skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think that this article is "meh," so let's look at it step-by-step:

1. Emotional Support

Author gets emotional support from wife and admits that you will need someone to help you through the shit-storm that is founding a start-up. But most young entrepreneurs don't have spouses. Seems like a co-founder fits the bill here.

2. External Validation

A couple of points: you should listen to your customers, but your customers are a very bad barometer for gauging big company decisions -- sometimes you need to make changes that they won't like. Changes that are good for the company (or changes that help you pivot) but piss off significant portions of your customer base; the customer is not always right. So if customers are a bad source of validation, what about other entrepreneurs? Let's face it: they are busy with their own projects to give you any meaningful feedback. The author's last point is to "write that down" -- seriously? Just get a co-founder.

3. Ideas / Brainstorming

Brainstorming is not merely spit-balling. Author says that "you want to prevent brainstorming ideas and possible solutions that are inherently not viable or even true" -- but who else knows your company as well as a co-founder? I.e. who else could gauge whether or not solutions are viable (or true)?

Let's ignore the shameless plug here (and the fact that using a website for brainstorming seems prima facie silly); I just want to point out that brainstorming outside of your company is worthless. You, quite obviously, need to brainstorm with someone in your company. Might as well make it a co-founder.

4. Skills / Capacity

It seems pretty obvious that you want to do something in the tech arena, you need to be pretty tech-savvy. If you're not tech-savvy, you need to associate yourself with someone that is. There's a good reason investors don't invest in business people. I remember listening to a talk by some of the people at Mint. One of their anecdotes went something like so: "When you go and pitch to a VC, every programmer is +$50mil in valuation, and every suit & tie "business guy" is -$100mil in valuation."

Apart from the intuitive attractiveness of this train of thought, there also has not (ever) been a successful "business guy" with no tech expertise and no technical co-founder doing much of anything in the start-up world.

Finally, let me just say that the people at YC know what they are doing. They rarely accept single-founder start-ups for a very good (and obvious) reason. The lack of technical expertise is also a big red flag. After all, if I've never seen the inside of an engine why would a bank fund an auto-shop I want to build.
Are you asking why they didn't use Haystack? Haystack isn't released publicly as far as I can tell (plus, just because another company writes something doesn't mean it's actually good).
I've deactivated facebook permanently (I changed my password to something impossible to remember before deactivating). This works very well, since facebook is about having higher number of friends, when there's zero, there's no point in going back to it. It's value at one point was very high (when I could still tolerate the level of bullshit amongst my peers on fb; most are insecure little instagram addicts) but now it's worthless as I can never gain back some 300+ friends on FB.

What's happening now is that I feel much more free. If someone is not there for you in real life to talk to face to face or on the phone once in a while, then I wouldn't have otherwise dealt with them but it was facebook that made all these uncessary contacts seem suddenly necessary, out of hoarding friends and contacts on FB to show other insecure FB friends that you are sociable and awesome.

Now I chuckle whenever I hear some idiot snapping shots of their receipt or food, it's not the camera shutter, it's the sound of insecurity.

However, I still keep my linkedin account because it's intrinsic value as a social network tool is immensely more valuable than sharing stupid cat videos and your "friends" who are nothing more than just a few rows of data stored somewhere by an entity trying to show the right ads for you to click on. They might as well tell people to start wearing tshirts that display ads that matches your previous staring habits (were you just checking that chick out, time to bombard you with dating site ads on your friends t-shirt!)
Exciting project. Needs to have some more apps before it can be adopted by the masses. We need a platform that is as simple as an iPhone but designed simply to be 'the personal cloud platform'. It should offer the security the freedom box promises and still offer solutions to less serious problems like torrent downloading and music streaming.
I tried doing a header bar with company name, but it looked super redundant for the majority of postings: Company Name followed by Company Name. Problem is, the first line sometimes contains other information too, so I couldn't just cut it out. I would have to curate the comment body itself at that point. Maybe next time.

Bumped the padding a little.
Some of us had our career paths substantially affectd by, in particular, SF writers of a certain era. For me, Pohl was one of them who, in part, made me who I am.
Indeed. It is one of all time my favourite hard sci-fi novels.
Oh, I don't mean to completely fetishize that lifestyle--many steelworkers, for example basically just kind of wear out after a couple of decades of hard work.

That said, there are still clearly disadvantages to being coders.
The cost is going to be high, maybe $100 billion by the time the project is done. Even with the feds helping, that is a huge sum. Are we really going to get the most "bang" for our bucks? How often do people travel between LA and SF anyways? Improve BART, VTA light rail and CalTrain (in the Bay Area), and I suspect it will have a much larger positive impact on the lives of more people.
J seemed to be a good step in that direction.
I should've phrased it better, but I was asking him as a person of minority by choice.

