skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for pointing out possible nuances. Unfortunately:

(1) I searched for this exact phrase (using Google :P) hoping to find the nuance to prove me wrong. I found it on Wikipedia [1] as well as on The Huffington Post [2], the latter actually containing the video in which he says these things. The problem is this: adding "but if you really need that kind of privacy, [you're screwed]" doesn't change the meaning of "if you have something to hide, you must've done something you shouldn't be doing" and that is still utterly, UTTERLY narrow minded.

(2) The terrible, terrible naive argument is made a lot today by all kinds of people (even by my own father, who is generally a huge role model for me), making my criticism of it, unfortunately, quite relevant towards today's spying of the US government. Even if Schmidt HAD added nuance to take away my criticism of what he said -- which he either didn't, or I haven't found it --, it would've stood as a more general criticism. I'm not convinced that Schmidt doesn't still stand by what he said back then, but it can't be too hard for him to make a statement if he feels his views have been improperly represented by the media. If he has, I would love to know about it. As it stands right now, I just cannot have private communication through any service which Google provides, and that means I actually might have to be careful about what I write, and THAT is very wrong in my opinion.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/12/07/google-ceo-on-priva...
Might inject those `tput` color commands into my shell

To those curious: https://github.com/jalcine/dotfiles
No, it is not. The first item on the list is about profitability. Being profitable isn't the same thing as having positive cash flow:

http://www.investopedia.com/articles/01/110701.asp
Yes, you can use echo, but that won't work if the command is something like "ls DIR | wc -l".
and what about the WTF video ? Am I the only one to be surprised ? I find it rather funny =).
N/5 + 1 is just plurality.

"most" == majority == N/2 + 1

which is it, is it just that VCs want to see that there is a designated leader among the founders, or do they want the relative amounts of stock to not ever become an issue for the viability of the startup ?

mere plurality is risky, because any of the founders could sell their share to another, creating an ownership crisis where the nominal head of the company has a minority share.
What about "I've tested the market with a prototype over the last year that has generated revenue (not much but some) and now I'm recruiting a cofounder?" Still 50/50? Or should the earlier founder be compensated for earlier work with future work being earned evenly b/w the two cofounders on a vesting schedule?
`2>&1 > /dev/null` will drop stdout and write stderr to stdout.

`> /dev/null 2>&1` will drop both stdout and stderr.

For myself, with `which` I would just use `> /dev/null`, as `which` writes to stdout and not stderr: if anything comes through stderr, you probably want to know about it.
Bootswatch - free themes for Bootstrap 3
Also updated the About Page, http://boxmydownloads.com/about/
Tarsnap and BCC are pretty awful by the metrics by which startups are judged. They've take. Many years to produce a very modest return.

That doesn't mean they're not worthwhile projects, but make no mistake: they are very lousy startups - so bad that the only reason to invest time or money in them is love or learning. The financial return is pretty close to zero compared to other ways Colin and Patrick could have spent their time.

Startups are high growth businesses. If there's no high growth potential, it's not a startup.

The list is pretty clearly about startups, not pet projects.
Is default list of languages in the sidebar the top 7 trending languages? Surprised to see Clojure and VimL.
This type of post often uses the Goldilocks fallacy to appear like it offers advice when it's actually restating the actual problem: the way to achieve Y is with just the right amount of X.

"A successful startup is easy: simply build the right product in the right market with the right team, and don't forget to build it at the right speed!"
I don't think the advice is valid because it comes from a place of dogmatic declaration

I hear this from people once in a while, so I've been trying to watch my tone when I say and write stuff. The thing is, I don't mean to be dogmatic (and it's not how things sound in my head). These are my truths that I discovered, and things I try to look out for. When people find a different set of truths that work for them -- that's absolutely wonderful. I always try to learn from others, and try to never make prescriptive statements. I really should learn what about my tone makes it come off prescriptive and dogmatic, and then not do that.

'cperciva's startup, Tarsnap, is not something I'd say "augments the human condition for a huge number of people in a meaningful way"

On the contrary, I would say it does. It lets people store their data and have a complete peace of mind -- people can be secure in knowledge that others won't read it. It changes how people feel as they walk about their day, because security of their data is in the back of their minds. That's changing the human condition.

This encourages the stream of, for example, crappy camera apps that currently saturate the app store.

It also discourages the stream of, for example, services that try to let people order pizzas online, when it's clear that pizza shops don't want them, they never wanted them, and nothing has changed that will make them want such a service now. This isn't the only criteria to look out for -- it's necessary but not sufficient.
All right, but he wrote: "The 2>&1 > /dev/null puts both output stream and error stream to /dev/null (which means nothing printed on console).". So the intention was different.

PS. I think "which" will never produce anything on stderr
> if you see advice here that puzzles you, it may be a sign of a painful lesson you're going to learn in the future.

