skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There seem to be 4 routes:

1 have rich parents (not kidding)

2 work part time until you can get angel investment

3 a pre-angel incubator ala YC

4 live somewhere really cheap and use savings

In the two startups I've worked for, I personally saw routes 1 and 3.
Google recentely opted for Mercurial (partly) for that exact reason: http://code.google.com/p/support/wiki/DVCSAnalysis
To summarise: 2 roomates, private bath, and - parking included in a great location: near the lake, near the loop. Parking is at a premium around here, and could cost over $200/month easily. The ad does not specifically mention "hackers".

Chicago is a great city, for those who don't know. Most of the programming jobs around here are financial - the commodities exchange is big here, but there's a lot of small financial software companies in several areas, even in this economy.
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the only "tweaking" I did to my workspace, was build a cover for the desk's surge protector Power button. I always kept hitting it and its pretty inconvenient having your computer die in the middle of working on things.
Physical whiteboard in the same room.

Big screen.

A command line (Terminal on mac, cmd.exe on windows).

A launcher app (Quicksilver on mac, Colibri on windows)

An editor (TextMate in mac os, NetBeans in windows).

A mindmap editor for planning, design and notes. (Freemind, cross platform)

(I purposefully stay cross-browser, cross-OS, going back and forth between my MacBook and my Wintel desktop pc. This forces me to keep using and testing both my product and dev environment in several different OS'es and browsers - plus it provides redundancy; if one env blows up in some way, I can just fall back on the other.)
Cool video of (jailbroken) iPhone working with Bluetooth keyboard
I couldn't live without my 5 screens:

http://www.deskography.org/people/yjg1097qMx/desks/786/photo...
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Currently working AT a startup part time.

It's a scientific hardware startup and times are very tough...
The strategy may work, at least in the short term.
That was hilarious! Nice to see a drip from the faucet of humor in the desert that is HN. No disrespect meant :)
PHP. You don't even need to know it to whip out something in php. The application domain is pretty much all that PHP is good at, boring websites, and since it's an intranet application you don't have to sweat the security. It shouldn't take more than a week to do, leaving you plenty of time left in the summer to learn a real language, like Python. And finally, should you ever get bored with it, you can always find someone to finish it.

When in doubt and apathetic, copy and paste php code.
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Here is my workspace. I really like the 3 Acer 22" monitors. They were cheap and work well. I also have a laptop with Mac OS X for my iPhone work.

http://www.websmithing.com/my_workspace.jpg

Nick
"What Should I Work On Today?" A very entrepreneurial problem...
Not hacking or startup related but perhaps grounds for a discussion:

I feel pretty stupid submitting nytimes.com but this apple ad really did it for me. i don't want to spoil it but with each ad they put on the New York Times website, they step it up.
honesty is always the best policy, but how you present your honesty can be the deciding factor in whether your ideas are taken on board.

i enjoyed influence by cialdini, it helped a lot in getting my ideas across in my job.
Ask HN: How much time of his time should a CEO in a 5 man team spend managing?
Recently, I moved from a role whereby I spent 1/3 of my time doing coding and other low level stuff, 1/3 of my time doing biz dev, 1/3 of my time planning and managing to spending 2/3 of my time planning and managing (spending no time on low level stuff)

I FEEL that this is making the team much better, but I am not completely sure if i am being deluded.... any feedback?
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Nutrition != Medicine.
Historically, our job security beats the Papacy hands down. Even excluding the early Popes who were martyred in quick succession, the average papal tenure is under 8 years, with a fair number of murders and alleged murders. Check it out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_popes. So I think you're right about the Pope's envy :)

Regarding the job market, I do contract work in Colorado and have had no problems either. My programmer friends in the US, Europe, and Brazil are all gainfully employed. I think there's a chronic shortage of good programming talent that's not going away anytime soon.
If so, I misinterpreted it. My impression was that:

1) Zackattack doubts that the labor market is good for LAMP hackers, and puts out feelers suggesting that he is looking for work in the field (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614130)

