coats, hoodies, or anything else on your torso which isn't usually called a shirt?