I fully understand making a site accessible for those who need it, but I don't understand the NoScript people.
Have you ever read Pohl? Hackers could learn one or two from him.
Every place you see "native" in their video, substitute "security nightmare".
Show HN: Want an Internship in the Bay Area? Check this out
Check this out: http://bayareaintern.com
> Plus pretty sure you don't understand modern day kids otherwise you would know that private tools e.g. Snapchat are more often the real invasion of privacy.

How is Snapchat more an invasion of privacy than Facebook? Facebook has played fast and loose with user data at every opportunity while Snapchat is based around user data being ephemeral. Maybe I have missed the news stories of kids committing suicide because of private Snapchats, but the two companies have literally opposite goals in terms of data retention.
Clickable: http://bayareaintern.com
I don't agree with it, nor do I understand it.
I see the same behaviour in corporate bankers are are earning many millions per year. It's OK to steal because I deserve more.
People like this are common thieves - and nothing more.
Growing up, my family went from poor to middle class. We did the hard yards. We never stole. Why? Because its about principals and ethics. Never, never excuse a thief. If your statement were true, i'd rip off the volunteer organisations that I _volunteer_ in ... because they don't pay me enough.
It's no secret that you need to minify your scripts and pass them along in a single request and put them at the bottom where they won't be blocking the UI to render. You should also link to CDN's to avoid that costly lookup or wait for the HTTP request hit (which is just so much larger when you're talking about it coming from the server (hopefully its light JSON and not a beast riddled with server-side templates.

Bustle is an example used by Tom Dale, and their js app is what? Not even 150kb? your headers alone are probably slowing you much more than this.

Locking the UI is bad, but it's not all JS apps that lock up the page as the browser puts it all together. You just need to know how the browser reads your styles and scripts and put them in the right place.
It's more than implied by the OP; he did, in fact spell this out explicitly: "Of course, there will always be cases where server-rendered HTML will be more appropriate."
I do understand that demonstrating higher value and then successfully negotiating for a raise can earn you the enmity of your coworkers. People are only human, after all.

On the other hand, I knew coworkers who were thieves and justified it with their notions of entitlement. I didn't exactly feel inclined to trust them, either, and trust is a basic element of friendship.

So I guess we all get to make our choices and accept the consequences.
And whilst a vanishingly small percentage of people were using Mozilla, why not? If Mozilla wanted to get people to use it, it had to be compatible with (most) of the existing web.

Similarly, I won't be testing my websites in Soguo or Yandex until more than a vanishingly low percentage of people are using them on those sites.
Web Optimization Case Study
As another Portuguese speaker, I don't think that "ser" is all that immutable; it describes plenty of non-intrinsic and/or immutable properties. In fact, the verb is used extremely often in the past tense, which shows that in Portuguese the objects often change what they "are".
The Racial Dot Map: One Dot Per Person for the Entire United States
Re: photos of you being posted: You can enable manual approval of you-being-tagged appearing in your Timeline in privacy settings.
>So if you are having a poor experience then find better friends.

Yes, let's all get different people for friends, so we can have a better FB experience.
That doesn't contradict what I said. It may be concentrated among the smart, but it will still be concentrated.
During WW2, the Allies would crack messages to locate submarines.

Now killing a submarine once you know where it is, is pretty easy. The problem is finding the submarine, and explaining how you were found. To handle that, the Allies used a form of parallel construction. They would send a spotting plane over the area, to spot the sub and give a plausible reason to have located the submarine.
You don't have an address book? When I email someone I see their real name and photo too. I do miss out on where they had dinner last night or that they went to the beach, but that has nothing to do with anything.
You wouldn't happen to know which USB to SATA controller it is, would you? (device ID under Linux might help)

Sharkoon isn't the only one that uses those controllers (Astone might also) and I keep some of them around for testing purposes.
Your production support and quick action might be more impressive than anything else! Nice
Not scary if you disable password logins, implement PKI, and limit logins to specific addresses.

I get a kick out of viewing all the failed attempts in /var/log/auth

Added bonus is adding all those bad guy addresses to my blacklists.
As a person who generally prefers to be private wherever possible, I am still divided on a related topic: security cameras. I don't want them to be recorded everywhere I go, but then on the other hand, I do realize that the world does have a few bad people and in many cases, they are caught with the help of cameras/CCTV footage.

I had always wondered if someone can shed some light on this debate from the other side perhaps and this article comes close.

I have still not figured out where I stand on the CCTV cameras in public places though.
Is it just me, or is firmware quality getting worse these days?
Nice point, that does make a lot of sense.
_escaped_fragment_ is a bit of a hack, but it also provide enormous benefit. It allows you to gain all the benefits this article is talking about (which I won't repeat here) and still make you site crawlable without duplicating code.