2) Tptacek says that he has had the opposite experience and that it's hard to find good hackers (i.e., the market is good for a hacker). He suggests that the market's supply is outpaced by demand and that he is having trouble hiring a good HTML/CSS hacker (the statement might be ambiguous, but since he says his usual sources are 'booked up' it seems pretty clear that he looking to hire a hacker). http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614135

3) Zackattack responds that he is a HTML/CSS hacker, and might be a good fit for Tptacek's project (i.e., Zackattack is trying to solicit business). He leaves the email address Zackster@gmail.com (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=614143)

Did you have a different interpretation?
like any of you actually read this. omg what a bunch of phony bull
cheers to you
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(Fairly) soundproof room; lots of lamps, none too bright; Aeron chair; new desk designed by Kate Courteau (the architect who designed the YC offices), with a steel frame and butcher-block top; Macbook Air; bluetooth mouse; 23" Apple monitor; a bunch of terminal windows running either vi or the Arc toplevel or tail -f of some server log; Firefox windows with Gmail, HN, and localhost; cup of tea; UHU tac earplugs (disengaged); postcard of smiling Wodehouse, age 92, with dachshund.

http://wodehouse.ru/photo/phdach.jpg
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Try Django. Documentation on their site should be enough for you to get going. Also there a plenty of reusable django applications available on the internet, like djago-registration, django-comment-utils, which will allow you to create a website with a lot of bells and whistles in a day or so.
It's satire, not politics. In fact, it's clever satire. Read the text. It's most humorous.
I would definitely agree. The 'gmail' part didn't strike me as out of place so much as the 'zackster' part. I believe Zackattack's name is 'Zachary Burt', which would make 'zackster' an informal (and, in my opinion, somewhat frat-ty) nickname.

The only situation I could imagine that would make 'zackster' appropriate for someone looking for a job would be if his first name were Zack (or Zachary, or some other derivative) and his last name were 'Ster.' Since I doubt that is the case, I suggested he set up some other address for soliciting business

Since Zack is just graduating it will be (relatively) easy for him to make the change now. It will likely be more difficult in a few years once his name/email get out there.
http://www.deskography.org/people/FgR504TfT/desks/359/photos... has you beat :P
>More bluntly, how do you pay for rent and food?

I am working on a startup part time while a (grad) student, and I pay the bills by being a TA (which refunds tuition and gives me just a little more than I need for living expenses). Keeps me pretty busy. :) Don't think I could do it full time (i.e. drop the TA job) though.
I posted this ad. You can read up on me in my profile.

Here's the deal: The apartment's in a development called Atrium Village that houses a lot of people looking to get out of nearby Cabrini Green (the housing project that the Hoop Dreams kids came out of).

It also houses a ton of med school and seminary students...and me, someone working on a startup who's not pulling in a lot of cash at the moment. There's a 12-month wait to get into a new place here because of how cheap it is (they get money from the state to keep rent down). I started here as a subletter and they let me stay on. We're looking for a full-timer.

The place has a massive parking lot, is close to both the Brown line and the Red line, has a pool (open in the summer) as well as a tennis court. We're across the street from a public library and the beach is 8 blocks east.

Drawbacks? The apartment itself is pretty average, similar to the places a lot of college kids get during school. The neighborhood can seem a little intimidating if you're out after midnight though I've had no problems.

I've been living with two med school students here for the last year. One, the guy with the biggest room just decided he's moving back in with his parents after his fiance left him (long story). So we need to find someone. His room has its own full bathroom. The other guy and I share a bathroom. He's never home, while I'm just about always home.