Ugh, does anybody mind taking a stab at paraphrasing this one:

> Don’t say things if your competitors can’t say the opposite. For example, your competitors can’t say their product is slow, so saying yours is fast is sloppy marketing. On the other hand, your competitors can say their software is for Python programmers, so saying yours is for Ruby programmers is good marketing. Apple can get away with breaking this rule, you can’t.

This is the only bullet out of the list that I can't quite brain.
Having the console finally work correctly in debugging sessions (execute in the current stack frame) is going to be great.
Yes, I read that bit. Your objection seemed to be about the comparison with an older version of gcc, and I was noting why that comparison was legitimate, for them.

EDIT Ah, I see how: you're talking about clang's website, whereas I'm talking about the submitted link, which is about FreeBSD. Note: the same argument also applies to other companies avoiding the GPLv3, which would explain
why clang's website uses gcc 4.2 in its comparison.
Though people here mentioned the GPLv3, no one noted that 4.2 was when the gcc license switched to it (I checked the HN comments).

FWIW I've seen a GPL project eventually lose out to a BSD-style competitor, and the latter were surprisingly nasty about it, similar to what you're saying. This might be due to commercial interests vigorously supporting the BSD-style version for reasons of MONEY. But apart from nastiness, it makes sense that a more permissive license, being free to a wider audience, will be more popular. OTOH perhaps here, for a compiler, requiring people to give back (GPL) will work better? OTOH2, promising new tech always gets a certain ersatz caché - whether that promise is fulfilled or not.
Downloads valid for a year.

Does this mean that you automatically remove the downloads after a year, or in other words, not only download files but remove them as well?
There's already Streetview: http://oculusstreetview.eu.pn/?lat=25.196966&lng=55.27379900...
Over 400 VM Images of open source software stacks in the VM Depot Azure Gallery
I have to agree, at least in terms of these Trek sites. The latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome constantly use 50%+ of my CPU to render these pages, without me having to scroll or interact at all. For a site that doesn't use any plug-ins, it sure heats up my laptop like a plug-in would.

* Edit: I only meant to agree that these specific Trek sites feel very slow, not "all Google services."
If you're using Bash, you can use this shorthand:
which curl >& /dev/null
I agree with you that having customers on a waiting list or a pre-order list is a great move with regards to pre-money traction, but there are certainly companies out there with proprietary technologies that require funding before they can be brought to life. Particularly, in the life sciences, biotechnology, and other high-IP areas, it's not very intelligent (or feasible) to launch a Kickstarter campaign in order to get traction.

But you make a _great_ point - traction doesn't apply to just users, which is something this particular post heavily emphasizes. Having 10,000 blog followers, pre-orders, enterprise customers, commitments, even endorsements from influencers who can promote and/or sell the product once commercialized, are all traction. Totally. Even IP is traction if done right.

Additionally, two years ago we didn't have any crowdfunding and there were plenty of companies that raised money without any "traction" as it's commonly understood in the Techcrunch arena today.
I'd agree, that one phrase seems a little out of touch. If it had been phrased differently (e.g. "Do something that changes the world") I still would have taken issue with it. I'm not attacking the phrasing so much as the sentiment that startups need to have Google-level ambitions (something I don't think Larry and Sergey had in the beginning, in fact). Even pg has observed in one of his essays that not all founders set out to disrupt entire industries.

But to be fair, there are plenty of examples of companies (Microsoft, Google, Airbnb, Dropbox) which arguable have legitimately augmented the human condition for huge numbers of people. There's just plenty more that didn't, and that's okay.
I get what you mean, but there are reasons for shell scripts to stay shell scripts, and not move to Python. One such project [0] is patching Android to allow for a privacy framework. What would Python offer me for diffing and patching that cleanly written shell scripts would not?

Shell is still good for one thing: piping commands together. You can do that in Python, but I think even complicated output coloring and debugging scripts should stick to shell when the focus is piping utilities in and out of each other. Python can do that, but it is not its sweet spot, in my opinion. I am sure others disagree.

Different tools for different jobs, blah blah.

[0] https://github.com/mateor/auto-patcher
function require_curl() { which "curl" > /dev/null; }
function require_curl() { which -s "curl"; }
function debug { ((DEBUG)) && echo ">>> $*"; }

Last one is bash, which -s is BSD'ish
Thanks, It is very cool. I really donot know `which` does not write to stderr.
or &>/dev/null
It was suppose to mean that, you can use up your downloads, anytime within a year.