You are right about one thing, it is a pain to setup. Much harder than it sounds at first. After doing it a few times, I finally got sick of it and built http://www.BromBone.com. It's a service that takes generates the html snapshots for site owners and keeps them up to date. I hope it will let site owner keep all the positives and eliminate most of the new negatives.
I singled out, and deleted my account from, Facebook because of one of the recent news stories that showed that they actively tried to build profiles of people that their users know who are NOT on Facebook. It's one thing for me to voluntarily hand over information about myself, but it's quite another for Facebook to sneakily try to access information about my contacts.

Does it make any practical difference? I'm not sure. Being totally invisible to surveillance may be next to impossible, but I found that action on the part of Facebook to be needlessly over the top.
When the government comes out and says -

"The evidence and proof that Bashar was the one that ordered chemical weapons use is so obvious and unquestionable that you don't really need to see or ask for it... Because doing so would be irrational!"

Start worrying.

In a few weeks or months when it comes out that the chemical attack was really done by one of the 57 or so US and Al-Qaeda backed + funded insurgent groups operating in Syria, I really hope that Obama keeps his word on punishing those responsible (for crossing the red line).

Though the best info I could get is saying right now that the rebel group that launched the attack didn't know what they had, and thought they were launching conventional rockets. So I'm not sure you can blame them the same way you could blame Bashar.

The funny thing about all this is that if the US just came out and said we are doing this to secure the next 50-100 years of US energy needs and geo-political strategy - I'd be all for these middle-eastern wars because I understand the need for it. But I'm not sure the general public could shed its moral supremacy desires, nor understand complicated issues or how the world really turns.
Let me get this straight: you flagged the post but you are whining because not enough people have joined you in disliking this? Truly an outrage. I wonder how we will all sleep at night knowing your inalienable right for the world to be just as you wish it to be has been violated.
It's not quite as simple as that, but there is a short window (~2 months I think) where you can't change jobs or move country without resetting your application. After that, you can move jobs but your new employer has to agree to transfer the green card process too.
Bug report: Doing a Ctrl-F to find my technology or location of choice causes the job description to get scrolled down, so the top part isn't visible (and therefore I can't expand the whole description).

As an example, do a search for "Python" and you'll see a desc with this sentence in it: "We use Python/Django, JavaScript (jQuery, AngularJS), ActionScript, MySQL (and some MongoDB), but you’d be free to choose your own tools and libraries."
Possibly the best compile to C language. Easy to setup, fast, feature rich, works nice with C and best part: configurable GC.

One thing i don't like tho: Case insensitivity.
I write many in many languages, all but Nimrod are case sensitive. Lot's of 'already defined' errors.
There is nice discussion about it here: https://github.com/Araq/Nimrod/issues/521
http://dwd.wisconsin.gov/er/labor_standards_bureau/publicati...

States all have their mechanisms where a worker can file a complaint without needing a lawyer.
>I guarentee that you discouraging your kids from having Facebook accounts (or whatever their equivalent is) will only do harm.

Because FB is some kind of inevitable force?

I, for one, also respect parents that don't let their kids watch television crap.
I think this is great. Love the filters. It'd be nice if you could also filter by recently added. I'm currently looking for a job and it's kind of a pain to have to scan through the whole list looking for one or two new jobs that have been posted.
Maybe in his legacy we can run Problem Pits. Anyone up for that? (In The Problem Pit)

There's also the creepy novel about a voice in someone's head because they know something and die. Anyone remember this one?
Yes. Thank you for a location filter. This is a fantastic use of the geolocation API.
There's always going to be outliers, especially if you allow such messy variables in as 'founding a business'. That doesn't do much to disprove the general metric.
There's also http://hnhiring.me which I wrote a couple of years ago. It's a bit more flexible with filtering, but uncurated.

Incidentally, HN is up at the top of painful websites to scrape. All comments are at the same level of hierarchy, and the appearance of threading is accomplished by a spacer <img> with a width set according to the nesting depth. There are also no absolute times, and the times that are there slowly lose resolution. In order to get a comment time that's accurate to the minute, you have to load the page twice an hour and store the post id to time mapping.
Booting a Self-signed Linux Kernel
Facebook needs community moderators, who can ban users from certain networks.

Get creative about the job market.
but you are exactly the type of person that FB thrives on, insecure, tendency to exaggerate one's sex life, social circles, etc., most importantly perceived fear of other's perception of you based on your psyche at the time of posting that totally uncool photo or link that no one cares about.

I would never go back to it but I'm keeping my linkedin because it pretty much solves all of your problems listed with facebook.

Linkedin is a great tool for career advancement, facebook is a great tool for self-aggrandizing one's ego, a constant arms race of photos, links, and every detail of your life that can give you slightest edge over your peers.
WebDev Links
still broken for me.
> if you have a strong accent (e.g. your English is not that great), you perform poorly as a startup. This isn’t a xenophobic statement, but just a statement of fact.