It'd be great to find someone from HN to join the team here.
+1 for Django. Here's a list of a bunch of the pre-built apps: http://djangoplugables.com/projects/
Can someone help clarify this meetup's topic for me? To me, "monetization" means "extracting more revenue/sales/profit from each user"... a kind of general business issue. But it looks like this is more about virtual currency systems in game and game-like worlds. Is that right?
Adium adds support for IRC and Twitter...
Stick with LAMP - PHP, Mysql, Linux - you've got the tools. Don't fall for the Ruby/Erlang/Lisp croud. Don't struggle with the language. Get it done and worry about the details, not the language.
Definitely not a good time to move to Portland now. We generally always get harder by recessions than most other metropolitan areas for reasons that are many and varied, but probably including a somewhat hostile business environment - as in state and city government aren't very business friendly. It also took us longer to come out of the tech wreck recession - it took until 2004, 2005 for tech to kind'a sort'a recover.
(For anyone with a US IP address and 3 hours to kill, Hoop Dreams is available on Hulu and it's really an incredible movie. http://www.hulu.com/watch/28514/hoop-dreams)
Upvoted since I just got done with six hours of tweaking my iPhone app on my macbook on my dining room table. :) More often, I'm reclined on the couch, though.

I used to be a cave-type, but now I find that I'm more productive when I'm around people (as long as they aren't actively engaging me). So I'll work from home with the kids playing around me and get more done than I do in my isolated cube at the office.
Oddly enough, I usually find that I end up spending considerably more at farmer's markets than I would have in a supermarket. Of course, the quality and freshness are much better at a Farmer's Market - but the prices aren't cheap.
i think so, otherwise it's just a hobby.
1. Get high paying contract work.

2. Live as cheap as possible, live with relatives, clients, whatever cheap thing you can find.

3. To keep you working hard, hire some part time help in areas you suck at. For me this is design.

4. Bum food, complain about lack of money. You'll get more pity and help these days.

5. Spend money wisely, don't get services that don't give back at least as much value as they cost.
My understanding is that it's around Virtual Currency trying to monetize your applications (facebook, myspace, etc). And you still monetize a 'user' as you make him buy Virtual Currency via either

i) Real Dollars. (you get the money)

ii) Doing Offers. (The Offering company pays you)

Many VC's think it's a proven model for at least Social Networking Applications. (See Offerpal Media, Peanut Labs)

I will be heading there tomorrow, so I will update you guys how it went.
It makes me a little bit ill that this guy gets paid $50k for a single speaking gig.

Even we assume that those speaking events are net profitable fundraisers (an assumption I sincerely doubt), I have to question a system that pays anyone a third of a year's salary (in San Francisco) for a single evening of work. How many employees could have been retained last year by not paying this guy to expound upon tired clichés over rubber chicken?
http://njoubert.com/images/workspace1.jpg

Dual 22" monitors hackintosh running OSX 10.5.6
6 spaces, normally 2 spaces per project and one for random stuff. (I like to arrange all my code in one space and all the docs and the like in another and switch between the two as necessary).

You'll notice the Macbook peeking out from underneath the desk on the left - if I need more screen space I pop that one open. Or if I'm not at home!

M-Audio speakers are crucial - good music is a help! And lots of paper / binders / books to refer to all the time.

At least 3 lights sdjustable to whatever conditions I prefer, and black shades in front of the blinds to block out sunlight and heat.
I'd love to see more posts like this directly on HN.
What I think would help is picking a web framework. That would pretty much guide you towards a language and eliminate a choice.

Look around at the popular available frameworks and choose the one that appeals most to you.
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Mac Air with Philadelphia Brewing Co. sticker over the Apple logo for iPhone dev; cheap Toshiba laptop for web hacking; Chromium for browsing; Firefox/Firebug for dev; Gimp; Postgres; whatever aesthetically pleasing environment the coffee shops around me offer; sometimes getting pumped up listening to good musak on the iPhone; from time to time use one of the many white boards at Wean Hall at Carnegie Mellon.

MacAir (lil guy next to it will soon drown):
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_QdVzmQAz0JQ/ShEHWvpIW1I/AAAAAAAAAE...