Thanks, I ve updated the message.
This is exactly what I feel like every time I see an article/presentation about (maybe even really small) tools that just get the job done but I didn't know about and didn't even think about looking for although I can think of so many cases where they would've been incredibly useful.
My, god. Could they have possibly created any more or any more inscrutable jargon? Must have had whole teams dedicated to doing just that. Keeps out the riff raff I suppose.
Wouldn't this work so much better as a Chrome/Firefox plugin?
you do actual measurements to see what factor the ambient temperature has on the measured temperature of a phone battery? How about having the phone touch a 37 degrees centigrade heat bath on one side (in other words: a human body) and ambient air on the other? Before this paper, could you have made any reliable prediction on how big an influence ambient temperatures were on the sensors in the battery?

There are mechanical engineering textbooks on the subject, such as http://books.google.ca/books?id=vvyIoXEywMoC&hl=en. Reliable heat transfer analysis has existed long before this paper was released.
"We are solving the problem of users downloading their files to their local machine and then uploading it to their Dropbox (huge files)."

At first, it makes sense. But after a second thought; this (uploading directly to Dropbox) will happen when and if you want to download that file only for backup or to use/view it later.

Because if i use the app and save that "huge" file directly to Dropbox, i have to wait for it to be downloaded to my computer to use/view it.

Did i understood correctly? Or it saves the file locally as well?
I think that will always be a problem. Subjective actors reading the article: us; and as founders, we're at the stronger end of a power imbalance. This whole list assumes a raft of skills that we had to learn elsewhere. And nothing is certain.

In my personal experience, for each Cassandra who correctly nails the company's errors, there's more self-important kiss-up-kick-down types who think their critiques are gold. (People who punch-up-kiss-down are far more respectable, but tend not to last long...)
Great, now when the f* am I going to get terrain back on Maps for Android?! Last summer, my phone provided some information about terrain difficulty for light hikes (serious ones should involve a paper map so that you're not screwed if you lose battery/signal/whatever), bike rides and whatnot. This summer, with a newer, fancier, Nexus 4, that information is gone. The world is flat, indeed.
A lot of these resonate with me... to the extent that I already believe them. It's tough to absorb these sorts of generalities though, which is why startups make the same mistakes over and over again... not because they haven't heard the advice, but because it's hard to apply. I'd love to see, over the next 57 weeks, the author take one of these per week and tell a real story about how he learned it. An example: "Your authority as CEO is earned... don't try to use authority you didn't earn." When did you learn this? You certainly didn't think before "I should use authority that I haven't earned." So how did it stand in your head before, and what experience made you rethink it? Overall, I love stories that give me more concretes to absorb into my understanding of cause and effect, and details that I can use to bolster my understanding of the pithy advice. Thanks for sharing your hard-won experience, and I look forward to more posts in the future.
Yup. Also I doubt anyone who sets out to "augment the human condition" will: most founder of big cos set out to do something small, & and grew from there when it worked well.

If Google started with the goal of being where it is today (self-driving cars, ubiquity), rather than to build the best search-engine possible, it'd have undoubtably failed.
> #25 Don’t build something that already exists. Customers won’t buy it just because it’s yours.

Not a good rule. I know many guys that are making serious money because they improved something that already existed.
Redhat seems to make money...
> It changes how people feel as they walk about their day, because security of their data is in the back of their minds.

Not necessarily. I'm confident there are people who do backups not because they actively worry about data security, but because they know that not worrying won't protect them.

(edit: though I guess this isn't particularly relevant, if it changes how many people feel as they go about their day.)

> That's changing the human condition.

This seems like a stretch; I suspect the phrase means something slightly different to you than it does to me?
Don't make positive assertions about your product which your competitor wouldn't make an opposite assertion of their product. Stop trying to say you're the hottest shit on the planet, try to make it clear how you're different without trying to imply everyone is shit. Makes it harder for people to get into idiotic debates about whether the claims are true or not for some stupid metric.

That is, I suppose, unless your product actually is somehow much faster, smaller, bigger, whatever and it does everything else exactly the same.
I think this is a repost.

I love the incremental progress that is being seen on this project.
#3 is often the equivalent of taking a walk or a shower, or walking in the shower. It's enough of a context shift that your brain will forget the inessential and you'll notice the pattern you were hoping to extract.

I think it's one of the great things about working with extensible tools and having a tool-building mindset. You can maintain momentum while relaxing your brain from working on a seemingly intractable problem.

But, you should be using emacs. :P
I don't have plans to. It's an open-source library, though, so there's nothing stopping an enterprising programmer familiar with PHP extensions to add some herself. That's what Gumbo was designed for: to serve as a building block for other tools.
Aw you got me excited. This announcement is from June.
Yeah, exactly.

Just right click on the link that would like to save. And it will be downloaded in your Dropbox folder.

Thanks, I m already in the process of building a Chrome extension.
For me the killer feature are these: http://paulrouget.com/e/devtoolsnext/

Though that CSS auto-complete is sweet as hell.
I don't have anything substantial to add. But this development still blows my mind
This is a month old, why is it being posted now?