If that is supposed to be a statement of fact, it's wrong, for 2 reasons:

a) A few observations do not equal causality. Unless each and every startup (founder?) was examined and found to match this statement, the statement is wrong. Try a weaker statement ("...you likely perform poorly as a startup...")

b) I know several successful founders with strong accents in English. There's a small, but not insignificant factor you've left out: the US market isn't everything (and it's becoming less important every day). A startup neither has to be successful in the US to be successful, nor does it even have to have English speaking customers or users. Nit-picking? Sure. But I wasn't the one who made overly broad statements that possibly offended startup founders all over the world.
Also, if you're going to create a "browser" that throws almost everything out, why make javascript one of the things you keep?
I admit that this happens in some companies. However, it can only happen to developers who either are not good enough to find jobs elsewhere, or are not aware that they could find jobs elsewhere. As such, I feel those developers are not actually trapped, but rather unaware.
The section in construction is a line to nowhere that will see no high speed traffic for years, if ever.

The portions that must be worked on first is the crossing of the Tehachapi mountains, as it is the most time consuming portion. Yet instead, they are constructing line in the southern Central Valley.

I agree with the pessimists. Much as I want high speed rail, I doubt it will happen.
Australia. 80k. 2 years.
I could go 120k, but it would involve losing the cultural and company benefits.
The problem is that now everyone who wants to build a decent crawler/scraper has to do it as well. Used to be any kid in his parents' basement could put wget and sed together and explore the internet. Now Timmy has to bolt a whole damn browser runtime onto his script to make sure he's getting the content text from blog posts and twitter feeds.

Asking Timmy to "step up his game" is heartless, and it'd be unnecessary if we were better citizens.
Well, philosophically, I think having static content served in a backward compatible way is perfect. Pragmatically, I haven't found a good solution to do it without duplicating all the code. That by itself might be a very good reason as to why one would focus the development efforts on the 95% of users.

You say people like me. I'm more agnostic here.. just interested to understand the arguments of both side. I just think that a post saying "This is black. Period" doesn't add much to the discussion.
>The quickest way to get upvotes is for a title to have "has died" or "dies" in it.

That makes HN the ideal venue for such a post. Contradiction much?

What you meant to say was perhaps "I don't want HN to be a venue for such things".
Google is defragging Android
The AI (Sigfried) that he wrote into Gateway had me noodling at AI (and writing BASIC interpreters, of all things) when I was in high school, in the 70s. Even though I knew the "compterese" bits he wrote into the sidebars of Broadhead's conversations with Sigfried were bogus, I had fun making sense of them.

So, I politely disagree with you.

Other computers-in-SF works that influenced me include: _The Moon is a Harsh Mistress_, _The Shockwave Rider_, _The Adolesence of P-1_, _When Harlie Was One_, _Michaelmas_, and a number of others. I will treasure these books, as they got my imagination started early, and they were a lot more palatable than computer reference materials in those days, which were dry and rather hard to come by if you were a kid.

[edit: grammar, add some more works]
what's funny is that I would keep posting as often as I desired and that I would always get likes (maybe some were sympathy likes as you say) and it was why I kept posting, like a crazed drug addict, it was a never ending cycle. One youtube video after another, your likes drove me.
Pointless, no matter how you spin it. Real engineers deal with measurable items like gravity and wind and light that don't change. Software can be anything, any language, any target, any industry, any size, any skill level required, etc. There is nothing practical to test that relates to everything. In my 3 decades of being a programmer there is absolutely nothing meaningful remaining from my first job: if I had had some magical license it would be pointless today.
It must be terrible to wade through the one obituary on the front page to get to the stuff you want to read. I feel for you, I really do. So much wasted time you could have spent reading about JavaScript or people's opinions about the accents of non-native English speakers.
So, Japanese is a uniquely bad example here, right?

As I understand it, there are three alphabets: kanji (lots of Chinese characters), katakana, and hiragana. The latter two are used to spell out the syllables of words, in some sense acting like an alphabetic language. Kanji seems to have a thousand or two characters in use, whereas katakana and hiragana have around fifty.

Beyond looking up stroke numbers and radicals, I found dictionary usage for Chinese characters somewhat hard--English lets you basically do a very easy binary search on a word (start at most significant character, find section, move to next most significant character, etc.).
> No advanced society (past a certain GDP) has slipped back into tyranny

What are you talking about? There are advanced societies today that are in the middle of tyranny (Russia and China come to mind) and there are very well known examples of societies slipping into it (Germany and Japan come to mind).

National moods can change surprisingly quickly. Look at gay rights for a recent example in the US--public opinion has done a 180 in a generation. Privacy rights have an interesting partisan dynamic as well, unlike many other issues it does not split down party lines. It could definitely go the way you're saying, but I wouldn't consider it a done deal.