White boards (my friend is in the pic):
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_QdVzmQAz0JQ/ShEHIm3Q9vI/AAAAAAAAAE...
It is a bit of hyperbole but if you ignore the author's comments it is a good read. If every software was developed that way as the article advocates

1. It will be prohibitively expensive

2. Progress will be really slow. Perfection to the exclusion of everything else will just stall development.
Don't ever dumb yourself down just to be accepted by people. It seems like you have simply outgrown your friends. You are growing and becoming a different person. That is a good thing.

I've always been the type of person who most enjoys having "deep" discussions with one other person. You need to connect with people on a much deeper level than you are currently doing. Don't worry, there are plenty of people like that around. You need to go out and find them.

So... Get out of your comfort zone and start trying new things. For instance, try swing dancing, start taking lessons. You'll find an entirely different caliber of people at swing dances than you will in bars.

I think you are doing fine and the fact that you are concerned about this and reaching out to others to find a solution tells me that you will most likely find what you are looking for.

Good luck in your search and keep on learning and growing like you are doing. It sounds like you are on a great path.
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Seconded. I buy a new loaded Apple notebook every 3-4 years, and each cycle I debate on getting a Mac Pro that will wipe the floor with the notebook for even money. I never do, because I can't stand to be chained to a desk.
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> researching it is a pain because "screen" is such a poor, generic name for a project.

Really. I find it pretty easy to use search terms like "gnu screen" or "screenrc" to get lots of results in Google...
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lol, i'm from the north, no here there's a lot of computers (it was a state project to make them cheap for families at $700 or less) and internet is cheap also ($15/month) but my friends don't understand computers, they only know how to log on facebook :D
It depends on how much you want to learn a new language. If you just want to get the job done, use what you know already. If you want the to leverage the project to learn new things, pick a new language (or a new OS, or editor or version control system).
check out http://drupal.org
Same. Macbook (nothing fancy, just an entry level 13" one) on the kitchen table, plus a sketchbook and a sharp pencil
Son of a gun!
1 have rich parents (not kidding)

I'd broaden that category to "have tolerant parents". My parents aren't rich, but they have a basement which would be empty if I wasn't living here.
http://www63.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=SHA1+collision only comes up with the SHA1 digest of "1 collision", except that I can't re-produce the digest it gives: 260b ad88 a9bf 718b e7ac 56ab 10db 8368 2e04 3f5e
"1 have rich parents"

They don't need to be soooo rich (you don't need millions to start), if they understand what you do, they'll support you.
Also living within your family will reduce costs: rent + fooding + other things.

I'm doing it from home and starting slowly but surely
RUBY/RAILS. As productive as Django. More books, good community and so on.
maybe 10%. even with the 10%, i might not enjoy too much about work and would love to find work that seems to blend in seamlessly with the rest of my life.
I like the phone :D
I have a PC with 17" screen, also a HP laptop, Microsoft Mouse and Genuis Keyboard, Wifi Router, External Disks, lot of CDs and MP3 Player.
"Managing" and "planning" are distinct activities, and then there are a bunch of sub-activities that make up either.

In a 5-person startup team, you should spend virtually no time telling people what to do (i.e micromanaging). They should be able to figure that out for themselves. If they can't, you're probably screwed.

But there's a lot of work involved in figuring out customer requirements, breaking down those requirements into tasks that have to be done, covering bases that would otherwise be forgotten, and generally fretting so your team doesn't have to. If you're taking care of that so the rest of the team can worry about the low-level details of getting stuff done, that's valuable, and it's not unreasonable to expect that to take up 2/3 of a person in a 5-person team.
This is really the crux of the argument: What do you want to have when you finish?

If you just want the completed application ASAP? Go with what you know, and don't waste time on learning anything new.

Want a completed and familiarity with a new language + framework, at the cost of delayed launch? Go with the new language.

The application you've described is simple enough to be done with any framework + language fairly quickly, so no worries there. Just weigh your motivations and get to work!