What's more interesting than this is that they just had a succesfull divert test: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t15vP1PyoA&feature=youtu.be
Hey, thanks for responding to my comment directly. Sorry if I sounded harsh :)

I understand you didn't intentionally mean to be dogmatic, I probably could have worded that more appropriately. But I think it comes across that way because it's unintentional. That said, it's not as though every piece of advice came across that way. And again, I want to emphasize I'm attacking the advice stated in that way, not you, because you didn't apply this blanket to every piece of advice.

If you believe Tarsnap fits into your own definition of augmenting the human condition, then I suppose I can't argue that. But taken at face value, the original statement appeared to strike a chord with a number of commenters and myself because of the implicit scale - if you ask which companies augment the human condition, I believe most people would respond with companies on the scale of Apple. Small, almost boutique-level startups are very successful without this level of grandeur.

But again, I revise my original criticism if the definition of impact is broadened, like you just clarified.

As for pizza shops - I can see how your advice encourages appropriate behavior, and I agree to that. But I also believe that (and this wouldn't be your fault) it can also encourage "easy exit" mentalities where people just copy a fad and tweak it for success.
A few thoughts:

1) We don't have to hit the ball out of the park on our first time out. I'd be happy to see a hyperloop prototype from, say, Manhattan to JFK built.

2) Which countries might "race" to get something like this sorted out (which may compel a more world-wide movement)? China? Spain? Japan?
I believe "return $?" is the default behaviour if you don't have a return statement (i.e. you can require_curl || echo "no curl")
The 10 first tips can still be applied without the 11th. And a mail thread can replace their tool. Less efficient, but free. And still more efficient than testing in prod.
As Chris said, `2>&1 > /dev/null` will drop stdout and write stderr to stdout. If you do not want anything to printed on console, you can use it. Now only i came to know that `which` never produce the stderr. So it is enough to use `>/dev/null`.
shirt-cockers ftw!
Linux is licensed as GPL v2 (only), so a switch to gpl v3 would require concent from all contributors and be practically impossible.
I've noticed two features silently vanishing from my galaxy s2. Installed apps no longer appear in the search results from the Google Now widget and I no longer have the option to download a complete email in th ebuilt in email client.

Have these been removed due to patents?
Good list. From my point of view, it's also a good source of questions for an employee to ask the founders when interviewing at a startup .

I don't get this, though:

> Watch Jiro Dreams of Sushi, then do marketing that way. Pick a small set of tasks, do them consistently, and get better every day.

How is that marketing? That's getting good at your craft and improving your product.

I watched the movie, but I'm not sure that Jiro is good at marketing. Apparently he's very good at making sushi, but it seems he became successful (and later world famous) despite being bad at marketing.

Incidentally, his shop's average ratings at Tabelog (one of the biggest Japanese gourmet websites) is only 3.8 out of 5, with quite a few "bad" reviews.
knowing what the change in battery level is would allow for a pretty good estimate.

They've taken a very different approach to the problem though, and are filtering heavily such that they can ignore most transient phenomena as it gets filtered away.
Glad to hear. It was suspect. "I can't be bothered to figure out how to build so I guess we'll patch the binary."

I guess Apple doesn't exactly shout from the rooftops how to do this but I see now that this is the top Google hit for "building xnu". So it's not too hidden.
With respect, I think everything you said here is opinion. Slava responded to my comment arguing for the merits of Tarsnap augmenting the human condition instead of saying it's not a startup.

That's not to say your rebuttal isn't valid, but that I think there's confusion of what really constitutes a startup. Was Instapaper a startup? It sold for an exit, but on the face of it I don't see how it inherently scales differently from something like Tarsnap.

I would define any budding tech company as a startup, though it might not be accepted by VC's or Y-Combinator because it couldn't scale. That's my own opinion.
Here's Marc Andreesen saying the same thing with very different words:

"There are always real and legitimate reasons why people often pass on opportunities — they see the risks and they wish to avoid them."

And here's me trying to say the thing in still other words:

Most people are not stupid. If they've chosen to make their product a certain way, it's probably for a real reason. If your marketing implies that they're stupid, people will assume that you can't see their real reason, and assume that you're stupid. It's better to phrase things in terms of trade-offs instead, and let your market decide whether the trade-offs you've made are more appropriate for their use-case than the trade-offs your competitors have made.

For an example from a project I just released:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908

(Incidentally, almost all the comments on Gumbo were of the vein of "Why should I use this?" until I started making replies like this, saying "Here's what html5lib does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs from those choices. Here's what validator.nu does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs. Here's what Hubbub does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs."
s/coffee/tea/g

Uninflected language is a pain. Ditransitive terms (substitute, comprise, etc.) are easily misunderstood at the best of times.