On a side note: I'd go for rails (ruby), then django (python), then symfony (PHP) by personal choice. The generators for all of these languages will save quite some time, likely.
Nice to see some other people from Chicago. We should organize some sort of downtown meetup.
All 4 could be broadened:

1 have rich parents (not kidding) >> Parents

2 work part time until you can get angel investment >> Another income

3 a pre-angel incubator ala YC >> Small investment/tor

4 live somewhere really cheap and use savings >> Savings

I think all 4 imply also living cheap
Don't bother reading the article. It's mostly crap, wrong or both. If you're still interested, here they are for you, without the garbage commentary

Honorable Mentions: Biometrics and Ubuntu

10. Virtual Reality

9. Alternative search engines

8. Voice recognition

7. Apple Lisa

6. 10GB Ethernet

5. FireWire

4. Bluetooth

3. Itanium

2. Zune

1. Windows Vista
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i found this site too : http://www.deskography.org/
I want to love PHP. I really do. It seems like everyone and their mom uses it, and thats why I tried to pick it up before. The problem for me has been an easy way of coding it.

I mentioned Visual Web Developer in my OP. I'm not lying. I absolutely love the intelli-sense, the tab-finish, the debugging, the easy UI.

Is there something I could use that does the same thing with PHP?
Thanks for the tip. I've tried Drupal before with another site. It's pretty slick, but it has a ton of stuff under-the-hood which I don't think I would need. As a result, my site ran ridiculously slow.
Lots of young, energetic, educated, creative people, willing to work for cheap. This is an opportunity. Somewhere, a smart entrepreneur has already noticed and is planning to capitalize on this. Why isn't it you?
Thanks for the tip. As per my comment below, is there an IDE similar to Visual Web Developer? This is what I'm most comfortable with and enjoy using.
A MBA for working in the sofa and in the garden. A Mac Pro for when you are chained to the desk. Happiness.
I took it in college. It made me smarter. No doubt about it. I'd take some and have to run off to the library to lookup things in back issues of journals such was my thirst for knowledge.

It was potentiated like CRAZY by coffee and adderall.
Thanks for the links.

I've gotten the impression that creating hits is a complete black art, whihc is one reason companies are so keen on blatant copies and minor variations.

It was also my understanding that most acts fails, even those pushed by major media; people are fickle about what's trend-worthy.
It was pretty funny. I got a good laugh, but its a good illustration of something I've been thinking about since all of this began.

Its dangerous to compare the profits of someone like Henry Ford with someone like Richard Fuld. I'm afraid the subtlety might be lost on both politicians and the general public. There's a difference between someone who becomes rich by making things and someone who does it with "derivatives". One creates wealth. One just "makes money".

I cringe every time I hear some highbrow use the word "wealth" as just a more sophisticated-sounding way to say "money", oblivious to the difference.

If, in our zeal, we demonize the Henry Fords along with the Richard Fulds, we'll create a perfect regulatory environment to ensure that we never get another of either.

Edit: I put "derivatives" in quotes partly because I didn't want to bleat "derivatives bad" as if it should be promptly followed up by a statement of the goodness of quadrapedality, and partly because "gaming the system in order to distort the reality of risk and thereby extract unearned profits for the unaffected mitigation thereof" didn't exactly flow. I was promptly and correctly called out for it. Bummer.
By all means. I tried to do so a few weeks ago but it was a miserable failure.
I'm gonna recommend .NET here, mainly because that's what I use and like, but my top reason would be flexibility.

You don't have to use only one language, use many. If you already know C# you can start with that. If you get tired of it you can pick up F# to write algorithms and calculations. Want to learn Python? Get IronPython and use it to write Unit Tests or a rich interface with Silverlight. You name it, everything under the same platform.

If there isn't a requirement that prevents you from using .NET, I don't see a reason not to use it.
- Gnome -> 8 workspaces on two monitors
8 workspaces? I can't even manage to fill 6 workspaces; anyways I thought I'd share my 8 most abused keybinding combinations for multiple [3x3] workspaces. Switch to workspace <Ctrl><Alt>[Up, Down, Left, Right] and move active window to workspace <Shift><Alt>[Up, Down, Left, Right].
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